Investing In Real Estate With Lex Levinrad Lex Levinrad

On today's podcast I talk about creating a life of financial freedom. 
I think this is a very approriate time for me to be talking about this becauase last week I returned from a two month trip to the Bahamas where I was living on my catamaran. 
I was interviewed by my students Fred and Andy on Sunday night on an IG Live that they were hosting, and one of their main questions on that interview revolved around how to create financial freedom, and what it means to build your life by design and to have a freedom lifestyle.  
But their real question was "How do you manage to be off the grid in the Bahamas for two months and still have your real estate business run so efficiently? So I thought I would talk about this concept of financial freedom on today's podcast episode. 
Building a life by design means having intent in how you want to live your life, and then creating that life and that lifestlye by purposely planning for it. Learning how to invest in real estate and building a real estate business that buys and sells real estate is the best vehicle to help you achieve financial freedom. 
If you have any questions, leave them in the comments.
Enjoy the podcast!
 

On today's podcast episode, I talk about the current state of the real estate market and where I think the market is heading. 
One of the questions I get asked the most is "what do you think of the market right now" or "do you think the real estate market will crash. This podcast episode answers those questions. 
Disclaimer: I cannot predict what will happen. No one can. There are too many unknown variables like war, interest rates, the Fed, the dollar, stock and bond markets, etc. However what I can tell you is my opinion on what I see and how I interpret it. That is what this episode is about. 
Prices have moved exponentially higher. I was looking today at houses that were worth $150,000 in 2000 that are now on the MLS at $300,000. In many markets, prices have doubled in two years. So be very careful of listening to the "Case Shiller Home Price Index" and other data that is put out by mainstream companies because a lot of this data is skewed because it's an "average" or "median" of the entire country.
Different cities and different States have completely different demographics, population growth, job growth and demand (or supply). Averaging this data gives us a big picture. But we cannot invest in our local market with data based on the entire U.S. Real estate is local. If my market is Port St Lucie, FL I am not interested in what is happening in Phoenix, Seattle, San Diego or Philadelphia. I doubt prices in Buffalo or North Dakota doubled in the past two years. Because no one is moving there. But people are moving to Florida. Florida has been hot and Covid exacerbated that. The past two years have been absolutely insane and it seems like everyone in the U.S. was trying to move to Florida. For that reason many people that are local do not see a problem in our local market. However based on my own research I am seeing some cracks forming. 
What I am seeing on the ground is a little disturbing. 1/4 of the listings of the homes on the MLS in some cities are new construction homes built by builders in the past few years. Many of these were "build to rent" homes which were supposed to be purchased by hedge funds and private equity funds (and home buyers). But demand has dried up. No one predicted that rates would move from 3% to 6 1/2%. So these builders are sitting on excess inventory and have had to slash prices.
At the same time, their biggest buyers are drying up too. Many of the largest single family home buyer funds are not buying any more and have ceased their buying operation until they can get a handle on this market (and their inventory). Offerpad, Open Door and other iBuyers are hurting. Some of these operations even have going concern situations (Offerpad just dropped below $1 a share today). Invitation Homes and American Homes For Rent and most of the large Hedge funds have stopped buying too. They stopped buying around July/August of last year. Some only stopped buying at the end of last year. Now they know there is a problem.
So if the largest private equity and hedge funds, titans like Invitation Homes and American Homes for rent are not buying then what are they doing. According to my research they are selling. They are reducing the homes on their balance sheet and they are increasing cash reserves because they know what is coming. Goldman Sachs put out a report just last week of 4 cities that could see a 2008 type of decline. Those were San Diego, Phoenix, San Jose, and Austin. None of those cities are in Florida, but often when troubles start in hot markets like Phoenix, that pain spreads to other cities and towns (and States). And prices being marked down affects their balance sheet, their financing and how much lenders are willing to lend.
It looks to me like the smart money (Wall Street) is not buying houses and is selling houses. So So my question is who is going to buy all of these houses? The first time home buyer has seen rates moved from 3% to 61/2% in the past 12 months. The average home

