43: Driving For Dollars in 2016

Listen / Watch

Show Notes

Danny Johnson is the host of the Flipping Junkie podcast and today he shares with us incredible tips for driving for dollars in a world where technology has made things so much easier.

In this episode, we discuss:

• What driving for dollars is
• When to drive for dollars
• Where to drive for dollars
• How to drive for dollars
• What to do after you get the addresses
• Common questions about driving for dollars
• How to outsource driving for dollars

 

links

LeadPropeller.com - Real Estate Investor Websites

FlipPilot.com - Real Estate Investor Software System

Please Rate and Review

This is my simple request: If you enjoy the podcast and look forward to hearing a lot more episodes, I would be very grateful, happy, beholden and otherwise indebted to you to rate and review the podcast on iTunes.

It’s your choice and I do not want you to feel at all obligated. But I’d love it if you would subscribe and leave a rating and review.

Ratings and reviews allow the podcast to be seen by more people, which will help me achieve my goal of helping as many others as we can to get started in the house flipping business and change their lives.

Click here to rate and review our podcast! :)

Not sure how to leave a rating and review? Click here to view the instructions (it only takes 2 minutes)

How to Subscribe to the Podcast

There will be a brand new episode every single week, so be sure to subscribe and receive each episode as it’s released.

Subscribe on iTunes  Subscribe on Stitcher

Episode Transcription

Danny Johnson: This is the Flipping Junkie podcast episode 43. [music] Welcome to the Flipping Junkie podcast. My name is Danny Johnson; former software developer turned house flipper, flipping hundreds of houses. Each week, we bring you interviews, strategies, stories, and motivation to help you get started flipping houses and on your way to becoming your own boss and achieving financial freedom. Thanks for spending time with me today. Now, let’s get to it.

Welcome back to the Flipping Junkie podcast. I’m glad you guys are listening to this podcast. There’s a lot of other real estate investing podcasts and I’ve got a lot of friends that do podcasting for real estate investing, so I do appreciate that you listen to all of us and especially ours, the Flipping Junkie podcast. Thank you for tuning in and listening.

We’re right in the middle of a series of podcast episodes. It’s probably going to span about a year where we’re basically giving you a real estate investing/house flipping course through podcasts over the year once every week and so that will end up being I’m sure well over 50 episodes starting from the beginning of foundation mindset, getting your thinking right to be an entrepreneur and then moving into how to get funding for properties to be able to buy these houses, to fix them up, flip them and make incredible profits.

Then now we’re moving into where we’re talking about marketing. We’ve had a couple episodes about direct mail and in the last episode I did mention that this one would be an episode with Tom Krol about the best list to get for your direct mail, and I apologize but that’s going to be put off for a couple episodes because of a scheduling conflict so we’re going to move that. Sorry if you expected that today but that will be in a couple episodes.

What I wanted to talk about today is driving for dollars. This is what Melissa and I started with 13 years ago, the first thing that we went out and started doing. I have to tell you I really enjoy doing it and I still, to this day, enjoy doing it because it’s relaxing and I feel like I’m out really seeing what the neighborhoods are like, seeing what the market is like, beating the street and just getting out there and seeing what’s going on. It’s good to know your market. It’s good to have that good of an understanding and for being out there and drive around and see which neighborhoods are being rehabbed, which neighborhoods still have a lot of houses that need repair but have quick turnaround, quick short days on market where houses are selling fast. I mean, those are awesome neighborhoods to get into because there’s a lot of housing stock in there that needs repairs that you can target and you can buy and then be able to sell quickly and it’s just the perfect thing. So, getting out there and seeing what’s happening. You know, you can read charts and spreadsheets all day long but that to me, I just can’t do that kind of thing. I’m not that type of person. I’d rather be out driving around looking at this stuff, seeing what’s going on. So I don’t know, driving for dollars has always been a great thing for me and Melissa and what we’ve done in our business. Our first deals were from driving for dollars. So I think it’s still a very viable way to find great deals in 2016 and beyond. So this is driving for dollars in 2016 is what we’re going to be talking about.
Before I get into the episode, I wanted to quickly talk about Lead Propeller websites. We’ve got a lot of cool things coming up with Lead Propeller websites, some advances. You know how things change pretty quickly in the internet and we stay on top of that and that’s one of the benefits of having a service like Lead Propeller for your real estate investor website, is that we do stay on top of what’s happening and keeping with the changes so that you can rank along search engines and get great deals, great leads to your website so that you can flip them.

