I used to believe that the entire world of Real Estate investing was an upward spiral. What I really wanted to achieve was to become a major landlord of rental properties, however, to accomplish that I’d need to raise an enormous amount of capital, that’s why I had to flip a lot of homes first. In order to turn my first house into a rental I had to fund the initial 10%-20% down along with closing costs, as well as other expenses, so I had to close many wholesale deals before I could do that.

The journey from the beginning step to the last step, it felt like a long and difficult journey. Since I had little time left, I went through my notes on wholesale and then went online to locate an organization that could produce some signs for me. (Those We-Buy-Houses as-is and in any state signs). I filled out the site and ordered them, and waited patiently for my first package of signposts to be delivered. While the signs were arriving, I was also looking into direct mailers and driving for dollars as ways to create an effective lead funnel.

I recall a time in which I had mapped out my first route of the most crowded junctions of South Tacoma by day and at night, I would leave my home at 2:00 AM, armed with several signs as well as metal frames and ladders and put up signs in the ground or attach them to the closest telephone pole. I decided to do this early in the morning as I was nervous and scared of being noticed doing my work in bright daylight. Then, I was able to get my team members motivated enough to stick with the project, and it became an effort of the entire family. My mom was a part of the design for the direct mailers. Every week, she and I would each be able to spend hours pushing the letters into envelopes, and writing addresses on the front of each one.

My brother and I would comb through a list of foreclosure homes to drive around in search of dollars, and then split the routes every few days. We would note down our notes each time we returned. Both were great assets since I had plenty of time, but not much money, so this seemed to be the perfect opportunity to enter the Real Estate Industry.

However, none of the methods I tried ever yielded results, and I soon became exhausted from the entire process. The letters were expensive to mail in large batches and exhausting to write every week, since mailers need at least 5–7 “touches” before they can get a response from a seller. The driving-for-dollars marketing campaign was futile because we had to make an address list on the route we took when traveling towards properties that were pre-foreclosure However, I didn’t have a strategy on what to do with the data we collected, therefore I didn’t follow up with leads I could have.