Just how exactly do we live our best life now?

Rather than give you a long blog post to sift through with a summary of action steps at the end, I am going to give you the action steps now and then the breakdown to support it afterward.

Some people can “get it” just by reading a quick overview. Most (like me) need more understanding.

If YOU want to live your best life now, Dale Carnegie, Henry Ford and Napoleon Hill have all confirmed what you need to do…and if YOU TOO want to live your best life now, this is all you have to do right here…

1. Visualize What You Want

2. Make It CRYSTAL Clear in Your Mind (Being clear is a vitally important part)

3. Create A Plan to Achieve What You Want

4. Turn That Plan into Action (this is where the real

5. Adjust As You Progress Down Your Path to Remain On Course

It is no secret. If you want something, all you have to do is DO IT.

The problem is, well, that’s why its usually not enough to just give the action steps to a process.

We expect that by giving someone the recipe to success, we think that they will just somehow make it to the finish line.

However the reality is that people show up to different opportunities with different skill sets, expectations, biases and circumstances.

Before your brain even processes what I am trying to explain, it has to first off sort out all the thoughts, emotions, biases and life experiences that it has stored up from your previous life experiences.

These thoughts, emotions, biases and experiences are standing directly in between what I am telling you and they are trying their best to determine where to place this new information. Some if it will resonate, some of it will not.

However, until it figures out how to properly compartmentalize this information, much of it becomes information overload which leads to us doing nothing with this new “profound” information.

(Does this sound familiar to many past experiences?)

So now that you know that you WANT to live your best life now, I am going to remove the first layer of HOW to live your best life now.

Start where you are.

That’s it. Simply, start where you are. Now I am sure you were lookin for something shiny and soft and cuddly that was going to appear as magic to your situation and give this never before heard of formula for living your best life.

And part of the reason life has become so difficult IS BECAUSE OF today’s shiny, soft, magic formulas that make you feel  as if life is going to change radically without something radical happening first.

You see, human brains make decisions based on emotion and justify them with facts.

Do you know WHICH facts? Yes you guessed it. Only the ones that FULLY support what it is you TRULY want to hear.

More people are not living their best life now is BECAUSE their emotions are too involved.

They do not know how to separate the actions from their feelings.

With today’s distractions and images of nearly everyone living life on cloud nine with perfect bodies, amazing relationships, endless money and luxuries so opulent its no wonder our emotions put a brick wall in front of our desire to take action.

This is where we get stuck.

Wanting something to the point where we actually see it happening, but never taking the first step because our emotions get involved.

So lets recap so far…

If you want to achieve something here is the “formula” (don’t squint at me, this info is straight from the greatest men who conquered their respective fields before today’s distractions were around)

1. Visualize What You Want

2. Make It CRYSTAL Clear in Your Mind

3. Create A Plan to Achieve What You Want

4. Turn That Plan into Action

5. Adjust As You Progress Down Your Path.

In order for you to achieve you have to FIRST BEGIN. This means overcoming your emotions that tell you “I’m tired” or your feelings telling you “I am not you and don’t work as fast”.

In order to BEGIN, YOU MUST START WHERE YOU ARE.

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE EXACT STEPS I AM GIVING YOU.

Those steps were MY STEPS to success and while 80% of what you are taught will serve as a frame work to getting you most of the way there, its that 20% that makes all the difference in the world.

That 20% is you admitting you can do this, knowing where you are is different from everyone else and being CRYSTAL CLEAR on the goal and COMPLETELY FLEXIBLE in how you get there.

Does this make sense?

I know my challenge is immense since so much of what we see today is led to believe us that THIS EXACT process is THE WAY, AND ONLY WAY to getting this result.

That’s not the way it works.

If you can separate your emotions from the action steps of getting where you want to go, you will quickly realize that BY JUST STARTING, you will have began LIVING YOUR BEST LIFE NOW.

DO NOT CONFUSE YOURSELF THAT SINCE YOU HAVE NOT YET ARRIVED AT YOUR GOAL, THAT YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO PROCLAIM THAT YOU ARE LIVING YOUR BEST LIFE NOW.

This is a lie that has the whole world fooled that if you don’t look like your instagram feed, then you are less than worthy.