On today's Podcast, I interview my friend Brandon Bateman about Pay Per Click (PPC) and SEO For motivated sellers. I first met Brandon at my Collective Genius mastermind when I was introduced to him by a mutual friend. Brandon is running the PPC and SEO campaigns for some of the biggest real estate investors in the country (including many of my friends in my mastermind). Since we spoke about motivated seller marketing on the last podcast episode on this show, I thought it would be a great time to ask Brandon to come on to the podcast so that he could share some of his PPC and SEO Wisdom with all of my listeners. This episode is packed with a lot of information related to marketing to motivated sellers. We talk about Google Ads (PPC), Facebook Ads, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), website design and many other concepts related to motivated seller marketing. Brandon is an expert in PPC and SEO, so get out your notepad and make sure you take some good notes from this podcast episode! OUR REAL ESTATE TRAINING PROGRAMS If you are brand new to real estate and want to learn more about our real estate training programs, investing in real estate, buying rental properties, wholesaling real estate, and fixing and flipping houses then please register using the free webinar training links below: FREE WHOLESALING TRAINING https://www.lexlevinrad.com/webinar FREE FIXING AND FLIPPING TRAINING If you want to learn how to fix and flip houses, I have a free fixing and flipping houses training webinar at this link: https://www.lexlevinrad.com/fixandflipwebinar DON'T FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE TO THIS PODCAST TO BE NOTIFIED OF UPDATES SUBSCRIBE TO MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL http://www.youtube.com/lexlevinrad?sub_confirmation=1 CONNECT WITH ME ONLINE http://www.lexlevinrad.com http://www.facebook.com/lexlevinradrealestate http://www.twitter.com/lexlevinrad http://www.instagram.com/lexlevinrad http://www.linkedin.com/in/lexlevinrad http://www.pinterest.com/lexlevinrad http://tiktok.com/@lexlevinrad/ DOWNLOAD A FREE COPY OF MY BOOK ON WHOLESALING BANK OWNED PROPERTIES For more real estate tips about property investment, investing in real estate, and how to start wholesaling, download a FREE copy of my best-selling book "Wholesaling Bank Owned Properties" at https://www.lexlevinrad.com

On today's podcast episode I talk about marketing to motivated sellers. The main difference between new real estate investors, and expert real estate investors is the willingness to spend money on marketing. And this really boils down to understanding marketing costs and how marketing to motivated sellers really works. The first thing that you need to understand is cost per lead. If I mail out 10,000 postcards at a cost of 42 cents per postcard then my mail campaign cost me $4,200. If I get a response rate of 1/4 of 1 percent then that would work out to be 10,000 x 0.0025 which is 25 leads (sellers). If I spent $4,200 to generate those 25 seller leads, then my cost per lead is $4,200 divided by 25 which works out to be $168 per lead. So with that marketing campaign my cost per lead is $168. If after speaking to those 25 sellers, only 10 are truly motivated to sell and I decide to go on 10 seller appointments then the cost per seller appointment is $4,200 divided by 10 which is $420 per appointment. If I can close 1 out of 10 appointments then I would be able to buy 1 house and my cost per contract (house) would be $4,200. If I could buy 2 houses out of the 10 appointments then my cost per contract would be $2,100. Currently this is what our average cost per lead looks like for the past 30 days Pay Per Click $236 per lead Facebook Ads $78 per lead Direct Mail $203 per lead I find the most consistent deals to be from direct mail and pay per click (Google Ads) A good acquisitions rep can close one out of 7 to 10 leads. An average acquisitions rep can close one out of 15 rep. And a not so great acquisitions rep can close one out of 20 leads. If your average lead cost is $200 and it takes you 20 leads to close a deal then your cost per deal is $4,000. If you are good, you should be able to bring your cost per deal down to half of that. I have found that on average most deals cost around $3,000 to $5,000 once you factor in everything. If you add in overhead and payroll then that number can go up to $6,000 or more. But if you are just starting out, and you don't have overhead and staff you should be able to get a house under contract for a marketing spend of $5,000. So to be conservative, you should be willing to spend $5,000 to generate a deal. Let's look at it another way. If you are buying houses to fix and flip or keep as rentals from wholesalers that are marking a deal up $20,000 or $30,000 then you are paying $20,000 or $30,000 more for that house. You just don't feel it because you didn't spend the money in marketing to generate the contract. But if you had spent $5,000 to get that same house you would actually have saved yourself $25,000. That is how you should be looking at it. That's not to say that you shouldn't buy from wholesalers. You should buy any good deal you can find. But you will find more deals at better prices if you are marketing to motivated sellers directly. Do you want to be competing with every other cash buyer out there looking for deals from wholesalers? Or do you want to learn how to get deals yourself? At the end of the day, regardless of whether you are wholesaling, buying rentals, Airbnb's or fixing and flipping houses you are better off marketing to find the deal yourself since you will eliminate a lot of competition. And if you are going to be marketing to motivated sellers, then you need to understand that there is a cost to generating a contract. And you should be willing and able to spend that marketing money to generate those deals. If you are just starting out and you don't have a marketing budget yet then use guerilla marketing methods like bandit signs and driving for dollars to generate your first few deals. OUR REAL ESTATE TRAINING PROGRAMS If you are brand new to real estate and want to learn more about our real estate training programs, investing in real estate, buying rental properties, wholesaling real estate, and fixing and flipping houses then please register using the free webinar

