Even as I’m working on finding prospects who will be passionate about acquiring distressed property, I’m knee-deep in administrative activities to ensure the success of the project. Here’s a progress report of what’s been happening.
I’ve sent lists of our properties to a couple of different wholesalers - one in Florida and one in North Carolina - who will post them on their Web site and add their fee to the purchase price. This effort has made me realize that we need to have photographs - not just listings - of all our 33 properties posted on a Web site. But we’ve gotten as many as three dozen photographs per property, and it’s time-consuming not only figuring out which ones would be best, but uploading and captioning all of them.
I’d really like to find other wholesalers, as well as other on-the-ground services to help out. Unfortunately, Stonecrest, the originators of this project, are keeping all the people at DBNR’s level isolated from each other. They are concerned that if more inexperienced investment groups have access to the more experienced ones, the latter will be bombarded with queries. I understand the logic, but I don’t agree with it. In the meantime, Web communities such as Bigger Pockets are filling in the gap somewhat, but there’s a lot of information there to sift through.
We’ve been wrangling over customer-relationship management (CRM) systems as well. We started out with a product that Stonecrest recommended, but that proved inadequate. We’re now working with ACT, but need to be able to upgrade to SugarCRM at some point in the future. All we really need is a database that everyone can access remotely, and one that is updated regularly, and it’s proving to be tougher than I thought it would be.
This project is also turning out to be an education for my management and leadership skills. Coordinating the activities of salespeople is still not the same as me doing it myself. For someone who’s worked independently for so long, I find myself getting impatient when people don’t file their sales reports. I anticipated that it would be challenging to manage a remote staff - and it is. We’re all learning together.
I have finally chosen someone to provide title information. That was my second-to-last piece of infrastructure work. This was also tougher than I thought, because some provide niche services for escrow companies and lenders, and charge more simply because they can. But other people are putting information on the Web and charging as little as $100 per month, which is a third of what industry leader First American wanted to charge for the same information. I went to First American and told them about this discrepancy, and to their credit, they gave me a contract at the lower rate.
The last piece of infrastructure work? To find someone to do evictions, if that becomes necessary. That’s something that, thankfully, doesn’t have to be done right now.
