Just blasted this to over 20 video sites using TubeMogul to promote my real estate business in my local market using good keywords. This could work for any type of business. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I closed my first real estate deal of 2009 today!!! It netted me $5500 before marketing costs which cost about $720 (more on that later). So is wholesaling houses an easy way to make money? In theory…Yes. In reality…well…it depends. In this case it worked out great. I bought the right property and had the right end buyer already lined up. In all, I profited $4780 for about 20 total hours worth of work. That’s $239 an hour. While the process is simple, it does take work and in this market, a little bit of luck.
For those who have no idea what wholesaling real estate means, it is simply a matter of signing a purchase contract with a seller and then selling your rights to that contract (“assigning” or “flipping”) to another end buyer before your inspection period or closing date runs out. With the proper contract contingencies, it is a fairly low risk way of making a few quick bucks in real estate.
The trick to this process is finding a buyer quickly. Now, this is probably the most important and hardest part of this process, especially in this market. With a lot less investors out there who are rehabbing (buying, fixing up, selling at retail) houses, wholesalers have a better chance of selling their properties if they can sell them to landlords. Smart landlords are buying right now. Houses are way off their highs from a few years ago and if you are going to be holding the property long term until the market turns around then you can get some great deals right now.
So here are My 7 Steps to Wholesaling Properties for Quick Cash…
1) Learn your Local Market – What types of properties are investors buying? Where are they buying? How much are they worth at fixed up retail value?
2) Create a Buyers List – you need to have buyers lined up for your properties since you need to sell them quickly. There are many ways to do this but I’ll save the details for another time.
3) Find the Deals – Typically, you need to buy houses for a discount of between 40-60% off of there fixed up retail value (There is a little more to it but that’s the basic magic number. There are basically two ways to do this. Find great REO deals on the MLS (it is a little trickier with these because technically when a bank is involved you cannot assign your purchase contract). The other way, which is how I recommend, is to find the deals yourself before they go out on the MLS by marketing. Believe it or not, you will get more then you think.
4) Get the House Under Contract – Negotiate your ass off and wait for a winner. Don’t rush out and get a so-so deal. Patience pays in the end. The better the deal, the easier to sell to an investor.
5) Assign the Contract – Contact everyone on your buyers list who you know is in the market to buy these types of properties. Email, phone, fax, internet marketing. This is a marketing business. The better you are at marketing the more successful you will be. Assign that buyer your purchase contract for a fee. The fee can be whatever markup you can sell that house to an investor for. Usually anywhere between $3,000 - $15,000 with an average of about $5000. Some people get much more.
6) Send the Purchase Contract and Assignment Contract to Title Company – This is where we pray everything goes smoothly…it usually doesn’t.
7) Pick up your check - $$$
Anyway, I have to run for now. Obviously there is a lot more to it so I suggest that you get a little more educated before going out and doing this. I will follow up with some great resources.
While this is not exactly Slugmoney, if real estate interests you, wholesaling houses is probably the easiest way to get started for very little money or risk. I highly recommend that once you have wholesaled a few houses and made a descent cushion of cash, to cherry pick your best deals and keep them yourself for the long term. A few of these will give you some nice monthly cash flow as well as long term financial wealth. Now that’s the kind of Slugmoney we’re after!
So today started my experiment with making money from parked domains. I am not going to go through the process but here is the blog post over at LivingOffDividends that made me jump in. Although they give many great ways to monetizing websites, I chose to start with Domain Embarking because I happened to have an old domain sitting around not helping me get any richer. All I did was update the DNS for my domain and they take care of the rest. Check out my site for an example of what you get. This is a long term endeavor and definitely a sluggish way to make money (if any) but I will be keeping you posted on results.
The goal is to buy about a dozen $.99 .info domains over at GoDaddy and let them ride! Big money, big money, no whammy’s and stop! (sorry)
What have your experiences been with monetizing websites?
Well well…that was a nice nine month vacation. I don’t want to bore you with the details but I have been involved in some very interesting and lucrative money making adventures over the past few months. Some amazing new content in coming soon!
Photo by janetmck
After looking for some extra ways to make a little more cashola online, I came across a great post by Moolanomy on 40 Alternative Income Ideas and Resources.
