Welcome to Cleveland Real Estate Investor. On this podcast, you'll hear about every aspect of the real estate investment business. You will talk to your rockstar investors about their businesses, how they built them, where they came from, and where they're going. Who am I? I'm Joe Lieber and I've made millions of dollars from the real estate investment business over the last 20 years. If you're ready to hear the good and bad from a guy who's learned this business from the school of hard knocks and get educated by some bad ass entrepreneurs, then put your helmet on, strap on your chin strap. Let's ride.
Hey, what's up guys. How are we doing today? Thank you for tuning in to hear another show today, I'm going to try to get back to some of the technical stuff, real estate. I did a couple shows for you talking about philosophies and how you can, you know, buy anything you want. And yada, yada, I'm not very good at that. There are just things that I I live by now. I sharing it with you, but there's plenty of other people out there that that can do a way better job of philosophizing with you about how you can do this and that, and blah, blah, blah. So I'm just gonna talk to you guys today. Got a couple emails from you asking for specific shows. So I'm doing one on finding deals on this show today for you. I'm going to try to dial down a little bit more and not just be so vanilla, like, you know, get a list and go to source, you know, mail and absentee list and talk to a realtor or whatever.
(01:48): I'm going to try to give you some different ideas than that basic vanilla bigger pocket stuff you're going to find. And you know, hopefully it helps gum as really say some real life situations, that stuff actually going on with me right now and how I found my last 10 deals. So here it is, here it is. All right. So I just bought a house in Middleburg Heights. Got a really good deal on it. And no, I didn't direct mail them. No I didn't cold call 'em no, I didn't do this or that. No, wasn't a referral. Here's how this happened. My dad who makes me nuts, he likes to go to garage sales and buy. He doesn't want or need makes my mom crazy when he does this, he makes her sit in the car and he like goes up there and looks at all their crap and usually walks out with something for $2.
(02:40): And she cringes, every time they go past the garage sale, cause he knows his kind of want to stop. So he gets these, these sales well lately over the last year, I'm like, listen, when you go to the sale, instead of buying a bunch of crap, why don't you just say, Hey, what are you doing with the real estate? Cause you use there something going on, maybe they're, you know, they're moving or want to move or need money or someone died or you know, something's going on. Usually. So now I kind of got him trained where if he's gonna go to a garage sale, he just walks up. He's like, I don't want any of this, but I want the real estate. You want to sell it? And he does it and it's kind of funny, but he got me a deal. He just got me a deal because of that.
(03:25): We're in escrow to close. We'll probably close in two weeks and that's what he did and his sure stuff, you know, someone died and they want to get rid of it. They want to get rid of it quickly. And I made them, which I felt was a very fair offer for the property. And I'm going to close on this thing and it will be a nice little rehab for the team. So garage sailing, I mean, believe it or not, it nobody wants to do it cause you have to do something nobody wants to do anymore. Oh, that's work. Right. You have to work a little bit. I know it's sucks. We all see the fricking kids on YouTube made a million dollars last year, posted pictures of whatever, but it doesn't work that way for all of us. I always say I can't sing dance or run with a football.
(04:14): So I got to do it this way. It's true. And you have to work. You cannot just always going to be able to buy a list source list and mail it and get a deal. It just doesn't. It works, but it's not always gonna work like that. Like the harder it is thinking about this for a second, the harder it is to grab the fruit, Apple out of the tree, the more likely you're going to have competition and you're going to get a deal, you know, that low level stuff going on, auction.com or look on the MLS, stuff like that. That's easy. Everyone can do that. Doosan California are doing that, but Doosan, California, aren't going to a garage sale when it's 31 degrees outside and snowing and yeah, they have garage sales in the wintertime guys. I just saw some money doing that. But whatever, it's another level, right?
(05:08): It makes it harder. It's like when they used to do the downtown auction, you had to go downtown. Who wants to get up at seven 30 in the morning, go downtown, fight the traffic stinking place over there. Justice center, go sit in there, bored out of your mind for two hours and nine times out of town, not walking out of there with a deal. It was a level. It was a layer in the more layers, the harder it is to get the deals. The more likely you're going to get a deal. You have to work. It is really the bottom line. Look, you know, everyone's always wanting to spend all this money and time on marketing, like buying the list source list and tweaking it and taking people on and off and looking for this situation and that. But a lot of times these deals really are out.
