We talked about 2 parts of our membership and I think you might be interested.
Our usually older and more experienced investors want to see more advanced topics. One that was brought up was the 1031 Exchange and it was suggested to start an Exchange club. I would love to hear from our more experienced investors as to what they would like to see at our meetings that would benefit them besides how to wholesale a house, how to rehab a house, etc.
Then we had 2 successful 20 something investors tell us how they think - and if you are a baby boomer it will help you understand your kids and or your grand kids
1) The facebook and twitter thing is because they want to feel a part of a conected community, be a part of something bigger.
2) They want to be a good member of that community - honest, integrity, green all very important to them. One spoke of doing green rehabs, that he does, costs him more. But he is also able to pull in a better quality tenant who will pay more because they are being better members of the community by being green.
3) They like instant gratification, they don't want to work at a job 30 years to finally end up well of and in a good position, they want to be in that good position next year and many are very entreprenurial and turning down good jobs because it will not get them where they want to be fast enough.
That's it for notes for today. I hope you now understand how we as REIA group leaders think and have a new insight into your kids, grandkids, employess and Gen Y tenants and home buyers.
See you at the meeting in July -
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Day 2 - after lunch - legislation & speakers
We moved on through out the day to talk about Legislation
and guy's if you are not staying up to date with the Calls to action that we send out, we need you to react on each one. Our law makers don't know that this paragraph here or those 50 pages there are important to us unless we tell them. So when we send out a call to action, please take the time to take action or we may get walked all over and not be able to offer lease options, owner financing, or maybe even short sales the way some things are going.
And the best part each year of mid - year seems to be the Good the Bad and The Ugly. We kick all the speakers in attendance out of the room and talk about who does a good job and who does a bad job. And I got page of good speakers to bring back and a small list of people to avoid.
and guy's if you are not staying up to date with the Calls to action that we send out, we need you to react on each one. Our law makers don't know that this paragraph here or those 50 pages there are important to us unless we tell them. So when we send out a call to action, please take the time to take action or we may get walked all over and not be able to offer lease options, owner financing, or maybe even short sales the way some things are going.
And the best part each year of mid - year seems to be the Good the Bad and The Ugly. We kick all the speakers in attendance out of the room and talk about who does a good job and who does a bad job. And I got page of good speakers to bring back and a small list of people to avoid.
Day 2 - continued
Next we got to hear from Alan Langston with AZREIA in the Arizona markets. Please take a look at his site and see what they have going on.
He was sharing with us some new models for the local REIA like MAREI to work with our national Business Partners like Home Depot and Sherwin Williams and still support National REIA and the efforts that they do for us every year.
You don't know it, but the REIA groups like MAREI need money to keep going and bringing you great services, but we also want to offer your more services, education, benefits, and fund a way to track and react to legislaion at the local city and state level as well as at the Nationl Level. So we all have to play nice to create the revenue so we can offer service -
So think about it, last week we had many people who had issue with something Kansas City Missouri did. Now we all wanted to be a part of a committee that would follow up, take our concerns back to the city council and then get it changed. And to do that we can form a committee and do something and we should. But if we had the funding, we might be able to hire a watch dog whose job it is to tell us about things before the happen instead of us reacting and trying to change something once it's already a done deal.
So Alan's plan would allow us to parnter better with large National Vendors like the Home Depots and Sherwin Williams stores that would bring in more national companies with large discounts for you as members, bring in additional members that benefis us all as well as their membership dollars to fund more services, which would in turn give us buying power as a whole to negotiate larger local and national discounts and influence our lawmakers more effectively.
This probably does not make any sense, as I am still on the first cup of coffee after a late night trying to figure out how the craps tables work. I will stick to real estate or see if I can find a YouTube video instruction, cause I still don't get it.
He was sharing with us some new models for the local REIA like MAREI to work with our national Business Partners like Home Depot and Sherwin Williams and still support National REIA and the efforts that they do for us every year.
You don't know it, but the REIA groups like MAREI need money to keep going and bringing you great services, but we also want to offer your more services, education, benefits, and fund a way to track and react to legislaion at the local city and state level as well as at the Nationl Level. So we all have to play nice to create the revenue so we can offer service -
So think about it, last week we had many people who had issue with something Kansas City Missouri did. Now we all wanted to be a part of a committee that would follow up, take our concerns back to the city council and then get it changed. And to do that we can form a committee and do something and we should. But if we had the funding, we might be able to hire a watch dog whose job it is to tell us about things before the happen instead of us reacting and trying to change something once it's already a done deal.