I wanted to quickly talk about because I hear other people that say that they’re investors and offer software websites and things like that. But when you look at sort of the background, it’s not really active investors. It’s people that have flipped some houses in the past several years ago or bought a rental property and considered that real estate investing. The real problem with that and the real issue there is that you’re sort of missing out on all the experience that active flippers have with working with motivated sellers and understanding their point of view and what they’re looking for and how to work with them. So that’s sort of the benefit that you get from active flippers that provide that sort of information because it’s a working knowledge. It’s knowledge gained through experience and it’s really priceless. I mean, there’s so much insight to be had when you work with people like that. So, I just want to mention that as part of a benefit of really working with us and Lead Propeller and REI Mobile. One example of that, just to make the point a little bit more clear, is with internet marketing there’s a lot of studies out there, a lot of different information that you can find. It’s kind of hard to know what’s right and what’s wrong and what would work in our industry and what wouldn’t. So the problem is I see lot of times that some of the information out there gets used and it’s shown to work in a certain industry and then that’s just transferred over automatically assuming you would work for real estate and for marketing and whatever sellers, and it’s just not good advice.

One key thing with that is sort of like if you look at conversion rate testing. So you want your website to convert better, so more of the traffic that comes actually fills out the form and submits it you to so you have the lead. So that’s conversation optimization. You have a website that converts it really well. If you look at studies that show that the shorter the form, the less fields in the form, the higher conversion rate you will have. So that just sounds great, right? I’m going to go ahead and strip out most of the information on my form and just ask for their name and email address or something like that. You might think, “I’m going to get a lot more leads now because I’m not requiring a phone number, I’m not requiring an address,” and things like that.

The problem with that though is in our business, the person that talks to the seller first honestly has a huge edge over anybody else. So you might get a couple here and there that people that didn’t want put in a phone number that submit their lead information or you have their email address, but you can’t contact those people very quickly. You can send an email, hope it doesn’t go to their spam box and hope that they respond to you and you’re going to be able to communicate. But if they then go to another website and submit a form that require their phone number and they do that, that person is calling them right away and so they just made first contact and they have the huge advantage. So it’s knowing things like that, knowing that historically with my website that I generate my own leads for my house flipping business. And whenever I don’t get a phone number, I’m losing out because it makes it really hard to get in touch with those people because they’re not responding to email or the email might be going to their spam folder. You could have all of those issues that you don’t control. I’d rather have a phone number that I can get in touch with them right away and know that they’re going to receive that and if not, then get a message in and I can keep trying to call them. So shorter form isn’t necessarily always better. I would take fewer leads and it doesn’t even affect it that much from what I’ve tested. So getting that phone number is very important. If you do have a real estate investor website, make sure that you have the phone number in the form. That’s just like an example of one of those things that’s a benefit of Lead Propeller websites with us being real active investors doing motivated seller marketing for leads because we understand and have worked with thousands of motivated sellers over the years. So if you haven’t checked out Lead Propeller, go to LeadPropeller.com and check that out.

