Live Training: How to find off-market properties

Hey, this is Shanna with She's Got Assets. I'm going to do a little livestream tonight. I'm just getting all my ducks in a row here. Um, no, it's kind of on the eve of a holiday, so if you're tuning in, I super appreciate it. Um, I'm just gonna make sure I'm live in all the right places. Hopefully you all can see me. You know the drill. If you can see me and hear me, just let me know. Super helpful. Otherwise I'm like talking to myself, and sometimes things like audio don't always work, so please let me know. Um, Hopefully everything is— I'm going to make sure. Yeah, it looks like my earbuds are not connected, so just clicked a few things there. All right. Okay, I'm going to check a couple other spots and then we're going to go live, or we're going to share our presentation. Hope everyone is ready for the holidays. All right, I see a few people on. Let me know where you're calling in from and maybe your favorite Thanksgiving side dish or something like that. I'm always curious. I definitely like pie. Mashed potatoes. We're having a nice quiet Thanksgiving. I know it can be a little hectic around the holidays. So yeah, I have a fun topic tonight. We're going to talk about how I find off-market leads and do creative deal structuring and then turn those into midterm rentals. Hey Nicole, thanks for tuning in. Awesome. Appreciate it. Yeah. So I'm just going to do a little case study on that. I had one of my students go under contract today. Super exciting. It's like her first off-market deal. She's a new investor, so it's really exciting. And This is a landlord that has multiple other properties. Hey, Janet from Lodi, California. Thanks for tuning in. Awesome, you guys. Okay, I'm gonna share my screen. I should have prepped this ahead of time. I was kind of scrambling on these things. So let me just go ahead and get my presentation ready. Share screen, just one second. Okay, share. Okay, I think I'm sharing. If you can see me, let me know, or see the screen. I'm gonna try and go into presenter mode so it's a little bit cleaner. Otherwise it looks a little janky, my favorite word sometimes to use. Okay, I think it's working. Let's see, I'm gonna change the view here. I'm not sure why I'm blurry. That's interesting. I have no idea. You can see my work. It's just actually fine with me. No idea why it's blurry. Yeah, I don't know. Okay, there we go. Okay, it came back to life. Camera issues. Okay. So the topic tonight is how to find off-market properties without door knocking or cold calling. Like everything works in the world. You just have to find what's the right fit for your personality and your style. For me, that was not door knocking or cold calling. So if anyone can relate to that, like let me know in the chat. Not my jam. Okay, so we're going to just dive into that a little bit. We also just had some really fun Black Friday specials, some offers I've never offered before. So stay tuned for that. All right. So, and I'm also going to share my latest off-market purchase, which was 100% seller financed, zero down. So you've probably seen me before. If not, I'm so nice to meet you. I'm Shona, I'm the founder of She's Got Assets. John and I have senior and foreclosed properties in the Asset Society. Lots of different things going on. I'm also the host of She's Got Assets. It's a podcast. You can find it in all the usual places like Spotify, YouTube, Apple. We have 17 doors that we own, you know, solo, just your family, and 7 midterms and counting. I do this every day. I'm an active investor and I love sharing what I learn. And a little bit before I went into full-time real estate, I was an agency co-founder We founded a creative agency, then we ended up selling it. Um, but I've been pretty much an outside cat my whole kind of, um, professional life. Um, yeah, for sure. Outside cat. Anyone can relate to that. Let me know. Um, um, again, I'm the kind of serial entrepreneur. I live with my family in Portland, Oregon. We own a mix of long and midterm rentals. And on a personal note, I love coffee, baking, design, treasure hunting, and I'm definitely obsessed with real estate. So that's why I do this. Alright, so, this, you know, I, there's a lot of strategies out there. When I was first learning kind of off-market deals, I was taught this kind of going after distressed sellers. And yes, that's the thing, we can 100% help them. But for me, it just didn't feel— I felt like everyone else was harassing them. So we're typically taught to go after some kind of distress like foreclosure, divorce, probate, tax liens, or driving for dollars, like looking for like tall grass or, you know, just really distressed looking properties and disrepair, right? It definitely works. But for me, it wasn't It wasn't something I really enjoyed doing. I tried it. The other thing that was typically done is like the cheesy mailers were saying like, "Fast close, cash offer, no repairs," SMS campaigns, cold calling, driving for dollars, even like bandit signs if you know what those are. Like on the telephone pole, there's like a sign like, "We