So Alan's plan would allow us to parnter better with large National Vendors like the Home Depots and Sherwin Williams stores that would bring in more national companies with large discounts for you as members, bring in additional members that benefis us all as well as their membership dollars to fund more services, which would in turn give us buying power as a whole to negotiate larger local and national discounts and influence our lawmakers more effectively.
This probably does not make any sense, as I am still on the first cup of coffee after a late night trying to figure out how the craps tables work. I will stick to real estate or see if I can find a YouTube video instruction, cause I still don't get it.
Day 2 - continued
Then we got to hear from another REIA leader who has turned around a declining group and got it growing again. Tom Zeeb from the Capital Area REIA in Washington DC He had a lot of ideas for us on how to attract new members and we plan to implement many of his ideas so we have new faces at our meetings for you to network with or share your service. And the bigger the community, the more clout we have when issues come up that are bad for investors, like billing the landlord for the water if the tenant does not pay.
And many of these ideas will translate over into your business.
1. You have to have Video on your site, so figure out how to record Video and drop it into your site. So do short 30 second to 2 minute videos and put them all over your site.
2. Use your face, and as an investor I can't figure out what investors barely put their name on the site, let along their photo - realtors personalize their marketing well - so why don't we as investors, let the people know who they are working with.
3. Take some time to reduce costs, - renegotiate contracts on your rent, your phone service, anything you pay money for on a regular basis, if you have not put services out to bid this year, do it, you might cut $100s off your expenses.
4. His group has gone to a full time quarterly membership that auto bills the member's card once a quater. They are paying a bit more through out the year, but in smaller increments - I need feedback from the members on this.
5. Their group also put together their own Lead Generating web site for motivated sellers than feeds into a call center that shares calls with the members who pay for the service in a round robin type of thing. I think all the Home Vestors Franchises had this at one time in Kansas City and they pooled their money for all the bill board ads to get the calls to go to the main web site or an 800 number and the call service had a round robin feed to each of the home vestors owners - I need to know more about this because we need to do it - bill boards and massive web sites can be cost prohibitive, but with 10 investors pooling funds, it can be more effective.
6. He talked about sub groups - their group has a womens only group ( we heard this yesterday) and they have a night owls group that meets once a week except for the week of the main meeting. They meet from 10 to midnight and it is very well attended. - I want to do subgroups more at MAREI, but I need sub group leaders.
7. He also suggested we include on our name tags what our specialty is, so that we all know exactly what the person we are talking to at the meeting does. We are going to try to implement this, so does anyone know where I can buy specialty stickers?
And many of these ideas will translate over into your business.
1. You have to have Video on your site, so figure out how to record Video and drop it into your site. So do short 30 second to 2 minute videos and put them all over your site.
2. Use your face, and as an investor I can't figure out what investors barely put their name on the site, let along their photo - realtors personalize their marketing well - so why don't we as investors, let the people know who they are working with.
3. Take some time to reduce costs, - renegotiate contracts on your rent, your phone service, anything you pay money for on a regular basis, if you have not put services out to bid this year, do it, you might cut $100s off your expenses.
4. His group has gone to a full time quarterly membership that auto bills the member's card once a quater. They are paying a bit more through out the year, but in smaller increments - I need feedback from the members on this.
5. Their group also put together their own Lead Generating web site for motivated sellers than feeds into a call center that shares calls with the members who pay for the service in a round robin type of thing. I think all the Home Vestors Franchises had this at one time in Kansas City and they pooled their money for all the bill board ads to get the calls to go to the main web site or an 800 number and the call service had a round robin feed to each of the home vestors owners - I need to know more about this because we need to do it - bill boards and massive web sites can be cost prohibitive, but with 10 investors pooling funds, it can be more effective.
6. He talked about sub groups - their group has a womens only group ( we heard this yesterday) and they have a night owls group that meets once a week except for the week of the main meeting. They meet from 10 to midnight and it is very well attended. - I want to do subgroups more at MAREI, but I need sub group leaders.
7. He also suggested we include on our name tags what our specialty is, so that we all know exactly what the person we are talking to at the meeting does. We are going to try to implement this, so does anyone know where I can buy specialty stickers?