So anyway, I’ll go ahead and get into the show now and we’ll talk about driving for dollars in 2016. I’m going to have some great tips about different things that you can use now that’s available that wasn’t available when we got started driving for dollars. Some great technology that can use, most of it free, and information on how to best drive for dollars to maximize your time and get some awesome leads. [music]

All right, here we are. Driving for dollars in 2016. It’s crazy it’s already 2016. And who knows you might be listening to this and it’s 2018 or something like that and it’s still great advice. Maybe the apps have changed a little bit and some of the software probably improved more and things like that by then as things change so quickly. But most of this advice is still going to hold true because really, most of it is what I had learned 10 years ago and still apply today, or 10 or 13 years. So, it’s just information that driving for dollars has been around for a long, long time and it’s just an excellent way to find great deals. So, some people might not know what driving for dollars is and real quick, that’s just locating properties that are vacant and/or in need of repair. It’s called driving for dollars because you’re driving around, locating potential flip deals that will put money in the bank for you and you’re just driving down looking for potential opportunities by actually visually looking at these. Visually looking – I don’t know if there’s any other way to look. But looking at these houses as you drive through these neighborhoods and writing down the addresses, and then the thing is to find the owners through tax assessor websites and other means and direct mailing them or calling them and trying to see if they’d like to get an offer to buy the house because it’s likely vacant or likely in a situation where the houses had so much deferred maintenance that they can’t afford to fix it up and there might be some other issues or situations that they’re facing that has caused those problems and might put them in a position where they’d be interested in getting a cash offer from me to buy the house. So that’s what driving for dollars is.

I’m going to be talking about when to drive for dollars, where to drive for dollars, how to do it correctly and then what to do after you get the addresses of these houses and then answer some common questions that people have about flipping houses and then some ideas in there as far as apps and stuff like that to use. So it’s going to be a great show. Let’s go ahead and get right into when to drive for dollars.

I want to start with this because I think the times that you drive around these neighborhoods has a big impact on how many properties you can find that are vacant that might not appear to be vacant just on the surface as you drive by at 10 miles an hour. So let’s talk about the best time. I prefer days like trash day, so the day that trash is going to be picked up. People will have the trash cans out to the curb and if you drive by at 10 miles an hour, you can just be kind of looking for the properties where there’s no trash can at the curb and then you can look and focus on those properties and consider whether you think that they’re vacant or not so that you’re not having to inspect every single property as you’re driving by. That’s one I like to do.

Another time is if you see that the neighborhood is getting phone books or something deliver, you can drive through and like a week later or something like that, and if there’s still the phone book on that porch, it’s probably vacant. Vacant doesn’t always necessarily mean vacant for a long time. It could be on vacation, it could be any kind of situation where the people might drive into their garage and never go through the front door so they don’t even know the phone book is there. But you don’t need to concern yourself so much with that because really what you’re doing is you’re going to be sending some letters and stuff like that. So even if the house isn’t vacant, you could get lucky. They could still want to sell. But really, all your out is a couple bucks and sending several letters and stuff like that. So I wouldn’t fret too much over whether the house is absolutely vacant. If there’s signs showing it might be, I would go ahead and write down the address.

So trash day, when phone books are delivered and things like that, when mail is being delivered. So if it’s typically around 1:00, 2:00 and the neighborhood is getting their mail delivered by the postman, it’s a good day to drive because you can talk to that mailman and ask them or her where the vacant houses are and a lot of times they’ll tell you “That one over there is vacant. That one is vacant.” You can get a lot of info from them. One smart way to handle that is to give them a business card, for one, so that they know that you’re not just looking to break in or vandalize the house. But number two is what you want to do is set up a bird dog referral system so that these postal employees will give you a call or give you a list of these vacant houses and you can work out some kind of referral thing or maybe you can give them some sort of a gift if they send you a lead to one of these houses that you end up buying, so that’s a great thing that you can work on doing.

Another time that you would find beneficial to drive for dollars is when people are usually home. What I like about that is basically if there’s no car in the driveway when everyone else is home, that’s a good sign that that’s a house that you can look at and pay a little bit more attention to. Some other ones that may have looked vacant could have a car sitting in the driveway in the evening after work, so you would have thought it was vacant but it turns out it’s not. So situations like that.