buy houses for cash," stuff like that. I didn't try that. I tried pretty much everything else. This is some examples of like typical marketing that gets sent out. It's pretty cheesy. It's, you know, I don't know, most people that I think just goes straight into the recycling bin or the junk bin or whatnot. And you got to pull the list and spend money on that kind of marketing that I think you have to send a huge volume out to get a good return. Like, again, it all works, but you have to just do it really consistently. And this didn't really resonate with me, this type of marketing. It's kind of like mass production, just kind of a little bit yelling at you is what the feeling is. But anyone can relate to this in the comments, Janet. Says yes, right? It's very like, I don't know, it's just like, and we're assuming that people want to sell for all cash and no repairs and we don't know what their situation is. So it could be, you know, maybe a little bit insulting, right? If you don't need to sell for all cash or maybe your house is in fine repair. So we just, we're kind of making a lot of assumptions with that. And this is the typical response, right? Maybe some choice words, especially if you're cold calling. So how does it make you feel? For me, it was kind of like, I don't like this kind of marketing. There's got to be a better way, right? So I had to go out and out to the world and kind of find different ways to connect with sellers. And there are different ways. And, you know, I figured out the kind of marketing that was like actually got leads calling me and thanking me for the marketing, right? So here's an example. I got a letter. I never call back from those mailers. They go right to the shredder. There was just something different about yours, right? And that's— this is a very common response I get to this type of marketing. And if you, you know, if you send out like a postcard, You know, this is not going to— no one's going to call you and say, hey, thanks, I loved your postcard, right? That's probably not going to happen. Or if it does, maybe I'm wrong. It's unlikely. So these are the kind of responses we get from inbound leads. This is another example of like a voicemail. It says, maybe we can make a deal. I have other houses for sale too, by the way. We're getting old. We need to sell our rentals anyway. Goodbye. And thanks for sending us the letter, right? Like people are actually thanking you for sending them you know, marketing, which is really unusual. Yes, seems fake, right? Totally. But these are the— these are actual messages I got on this voicemail. So we're going to break it down, how to get off-market properties without all the yucky marketing. Again, it all works. Like everyone, you can door knock and cold call, it definitely works. You just have to do it on a fairly massive scale. The other thing with like cold calling is you need to skip trace the numbers and that can get expensive, right? So everything works. It's just for me, I found a way that felt more authentic to me. So I do kind of, I teach a hybrid strategy. It's an online one for inbound leads, like someone searching, um, sell my house fast or all cash, right? Those are inbound leads through the website. And then I have an off-market strategy, which is direct mail, right? It's kind of old-fashioned in this age of everything AI. Like, I love technology. I have this like AI necklace I've been wearing. So it records everything. It's a little creepy, but super cool. So I'm a huge fan of technology, right? But there's just some types of marketing that just are kind of classic, right? And they still work and they really get people to call you. And it's a very different type of marketing. So the offline marketing strategy is people that appreciate more of a thoughtful message and experience, not those cheesy postcards, right? They're maybe not distressed in the classical way that we think they are. So we start with like a handpicked list and we have a direct mail formula that we use. So we create the list, right? We pull the list. It's based on different criteria. And you can do it yourself. There's tons of software out there. One tip that people don't know, you can even have your title company do this. They're more than happy to do it. They definitely want the business. It's called farming. I use software, but title companies will pull lists for you. Agents do it all the time. So it's a very common thing. And then you need to process your list and kind of clean it up in a certain way, like remove the entity names, and then you address it and then you mail it, right? That's kind of the high level of the process. And the thing about this kind of marketing is the list that we're pulling is essentially tired landlords. So we're shopping just as much for a property as we are a person. And we're looking for properties that could potentially come with financing, right? Not all the time. We really have to understand the seller's goals or motivations. But oftentimes, these are free and clear properties. They— if they sell their property for cash, they'll have a huge capital gains hit. Maybe