(05:50): Like I said, they're hiding in plain sight. And what I mean by that is like driving for dollars. Like it's a little old school in gangster. You know what? It works. You know, driving down the the streets, looking for the triggers, the grass is tall, no blinds on the windows houses dilapidated. Hey, there's probably something going on there. Write the address down. Do your fancy skip trace in all this stuff that you know how to do. Find that owner. And here's a novel idea. Call him both. Send them a letter away from the call. You make an outbound call. Hey, I was driving down 120 fifth street today and I saw your house falling over, you know, city Cleveland's and yang your in two minutes. Do you want to do something with this? You'll be surprised. Holy cow, you really will be surprised.
(06:38): Dwell. I'm thinking about it. I have a friend that does this. He gets the college kids in their home on break. Get some like the mail bags and gets door hangers goes to Vista, print buys 5,000 door hangers. Let's say I buy houses, cash. And he condition. I pale closing gospel of law. You know the thing. And he has the kids walk the streets and door, hang every one of them, every house. And then in a neighborhood, you know, it's worth the investment because what happens is when these kids are walking, they're trained to have a conversation with someone. Hey, what are you doing? My boss is buying houses, cashiers. Here's a, here's a door hanger. Oh, what does that mean? Well, Hey, he's around the corner. And he kinda like rolls around the neighborhoods, like with them. So to speak like in his car, the he'll drive up one street and check on the dudes walk and everything.
(07:27): Cool. You need some water or whatever. And then they'll, he'll go to the next street, check on that dude. But if somebody says something like, you know, I've been thinking about selling, he just pulls right in and has a conversation right there with them and they get deals kind of work it, man, you got to work it wrapping cars. Nah, I like it. You know? And that's some cheesy like sign you get from Vista print magnetic sign that goes on your side door. It says, you know, Oh boy houses. That just looks bad. I'm talking about investing money into a nice quality wrap. I don't do it right now. I'm going to start wrapping our company vehicles. And then you can do a unique phone number to each car. Like I have call rail so that you can get as many numbers as you want.
(08:12): But like I have a package of 25 numbers or something. I can take a phone number just for that truck. And then when a call comes in, I can look at my call reports and see where it came from. And if you buy a house like that, hook the dude up that you wrapped his car, whether it's your contract or your brother or your dad's truck or whatever you want to do, hook him up, give him a thousand bucks. It's worth it. There's a cost per lead matrix to look at. You know, I spend thousands of dollars per closing. I look back, I'll spend three, $4,000 to get a close deal. Sometimes it's heavy. That's a lot. You have to look at those numbers. So to give someone a thousand, 1500 bucks for wrapping their car and you want to give them a spiff too, maybe, you know, you'll have to go crazy.
(08:58): Cause I know money can be tight, especially when you're trying to market. And you're just rolling, but maybe give them 50 or a hundred dollars a month drive around the wrap, the car. Not everybody wants to do that, but it's just an idea. I'm going to start wrapping my, I have a friend down in, I think he's and he's in the Nashville market. Isn't one of my masterminds. He wraps all his stuff. All his cars are wrapped all of his work vehicles and he says he gets deal flow. They'll do very well. They'll do six to 10 deals a year off of their vehicles. And the more times these cars are seen, the more traction you might, you know, sometimes there's a ramp up effect. You know, it might take two or three years, but when that person needs to sell a car, those cars always rolling around those cars always are rolling around Cleveland, the cash house, buyer, whatever cool tagline yet for your company or whatever.
(09:43): They'll remember that, you know, if it's something easy, it's good for deal flow. You know that it's a good option and you can get other people involved and let them make some money too and hook them up. There'll be more inclined to, to want to do it for you. If you're text messaging right now, I think it's played out. It's so dumb. Everybody. I get a couple of text messages a day and you know, because I have all these rentals obviously, and there are people are buying these lists of absentee owners. I'm on an absentee owner list. Most likely cause I and absentee owner list doesn't mean like I'm absentee, like living in Cali and my properties in Cleveland. That's not always the data you're getting when you're buying it from a list broker, it's just a different text. Mailing address can be considered absentee owner.