Then my last time that I want to talk about is the time that you are able to do it when you can bring your family along. So that might not be those same times as trash day or when everybody else is usually home, but the reason why I bring this one up is because it’s good to include your family especially your spouse in this business. I think driving for dollars is one of those things that everybody can get behind and everybody can have fun doing, make a game of finding which house, how many people, who finds the vacant house first kind of deal. It can be pretty fun and you can get to know different parts of the city that you may never even knew existed. Different little hotspots or something, different restaurants. So it’s a good thing for everybody and I think it’s a good way to get everybody involved in the business to get behind you in this business and that’s a big part that I think a lot of people fail because their family is not behind them and it’s just an uphill struggle. And when you don’t have people there supporting you, it makes it pretty difficult. So, those are all the times that I feel are beneficial or are great times to drive for dollars.

I’m going to have these notes, all these key points and things like that on the show notes page at FlippingJunkie.com/43. You’ll be able to get all of these notes. I’ll have them there for you to download.

So where to drive for dollars? Now, this is equally important. You want to pick neighborhoods that are at least 15 to 20 years old. Newer neighborhoods don’t usually have a lot of houses that are in disrepair or vacant. That’s the main reason for that. If there’s a lot of activity in a neighborhood or investors are buying and it’s not that old, go ahead. You won’t be writing down as many addresses but maybe those are better deals that other people aren’t finding. But the general rule of thumb is to find ones, start with the neighborhoods that are older though. You want to find where other investors are rehabbing, flipping houses where it’s a good sign of interest in an area. Some areas are really bad, you won’t find a lot going on in the way of people flipping houses and stuff like that. So you want to be sort of where there’s some action so that you know that if you do get a deal whether you wholesale or fix and flip it or rent it or whatever, you’re going to have a great possibility to do different things with the property. In previous episodes on direct mail I think it was that we’ve talked about how to find these areas where other investors are flipping houses that you can do from the computer even using List Source. I think there was an episode with Lamar Canon on there if you want to check that one out where he talks about using List Source without paying for the list to find out what zip codes have the most cash sales, and so you can check out that website to find that out.

Then another consideration you want to have for where to drive for dollars is basically where you don’t fear for your life. In this one, you might think, “Oh, that’s kind of funny.” There’s some war zones and stuff like that. But seriously, there’s some places in any city that you just don’t want to be and you might be able to make some money there, great. If that’s your thing, awesome. For me, no amount of money is really worth losing my life over and you might be thinking, “Oh, come on. It’s not that bad in some places.” But really, we’ve had some experiences with some things, with people jumping out in front of the vehicle when you’re driving by and trying to even – I had a buddy that even had a crackhead or something try to jump into his truck. He had his pasture window open while he was driving by and just crazy things like that. And maybe one situation where I think it was probably even a possible carjacking that we avoided. So you just have to be really careful. And I don’t recommend the warzone stuff. One quote that I always remember whenever I talk about that is from Ron LeGrand. He always was saying “Don’t go rolling through a war zone driving a fancy car, wearing lots of jewelry. It’s just not smart. Don’t do it.” So if you have a fancy car, lots of jewelry, please don’t drive through war zones, driving the car or wearing jewelry.

I prefer neighborhoods just under the median value for the city because we fix and flip, we want the price range with the biggest pool of buyers. So we want to target those areas where if we had a house for sale after we fixed it up, we’ve got a ton of potential people looking for a house in that price range so that we have a chance of selling it for top dollar and fast.

