Davao: Death Squads, Tans and Birth Clinics

Davao City:

So I took a few days off from my trip to go visit my sister, Laura, in the Philippines. My sister is volunteering at a maternity clinic in Davao City serving as a midwive to the pregnant women that can't afford proper medical attention. It's part of a program she is enrolled in.

Basically she delivers babies.

As I said, she lives in Davao City which is apparently well known for the infamous death squads that were put in place by the mayor who was elected three years ago. The intersting part is that they are not out to kill opposing parties or revolutionist (although that's a good possibility that occurs as well) but drug dealers and otherwise criminals so it's kind of like a "boondock saints" put in place by the government.

Well I was here, one girl mentioned she was out and seen a large crowd outside of the mall and after asking what was going on, she was told the DDS (Davao Death Squad) had killed a well known drug dealer.

So she booked an awesome little trip for me while I was here. She booked me a room at the BS inn... still wondering if there was alterior motives behind that. It was like a motel 6 but only about $9/night. My hostels in Europe were cheaper!

I met Laura's friends, seen where she worked and had thanksgiving dinner with all of her co-workers.

Then we went and played 3 hours of badminton at the local gym. I was wrecked by the time we were done. These people are crazy good at this "sport?"

We got everywhere by these "tricey's" which is a motorcylce with little cab on it as show below or just a motorcyle.

The cool thing about Davao was the lack of tourists. I seen only a handful of white people which was cool because of the attention we recieved everywhere we went. People stopped and starred, school kids yelled and waived...it was crazy....but cool.

I took a short video from the motorcycle ride that gives a tast of it:

So the first day, we went to the market and I tried cocunut juice just poured from the coocunt...FYI, it tastes horrible!!

Then we took a trip to the island of Samal to check out the beaches and the falls. We took the motorcyles and there was 2 of us + the driver on each bike..so people on a two person bike.

The hills were not exactly smooth asphalt either so the ride was a trip in itself.

We made it to the beach where we swam, ate lunch and I was conned into trying coconut juice straight out of the coconut and it was still horrible!!

We then jumped back on the bikes and headed to the falls. Pretty awesome and fun to say the least.

And here are a couple of the guys we paid to drive us around all day:

After that me and my sister headed to Paradise Island which is a local resort which is pretty cheap and still really well done. It was very high standard but by Philippino standards, not U.S. standards.

Here's the accomodations

We had dinner and played some ping pong and I crashed early. We woke up at around 7:00, had breakfast. My pineapple juice was litterally an actual pineapple that the turned the inside to juice and served as a pinapple..check it out:

Then we went snorkeling and took a nap on the beach, I managed not to get burned. The interesting thing about Philippinos is that they thing white people are beautiful and try to avoid tanning to get darker and actually have "skin whitening" soap and body wash.
In America, it's the tanner the better so it was nice to have a few days where I was the desired colored vs the red haired, freckled guy.
It just goes to show you the grass is always greener.
Here's Laura playing with some kids.

and some pictures of us with the underwater camera:

I think that's about it for this leg of the journey. I'm heading back to Bangkok to catch up with Bill and his buddy for the rest of the trip.

Davao

First day in Thailand

Well the flight wasn't bad at all. The whole 20+ hours went by pretty quickly due to sleeping, audiobooks, real books and music - the occasional video helpes as well. The views were prett nice over Northern Canada and Alaska.

I barely made my connecting flight from Chicago to Tokyo and as I expected, my luggage failed to make it. Not that big of a deal but since I'm leaving tonight to go see my sister Laura it's making it tough to get my luggage before I see her and I had a whole bag with stuff just for her so she'll be a bit bummed if she doesn't get it.

So I got to my hotel at about 1:30 A.M., got a sim card for my phone and checked my email before going to my room.

I slept until 7:00 and jumped into the shower only to change into my same clothes I've worn for the last 30 hours or so.

I only had the morning before I had to check out of my hotel so I grabbed a guy with his "taxi" and we took off. He let me drive...

ya right! There's now way I could have survived the way they drive here.

I had him take me to the canal where I could catch a boat ride to get the overall picture of Bangkok.

It was a trip to say the least! Here are some pics from the ride:

After that, I went to the Grand Palace. The main tourist attraction in Bangkok and for good reason - the place was incredible! Pics are taking forever to upload and I'm hungry so I'll post them later.

Then I went and checked out a few other temples and attractions. Talked with some young school kids in english to help them learn it better. There teachers were there and loved it. Cute kids for about 45 seconds, then it was to much so I moved on....

I went and checked out a suit shop with some really nice stuff for a fraction of the price you would pay in the U.S. (Slave labor does amazing things for prices). So Picked up a couple suits and shirts that they are mailing back to the U.S. for me...hopefully they make it there....