This pointed me to Amazon’s Seller website where I could sell some of my older books that I haven’t touched in a while.
I posted about 15 books for sale less than 24 hours ago and have already sold two books for a total profit of $14.96 after shipping costs (Amazon throws in $3.99 to help you with shipping).
Just thought I’d throw it up in case we have any book junkies out there looking to do a little home library weeding for a little profit.
P.S. SlugMoney Tip: Don’t bother posting any books worth less than a $3.00 asking price or you risk a good chance of going negative after shipping costs.
Photo by Tscherno
If you read my last post, Google Notebook: The Gas-X of Brain Farts, then you are probably someone who has some kind of system of recording your thoughts, ideas, and sudden explosive bouts of genius. If so, then why not turn your notes into income!
People take notes to remember important bits of information for future use. Believe it or not, there are tons of people who don’t care to do hours worth of research on a topic. They are actually willing to pay to get to the nuts and bolts of their information needs quickly. This is where we come in. Since the basic point of note taking is to solve some sort of future information need, why don’t we help others solve that need at the same time.
You probably already have an Ebook 90% written hiding somewhere in your notebook.
Following the E-Myth way of organizing and systematizing, I tend to organize my notes into logical, step-by-step processes or outlines with my overall goal being able to make it easier for me to use that knowledge in the future. Hence, my notes end up looking like “How-to” outlines with details filled in. Umm…can someone say Ebook?
I’m sure that if you have been keeping a written record of your thoughts and ideas, surely there is something in there that others would find interesting (and might actually pay for).
So without further ado…
My 1,2,3 Plan for Turning Your Notebook into Cash
1. Organize Your Notes on a Topic into a Logical Progression.
If you have written it down, it is probably important to you. If it is important to you, it is probably important to others. What problem does this information solve? Who else would have a need for this information? Start with the problem you are trying to solve and work backwards. How does this information take us from where we are to where we need to be to solve the problem. Start organizing for notes into a linear, logical path. What you will end up with will be a step-by-step outline to solving the particular problem. 90% of your work is done! Massage it. Do any added research you need to do to fill in the gaps. Keep in mind that once this is written you never have to look at it again…ever!
2 . Format your Content into an Attractive Product
Ebooks do not need to be long. In fact, as long as they fulfill a need for the reader they can be as short as you want. The Ebooks that I am currently selling are anywhere from 5 to 14 pages. Use any word processor such as Microsoft Word to get your final formatting just right. Then all you have to do is convert your final document into a pdf file using any of the many freely available converters and whaa laaa..you have your first Ebook hot of the presses and ready to sell.
3. In Jim Cramer’s Words…”Sell, Sell, Sell”
If you don’t already have your own web host where you can quickly put up your websites, start now. You should have an account that lets you host multiple websites so that you can quickly test your eBiz ideas. I use 1 and 1 to purchase my domain names for $6.99 and I use HostMonster to host my sites. There are cheaper hosts but HostMonster gives me the many options I need to test all of my crazy ideas.
Find yourself a website template or just copy the basic design and formatting style of some of the major Ebook sellers.
Write yourself some good sales copy to sell the thing.
No need for fancy shopping carts or credit card merchant accounts. Once your basic sales website is up, open up your free account on PayDotCom and they provide you with all the shopping cart, payment processing, and security you’ll need.
The old saying of “if you build it they will come” just doesn’t work very well on the web. Go promote your Ebook. Go on to user group websites and blogs and start commenting on the great Ebook you found that will help them solve their exact problem. **I do not promote blatant comment spamming so please do yourself and others a favor by promoting your Ebook with the utmost respect of others.
4. (Yes there is a step 4 but it’s the best step, I swear) Sit Back and Take What You Get
I never claimed that you would get rich by doing this but hey…this is SlugMoney! If I can make more than the $6 I spend on hosting my website each month than I’ll take it. That’s positive monthly passive income and that’s what SlugMoney is all about.
Photo by desi.italy
I recently read the post from Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Work Week blog about note taking and his system for writing down his ideas. I have used many methods of writing down my ideas, mostly disorganized pieces of scrap paper that ending up getting lost and gave me zero long term value.