So we’ve talked about when to drive for dollars and we talked about where to drive for dollars. Now we’re going to talk about how to actually do it. You might say, well, all you got to do is drive through and look for the vacant houses, but there’s I think a little bit more to it. You want to make sure that you’re not going over the same areas you’ve already covered and some neighborhoods, most neighborhoods are not grids anymore, not grid streets so it’s kind of hard to know whether you’ve covered every street in that neighborhood and you really don’t want to miss pockets because other investors that are driving for dollars might be missing those pockets as well. So you want to make sure that you cover every little nook and cranny. Car GPS makes it pretty nice to be able to see where you are in relation to what other streets are in the area and then one thing that’s come up recently that you can use is an app for your phone or iPad. Just do a search for Route Tracker. So you do a route tracker that tracks where you’ve been and show you which streets that you’ve been on so that you know what you’ve already covered, so that’s super, super awesome so that you know that you get total coverage of these areas when you’re driving for dollars. I prefer to have somebody with me when I’m driving for dollars so that I can focus on the left side of the street while the other person focuses on the right side of the street because after doing it by yourself for a while, you’ll notice that having your head on a swivel isn’t very effective, it’s going to wear you out a whole lot faster and you’re going to just be done and ready to get back to the office or home sooner than later. And it’s also just better because you’re having conversations on the phone and tend to do it more often and have somebody to kind of go back and forth or whether you think something’s vacant or not and get a second opinion.

So the next one is to watch out. Don’t be so consumed with trying to find these vacant houses that you run into a parked car or people. I’ve heard of this happening. Thank God, I’ve never done it myself. And it was a parked car, not a person but you don’t want to have either situation happen to you. So, just be careful, okay? Drive slow enough and don’t be trying to text the address while you’re still rolling and all that kind of stuff. Drive slow, look for signs that a house is vacant or might have a situation where the owners would consider selling.

So what are those signs of being vacant or being a situation where they would consider selling? So, neglect. Grass is overgrown, trees have never been trimmed, broken windows, trash in the yard, etc. etc. Just general look of neglect. After driving for dollars for a while, you’ll notice what those are. It’s just super obvious. Everybody else’s yard is cut and then this one has two-foot tall grass.

Newspaper, door hangers, or other solicitations piled up on the porch. That’s usually a giveaway as well. It’s just amazing you’ll see how much actual marketing is done that way whenever you see some of these houses that have been vacant for months. I mean, it’s just amazing how much stuff accumulates.

Another thing is missing or tagged electric meters. If you can see the meter on the house, a lot of times with vacant ones in certain places, they’ll just take the whole can so that people won’t be stealing electricity or something. But other times they’ll tag them with like a red tag or something. You have to find out what your city or town or area uses to mark or show that there’s no power to a property. Because no power, nobody is likely living there if there’s no power. Even if somebody is living there and there’s no power, it’s probably a horrible situation and one where they would likely be interested in getting cash.

And then also like peeling paint, rod, wood, boarded up windows, vandalism, stuff like that – anything to the extent to be something that’s been neglected for a couple of years or so without taking care of the properties, a sign that’s something happened in somebody’s life and they might be interested in you helping them out by giving them a cash offer so they can move into a nicer home or something.

So, what you do when you find these addresses is write down the addresses on a pad of paper, it’s the old-school way. You can use your phone to record a voice memo which is a little bit safer or you can use an app like Homesnap and with Homesnap, you take a picture of the subject property, it will give you the bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, estimate value, sales history, whether it’s in foreclosure, bank-owned, all that kind of stuff. So it allows you to also save all those properties in your account so you can keep them organized. That’s one thing you can check out, is the Homesnap app.

And then what do you do after you get these addresses? Once you compile these addresses, once you have a list of them, you’re going to need to find who owns that house. The most common way is to check the tax assessor for the county or parish or whatever you call it in where you are. Find their website. Most of them are all online these days. You can do a search by property address. Giving the address of where the tax bill is being sent and that’s typically almost always the owner. When you do that, sometimes you’re going to notice that the tax bill address is the same as the property address and you’re going to say, “Well, it’s obviously vacant. How come the tax bill is going to the vacant house?” Well, a lot of times there will be mail forwarding and sometimes something will have happened and nobody will have done forwarding and you’ll need to find those people. To me, that’s sort of gold, getting those letters back, so you want to mail anyway even if that addresses is the same and it’s obviously vacant. Mail it to that address anyway first-class. Letters are either going to get forwarded or they’re just going to get returned to you at the forwarding address or letting you know that it’s just vacant or something. And when you get those, you know that those are the ones to focus on with a little bit more effort. You can find people all kinds of ways these days. I mean, it’s not really that hard. You can use social media and look for their names and location, website like WhitePages.com and you want to get more advanced, you get a paid solution like TLO.com. You have to jump through some hoops and apply and stuff to get an account, but it’s great skiptracing, a way to find people.

