Carol Stinson is sharing tips and answering your SET FOR LIFE questions.. Post them here

I am a licensed Broker and am new to the SFL system. I recently joined a real estate investor group and was told I cannot as a licensed agent do a wholesale deal. I am so confused on this, I have watched Deans DVD's that came along with my SFL system and not sure why I could not do this. I would like to start investing but wholesaling to begin with. Find a motivated seller, put the property under contract w/and or assigns and find a buyer/investor to purchase and get paid on putting the deal together. This would be for properties not listed in the MLS. I know I have to disclose I am a licensed Broker if I were to put a property under contract in my personal name but please tell me this - my husband and I are setting up an LLC and want to use the LLC to put properties Under Contract with, can I do this if I am on the LLC? Need some input from the DG family - Please advise. . . .

Check out Bill O'Rafferty on here, he is a realtor in California that also invests.

so far I've gone through all the training webinars Josh has done. A few of the others....watch this 1st, domain names, websites (mini-trainings - lol), set up both squeeze pages (buyers/sellers) and purchase one core site. Hit the sites and did test-runs so I'd know exactly what B&S will be seeing. Also, ran cash buyers from leap pipes and exported them tonight after Dean's call. (some were duplicated - not sure if just a glitch) anyway, no biggie to clean it up. will start with as Matt suggested the multiple properties cash buyers 1st then work through the remaining list. I downloaded the buyers letter and tweaked to mirror Matt's suggestions to mail out. Will be mailing them tomorrow. I still have to complete the remaining training on the EDGE event, which is on my calendar for tomorrow night. So I hiccuped on the order exactly. But after tomorrow night, will just back to the order of Dean's steps. Oh, and created profile on crossroads...but haven't gotten very familiar with it yet.

So very excited, blown away at the magnitude of this system!

Thank you for creating this post.....your time....your example!!!

Jen

A Rising Tide Raises All Ships!

Hi Carol,
My name is Nick. I joined the DG team about 9 months ago. I'm probably one of the many people that has told you that you're making an incredible impact. Your story is very relatable and flat out inspiring. Currently we are having a tough time with mortgage payments and bills in general. We're in a place that we've never been financially and it's extremely uncomfortable to say the least. However, I'm trying to implement my action plans to reach my RE goals. I've been putting offers in on properties and I'm waiting to hear back from my great agent. Also, I'm starting to contact pre-foreclosure owners to see what can happen there. I wanted to ask, IS IT POSSIBLE to find great cashflow properties in NJ because of the high taxes? I'm in Northern Jersey 15 minutes from NY. My own shack... I mean house has taxes of $6000/yr. Most of the nice homes in Bergen county are taxed an average of $7K+/yr. Do you find it hard to find great cashflow deals for investors? Thanks in advance... Nick

i put in an item on the calendar clicked reoccurence and it put the item in every line for every day for this month, etc. how do you delete something from the calendar? there's no delete action if you click on the item or the date - double click or right, left click. i spoke to customer service several days ago, they had no answer - any help would be appreciated. thank you.

I'm copying the post from my other thread to here, hopefully I can get some helpful responses, thanks!

This is my first post, so if this is in the wrong area or needs to be deleted or moved into the correct forum topic, I understand.

I am new to real estate entirely, but am digging in and excited to get my first deal done. I just set up my buyer website, and put my own personal email info in the field and filled out the info to see what type of auto-responder message I'd receive. Near the lower half of the email it has "Click here to download your free report" with a link on the word "here". I clicked it just to see what others would be getting, and see that it's blank. One thing I noticed in SFL is that every 3 days for 27 days the auto-responder sends an email, and shows an area where you can upload a document for each of the emails.

My question is, how or where can I find these documents to download that way I can upload them into my auto-responder, or does it work a different way?

P.S. I noticed one thing kind of interesting, perhaps a glitch. When I put my first email address in the auto-responder I receieved everything fine. I then put in a second email to test the address also, picking slightly different criteria when filling out the form. I noticed however, with the second email, it somehow carried my personal email address of the first email onto the body of the second email auto responder. Curious, I used a 3rd email address and checked to see if it would show the 1st, and 2nd email address in the body near the top, but it didn't, it worked fine.

P.S.S One other quick question: When someone fills out the info in the auto-responder, where does that info get sent for me to read? Is it stored somewhere in SFL? e.g. I want to find a 2 story home with a big back yard, vaulted ceilings, and lots of windows.