On this podcast episode I talk about one of the most frequent questions I am asked lately, which is: "Is the real estate market going to crash"? While I don't think it's going to be like 2008 (although there is a very small chance it could be), the more likely outcome is a pullback in prices that will entice buyers back to the table. The main difference between 2008 and now, is that the reason that we got into the financial crisis back then was because banks had made very bad loans to borrowers that should not have been getting approved for mortgages. There were No Income/No Job Loans (Ninja Loans), and No Income/No Assets (Nina Loans). Literally anyone with a pulse could get approved for a mortgage and "stated income" and "no doc" loans were very common. Many of these loans were adjustable rate mortgages which reset at a higher Interest rate and some of them were even negative amortization loans. We all know how that ended with the 2008 financial crisis (very badly). I suggest you watch the movie "The Big Short" to learn about what happened back then. I think that the banks learned from their lending mistakes in 2008, and so the lending criteria were much stricter after the financial crisis. So in theory, the quality of loans out there should be much better than the last financial crisis. There are also very few adjustable rate mortgages, and most of the mortgages are fixed rate mortgages, so there are much fewer mortgages that can reset. Also prices have gone up so much that many homeowners have substantial equity and could simply sell. So that's the good news. The bad news is that the foreclosure moratorium has ended, and that has created a backlog of millions of people in foreclosure. These foreclosures and pre-foreclosures will need to run their course through the market. Many of those houses will go back to the bank and become bank owned properties. And those bank owned properties will be listed on the market at a discount in order to entice cash investors to buy them. That is your opportunity as an investor to buy those houses at a huge discount. Those houses need to be sold, and that increase in inventory of houses listed on the market will put substantial downside pressure on pricing. I am seeing many more pre-foreclosure, foreclosure and short sale leads, something we have not seen in many years. Learn how to market to homeowners in pre-foreclosure. The increase in interest rates from 3% to 6% (and now back down to 5%) has made housing affordability a huge issue. Many borrowers have been "priced out" of the market or cannot afford the mortgage payment for a home at current interest rates and current prices. So something will need to give. Either the price, or the interest rate (or both). I expect rates to move higher and prices to move lower. This is yet another reason why we will see more inventory, more sellers, less buyers, and more pressure on prices moving down. And that assumes current interest rates. If rates go up substantially from here then that could be a big problem. We don't know what rates will do but there are economists that are predicting rates could be as high as 7% or 8% by year end. If that were to happen, prices will decline more. So do I expect a real estate market crash like 2008? No, but I do expect a pull back of prices of maybe 10% or maybe even to to be as bad as 20% to 25% lower than where we are right now. To put that into perspective, a $300,000 house that declines by 25% would make that house worth $225,000. So if you are looking at ARV, and saying to yourself that a house is worth $300,000 then consider what it might be worth in 6 months or 1 year from now (lower). Any price decline will result in more sellers getting nervous and more sellers putting their house on the market. Sometimes human psychology can create a market hysteria which causes people to not act rationally. Homeowners that are negative or have little to no equity might decide to "walk away" from their mortgage - alt