Doug Pretorius (ON)

Don't worry about 'blowing it' Justin. There are more sellers where they came from. Remember, your job is to eliminate not to convince. You can't talk a seller into doing something creative, you can only qualify or disqualify them.

David, we had a discussion about this ages ago and came up with and idea you might want to try. Change your signs to read: Vote David "I Buy Houses" Busch Just make the word "vote" and your name REALLY small compared to "I Buy Houses"

I've never worked in an office, so when I was asked to speak at an agency a few years ago, it was kind of cool. There's an energy around you of 'things getting done' that doesn't really exist in your home office. If you did go that route I think it would be very easy to position yourself as the go-to guy for whatever type of deal you want. LP, sub2, wholesale etc. just talk to everyone and make sure they know to contact you when they come across a seller that meets certain criteria. As a fellow agent if you make it clear that you are NOT competing against them, they'd probably warm up to working with you a lot faster than if you approached them from 'outside' as an investor. Of course this all depends on how understanding your broker is! I personally decided against getting my license because of the bureaucracy.

I ran into a realtor at an open house a few years back who was a recent immigrant from China. We got talking and his face dropped and he just shook his head: "I can't believe I came to the 'land of opportunity' and what I found was a place even more communist than what I left behind."

Good to see you, Steve. MC, I heard something about the US government pushing banks to do all the same subprime lending that caused the trouble. Is that true? Here in Canada the government-controlled mortgage insurer did the opposite and drastically increased restrictions on investor loans and refi's in an effort to prevent what happened in the states.

The market here is same-old same-old. We didn't have the huge boom that you guys had in the mid-2000s, so we didn't have a bubble to burst, although prices did slide a little. Now it's continuing up. Average price for a single-family as of May is $333,288 up 6.9% from last year. Average household income is about $90,000.

Kinda seems that way doesn't it. At first I thought it was maybe just certain techniques, like lease options or something that wasn't as popular. But it looks like it's every niche across the board. Nothing has really changed though has it? I mean my local market is business as usual. Finding deals takes about the same amount of effort as it always has. I will say that it's harder to find qualified T/Bs, but certainly not impossible.

A quick perusal of the REI forums and things look pretty blah. Even creonline only has a couple of posts a day, I remember when they had 3 or 4 pages of new threads daily! reiclub is the same. And things are pretty quite around here too. My RTO site is steadily declining in traffic as well. I notice that here in Canada, Kijiji absolutely dominates google's search results for terms related to "rent to own". I don't think I've ever seen things this quiet before.

Oh man you just made Molly's day!

Used my wife's address and got a 100% response, sweet! I could have sworn I tried other email address before though...oh well, thanks MC

I know quite a few of you do email marketing. Although it's not something I've had much success with I do still send out a few emails to properties I'm interested in. Problem is I don't seem to be getting ANY replies anymore Unfortunately the most popular (by far) place to find FSBOs around here is kijiji which uses their own internal messaging system (instead of an email address that forwards to the advertiser's email like on craigslist). Obviously I can't be sure but I'm suspicious that my messages are being blocked because of replying to so many ads in the past. Anyone else run into this? Any ideas on what I can do? Very few people put alternative contact info (like a phone number) in their ads so if my messages aren't going through there's no way to contact them short of knocking on their door

With that option in place you can also list the property with an agent. I assume at the prices you mentioned this home needs at least some rehab, so look for an agent who has investors in their buyers list in addition to putting it on the MLS.

John, we don't have a health care # we have a health care quota. We're allowed 1 accident or major health issue (heart surgery, cancer etc.) in our lives. Anymore than that and we...well...die. It's terrible. You have no idea what you're in store for as socialized healthcare really takes hold down there. You might find that you even have to start paying more for...oh dear god...gas! Dan, the first thing I would look at is whether or not the basement tenant can RTO the main level, that way they have a huge incentive to work with you and you don't have any do any advertising.

If you decide to pursue it please share the details. I haven't had the greatest success with long-distance deals. Getting them signed up is easy enough and the seller is willing to do the showings, but I always find marketing to be a pain. I've tried it the other way too, looking for houses where I have T/Bs from my site. But the weird thing is my site generates the most T/Bs from towns with hardly any FSBOs

An email is a legally binding contract itself. You don't need signatures or faxes, it's almost 2013!