Don’t base it on results. Base it on commitment, activity and STEADY progress.

So lets re-summarize how you can begin living your best life now...

1. Grab a sheet of paper
2. Write down three-five simple goals you want to achieve
3. Create an action plan to get there
4. TAKE ACTION by Starting Where you Are

That’s IT.

Remember that DONE is the new PERFECT and waiting to begin until things are perfect are the biggest robbers of Starting Where You Are.

ANYTHING that gets in between you STARTING WHERE YOU ARE is a lie that is meant to distract you from LIVING YOUR BEST LIFE NOW.

A.N.Y.Thing

Start living your best life NOW by taking these simple action steps. The time is going to pass by anyway.

Wont you be much happier when you are looking back at the last 12 months and seeing how far you have come JUST BY GETTING STARTED.

I am grateful for your commitment to take action.

I want to hear about your experience and breakthroughs. Comment below or simply email me your results if you prefer not to make it public. Email me at Erik@TheRealErikStark.com

If you found any value in this conversation, please share it with the world. You never know who you may impact.

Our Number One Source For Our Most Profitable Real Estate Deals…And The Strategy Used to Extract All The Money

I remember my first few months when we began to make serious money in real estate. Life was good. Deal flow was abundant. We had private money sources to fund our transactions.

Every day offered 1-3 serious opportunities to buy another property. We averaged buying and selling two deals per week for nearly three years.

The first year, all of our deals were assignments. We made $235,000 profit. The second year we opened up to doing rehabs and did 60% assignments and 40% rehab. We made over $700,000. The next year we flopped those numbers around and did more rehabs. We did over $1,000,000.

The money was consistent…and so was the constant need to be “on”. You could even say it was borderline stressful at times.

We did that for another year and at the first sign of the marketing beginning to change, we flew in our secret weapon…the very first educator I ever heard speak in the field of real estate.

He was not mainstream. Couldn’t be found on a webinar and his website looked like it was the first website ever created. It actually may have been. He was a close neighbor to Bill Gates. We didn’t care about his online appearance. We knew his track record and wanted to implement his model as our new way of doing business.

He flew in and we showed him our machine.

Nearly in tears, he explained and showed us how we are working our asses off to cut our own financial throats.

He made us aware of just how much money our lenders make from our hard work.

He pulled out a napkin and showed us how we are making a small fortune and only keeping enough to fill a small piggy bank.

From that day forward we changed the direction, positioning and structure of our business.

From lead flow to lender interest rates to strategy implementation.

We set out to become property owners and disassociated ourselves with being property flippers, wholesalers and even landlords. Those are bad words in our office.

We used words like price, terms, expandability, zoning, wrap notes, maker beneficiary agreement. It was a new level of sophistication.

Our first step was to identify 100 of our areas top properties we want to own.
Not single family. Small apartments. Retail storefronts with lofts up above. Prime office space. The good stuff we drool over believing we don’t have what it takes to acquire.

This seemed daunting as we were just some amateur guys who worked our flipping model well and had purchased a few hundred properties in the last couple of years.

We were used to going after old, ugly distressed properties.

Within 5 days we had 100 photos, public records, biographies on the property owners and a very solid idea of the income potential of each building.

We set out to get in contact with all of them.

We mailed personal letters that engaged people and began purchasing these properties one at a time.

I will admit this was MUCH SLOWER than our previous model however it only took the first deal to realize how much equity we captured with effort nothing like we did with high volume wholesalers and rehabs.

Sure I was still on the hook for $151,000 mortgage and note, however the major difference is that there was zero pressure to have that money back to the lender within a certain time period.

Not to mention that that deal covered itself day one…and still threw off excellent cash flow.

Here is EXACTLY how we bought that deal.

How To Build Wealth From Your Next Wholesale Deal.

Below is the summary of that..

Bought a cheap house for $17,500
Put $2000 down and seller carried note for $15,500 at 4% for 5 years

Sold that house 12 days later for $25,000 CASH NET
Moved the sellers $15,500 note to another property we owned and pocketed $25,000.

We netted exactly $7,500 from that sale (even though we pocketed full $25k).
Meanwhile we were negotiating a 4 unit apt building in an excellent part of town.

