Clever Creative Real Estate Strategies

Clever Creative Real Estate Strategies
This column is designed as a location for anyone in the community to post Clever and Creative Real Estate Strategies. I will share some of the interesting techniques we've employed or assisted with in my 16 plus years as a real estate trainer and investor. Please feel free to add your own creative strategies from personal experience or working with other people. The purpose of this string of posts is to stimulate creativity and perhaps you, as I have, will create some new variations on real estate investing that have never been utilized by anyone else.
So, where to begin? There are a lot of cool stories, I think I will start with one that I will call "Boarded Up Houses and Limos."
I know a person who is only interested in properties that are boarded up on the windows and doors. He drives through some of the poorer neighborhoods in town in the back of a limo that he has outfitted to be his office. When he finds a property that is boarded up, he signals his driver to stop. He has a team of researchers who are trained to track down owners of vacant or abandoned properties, and he calls one of these researchers to find the owner, and another to evaluate the property--comps, numbers, etc. Then he continues to drive on and find the next property. Each property goes through this process.
When the results of the searches come back, he will attempt to contact the owner by telephone, if that fails, he uses mailers. He already has the numbers and knows what he can offer on the property. If the property is a listed property, then he makes contact with his agent to make an offer.
Obviously he is making very aggressive low offers on the properties, he makes a lot of offers, and he also does resubmits every 14 days on any property that is still on the market.
When he is successful in getting an offer accepted, he makes only one modification on the property. He contacts his handyman, who goes to the property, measures the existing boards, goes down to the local home improvement store, and purchases and cuts new plywood. This is then tacked over the top of the existing boards on the windows and doors. He has also included a clause in the contract that allows him to make this one modification during the contract period.
He then markets the properties to rehab investors at higher prices than his contract price, and assigns the property or goes through a double close process. If you ask him why he does this, he indicates that he has found that this single modification is worth approximately 10 times the cost in profits. In his own down-home way, he says: "I guess people want to pay more for NEW boards than they do for OLD boards." He has been so successful with this that he sometimes takes his limo on the road to implement his procedure in other markets.

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