From National REIA Mid - Year Day 2 - Rentals.com
We started out the day with Breakfast with our Industry Partners. I was able to eat with the women from http://www.rentals.com/ and learned a lot about their services. We know that we can all get a 20% discount from them on their regular pricing (discount code in the Member Library), but other than that they were a place to market our rentals, I did't know much more - so here goes: They rank usually either #1 or # 2 in google when people search for "house for rent" that means your people looking for a house to rent, start there.
Then they got technical - they have all the demographic data on who rents from them, how many clicks that get from an area, what they are looking for and other statistical data. They know that the tent to have a little better tenant looking on their site which converts into a better tenant in your houses. And they have other services to track leads who contact you via email or phone. So if you are offering any type of rental, you should give http://www.rentals.com/ a test. It's like hiring a part time employee to do a lot of your marketing work for you with out the payroll issues or giving them a desk to work at. And there were quite a few Rentals.com users or group leaders with users at the table, and they all loved the service.
Then they got technical - they have all the demographic data on who rents from them, how many clicks that get from an area, what they are looking for and other statistical data. They know that the tent to have a little better tenant looking on their site which converts into a better tenant in your houses. And they have other services to track leads who contact you via email or phone. So if you are offering any type of rental, you should give http://www.rentals.com/ a test. It's like hiring a part time employee to do a lot of your marketing work for you with out the payroll issues or giving them a desk to work at. And there were quite a few Rentals.com users or group leaders with users at the table, and they all loved the service.
Friday, June 25, 2010
National REIA Mid-Year Conference - Day 1
Ideas to bring back to Kansas City from National REIA Mid Year conference - day 1.
Members, please give me feedback
- I Pad - saw these on the plane on the way here - way cool. Don DeRosa is integrating them in his training program. Get an Ipad with all of his training and all of his tools preloaded with instruction. This is too cool.
- Recording meetings like we already do, but then making CD's to sell them rather than downloads from the web site. If you want to make CD's or DVD's for your own markeitng we talked about a sesrvice - KUNAKI?? have not looked it up yet.
- Women In Real Estate - sub group for the ladies only. Maybe in Kansas City we could combine efforts with the local WIRE chapter.
- For a meeting idea - have an "As a Dumb Question Night" with a panel who answers any audience question.
- Have our more experienced members create and teach a class. Great for the business associates to share their expertise and gain new clients.
- Weekly Breakfast Sub Group at Ihop for the more experienced investors
- Market Update once a quarter at the meetings
- 15 mintes of I have this to share or I need this at the beginnig of each meeting
- Take real live actual deals from the audience and have 3 different investor analyze it for their way of inesting.
- And I have been talking with Edwin Kelly from Equity Trust about an all day Self Directed IRA training and networking meeting to get us all working together and utilizing self directed IRA's and private lending among the group more.
Will have more after today I hope.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Getting more customers as a Real Estate Investor
As a real estate investor in Kansas City or anywhere in the country for that matter, it all comes down to really two things: finding the money and finding the deals.
To find either one, you are going to have to put on a good face and put out some good marketing.
I am going to assume for a minute that you have taken the time to set up a good an effective web site, but the next step is to get people to go to it and to get the search engines to find it and tell people about it on the first page of Google.com for example when a search is performed.
From what I have been reading and hearing, one good way is to write relevant articles that are key word rich and get them out there on the internet. I have been working to some extent to use article marketing for both my real estate investment businesses and the real estate investment association.
There are quite a few keys to using article marketing.
For example as using key words with in the article and in the title, words that you think your customer might search for on the internet. Another key might be writing an interesting and informative article, not just rehashing the same old thing over and over. Or maybe having a good about the author section to entice them back to your web site for more information.
After you write the article, with several different titles and slightly different content in the article, then you need to post it online somewhere.
Maybe on your blog, or on an article submission site.
One site I have been using of late is http://www.articlesbase.com/ and since I have registered for my free account with them, I have been receiving a short email about once or twice a week with a quick article about how to improve my articles, make them more effective, and get people clicking on them back to my web site.
If you have been thinking about driving traffic and search engines to your web site using articles, I highly recommend checking out this site and their how to information.
And this concept will work for anyone:
And this concept will work for anyone:
- Investor site trying to drive buyers or sellers
- Investor looking for private money
- Contractor looking for houses to rehab
- Title company wanting to do more closings
- Mortgage people wanting more loans
- Insurance company wanting to insure more people
- Anyone.
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