Cedar Rapids Real Estate Resources

There are many ways to increase your response rate when marketing for your real estate investing business, but today I am going to talk specifically about a general one that can be applied to ALL of your marketing. This one simple method can be used to give you a small boost in response regardless of what type of media or message you are using, or what market you are targeting (the 3 Ms of Marketing). What is it?

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In your search for great deals, you are probably utilizing all of the resources that you know of to find the next deal worthy of your investment time and money. This probably includes scouring craigslist ads, calling on FSBOs, and following up on your own marketing if you have any out. You may also be using a real estate agent as a source for deals. As the number of bank owned properties on the market increases, real estate agents are especially useful as sources to find and negotiate these types of deals.

However, you may need to train your real estate agent to cater to your particular needs as an investor. While there are some great investor friendly real estate agents out there, there are also many agents with little experience dealing with investing or dealing with investors. These agents can still hook you up to good deals, but

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If it's time to fill a vacancy for one of your rentals, you will want to get the maximum marketing exposure possible. Chances are, that if you are reading this article online, you already understand the value of the internet. Three lines of description in your local print newspaper is no longer enough to get the phone ringing with enough interested renters in most markets.

With the widespread availability of the internet and the ease of accessing information on it, most of your potential tenants expect much more than a brief description of the raw data of their future dwelling – i.e. beds, baths, square footage and rent. Instead of spending all day on the weekend driving around looking at potential rental units, most of your tenant pool will prefer to browse through full color photographs of available rentals from the comfort of their favorite computer station. Many internet sites even offer virtual tours of available units, so to be competitive in our current marketplace, you need to make sure that you have the marketing out to reach all of these internet-surfing apartment hunters.

In addition to posting ads with full color photographs on popular sites like Craigslist,

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Unless you own all of your rental properties free and clear, chances are that you have some escrow accounts with your lenders. These escrow accounts are fed every month from your mortgage payments and this money is supposed to be used by the bank to pay your annual property taxes and insurance premiums. While it is tempting to let this system run on autopilot, you really shouldn't rely on your bank to get this right. Banks do make mistakes, some more frequently than others. While I personally may just have bad luck, I have had more than my fair share of challenges with different banks messing up my insurance payments over the years.

Of all the bizarre things that I have seen happen to my escrow accounts over the years, recently one of my lenders paid someone else's premium from my escrow account. Needless to say, after receiving telephone confirmation that this issue has been resolved, I am monitoring my escrow account very closely to make sure that the premium is returned to my account.

Most of the time though, when your bank messes up, it is just an annoyance that requires some extra time on the phone.

Here are some of the things that can go wrong when your bank doesn't pay your insurance premiums:

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At our monthly real estate investor meeting last week (here in Northern Colorado), I discussed with the group my preferred strategy for getting a huge marketing advantage to sell houses quickly for full price. This is the strategy I recommend BEFORE deciding to drop the price on your properties. It is especially effective with low interest rates.

Here's how it works. Let's say you are trying to sell a $200,000 home and you'd consider dropping the price $10,000 and selling it for $190,000 to get it sold quickly. Rather than dropping the price $10,000, you might instead consider

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