Our journey continues So our potential buyer has been to the website, they’ve seen the photos of the house and now they’re reading the description. The property description is just as important as the photos. Unfortunately, investors seem to always hurry through their description. Often times you’ll see a description such as this (IN ALL CAPS OF COURSE): “TOTALLY REMODELED START TO FINISH – GUTTED AND REPLACED, EVERYTHING NEW”. In other words, it used to be a crappy, unoccupied house with mold, mildew and rodents as it’s primary tenants. I think a better way to interpret that description would be this: “I’M A REAL ESTATE INVESTOR. I BOUGHT THIS ON THE CHEAP AS A FORECLOSURE. I THREW SOME PAINT ON THE WALLS AND SOME CARPET ON THE FLOORS. NOW I’M GOING TO SELL IT TO YOU AND MAKE A LOT OF MONEY!” Before the deal has even been discussed, you have already done yourself (and your client) a disservice by devaluing the property in your shallow, bland description. Try to avoid using phrases such as “totally remodeled” or “everything new”. Stay clear of “new water heater” or “replaced furnace”. Look, buyers don’t really care about the water heaters, the furnace or the hall closet. Buyers are like you and I. They watch all of the interior design and flipping shows on cable television. That’s what they want in their purchase. Two things sell homes. Kitchens and bathrooms, so use that to your advantage. Note that the kitchen has a certain brand and/or color granite countertop (A Wow Factor). Mention that the bathrooms have heated tile, another “Wow Factor”, especially in states with cold winters. Note the stainless steel appliances in the kitchen. Focus on your “Wow Factors” and the house will sell itself. Use terms like “special order tiles” or “custom (brand name) granite”. We also like to use terms like “professional”, “special order”, “upgraded” or “customized/custom”, etc. As I mentioned in previous articles, we developed our own brand, Ann Lee Interiors and have reaped huge rewards because buyers and agents now know our brand. Rather than describing our house as a “totally remodeled inside and out” home, we like to stand-out by saying “Another Custom Home Brought to you by AnnLeeInteriors.com”. This gives your potential buyer a feeling that a professional interior design company came in and did it just like we see on television. Your customer wants what they see on TV, so use that to your advantage. Create your own brand! You may ask, “Why do you refer them to “AnnLeeInteriors.com” rather than just “Ann Lee Interiors”? We want the buyer to visit the website because it gives our interior design company a ton of credibility! It also shows them examples of other flips in which AnnLeeInteriors.com designs were used successfully. I close with an example of one...
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James Stockdale is best known in recent decades as the vice presidential candidate in Ross Perot’s failed bid for the White House back in 1992. But what he is best known for is his surviving over seven years of daily torture as a POW in Vietnam. He was shot down in 1965 and was ultimately released after negotiations in 1973. Stockdale once observed, “You have to practice hurting. One should include a course of familiarization with pain. You have to learn to take a bunch of junk and accept it with a sense of humor”. But survival is not about being a hero. Author Laurence Gonzales writes, “Survival is not about bravery and heroes. By definition, survivors must live. Survivors aren’t fearless. They use fear – they turn it into anger and focus.” He continues, “A lifetime of experience shapes us to meet or be crushed by such challenges as a bad divorce, the shattering of a career, a terrible illness or accident, a collapsing economy, a war, a prison camp, the death of a loved one, or being stranded in a jungle”. So now, let’s see if we can discern some ways to build that familiarization with pain and thus survive: First, one of the most potent survival truths is this: Find another person trying to survive and help them to safety. Helping another removes one from the self-focus of fear, pity, and pain. You move from being a victim to being a rescuer and that helps focus your energy on a plan to get you out of your own deep woods. It’s the old adage, “if I push your car to the top of the hill with my car, my car gets to the top of the hill as well”. Gonzales later states, “Doctors and nurses often survive better than others because they have someone to help”. We certainly may not feel like helping another when we are suffering our own pain, but it will actually help relieve a significant portion of our pain if we help another with theirs. Living a life of helping others by pausing our own journeys to play the good Samaritan role may be a true life-saving habit. Emergency conditions usually bring out the person that we have been becoming all along. A selfish “me-first” attitude will only stunt our survival chances, whereas an others first attitude could give us the right attitude in a crisis to survive it. Secondly, survivors must find a purpose in their survival. Quite often, that purpose is living for someone they deeply love. During the crash of 2008, a close friend went through a terribly dark depression. It was a darkness that enveloped him each morning and suffocated light and life out of him all day. After months of mentally chasing his tail as a dog does his own, he was fatigued...
