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.
[00:54] Yo, what's going on guys. Girls, thank you for tuning in today. Appreciate all you come in here. Happy new year, we are off to another year of excellence, right? We're all going to do it this year. Going to lose weight. We're going to make Monday. We're going to spend more time with our families. We go on vacation. We're going to do it. That's what they say. New year's excitement. I'm excited. I'm going to have a great year this year, fully planning it and enjoy myself. I'm going to do deals. I know I'm going to do deals, make money. I'm gonna make a difference. So listen, I got an episode for you today. It's a by request, call it scratching, scratching for deals, looking for deals. When you have no money, what do you do? If you try to find deals, but you have no money. That is the situation a person called me up is in.
[01:55] Yeah. I talk about a lot of great ways to get deals. Direct mail, Facebook, Google ad words. The issue is it's expensive. It's really expensive. You got to convert for it to make sense. And especially for a little newer to the business, you have too many deals. You're not going to want to go blow five grand a month, 10 grand a month or more on marketing. So I'm going to talk to you today about ways to get deals without using a whole lot of money. All right. And one of the episodes, we talked about my old man going around hitting garage sales and he pulled one, pulled a really good deal, right? In Middleburg Heights. There's no cost to that. The old man loves going to these garage sales and I've kind of trained him now. Really my mother trained him to stop buying junk and just go in and see if they want to sell some real estate.
[02:49] A lot of times they do. It's amazing. I think it's a great lead gen doing deals off of it. There's another one calling or real tours, you know, you'll these realtors that work certain parts of the city that you might want to invest in. Like whoever the big guys are like, we all know like Tim Ali, right? He's big in Middleburg Heights means the go-to guy. Maybe Tim doesn't buy, you know, he's a listing agent. So it would be nice to start a relationship with a guy like that. For example, I'm very good friends with Tim. He's a great guy. And he's open to stuff like that. If you're a cash buyer, he's walking into these houses all the time. If you see a as opportunity, train him to call you like, dude, I buy distressed assets. You could have both sides of the commission.
[03:34] Realtors love hearing that you'll get 7%. They love that. Offer it up. You will get deals that way. Public records, it's free to search that stuff. You can just go right on Cleveland. I'm a municipal court.org, search up different things. Evictions, housing violations. These are all triggers. That's free, it's work, but it's free. Get that data. Someone that might be in a situation. If they have a housing violation, they probably discussed it. BB deed. That's what I call it. B B deed that is broke, busted and disgusted. And that's a great seller. And there's a lot of sellers that are BB deed got to catch them and you will catch them during an eviction. You will catch them. They're in a housing court violation. You will catch them on a lead. It paint a violation. And Oh boy, I'm doing an episode on lead paint next.
[04:36] And it's going to be good. You might want to tune into that one. That is a free source. Look them up, get the case, look them up, call them. It's free to call somebody cold call, man. We're going to get to that in a minute. That's probably my number one way of getting deals. Wraps. I think I said another episode. We're wrapping a van, our first one right now moving billboard. And that's some cheesy Vista print 18 by 24 magnet. That's not going to do anything. I'm talking about a nice professional rep. Like he actually looked like, you know what you're talking about? We'll see how that converts. I heard the do very well. We're going to find out. I will let you know. I'm only doing one right now. And that's a little bit of money involved in that. But at least it's not repetitive.
[05:22] It's not like your son now, 5,000 bucks a month in postcards. And you got to do it again next month and next month and next month, that's a one time thing. And maybe you can even barter for it. I don't know what you do, but maybe you can barter for it. Bandit signs. It's cheap. You can go to abandoned signs.com. They have some really good ones out there. Those guys are on top of their game. They have like the best bandit signs that convert. And you can throw those out there a little bit. Don't go crazy. You know, the cities really don't like that stuff. So don't go nuts, but you can get them around. They'll work. Wholesalers. I love buying from wholesalers. You host the other cats, man. You guys worked. So I got mad respect for you. That's why I never gripe. When I'm paying you these huge wholesale fees.
[06:03] I know what I'm paying you. Cats. You know, you're watching $10,000 checks. I'm ripping to you. $7,000 checks, 12, $15,000 checks. But you do a lot of work. You earn your money. I respect for that. You guys kiss a hundred frogs to get one Prince. So amen. TIAA. I don't have the patience for it. I have guys in here that do it. That's awesome. But it's still great to buy from you. So thank you and keep sending deals here. And I'll keep writing you checks and making your life easy. Thank you. Social media. That's free. Everybody loves social media. Now look, I'm not a good social media. Got to talk about, you know, I'm kind of at that age where I think, I feel like I missed it a little bit. I don't understand it. I can barely send an email to be honest.
[06:48] And I don't know how to do Facebook retargeting and Instagram this and getting likes. And I don't understand it, but I do have someone in Dallas who does it for me. And we do Google ad words, but some of you cats can do it yourself. I got to pay somebody, but some of you cats and know how to really do that stuff. It's cheap and let people know you buy houses. So my mentor, Mark Evans, I had him on the show actually a few episodes ago. He goes right on Facebook and he'll like post a picture of like him or a flying money in the air, like to grab people's attention. He'll be like, Hey, I got money to spend. I got to spend a million bucks. I want to buy property, call me. And he gets deal flow like that. He's targeting wholesalers is what he's targeting and people call him with deals.
