Dec 09
5
by Dave Peniuk
Well, here we are, approximately 6 weeks since my last post since completing Ron LeGrand’s Quick Turn Real Estate investing seminar in Edmonton, AB. And I have one word for the experience thus far….WOW!
Now, before I jump too far ahead and tell you all the amusing, irritating, sad, and potentially profitable things we’ve been introduced to, I want to start by explaining just what exactly we’ve done so far.
In the past 6 weeks, we have personally put together and mailed 4,000 yellow letters. This work was coordinated by Julie’s Mom. We hired some willing workers on Salt Spring Island to help us with the addressing and personalization of the letters so we didn’t do them all ourselves. But yep – that is still four thousand envelopes and letters! All to the same city, across 2 postal codes (like zip codes in the US).
From those 4,000 letters we have received over 1,000 phone calls which my father-in-law has largely handled!
We did NOT hire patlive.com as instructed by Ron at the event simply because:
- We felt we wanted to learn “the business” firsthand by actually talking to folks that call
- We know it would be very expensive to go through patlive.com
- We build better rapport with the callers, in the hope that down the road if they do want to sell, they’ll call us first
So, you’re probably dying to know how many deals we’ve got from all of this effort? Well, as of today we have officially no firm deals. That is rather disappointing given all the money, time and effort we’ve put into this in the last six weeks. BUT, and it’s a big BUT we do have several strong leads for acquiring some solid (and not so solid) properties.
We have 1 property which we hope to acquire for what’s owed using the Agreement for Sale strategy (it’s basically like buying the property without taking title/deed and without paying out the mortgage but still have “control” of the asset), we have another where we intend to acquire using Wrap Financing and buy with little of our own money, and we have a few others whereby we’ll use similar strategies. Again, we have no intention of teaching you any of these strategies. We are still going to focus on buy and hold real estate investing and the fundamentals but we will give you updates on this adventure because it’s certainly entertaining and we know there’s lots to learn from the experience.
Now, the BEST part of trying Ron’s techniques are the responses we have received from the folks receiving our little, pleasant, yellow letter. And what I find so amusing is that this is basically all that’s on the letter:
Dear X We would like to buy your house located at X Please call us at X.
I can’t say exactly all the details of what’s on the letter and what it looks like for fear of Ron coming after me for passing along this information (although you can find examples of it all over the internet), but the essence of it is that it’s very simple and very non-threatening….but boy oh boy some people have felt threatened. Just look at this recent article about us in the local news!!
The responses are mostly people curious about our interest in their home, but recently we’ve started to get some really funny people:
The good part, by and large, is that 90% of all those we speak with are pleasant, good natured individuals who are mostly curious about what we are trying to do and maybe even what we may pay for their house.
And some people have even been upset when they haven’t received a letter… check out this one:
Regardless of how many deals we end up doing using Ron LeGrand’s strategies (and in particular the yellow letter campaign which has been our focus thus far), it has been a lesson in human behaviour and HIGHLY entertaining.
Please continue to follow our updates as we (hopefully) close on some deals and continue to find how we, the human race, react to unorthodox buying methods!