But a lot of times you can find them without doing any of that and it’s just interacting with people. it’s just getting out there and talking to people. So you know a house is vacant, you’ve sent the letter out, it didn’t get forwarded, it got back to you and says the house is vacant. What you can do is you can drive over to that property, go to the neighbor’s houses and ask them. Just say “Hey, look. I noticed this house is vacant. I tried to mail them a letter, it got bounced back. What I do is I fix up houses and I sell them so that a great family can move in next door and have a house that they’re proud of and fix that eyesore next door to you.” And just see if you can find out what the situation is, who the homeowner is and if they have any contact information for them. A lot of times they do so it’s just a matter of taking time to get out there and do that or hire somebody who wants to do it. So don’t just throw those away, don’t just send them out and get them sent back to you and throw them in the trash can.

All right. So some common questions that people have about driving for dollars. What if a house looks like it needs lots of repairs but it has a car in the driveway? Would you write that down? Is that one thing you would consider sending a letter to? The car’s in the driveway, it might not be vacant. They could be living there, whatever situation. So the car could be sitting there because the owner is deceased. It might have been sitting there for a while, it could be any number of things. But don’t get too concerned about all of it. The level of disrepair is enough to warrant me mailing letters to them to see if they’re interested in selling.

Onto the next question now. How many addresses would be considered typical for a good investment area? Now this is a question about how many should you expect to get as you drive these areas. If you’re not getting numbers like this, it might just be the area. You maybe pick an area that’s a little older or something. But I’d say that about 20 or 30 addresses, somewhere in there, 20 to 30 addresses per hour is a good haul for a typical neighborhood for flipping. If you’re targeting more rental-type areas, places that are a little bit more on the scale of working class down to warzone, there’s a big spread in between there. It’s not just from there to there but you should be seeing more around 40 to 50 addresses per hour in some of those neighborhoods where you have boarded up houses. So you can gather and list pretty quick by doing this, of these prime opportunities. And if you look at direct mail, if you’re sending out some sort of blanket thing or even just the absentees, you don’t know what shape those houses are in, you don’t know if they just rented it to somebody or they’ve been renting it to somebody for 30 years and have no interest at all in selling the place. But when you see these houses like this that are in disrepair or vacant, it’s a lot more likely that if you do get the call it’s going to be a good call or that you send them out, you should have a higher return or a higher response rate for your mailings by doing driving for dollars.

So the next question. What if I can’t find the address for the house? Sometimes you’ll plug them into the website for the tax assessor and it won’t find anybody, you won’t find any address. You might have the wrong address so try maybe adding a 2 because it’s usually odd and even on one side of the street. So try adding 2 or subtracting 2 from the number that you have. If you’re driving and you can’t see the address of the house, like the numbers aren’t on the house, you don’t know what the address is, just look at the neighbor’s house and look at the neighbor on the other side and then put it somewhere in the middle and mark it that you guessed it because you might have to do some adding and subtracting to find the actual property.

How often should you drive the same area? I’d say every year it should be sufficient to drive, to discover new vacants and to find out whether old ones are still vacant because after you hit an area several times over the years, you’ll start to see the property that’s like one that you know you’ve seen several times, it still looks horrible and you’re going to want to spend more time and more money to skip trace, or do something to find that owner of that property. To keep track all of it, I print out a map from Google Maps of the areas that I’m driving and I just circle and outline that day where I drove and then I mark on that. Inside of there I put the date so I know when the last time I drove to these areas and to know which areas you drove because you get busy and two months later you haven’t driven for dollars at all again and you kind of forget where you’ve already been. So I always keep track of that stuff, it doesn’t take long to do it.