Thanks a lot in advance

From the SFL Home Page, you can click where it says Calender to the left of your name in the drop down box. Then double click the event that you want to change or delete. For example, Wednesday Sept. 15, 1:30pm - 3:00pm Meet with the Robinsons. When you double click the appointment, you should get a window that pops up allowing you to edit the subject, location, time of appointment, frequency of occurance, etc. At the top of the subject line is a save and close button. To the right of that is a Black X which allows you to delete the appointment entirely.

Hope this was helpful.

Thanks Chris, I will check it out, I appreciate your response very much! Have a great day

OK Nelson you stumped me...LOL I am not sure about the auto responder. I suggest that you contact customer service phone number is 1-877-778-9374. When you do get an answer please share it here so we can all learn from it.

where do I start? I know to look for multiple buyers in my area of focus, but geesh. Any recommendations on how to search the list? There are so many, I guess I will just have to take the time....

Carol,

(I accidentally sent this as a private message to you. Sorry. I didn't understand the tabs at the bottom of your post. I wanted to post in on the blog in case anyone else had this question.)

God bless you and thank you for all of the priceless wisdom and understanding you impart unto us.

One question...

It appears that the terms "website" and "squeeze page" are used interchangeably in a lot of what I have read. When you referred to the website we should create, are you referring to one of the SFL core websites that are available to purchase or one of the squeeze pages that are provided for us with SFL?

Thanks for clarifying.

Steve

Wow you have 336 pages of buyers in your area? That is awesome! My suggestion would be to start with the buyers that have purchased multiple properties since they are the ones that are obviously the most active buyers. These buyers have access to a direct line of cash and are more likely to buy more than one property from you over time.

Good Luck

Steve,

This depends on if you already have a website or not. If you already have a website than you just want to activate the free squeeze page to drive traffic to your website. Once people sign up on your squeeze page they will receive an auto responder directing them to your website. If you do not have a website before you purchased SFL than I would suggest purchasing a website through the SFL system.

What are your feelings on this... There are many multiple buyers on my list some of them are names, yet more seem to be business names, and others are just address's. Do you feel I would have more success with the individuals or business's. Is there a significant difference on how they would work.

Thanks for your reply, your Awesome.

Thanks for clarifying this for me Carol.

By the way, Isaiah 41:10 is one of my favorite verses.

Bless,

Steve

display more than 50 buyers on a page?

Carol I just wanted to say thank you for just being you. I got my "EDGE 2010" kit and your presentation was just great. I really wanted to SFL program but just couldn't afford it at this time. Did you have alot of computer experience? You seem to be able to navigate your way around. Could you please give you facebook address so I could check out your site. I really need someone to talk to.

Thanks again,

Bertha

Individual buyers sometimes buy under a business name. Smart or should i say seasoned investors do not use their real name to buy properties. It lowers their risk by buying as a Corporation (Business name) as apposed to using their own name. In reality they are all the same. The buyers that purchase multiple properties are more likely to be active buyers and I put those at the top of my buyers list

Thank you

thank you nelson, problem solved. could you or carol answer these questions? how often is the buyer lead pipe updated, and how can you find out what type of property the cash buyer bought? it might be beneficial to know prior to contacting them. thanks

I honestly don't know about the first one, and I missed my call back from the tech support supervisor and I will need to call them back. I'll throw that question in with my others and get back to you. However, for me, I have 85 pages of cash buyers, that's more than enough for me to work with until it updates (if it does).

Now as far as the second question, with the info we're given we do have the purchased property address. You can pop that into trulia.com or http://www.totalviewrealestate.com/ and see what type of property it is,(SFH, condo, commercial property, etc). You'll get a general idea on the estimate of the property, and how old it was, it's bed/bath/garage, and that can at least give you a hint into what type of property their likely interested in. And if it's something that meets your criteria, is in one of the zip codes you are focusing on, you can send him/her direct mail and go from there. If there is a more efficient way, someone please mention it. Hope this was helpful

Hi Carol,

Here are a couple of the questions that I currently have:

1. Where can find the email skits that were referenced in The Edge?

2. Where exactly is your contract? You mentioned that it was in the Done For You Marketing section. Are you referring to the PDF?

3. Do you have any other suggestions for finding sellers other than putting up flyers (limited to places in your area where you can actually hang signs),posting on Craigslist, and mailing expireds? What more immediate ways of finding motivated sellers do you suggest?

4. For expireds, do you hand write the envelopes or using a certain printed font?

Thanks & God Bless!