Now I'm at the hotel writing this since I have little to do until my flight tonight. I'm going to go check out some shops once I'm done writing this.

All in all, it's good! The weather is great, things are going smoothly - minus the luggage deal of course but I'm sure it will work out!

Well I'm heading to the Phillippines tonight to see my sister for a few days.

SCPW is complete!!!

What a crazy ride! Persistence does pay off and I'm happy to announce that www.SuperCheapPropertyWebsites.com is completed and is ready for business.


I was planning on doing a large direct mail campaign to start things off but I'm going to wait until I get back from Thailand to ensure everything runs smoothly. The direct mail campaign should set the benchmark for the potential of the site so I'm excited to get that underway.

Only 10 days until Thailand!!

HUGE leap for SCPW + TV interview

What a relief! Building this website, www.SuperCheapPropertyWebsites.com has had it's ups and downs. It's seriously been like a roller coaster ride. At one point, everything is great and you're very close only to shortly realize that there are significant errors which are going to take time to resolve.
Well over the last couple days, my team in Chicago has made massive progress in getting this website to completion. I won't bore you with the details but we're incredibly close to launching now.
My guys are working on "tiding up" the site and doing intensive testing to ensure a smooth launch.

I'm hoping to start the marketing on November 5th, next Monday. This will give me time to review and analyze the results before I jump over to Thailand and the Philippines for a couple weeks.
It's kind of funny because my one buddy (http://snowbank23.blogspot.com/) who's a professional poker player just mentioned how he almost wished the Thailand trip would be delayed since he's thinking he'll have a great month playing poker...I think he thinks that solely because he got killed in October! J/K bill.
Well I almost feel the same way because I really need to be here to test and analyze different marketing campaigns. It's going to work out fine though because I can set stuff to run automatically and then I'll have lots of data to analyze when I return.

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TV Interview!!!!

This is pretty AWESOME! Part of marketing is trying to get as much free PR you can get - TV shows, Radio interviews, Articles in magazines, etc...

Well my Awesome G/F who's a reporter (and Princeton grad..but not smarter than a 5th grader) hooked me up with her friend to do a TV interview with. So next week, I'll be getting some free PR in the form of a TV interview.
Although it's a local channel, it's still positive because other journalist and reporters will catch wind of it and hopefully be interested and contact me for a story.

So yeah, pretty awesome!

Sold another House! A story of a flip.

I said I would post some real estate stories on here and I've failed to do so thus far so here ya go.

I just sold a house on Wednesday which leaves me with 1 of my own that should be closing in about 2 weeks and 1 I'm selling for an investor buddy of mine which should close in about 35 days.

Here's how the one I just sold worked out:

One of the major stumbling blocks for new investors is the marketing piece ( it's tough to flip houses if you can't find any houses to flip!).
I'm not going to go into the various marketing strategies at this point but I will cover the way I found this house which covers 2 marketing methods.

1. Driving for Dollars
1. This entails keeping your eye out as you drive around for run down houses. When you find one, you contact the owner to see if they would like to sell.
   
2. Obituaries
1. I realize this is going to make me sound like a monster but hear me out. This method involves keeping an eye on the obituaries page in the local paper. You find out if the deceased owned any property and then find out who their kids were and contact them offering to buy the house. To the kids, it's like found money. They generally don't care about getting the highest price, they care about converting that house into cash and FAST! This allows you to possibly get a good deal, especially if the house needs work. Now, I don't call the kids and say "sorry your dad died, do you want to sell his house". I'm a bit more tactful than that. What I do is send out one of my "I buy houses" postcard to the deceased house along with the kids houses. It appears to them as they just got a piece of mail that got blasted out to thousands of people. This makes you look less like a vulture.
   

Ok, so those were the two sources that led me to this awesome pink (my ex's are now saying "What is up with Luke and pink!?" house:



































The positive side to this deal was that the lady that died was elderly so a local non-profit group had come in 2 years earlier and installed a new roof, new windows, a slightly used furnace and updated the plumbing.
So the "guts" of the house were good and this is generally where the most expense comes in.

So I negotiated to buy it for $32,000. That's right my California friends, less than price of your car!
I then proceeded to fix it, well hire people to fix it that is.

I went way over budget. I think I anticipated about $15K and I spent about $25K.

So when it was done, I was into it for about $60K.

Here's what it looked like when I was done:

































So I put a for sale sign up and made a website for the house which you can see www.613LansingSt.com

I sold this house in about 2 days for $95K. That's right my California friends, less than price of your car!

It took a while longer to close than anticipated because the buyer need her parents to co-sign but she wanted to try to get approved herself first so that wasted a lot of time. Plus my mortgage broker was taking to many vacations!

So that ones history...well until April when Uncle Sam comes for his money!

So there's one of my flip stories.