We purchased that 4 unit for $159,000, put $7,500 down payment, seller carried $151,500 note at 7% for 15 years.

We cash flowed that building for over a year and finally someone wanted it so bad that they paid us $250,000 (if I remember correct).

So not only did we lock up a A class asset for $7500, but the property covered itself month after month, removed pressure from us having to renovate and improve, threw off additional net cash flow to our company, and then someone comes and pays nearly $100k more shortly after 1 year later. Therefore we also avoided cap gains tax.

ALL OF THIS STARTED WITH $2000 down on a cheap rental house.

I remember leaving the closing and went right back to my office to draw this out on the white board so I could visualize what just happened and how we can do it again.

This was the first time I realized Ill never go back to our old ways again.

We took that sellers $151,500 and moved it to another duplex, this time closer to downtown and paid off an underlying balance of $107,000 that we were paying more interest on.

Now that property was REALLY cash flowing.

Low and behold, one year later we received an offer for $252,000 on our duplex. Same scenario all over again. No pressure. No flipping. Self covering. Cash-flowing. Avoided cap gains. Made another 100k+

Don’t get me wrong, we had many 100k months, however those were dependent on us being in the field 50 hours per week.

Do you know what happens when you make $100k and are subject to capital gains?

You’re immediately only sitting with $70,000.

What we were experiencing was wealth creation.

So it turns out that our number one profitable source for real estate deals is direct to seller with out Top 100 Properties..

The number one strategy is to leverage and control properties. This can be done with option agreements, through owner finance and even certain wrap notes.

Im sure cash would have resulted in the same profits, however it was leverage that allowed us to sequentially hit on all cylinders.

How to Transition From Wholesaler/Flipper to Wealth Building Property Controller?

*Side Note – I advise you to begin building your own list of Top 100 properties however for sake of this post we are going to show you how to transition right where you currently are in your business.

First you start by incorporating this single question into your qualification sheet. Wether its you or a virtual assistant, I want you to begin asking this to every seller lead who calls to sell you their property.

“Are you interested in selling for cash or would you like to receive a secured monthly income from the sale”?

You can also try a variation of this and use “regarding the sale, are you looking to receive all cash or would you like to continue to receive an income stream from the sale of the property”?

*Another Side Note – I must stress the importance of offering cash first and leaving with the secured monthly income. It has been my experience that more people show interest when presented above which makes it more possible for us to structure their deal that way. Offering cash as the last option, in most cases made it super easy for them just to say “just give me the cash”.

By offering this question, you are opening the door to leveraging your way to wealth. Don’t be discouraged if your first deal doesn’t make you $100,000. Just know that anyone can buy a $17,500 crack shack with $2000 down and get there.

You want to structure these deals to forecast long into the future.

The one idea you need to wrap your mind around is that real estate is 100% SEPARATE from financing. They are two totally separate entities. Both can be profited from and maneuvered around.

Many of our deals don’t require a payoff at closing. Generally we do a discharge of the underlying balance and then simultaneously record the new note and mortgage on the new subject property.

Most typical deals that are common usually require a payoff, then the check to be sent back to the lender, the discharge to be recorded at the county, then the funds have to clear lenders bank and if you have a deal waiting in escrow to close with the principle or proceeds from the previous deal, you could be waiting days to fund your next transaction. We do it all within 5 minutes and every can mentally see the moving parts coming together for one beautiful symphony.

Your goal with these deals is not so much about the property, its about the structure of the deal. The goal is to create long term, low rate, amortized debt that you can switch to another property if you decide to sell the current property that the debt is being collateralized by.

Our mentor describes this as the “Bank of US”. It almost acts like a line of credit that allows you to switch debt, collateralize any equity and secure any source of funds as long as you have equity and cashflow to support the note amount.

The next objective you want to accomplish is to set these deals up for cash flow for the long haul. Getting your sellers to agree to 10, 15, 20+ years of financing is going to be one of the greatest future plays you’ll be able to enjoy in your business for years to come.

Once this deal is set up for 15 years, the lenders are getting interest only or amortized payments, the property is covering itself and you are now collecting cashflow.