they like the passive income, right? But their kids don't want to inherit the business. So they're willing to sell with creative financing. Not always. We have to really take our time with the leads and understand what they're trying to do. And sometimes it's a good fit that with this kind of marketing, the way we pull the lists, it's, it's just more likely, right? It's not a guarantee. We don't rush to that. We really try and understand, um, what the seller's goals are and try and make it like a win-win scenario. All right, so we have the messaging, um, kind of the vibe and positioning of the letter, how the letter is presented, um, and then like the design of it. So I'll show you an example here, right? So it's There's a lot that goes into it, right? But it looks kind of like a letter that was sent. You sent a one-off letter. It's really done at scale, right? But that's the feeling that people get when they open these letters, right? So it's hand addressed. We do it in a way that's to scale, but it really feels like someone just got a letter. You sent them one letter, so they're way more likely to open it. Just checking questions. Right? So it just— when you're going through your mail, right, you're going to stop at like a handwritten letter that looks authentic, that has like a real stamp. I like the cat and dog stamp, right? Definitely don't want to use generic stamps, right? There's a lot of nuance that goes into it, but this is kind of what the letter looks like, and it's definitely likely to get opened when someone's going through their mail, right? And this is also where— think of these letters as planting seeds, right? It's not going to get tossed in recycling like one of those really screaming in your face postcards, right? That's like sell fast, all cash. They will get filed away. I've been to seller meetings, living room meetings, where they sellers open up their vanilla folder with all their tax docs, and then I see the letter in there that actually saved it, right? Maybe the time wasn't right, but they're saving the letter and they're calling you later. So they're like little seeds that you're planting. So sometimes it takes a minute for them to kind of be ready to sell. Sometimes they're ready to sell, but we're really planting seeds, which I love. Um, like, I get calls like this: he sent me a letter a year ago and I held on to it. Like, this totally happens. I don't know what other marketing people actually hold on to, right? And what if the property came with financing, right? Oftentimes we're getting a property, we're getting it under contract, then we're scrambling to find maybe private money or hard money or a combo of both. But oftentimes these properties come with financing because they're free and clear, right? So this is— I'll do a quick overview of my latest acquisition. This was a property, they accepted my offer, was essentially zero down. It was a private note, 100% seller financed, right? And I used to think this was like a unicorn thing. Like, why would anybody sell on owner finance or an installment plan, as the IRS calls it, right? Well, there's a lot of reasons people do, but it's really truly a win-win. Um, the owners are getting passive income from their property. It's secured to the asset, right? It's, um, it's really truly a win-win. It's not just benefiting me, it's benefiting the seller as well. Um, but you have to understand how to market and how to deal structure these leads and like build trust and all that stuff. You can't just go out and ask for that. So Yeah. Okay. So that was a deal. So this latest deal I did was done a couple of these zero down. Not all deals are zero down, right? Some you need to negotiate down payment. Everything is negotiable. That's the beautiful thing about off-market deals. All the terms are negotiable. Unlike buying on market, you're pretty much locked into certain terms or conventional rates or whatnot. So this deal came from seller I purchased a property from before. It was actually a private note, but there was a first position with the note holder, the second position that was the seller, and everyone's like, why would the seller go into second? It just made sense at the time because there was a private note. And we were able to defer interest accrual because there was some rehab that came up in the inspection. So long story short, it was the purchase price was $625,000, like conventionally, right? We were thinking 20% down would've been $125,000. It's fully leasing, cash flowing about $3K a month. And once it's stabilized, we think it'll be about $5K a month. So this is the kind of deals you get when you do this, a certain type of very specific thoughtful marketing. It's not generic and really speaking to the audience and it builds connections and starts conversations that can lead to deals like this. Not all deals are zero down or 100% seller finance, but it just opens that door to have the conversation. So yeah, that is the latest deal structure. And I'm going to check questions really fast. I don't see any questions. Feel free to ask questions. But again, when I first heard of