I purchased SFL program and got a buyer's list. But I didn't know until you wrote this, that we can get their mailing address on SFL! That easy!?

I thought I have to go to the county's website to check each property record to get the buyer's mailing address.

Wow, this is more than I expected! Thank you again Carol for great tip!
I appreciate it!
Best,

Hiro
New York City

Hi Carol,
Thanks for your time and support. You're awesome!
Quick question: any good ideas where to actually have the post cards printed out and what kind of a solution is available for putting the buyers addresses on the postcards? I have more than 1000 buyers that SFL spit for me , so I need some kind of an automated\business solution.
Thanks,
Omri

Hey guys! I spoke to Nicole (a supervisor) today from SFL/The Success Academy and got a lot of my questions answered, and I want to take a moment to share them with you, as some of you may have had similar questions.

The first set has to do with the SFL's auto-responder that's available after you set up a squeeze page:

One of the first things I did was head to my squeeze page and put in an email address to see what kind of info my potential buyers would be receiving. After opting in with a personal email, I noticed a section that said "Click here to download your free report." When you click it a blank report comes up. To upload a report, you want to go to Marketing > Leadflow Websites > then on the far right of your website name, you'll see a button that says edit auto-responder. Click it, then if you click Next it takes you to a page showing you an automatic letter every 3 days from days 0 to 27. If you click on the first one(Mine says Your Report is Ready) there's an icon of an envelope with a paperclip, click that and you should get a report that you can download (mine says 3 ways to find your dream home.pdf - which may be because of the template I chose), then save it to your harddrive and upload it. Nicole said that they only provide the first document, so all the other days, if you wanted to attach something, you would have to create it yourself, or possibly someone from the DG Family may have something to provide us. I also asked if, when a potential buyer puts in all their criteria (such as what areas they buy in, what kind of houses they look for, 3/2 SFH, etc.) where can we see that information populate so we know what they're interested in, and she said currently SFL is equipped to take on that info so we'll still have to extract it from the buyer through direct response.

EDIT** ^^ I was adding some buyers to my SFL list and I ran across one of my own "mock" criteria in there, and I DID FIND THE INFO WHERE I PUT IN ALL THE DETAILS FROM THE SQUEEZE PAGE! It's in the "buyer script" tab under the general info! note: everything below this line remains unchanged in this post.

This next set relates to the cash buyers list:

I asked why I was getting duplicate information on some of my properties. For example, some of the cash buyers with the LLC name were showing between 8-50 of the same exact company name and property address. Most of the entries didn't even have the address of the buyer, only the address of the purchased property, why is that? I also asked if everyone in that list was already using SFL, and also how frequently the list gets updated. I also noticed an email function after you import the list into a specific catagory in the buyers section, and asked if we can email them even though we don't see what their email address is, or even if they have one on file?
She said that they very recently discontinued business with their old provider of these buyer lists, and they are looking to replace it ASAP, and hopefully that will be available to us in the next few weeks. But for now, the list we have does not update; we cannot email them because there is no email on file, we would have to retrieve that info from them by means of first contacting them with direct mail and getting a response from them; and as for the issues with me seeing duplicates and not enough comprehensive info to contact some of them, even by direct mail, I will have to wait it out, or can try using emailfinder.com (which I did, but I get 50+ results sometimes, so I don't know if I'd be contacting the right person, not to mention that you have to pay for that service).

So for now, I will continue to educate myself and step out and take action where I can, and build that buyers list as I press towards my first deal!

I hope this information has been helpful to someone, thanks.

I thank you for your help and assistance in helping with the sfl training, But like steven I could not come up with the funds to purchase it at the time,
but i've heard so much about it I wish i had it.I hope that when that day does
come that i can afford it,Dean will still have it available for people like steven and I. Then at such time hopefully you will still be here to help as well.once again thanks it's good to know that there is help here when you need it.

Wint.

omrik wrote:

Hi Carol,
Thanks for your time and support. You're awesome!
Quick question: any good ideas where to actually have the post cards printed out and what kind of a solution is available for putting the buyers addresses on the postcards? I have more than 1000 buyers that SFL spit for me , so I need some kind of an automated\business solution.
Thanks,
Omri

I purchase all of my marketing material from http://www.planitpromo.com/ They also offer mailing the post cards for you for an extra fee. You just supply the addresses.

Always get inspiration from Carol's stories and ideas.

We too have a disabled child and we are just getting started in DG program.

Already have some good contacts from potential investor and from possible partner in our state.

Keep up the good work Carol and Dean.

Jim and Alice