A week of Vacation & Work

So I just returned from a week of vacation. I forced myself to "forget" all things related to real estate for my 7 days of bliss. I read a great book that I would recommend and encourage all to put on your to-do list. The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. Wow! Solid material. Tim delivers idea after idea to lessen your workload. I know I'll be referring back to this book many times as our journey continues. I hope we're building our business responsibly now, so that we can experience the type of life Steve Cook (flippinghomes.com) speaks so passionately about. I also continued to read "Think and Grow Rich", by Napoleon Hill. This book is like a college textbook and I've been reading it for some time now. The 4HWW book was a quicker read, partly since it was written in today's grammar, versus Hill's book which was published in 1960.

While I was gone, Tim (of the brother status) was hard at work. He told me he listened to the first day of the boot camp cds and continues to be blown away and continually motivated. He finished our goal of listing all the properties in our small (1000 properties) farm area. We did it on the cheap by creating a spreadsheet and cutting & pasting from Maryland's Tax Property website SDAT (http://sdatcert3.resiusa.org/rp_rewrite/). We now have a complete list of all the properties in our farm area. We have also driven the area and given each property a rating on a 1-10 scale. Vacants get a 0. Our plan is to then do a letter mailing to those properties with a rating of 5 or below and any properties that listed as non-principal residences. Hopefully it should be simple using mail merge techniques.

We've got our letter fine tuned after submitting to the Flippinghomes.com website. We'll mail to each property 7 times and hope for some responses. Additionally, he attended our/his first RE investment club meeting. I'll let him write about his experience, but a quick preview......lots of hype, little material.

In preparation for our mailing campaign, we are also making it our goal to listen to the Saturday workshop session put on by JP of flippinghomes.com a few months ago. It was the session with Bill Guerra on The Art of Prescreening Motivated Sellers 101. It was one of the solid deals put out by the fh.com website and included 3 or 4 hours of interview/audio and Bill's ebook, "How to talk with Sellers". Tim and I are meeting Monday night and we're gonna be discussing what we learned and do some practice calls.

Tomorrow and Monday I'll be reading & studying in between painting my butt off. I've got my upstairs project underway and I promised my wife it will be done before the year ends in an even number. 72 days to go. I shall get this project done. We've been living in the downstairs of our 1400 square foot home since March. Man I'm slow. Granted I completely rehabbed our upstairs, but it's been one heck of a project. I look forward to using proceeds of RE investing to rehab our downstairs. I'm done with hammers and nails for a while...hopefully.

So that's what we've done since my last post.

What have you done to come closer to your Real Estate Dreams?

Ed