This is where buying property in EXCELLENT areas will accelerate this process. You have so many more possibilities in A class areas that you don’t get with crack shacks and war zones.

As explained, these deals in excellent areas created future demand that allowed us to realize over $100,000 in profit, from two properties, with less than $2000 of ACTUAL money out of our pocket (remember the $7500 was from profit from selling the crack shack) and only $151,500 note we were responsible for.

We RARELY made $100,000 by only using $151,500 to generate it.

And there you have it. That is Our Number One Source For Our Most Profitable Real Estate Deals…And The Strategy Used to Extract All The Money

So lets recap…

1. Your objective is to begin asking and getting comfortable with “the question”.

2. When you get someone who is ready to sell on owner finance, fill out the purchase agreement the same way, except instead of cash, its going to be a purchase money mortgage and the rest of the details are pretty much paint by number.

If you truly plan to make this a part of your future business, it would be to your benefit to get educated on the possibilities of owner finance and how to maximize your deals. We can help with that and have several case studies, unique processes, documents and structures to help you begin taking these down. As you become more sophisticated with larger deals you will want to have a full on language for communicating your skill confidently.

3.Plan for the long haul. Lock up those deals for as long as you can. When interest rates soar to 8, 9 even 12%, you’ll have a nice little asset that can be repositioned to free up your 5, 6 or 7% money source to use for your next great acquisition.

4. Get educated on how to improve your control and positioning on these deals. You’ll still be responsible for the debt associated with these deals just like any other real estate transaction, however you’re only limited by legalities and the extent of what you can confidently explain and this gives you ultimate flexibility.

As you begin to acclimate yourself to this you will discover that little by little the pieces begin to come together. It may be tempting at first to take that quick $5k fee, however, you’ll ever be as good as your last month.

Start with these steps above and tell me about your experience right here www.Facebook.com/TheErikStark . If you are struggling to define and implement let me know what your biggest struggle. I can be reached at Erik@TheRealErikStark.com

Check out this infographic to see how this deal went down. Wholesale Wealth Infographic

How to Make Big Money From Small Mailing Lists In Your Real Estate Business…

I must admit I get a little disturbed whenever I meet someone who is mailing out 50,000 mailers per month. Occasionally I feel a little awkward.

The whole time they are telling me how they are doing deals at rapid pace and on course to have the biggest month ever. My heart is congratulating them for having real handle on their marketing.

Meanwhile in the back of my mind, I remember what it was like to be mailing thousands of mailers each month.

As we applauded for the “industry standard” of 1% response rates, I couldn’t help but think of the 99% of mailers that are wasted (and this is on a monthly basis).

Not to mention that your next deal is kind of like “luck of the draw”.

This thought kept me up many nights. Sure we were profitable, but what if….I mean just what if there was a way to mail more successfully.

What if there was a way to target a specific group, with a ultra specific message that with each mailer increased the relationship around one core proposition?

What exactly would that look like?

Welcome to the world of making big money from small mailing lists.

Segmented Marketing and Creating Your Minimum Criteria

Segmented marketing is no new tool in the world of advertising. Pepsi learned from early on that if you find a group that gathers every Sunday to eat greasy food, potato chips and watch football, they are likely to also consume a lot of Pepsi as well.

Rather than blindly advertising your cola product to weight lifters and marathon runners (who usually dont want it at all), it made sense to figure out who is most likely to consume my product (or want their service) and not only who is most likely but will also likely be around others who are most likely to consume and on top of that they consume it frequently.

They could actually predict how many people would consume their product this Sunday. This led them to further realizing that in towns where these games occurred, they could predict how many ounces of this product these raving fans would consume.

If I am going to be a property buyer, I want to buy property from guys who own a lot of property and also for my property sellers to hang out with other property sellers who own lots of property. This gives us the best chance of buying properties from one segment of our market.

