Alan Cowgill

My student, Carl Majeski gets credit for this month’s

newsletter. He recommended the topic “Fixing my selling

houses machine” so here we go…

I was buying 5 to 7 houses a month and my market for selling

got soft. I started to pile up empty houses so I needed to

take steps to fix the selling machine and here is what I did…

Fixing my house selling machine:

My exit strategy is rent-to-own so when I talk about ’selling’

I am talking about getting a tenant/buyer in the property.

1) Fired the sales person.

And I changed the compensation plan. I had a sales person that

was getting a higher amount if she cashed out on a house and a

lower amount when we put someone in on a rent-to-own basis.

Well it took me a few months to figure out that she was turning

down rent-to-own folks and holding on to houses waiting for

the cash buyer. 85% of my homes go rent-to-own and then I get

cashed out in 12 months. She was holding houses after they

were newly rehabbed waiting for the perfect buyer. Dumb move.

Cost her, her job and cost me a lot of money on holding cost.

2) Hired two new sales folks then fired one of them.

There is a rule to hire slow fire fast. I am getting better on

the fire fast part. Don’t want to seem harsh here but the

bottom line is you can’t let anyone slow you down and

potentially steal your dreams…

3) Shut down buying machine.

Ouch! Didn’t want to do this but the market was selling market

was soft and so I put my house buyer on selling houses too.

4) Started monthly off-site, meetings with my staff:

a) Looked at past years numbers (sold houses) to determined

what worked and what didn’t. This was very enlightening and

so we then took that information and did the following.

b) Adjusted the “model” we were using to purchase houses. What

comes in needs to go out and what was coming in wasn’t selling.

The results of the revised model were that I needed to buy more

high price houses to rehab and not rehab the low-end

properties, just wholesale them to someone that wants a rental.

c) Stop over-fixing houses in low-end areas.

These are properties that we still had in inventory and would

get them back after an eviction. The biggest change was rather

than putting vinyl in the kitchen and bath and have good carpet

in the whole house, I switched to putting nice carpet with a

nice pad downstairs but glue down carpet in kitchen, bath and

upstairs bedrooms to cut cost. We found that many of these

homes would come back to us one or two times before they

finally sold and this change would not hurt us selling these

houses in the low-end area and be cheaper in the long run.

5) Stage the houses.

Makes the rehabbed home look nice but at a very low cost.

We put up a cheap table with fake flowers and a

tablecloth in the living room. We put potholders in the

kitchen and hand towels in the bathroom and hung a shower

curtain. Mini blind (very inexpensive ones) in some, if

not all, the windows. I even have guidelines on how I

want the mini blinds to look once they are up. Keep them

closed for the nice look BUT pull them up a foot so

people can look in the house. By the way, it seems like

the bath towels always come up missing by the time the

house sells.

6) Fine tune the advertising we were using. Test, test and test

until we hit on the ones that work. You know what I found?

Yard signs work best. Do not run newspaper ads early in the

month. The phone starts ringing after the 15th.

7) Listed some homes.

I sold two this way. I have it set up with my realtor that if

I find a buyer, he will cancel the listing at no charge.

Wholesale more.

Did three wholesales.

9) Do sweat equity deals.

Did four of these. I love these. No rehab work for Alan.

10) Get the house selling website in shape.

Made sure all the house pictures were up-to-date after rehab

and all the info was current.

11) Get our 1-800 number home information up-to-date.

We use PatLive and give info on each of the houses we have for

sale. PatLive info…

http://www.privatelendingmadeeasy.com/links.shtml

12) Hired a new person to handle much the clerical work above.

One person is responsible for the rental management for all

the houses we own. The new person handles the buying and

selling clerical work such as advertising, land trust creation

and dealing with private lender paperwork.

13) Got more signs in the yards. 5 in every yard plus one in

the window.

14) Get pointer signs out. 4 per house

15) We use selling techniques too.

All my house sellers have a cell phone on them, etc.

The above was an aggressive approach I took to solve our

selling house. It worked and we are now cranking up the

buying machine once again.

I realized that there are a lot of folks like Carl that need

to know how I sell houses and the machine I have set up. So

I called my sales people together and we recorded everything

we do. I included the documents we use also, check it out

at…

http://www.autopilotriches.com/app/adtrack.asp?AdID=127919

3. Important Tip

This might sound dumb but it isn’t. I bought a mini IPod made

Apple Computer. It is one of those things you see kids with

to play music on. Well you can put audio CD’s on it too so

what I do is put educational material on my IPod so when I am

flying around the country I can get through a bunch of

educational audio CD’s.

If you can’t find time to listen to your real estate audio

CD’s then this might help you too.

Alan Cowgill is a speaker, author, and real estate entrepreneur. Alan has bought or sold over 200 investment properties. His step-by-step system “Private Lending Made Easy” teaches others to find private lenders. Contact Alan at 937-390-0816 or 866-831-3540. For a FREE audio go to www.PrivateLendingMadeEasy.com