(10:27): So obviously I don't live in a rental and it's a different text mailing address. So that can be considered absentee on some of the, some of these list brokers. And I get these text messages all day and I thought everyone, I talked to, they get them all day and you're not differentiating yourself or anything. That's like a luck of the draw, like text someone and just so happens that week. They have an eviction or something weird is going on. And they're like, Oh, I'm just going to call this. But it's we do it. We're stopping doing it because it's not. What's the conversions not there. It's just, it's not worth the energy. It's not worth the effort. It everyone's doing that. I think better. I'm being told the best thing right now is getting a VA and do an outbound cold calling, skip tracing and getting the phone number is calling.
(11:11): Hey, you got this house here. Are you interested in selling? I mean, that's more of a, you can do that to scale. I think it's a little bit of a waste of time. I'll have one of my acquisitions managers do that. Cause you know, they want to make money, but I'm more of a targeted situation kind of guy. That's how I like to do it. Cause I can touch 10 people and get a house. Like if I know I'm dealing with divorces, I can get 10 divorces of people who have houses in Cleveland and they're getting divorced and they're probably going to want to get out of this stuff and sell it. Especially if you live in like one of the suburbs and they got their big fine home and they're splitting from the wife and someone's got a boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever they're going to want to get rid of that, that inner city house in Cleveland just to get on with their life.
(11:54): And I look for targeted stuff like that when I do marketing, because my response is how our QC motivated quicker. Touch 10, get one. I like that deal. What else I want to tell you? Oh, I'll tell you a story too. I did this in a long time ago, like from like 2010 to 2012, when the market was just in the tank, I would go on MLS, pull everything. That was a hundred days on market or longer. And that time I would make seller financing offers had a nice little thing. I would do a nice little email along with my assets. And I'd say, here's who I am. This is what I do. If your client wants to sell, I will buy this house on seller financing and I would make an attractive, you know, it's an idea. It works deals hiding in plain sight.
(12:41): My buddy, Tim Brotts good friend of mine. I don't know if you guys heard of them are falling. Now. He is a used to be a residential guy like me, but he went on to start doing multifamily. And about four years ago he bought an office space, big office in Berea and it came right off MLS. It was sitting on MLS for three years, Raymond Berea and you know, he made a low ball offer and they worked it out and he bought it and he always talks about that. Deal's hiding in plain sight and I love that. I think it's true. Value-Add deals. I told you guys a story on one of my shows, not long ago, about my double that I bought on hundred 25th street, you know, who wants a double it's like a narrow driveway and doubles can be a pain in their rear end.
(13:29): You know? And I turned this into a seven bedroom, three best single, put it on section eight, crushing it it's like a value add, like how can I repurpose this property for a higher and better value? But it was hiding in plain sight, right on MLS 55 days on market sitting there a little heavy going there with like a low ball. I don't say low wall, but a lower cash offer. And I didn't mind paying decent for it because I knew I had a better purpose for it. I'm going to go in there, make it a single family home and put it on section eight. I'm going to kill it. So that was something that, that was taken right from you ran underneath your nose and you cast didn't even know about it. You're sleeping. Yeah, that's all, that's the thing that I want to share with you today.
(14:12): Really just different stuff. You know, you gotta think a little differently. Sometimes they get these deals. There's a lot of people in this business now, again, they're flooding too. It is good secrets out. Everybody knows. Think differently, work harder. I've noticed a lot of people don't really want to work. They say they do. I'll do whatever it takes. No you won't because I talked to you, you call me, we have conversations. I'll give you great ideas. We talk three months later and you're screwing around building an Amazon store. Like what are you doing? I thought we thought you were going to be a real estate. And it's hard. Why? Why is it hard? I'm buying really good deals right now guys. And I'm buying a lot of suburbs stuff right now. Doing really good in that space. I'm buying great deals, great prices. People want to sell.
(14:55): They want out give me the money. It's cold taxes are coming due in January. They don't want to pay him. They don't want to go to the houses. They don't want to plow the driveways. They're worried the water pipes are going to bust. They are going to bust dis. So you know, they need to get rid of them. They're paying heat bills over there. They can't rent them. The COVID geez, everyone. I talked to this sewed done. They're like just I'm done. Good uncle Joe is here. Maybe I'll write you your check. All right guys. Thanks for tuning in really appreciate it. Have a great day.
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