[07:34] So I think that is a, I think that's a good way to get deals. MLS, realists, realists on MLS. I have a search set up right in my MLS that if a property is in contract and it comes back on the market, it emails me. Think about the mindset of that seller. I've been there. I'm in contract for 30 days, we're going to close. And all of a sudden you find out the person can't get financing or whatever. They fall off the face of the earth. And you're like, what? And you're back on the market. You're half because it's whatever would be the wrong time of year tax bills coming. You just been paying utilities on a vacant home. You're just done that, go screw it. I'll take 10% less. I just had it in contract for it. I just want this done. I want to be done with this.
[08:23] Those can be really good. I played that game for a long time. My acquisitions manager, Matt, he plays that game. He's good at it. And he's been doing that for 10 years or four years and worked for me. He was playing the realest game. It is a good game to play. You can get deals. People are burnt out, man. They're just like, I'm done over a hundred days on market. There's another one there's opportunity there. They've already raised their hand. They want to sell right there on MLS. I want to sell home. And now they're a hundred days on market. That's a long time. Like when you're a seller and you get in that mindset, all right, we're selling. And then you list it and then nothing happens. Like what the hell? You mentally spend the money. You're like, man, when this closes, dude, I'm going to go get a new car.
[09:13] I'm going to go on vacation. I'm going to pay off my credit card, whatever it is, they want their money out. It's like locked up equity. That's a crappy place. I feel like when your equity is trapped and they've, you didn't have to do anything. They've already, like I said, they've already said they want to sell their for sale. You can make deals like that. It's easier because they want to sell. You can make deals. Very good deals like that. So I've chased the, you know, the 100 days plus market, you can chase it just about in any market. Really. I mean, it works. Here's a different one too. You know, I talked about this on one of the podcasts, you know, finding deals, right? Hiding in plain sight. I just had a conversation with they, a mentor of mine out of Tampa Bay, actually Clearwater beach.
[10:00] And he was saying, you got to take these houses like nobody wants, like, we'll just say West side of Cleveland. That's my buy box. So like West side of Cleveland and add square footage, you know, one of the great secrets out there right now, they're paying really, really good, really good right now. And they pay off bedroom count. So if you can take a three bedroom and you can add square footage, you can increase rent. My classic trademark secret weapon is take a three-bedroom car where you have three bedrooms on the second floor in the bathroom rooms upstairs. And then the first floor consists of a loop being room, a dining room and a kitchen. Then you have the baby, but they have the unfinished addicts. And for years, that's all I did was yeah, edit conversions. I would do a center hallway, bedroom, front bedroom back.
[10:53] I had five bedrooms. I put them on section eight and get stupid money for those things. I still have a bunch of them. I'm killing it on those houses. And no one even see it was in plain sight. That's a deal. I have a lot of those. I love it. But so you can do that. Yeah, but you can also add square footage. Even through additions. It might make sense to throw a little dish. I just have one of my houses in Parma and we have like a 20 by 20 addition off the back of the house. I didn't do it. Someone else did. I was just standing in the house their day, going, this is awesome. I'm going to get more rent because of this. And I was telling my team, we have to look to do this on houses that we get box ranches.
[11:38] You get in a hundred and 30th and ballet or Navy you Cleveland cats. Know what I'm talking about? The little 696 square foot box ranch slab. Those are so easy to put an addition on and cut in two or three more bedrooms. You can literally them four and five bedroom ranches. Section eight will pay you crazy for something like that. And you can buy those houses over there for, I don't want to say for nothing because they used to be for nothing. Now they're a little more expensive, but there's still nothing. 50, 60 grand. You can buy them for we're buying them for 20. Those days are good. Huh? Hello. You can buy them for less than that. Teens. I have a lot of those I bought in the teens. But you gotta add, you know, you got to add square footage at increase value.
[12:21] That's what we do, right? You're a real estate investor. A real estate investor adds value. If you're not adding value, probably not really a real estate investor. So we want to do all right. So here I'll give you what is my number one source? Listen, I give it up. It's cold calling, calling, calling, calling. Now you can do it a couple of ways. You can get a VA and have them call and it's cheap. Or you can get someone here in the U S to cold call for you go, or they have firms out there that do it for you. Batch leads just open up a cold calling program and it works. It works well. You have a nice conversation and you'll get deals. You're investing your time. I mean, guys, everybody wants to be the guy driving the Bentley or rolling around like just doing nothing all day, but it takes a while to get there.
[13:12] You've got to do your time. You can't just go spend five, 10 grand a month on marketing is all just going to come. You have to really work your off with anything, but especially in this business. So cheap marketing hope. Some of this sticks to some of your cats and you do it. And I'll say it again. If you got any deals you get from this and don't have the money to take them down, meaning close them, call me, sell them to me. I'll buy it. Maybe if we develop a relationship I'll joint venture with you, maybe I'll lend to you. I don't know it. Won't take a little bit to work into that stuff, but let's open a relationship if you have these deals. I mean, obviously if you're calling me about not having money, not getting the money to take them down so wholesale into me, get them in contract, bring me the contract and I'll buy it. I will pay you handsomely because I know it sucks. Cold calling all this stuff as a grind, baby, it's a grind, but that's okay. What? Isn't a grind. Every business is full of headaches. Which pill do you want to take today? I'll take the real estate pill. I'm cool. It's the best pill I think. All right, that's it guys. Thank you for the request. Hope you enjoy this episode. Have a wonderful day.
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