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Let’s take a few moments and discuss one of our more unique branding items – The Ann Lee Interior Custom House Key. The founder of Starbucks, Howard Shultz once stated that it’s “the small details that matter“. With that in-mind, one of the initial things we realized is that the first item that a potential buyer touches are the house keys. When I first started out in real estate investing, I noticed that most investors would take all of the property-related keys and place them in the lock-box. From the get-go, this is something that I’ve tried to avoid at all costs. I have learned that having that many keys in the lock-box can be frustrating. It can also be confusing and can have a negative affect on the potential buyer. Especially in states where weather is extreme during certain seasons. We place one key in the lock-box – the front door key. We want it to be quick and easy to enter the home, hence, we place only one key in lock-box…and its a custom AnnLeeInteriors.com key. Well, after a while, other investors began mirroring us in that they started placing only one key in their lock-box. So, our competition had finally caught-on! After some quick thought and discussion, I figured out a new way to one-up our competitors and stand-out. Sure, we still only place one key in the lock-box, but we made it into a custom AnnLeeInteriors.com key! We even brand our keys! Our custom keys cost us about $1.75 each. Now you tell me – is $1.75 worth it for something that might just make the difference in your sale? That answer is a resounding “yes”! Since we want our buyers to not only remember us, but to pass our good name on to others, we ensure that every single house-related key is a customized AnnLeeInteriors.com key upon closing. Also, before you hand the keys over for good, ensure that all the locking mechanisms on the door are working flawlessly. Make sure that the keys slides in and works smoothly. Ensure that the locks line-up perfectly. You want the locks to work perfectly as this all goes back to the buyers experience. The entire experience should be just like the customized key and locks – everything is smooth and easy! ...
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Laurence Gonzales tells the story of Captain James Gabba, an Army Ranger. He drowned when he was taking down the upper Gauley river in West Virginia in his raft. He hit a rock and it knocked him out of the raft. The commercial guide was also knocked out of the raft and tried to rescue Gabba. He playfully pushed him away and laughed. Perhaps he was thinking that his Army Ranger training was many times more dangerous and stressful than this minor upset. Consequently, Gabba floated downstream into a massive rock blocking the river flow, and was pulled under by the power of the current and drowned. A typical civilian with no advanced training would have welcomed the guide’s rescue attempt and most probably lived to tell quite a story. Captain Gabba perhaps saw the guide’s rescue attempt as unnecessary for such a well-trained “stud” as he. His family attended his funeral and had only a tragic story to tell. Ranger training is some of the most rigorous and demanding that the Army provides. Successfully completing the grueling 8-week course can give the soldiers tremendous confidence and know-how in survival skills under extreme conditions. Yet, in Ranger training, having to be rescued equates to failure. Self-sufficiency is rewarded. Rangers lead the way; they don’t need to be rescued! Now, all things considered, physical and mental training should never be minimized; however, some of the very training in business schools, universities and military programs, while teaching extremely valuable information and technique, also insidiously teach a confidence that can be most counterproductive in survival situations. An MBA does not teach one to cope with a shocking divorce. When you are alone in a business failure, the degrees or awards hanging on your wall do not provide any comfort or remedy. In fact, all that training seems to mock you in your failure. How could a guy/gal like you with all that good training fail so miserably or be so confused in life? Let’s examine more carefully this seeming paradox in survival: 1. Survival requires both faith and works. By faith, I’m referring to that inner confidence that keeps us believing we will survive and ultimately be successful. And when we stop believing that we can, we don’t. And when we don’t, we die. But faith is more than believing we will survive; faith should also motivate us to do our part to rescue ourselves. Believing that someone will rescue us is often merely a false hope that will bring depression when it doesn’t happen. Whereas, faith can give us the confidence to look for ways we can hike out of our woods. Faith sees itself surviving, so it does those things that a survivor would do. 2. Survival ultimately depends on outside help. Juliane Koepcke – the 17 year-old girl who hiked from a plane...
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