I'll post the next one up when it closes here in a couple weeks.

Later,
Luke

Driving Lamborghini's, Ferrari's, Aston Martin's, etc....

Ok, so finally I've done what I've been dreaming about all summer!

I signed up along with 5 other guys/girls to take 6 ridiculously awesome, high end, exotic cars out for a spin one day.

The cars were:

Lamborghini Murcielago ($350,000 - 580+ Horse Power)

• 

Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder ($200,000 - 520+ Horse Power)

• 

Aston Martin DB9 ($190,000 - 450 Horse Power)

• 

Porsche 911 GT3 ($125,000 - 415 Horse Power)

• 

Mercedes SL65 AMG ($135,000 - 604 Horse Power)

• 

Ferrari F430 ($280,000 - 490 Horse Power)

• 

So yeah, it was absolutely incredible! We basically spent half the day driving around, switching cars and just having a blast experiencing what very few people every get to experience.

These cars are just unbelievable to drive. Extremely powerful, fast and a ton of fun.

Here are some more pics:












































































































And here are a few short video clips from the trip:

Delayed launch of SCPW

Ahhh...we got so close. There was a minor glitch with a 3rd party vendor that prevented me from actually having the customers domains purchase and point to their website so we are once again delayed.
I've learned that creating a complex, code intensive website is almost like a really tough riddle. Once you think you've figured it out, you realize you missed something and it happens over and over again!
I've already let my investors know and they are frustrated along with me as they want to see this thing launch and make them money but they are also understanding and know I'm working my butt off to get this launched so that comforts them.
So I have my developers working on the issue and hopefully it can be resolved early next week which would put my launch date at about the 22nd of Oct.

Here's 2 pieces of advice to anyone considering an online business: Ensure you get awesome web developers/programmers (you get what you pay for!) and ensure you're well funded with access to additional capital because it will cost more than you allocate, probably much more.

Goign to Thailand and the Philipines!!

Well I finally booked by ticket to Thailand. I'm leaving Nov. 19th and returning Dec. 4th.
I'm going to take about 5 days in between then to jump over to the Philippines and see my youngest sister Laura whose doing some incredible missionary work over there (Very proud of her!).
I'm going with a few other guys and we're just kind of winging it. We'll have a rough itinerary but nothing we have to stick to if the wind blows us in another direction.

I'm pretty sure most of the time will be spent down south hopping around the islands so should be a good time.

I'll try to upload video and pictures from my trip here if we have some down time and there's a computer nearby.

Pretty excited though!!

What are you doing with your dash?

I came across this very short video today, that although the guy commentating sounds like he's going through puberty, has a basic, yet powerful message.
Another important message here is how often we ignore the message based on the messenger.

Anyways, take a few seconds and check it out and then take a few minutes out of your day and think about it.

Dying 47-Year-Old Professor Gives Exuberant ‘Last Lecture’

I just stumbled across this incredible video that could most likely be the best hour and 45 minutes of your week!

I will copy and paste the story instead of doing it a disservice and trying to describe it myself.

Dying 47-Year-Old Professor Gives Exuberant ‘Last Lecture’
Description: Randy Pausch: Almost all of us have childhood dreams: for example, being an astronaut, or making movies or video games for a living. Sadly, most people don't achieve theirs, and I think that's a shame. I had several specific childhood dreams, and I've actually achieved most of them. More importantly, I have found ways, in particular the creation (with Don Marinelli), of CMU's Entertainment Technology Center (etc.cmu.edu), of helping many young people actually *achieve* their childhood dreams. This talk will discuss how I achieved my childhood dreams (being in zero gravity, designing theme park rides for Disney, and a few others), and will contain realistic advice on how *you* can live your life so that you can make your childhood dreams come true, too.

The first post

Hello and welcome to blog de Luke Hoppel.

I'm going to skip the "about me" spiel as that's in my profile and most people will already know me anyways.

So what's going to be in this blog you ask? Well I have a lot of exciting things coming up in the immediate future and would like to keep my friends up to date with what's going on.

There will be talk of:

• An upcoming launch and continued update of my new internet business (potential is incredible)
• My next move - San Diego, Australia, Buenos Aires?? Still haven't decided but it will be interesting.
  
• An occasional real estate case study for my friends breaking into Real Estate Investing
• New and interesting facts and strategies that I learn in the Internet Marketing Field
  
• A bunch of theoretical, talk about people, psychology, religion, success, happiness, business, politics etc....
• My rants, raves and very opinionated (Is that a word?) talk about various topics.

That's a touch of what I plan to post on my blog. There's a very good chance that my blog will actually consist of this one post and that's all but I'll try to post every few days or so.

So there ya go. Stay tuned for interesting discussion (if you are the type who finds this type of talk interesting).