seller financing, I was just like, oh, that's amazing, right? No banks involved. You get to work directly with the seller. I'm really— deal structure is something that's a win-win for everyone, but it definitely takes a certain kind of marketing and understanding deal structure and that kind of strategy. So with that being said, if you are interested in learning about that, learning how to buy off-market properties, how to deal structure, maybe you're looking to scale your portfolio or buy your first investment property. I teach that in the REI Playbook. We cover marketing on and offline, creative deal structuring, financing. And then if you're interested in the midterm rentals, right, you can turn it into midterm rental. Maybe you already have a rental that's possibly sitting or a flip and you want to 2x your cash flow. So I don't usually offer this, but I'm actually combining the REI Playbook and the MTR Playbook. In a super Black Friday bundle, you save $500. You can scan this QR code if you're interested or type something in the comments. You can book a call with me, but it's really teaching you how to buy off-market properties and deal structure, often with creative financing like seller financing, and how to turn those into midterm rentals to 2x your cash flow. And then the other Black Friday sale I have is the MTR Essentials. I'm adding 2— a bonus coaching call. So you get 2 one-on-one calls with me. Maybe you want to optimize your listing, maybe you need some strategy questions, just need like a roadmap for your midterm. And then you get access to the Asset Society. It's a 6-month membership that's included with that. So these are just Black Friday specials, they're pretty limited. So if you're interested in those, you can scan these QR codes or just drop a comment in the, in the notes here and I'll follow up with you. But definitely this is stuff that is not taught in a lot of places and I'm really passionate about it, just kind of buying off-market properties directly from sellers and maximizing your cash flow, even in expensive markets, right? I'm in Portland, Oregon. Having cash flow and equity is a pretty amazing thing to have. And that really comes with understanding deal structure and creative financing. So feel free to type anything in the comments if you have any questions. I'm more than happy to answer them. I know it's Everyone's probably getting ready for Thanksgiving, so I see a few people on live. Hey, Alex. Hey, James. Hey, Deedrick. Hey, Christian. Thanks for tuning in. Awesome to see you. Yeah, so I'm happy to answer any questions. If you guys have any questions— Janet says it seems a little fake. I don't know if you mean the letter or the actual— or maybe the postcard. Not sure which one, but Yeah, I like all marketing works, right? Hey, Nicole from Portland. Janet, I'd like to talk with you on the phone. Yeah, no problem, Janet. I'm happy to. I'll reach out to you after this. Yeah, but I definitely— this is stuff that I have learned from mentors and coaches, and I've kind of put it together in my own program. And I'm— the stuff really works. Like, I just had a student today go under contract. It's her very first rental. It's super exciting. It's an off-market deal and this is someone that has a few more properties he already wants to sell, or even though they haven't closed this first one. So the stuff really works. Yeah. Any other questions or comments? Yeah, I know it's the eve of a holiday, so everyone's probably pretty busy, but again, if you're watching the replay, feel free to reach out. Or if you want to take advantage of his Black Friday specials, I will drop the links in the chat shortly and just just, or drop a comment and I'll follow up with anyone that's interested in learning more. So amazing. All right, last call for comments. Don't be shy. Anything is fair game. I feel super awkward doing these things. You can type if you want to type something into the chat. I promise. The old style. Janice says the old style. Yeah, the postcards, those things. I did like one round of those and I was like, I can't do that again. I think I even have some floating around. So yeah, yeah, definitely not my jam. Again, everything works if you do it at scale and you just have to be consistent with marketing. I think that's probably true of any kind of marketing, but, um, just what I teach, I feel like is, feels more authentic and it actually gets leads coming to you. Um, Janet, I will, um, I'll message you after this. So don't, yeah, just, I'll message you. Um, or you want to send me a DM, you can send me a DM and I'll follow up with you. So. Amazing. Alright. Well, thanks for tuning in. Can— if you're watching the replay, feel free to comment and ask any questions, and I'll follow up. So I think I'm gonna say good night for now. But thanks again for tuning in. It's always fun. I appreciate everyone, and have a great Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy all the stuff. Enjoy your family. Very grateful for the community and all my students, and just happy to be able to teach this. So I will talk to everyone soon. Thanks.