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)

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

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

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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).