So we began to segment our marketing into very specified areas where we could predict things…

…things that we consider minimum criteria for mailing

…length of ownership
…motivational moving factors (no updates, looks vacant, no recent refi)
…minimum $25,000 profit potential
…ready for a higher and better use (add a top floor, ADU, build a new home)
…owners of multiple properties
…lower 1/3 of property values (according to tax values)
…being the first to know of a large development project that stood to raise values of all neighboring properties
…special zoning permitted uses

Once we identified a target market (aka our ideal avatar) it was time to create a message that resonated with them. This was when the market was peaking, mailing was saturated and sellers wanted platinum prices for their scrap aluminum property.

(Side Note – This target market was one specific city with around 20,000 people. Building of new homes was going crazy. People were popping the tops on their roofs and putting dormers on and selling for crazy price per Sq. Ft. The city was initiating all these incentives to property owners and developers and the sales and developments here were on fire. Our total monthly mailers applied to 2654 of them…so again not a whole huge mailing list. These are A and B neighborhoods where people live work and play so there is no undesirable areas where people don’t want to live. Only thing undesirable was a ugly beat down house next to a gorgeous one.)

Its like if your fishing, you can just go out and troll the lake and hope one bites or you can look for a school of fish, go get in front of them and increase your chance of catching multiple fish without having to burn up hours on your motor and gas in your tank.

Bottom line, there was enough money to be made in one city within a 5 mile radius that it made more sense to play here than it did to keep chasing deals across three counties. This is just one major market we segmented to.

We knew these people were being bombarded with mailers from Realtors and Investors.

We adopted a message that challenged people psychologically that IF they truly were interested in selling, they couldn’t help but wonder if we could honor all that we said we could in the mailer. (Don’t worry about this getting leaked to your market. Only those in our monthly coaching have access to this info =)

This put us in a situation where we didn’t have a huge influx of deals, however the spreads were thick and when ever a lead call came in, it pretty much was a done deal.

Largely because next to homeowners (who didn’t want these type of properties) we were the ones paying the most cause we knew what type of property could be placed there.

Action Steps

Here is how you transition from your mass mailings to segmented marketing.

Pick the territory from your mailing list where you tend to have a lot of transactions or better yet, wherever your largest check has come from.

I prefer to start with areas of great demand. Where there is a pulse. The type of area where you want to take your spouse to dinner on Friday.

Once you have identified your area, discover your own minimum criteria for this area and segment your marketing.

This info is in the sales data. Inside of your target market, what properties are mostly probable to sell and for under market value?

For us, it was mostly based on future developments so one of our minimum criteria was it had to potentially make us a minimum of $25,000 assignment fee and therefore we could do a minimum $100,000 profit if we had to develop.

For example, you might look at your identified area and come up with a total of 35,000 properties.

Now you want to ask yourself, “of all these people, who is most probable to sell their property soon, and at a discount”?

“Do any of them own more than one property where you can potentially buy a landlords whole portfolio”? (I don’t mean all at once. One property at a time every six months for the next five years or so)

Our first mail campaign would identify who, out of these 35,000 properties are the areas largest landlords. Its not likely all 35,000 will be who you are looking for.

Lets say that there are 46 guys who own a total of 1200 properties in this area of 35,000 people.

What I would do is look at some of the motivating factors that determine if a property can be purchased with a little equity…

…are any of these currently in probate?
…which of these have the lowest 1/3rd tax assessed value?
…what is the oldest recording date of these?
…which properties look like they have not been updated since they were purchased?
…who manages them?
…do any of them have outstanding code violations?

These questions set the stage for our minimum criteria that we use as a baseline to determine who our most probable prospects will be.

Somewhere in the data is the information that will create a “best case scenario” of who is most probable to sell their property. This data is where we make big money from small mailing lists.

There is your first segmented marketing campaign.

Next you might look into who of these 35,000 people has inherited their property. This is generally found by looking for quit claim deeds that were recorded with a death certificate attached.

Practice thinking just like Pepsi does…

Who is mostly likely to need my service that will allow you to identify a minimum criteria for these types of opportunities and then segment them out?

 

Check out this video that walks you through the process of making big money with small mailing lists.

 

Tell me, what are some of your past deals that you can now recognize as having this minimum criteria?

This is a good starting point for you to begin your transition.

If you need help finding your target market, segmenting, creating your message and implementing you can message me privately at Erik@TheRealErikStark.com or post to the FB group and Ill create a video to answer your questions.