Is there anything else I can do if it’s obvious that the house is vacant but they’re not responding to my letter? So let’s say that there’s a house that you found and it’s definitely vacant. I mean, the door is wide open, there’s broken windows, all kinds of things showing that like nobody is living there. You’re sending letters but they’re not responding to you. I’ve already answered this. Basically, you go and talk to the neighbors because they’ve got a house that’s next door, it’s an eye sore, obviously vacant, and try to find the whereabouts of the owners.

With technology these days, with Google Maps and with their, what’s it called, the map view where you can actually walk through down the street, so you’re going to hire somebody to drive for dollars virtually for you, they can walk those neighborhoods using Google Street View and that’s just at maps.google.com, you put in an address there and you just drag that little guy onto the map and it’s like you’re just walking down the street. You can have somebody in the Philippines working for just several dollars an hour, $4 an hour or something, walking down these streets for you, looking at these pictures side to side, looking for these vacant houses. Obviously, there’s going to be some missed properties, some properties that are included that aren’t very good candidates. But if your time is super valuable and it should be, you should give that a try or consider doing something like that. Another thing to be aware of is sometimes those maps, the pictures aren’t updated often so they could be walking down the street of something historical like a two-year gap from when those pictures were taken, what the reality is of the thing. So you might want to check first to make sure that the pictures of the areas of where you’re going to have them do this have been updated at least within the last several months or six months or something. But if you have people doing that, just to look for the obviously super vacant ones, heck, why not? They can be a little bit more strict. Your criteria for the properties they’re sending to you can be a lot more strict so that you’re only finding those really horrible and hideous ones. So, awesome tip there. With that technology, they’re doing that on the computer, they can grab a screen grab of each of the ones that they are submitting to you. So not only do you have the address but you have a picture of them as well, can be very, very helpful. Of course, you can always outsource to college kids or somebody to do this for you in your area, actually get out there and drive around and do that. So, that’s driving for dollars.

We’re going to be covering what to mail people for different lists including driving for dollars and these other episodes where we’re talking with people about doing direct mail because that’s what most of the highly successful investors, that’s where they get a lot of their deals, is from doing that. So, hope you guys enjoyed this episode and got a lot out of it. Driving for dollars has found us some awesome deals including some of our first ones. Even to this day, we still are getting deals and buying houses from houses that we saw when we were driving around. So, definitely doable, still works. Works very well and works for people that are working with a budget. If you’re just getting started in this and you don’t have a huge budget to spend on blanketing stuff with direct mail, driving for dollars I think is a great way to get started because the properties that you’re mailing to about, the properties that you’re mailing about have definite signs of neglect and signs of situations that the homeowners are facing that would warrant them wanting to consider your cash offer much more. So, just do it. Just get out there and start driving for dollars. Write down some addresses. Don’t be the person that gets scared if you’re new and drive down. Write down some addresses and then stick them on a list and just build that list up till you have about 500 and never mail because it’s just a lot easier to stay in your comfort zone and keep building that list instead of mailing because you might get a call. You’ve got to do it. Go out there and get that first 50 addresses and send letters to every one of them. It can as simple as “My name is Danny. I was driving through the neighborhood. I saw this house that looks like it might be vacant. I looked at it and needs some repairs. I like to take a look at the house so I can make you a cash offer. I’m looking to buy a house in the area that needs repairs. Please give me a call and then your phone number.” As simple as that. It’s not rocket science. Just do something. Get the calls, see that it works, keep doing it and you’ll end up with a deal before you know it. Have a great week. I’ll talk to you next week when I have the next podcast episode for you.