Having a reliable system of documenting your thoughts in a way that allows you to easily return to that knowledge and use those insights at a later time is an invaluable self-learning tool.
About a year ago, I finally stopped using paper as my prime note taking medium and switched to using Google Docs. What I ended up with was a bunch of long disorganized documents pertaining to various main topics that I often think and read about. Although this system was definitely a step in the right direction, I still found myself wasting time by having to later read through these rather large brain dumps in order to find the nuggets of info I was looking for.
My recent solution to this was a fairly simple move from Google Docs to Google Notebook. Although Google Notebook isn’t too much different than Docs, it does have the added functionality which allowed me to break down my notes on a topic into more organized subtopics. Also, there is a great little Firefox Add-on for Google Notebook that lets you quickly jump into your notebooks to jot ideas down without distracting you too much from what you are currently doing online.
I just thought I would offer up another solution for those of you who find paper note taking to be too disorganized for your own personal taste. I would love to here how all you guys and gals solve your brain fart troubles.
P.S. My next post will be on Turning Those Personal Notes Into Profitable Ebooks.
P.S.S. Don’t forget to check out and vote on a website idea I put up on ideablob. This was an idea that was sitting in my Google Docs for a long time now that I haven’t taken any action on and wanted to share and get some feedback on.
Check out this great site for testing and getting advice on your business ideas. Thanks to another great post from Dane Carlson which informed me of this useful site.
I have always had what I thought was a very interesting idea that I wanted to get some others thoughts on and this is a great way to do it. My idea is a unique social networking site that allows users to find people based on physical appearance (shallow, I know). But it also let’s you find your closest look-a-like or your closest celebrity look-a-like in a very interesting and fun way. Click here or on the vote image above to learn more and let me know if the idea basically sucks or has some potential.
Hello friends! Sorry I have been so quiet lately but I decided to take a little sabbatical down to Florida for a couple weeks. I thought I would try to test out the whole “Life by Design” Mini-Retirement and Location Independent Living type thing.
Although I didn’t go anywhere too exciting, I have to say that being able to taste what it’s like to be out of the rat race has given me some new found energy in pursuit of SlugMoney!
My Mini-Retirement was a 50% Success
Why only 50% success? Well…the travel, beach, golf, tennis, margaritas part of it was great! I mean I could really get used to it. Really.
“So what was the down side?” you ask curiously. Basically, I spent a shit load of money (even with a free place to stay).
Mini-Retirement(3 weeks)
Income: $127
Expenses: $2,134
Total: - $2,007
What Did I Learn
After looking into many different real estate investing strategies, I have decided that based on my personality (lazy hands off investor), I wanted to concentrate my efforts on purchasing single family starter homes and lease optioning them to tenant buyers. I felt that this method would give me the best of both worlds as far as fairly quick upfront cash and cash flow.
While listening to my favorite real estate podcast, I found out about Andy Heller’s lease option program that seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. Before dropping the cash to buy his program I went to the library and grabbed a copy of his book Buy Low, Rent Smart, Sell High. I have to say that I loved this book. It really explains a lot of things in detail and this REI method seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. So I sucked it up and purchased the course.
I was really hoping for more with the course. It was basically Andy Heller and his partner reiterating in audio format the exact same information in his book. Not much different except for the hefty price tag. To be fair, it did come with copies of contracts and letters that they use but these can often be found for free by digging around on some investment club websites.
The main problem with this method is that it is really based on buying REO properties. Now I don’t know what it is like in your neck of the woods but around here, 95% of the REO properties are in the ghetto which is not the kind of area I want to invest in for this purpose. The other 5% that are the right types of houses in the right locations usually need a LOT of work and the banks just aren’t giving a big enough discount to make the deal profitable. The small fraction of these that could be good houses end up being bid up by other investors who either have different numbers than I do, are going to renovate and live in the property, or are just plain dumb. I like to think the later.
Sorry for the REO rant. I’m just a frustrated newbie. Anyway…more on my lease option strategy coming soon. I am currently reading several books on this method and will have reviews for you shortly.
Have you ever tried lease optioning a property? Let me know how it went.
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