Your experience using birddogs

[coloradohouseswanted]

Hi all!

Have any of you wholesalers/rehabbers used birddogs bringing you leads? If so, would you please share your experience? I'm interested in how you find your birddogs, train them what to hunt for etc.

Thanks!

[EZmoney]

me too!! After 130 properties I need a break.

[Kawika_CA]

My local club here in San Diego has a haves/wants period at the meetings. Instead of standing in line every month I wrote an advertorial about Finding properties and I place 100 flyers at each meeting. About 90 get picked up. I get about 5 calls per meeting probably because there are about 100 people there for the first time so there's new people coming in all the time. Out of that I get 1-2 people who start looking for properties. One will actually return 10 properties to me. I'm getting about 10 ugly houses per week now and about 1/2 of those are vacant.

I hope that helps.
Kawika Ohumukini

[coloradohouseswanted]

Kawika,

thanks! This is a great idea. How do you pay birddogs, on the per lead basis, or when you actually buy the property?

[Kawika_CA]

I currently pay $10/lead and $1,000 if I buy it paid at closing. I'm starting to rethink this however to $10/lead and $500 if I buy or $0/lead and $1,000 if I buy. I'm not sure yet.

Remember to ask them what's their motivation? Is it the $10, the $1,000, or the chance to learn the business?

I forgot to answer your other questions. I have a finder package modeled after Kris Kirschner's package. It has general instructions, approved areas of town to search, areas to stay away from, 10 property condition sheets with line-by-line instructions, pictures of houses to get and avoid. That coupled with the advertorial is pretty much all they need.

Remind them that this is a business and they need to run their own business like a business which means they need to have their own motivation to get up and drive around, get the packet together and get it to you. I send the checks the same day or hand it to them if they drop it off.

I have them get exactly 10 the first time and I look through them. I still pay them but I let them know about unacceptable submissions and that I won't pay for them in the future. These usually include houses that are dirty but not junkers, in the war zones, obviously under rehab, etc.

I'm thinking of putting up a web site that they can use to verify a house hasn't been submitted already, run the addresses against the trustee sales list, track progress of the deal, etc.

I'm also writing a course to train my Bird Dogs and will probably make it available to others on how to find properties. It will include book, forms, web site access, audios, videos of searching, finding, documenting houses, and "street conversations" of talking to people on the street or at the door about homes for sale or distressed in the neighborhood, etc.

That will be followed up with a course on tracking down owners and doing their own title searches which is also a service we're going to farm out. I'm leaving the how to buy to the real experts (ala Ron Legrand, etc.). My philosophy is train them and they will come.

Good luck.
Kawika Ohumukini