Its pretty easy to find contractors to give you estimates these days because they aren’t very busy and they need work $$$.

First, you need to go and look in the places these guys would advertise to get new clients.

The obvious places are:

The yellow pages

The Newspaper

Your Free Weekly newspaper (Pennysaver, Thrifty Nickel, The Flyer, etc)

The not so obvious place to look is Craiglist.org

Go to Craiglslist and click on

Your State

And

Your City

Then click on Services

Here is an example of where this page is in my area.

http://tampa.craigslist.org/bbb/

(this is also a great place to find people to help you with your deals ie: House cleaners, painters, handymen, sign hangers for your for sale signs, etc)

You will see many services here and you’ll find contractors advertising for new clients.

You are their next New Client.

Pick a few ads you like and call them to setup an appointment to give you an estimate.

Make sure you tell them you want to update the house to make it look like it’s in “like new” condition. Tell them to find anything they can that’s wrong with the house and make a big deal out of it.

There are 2 ways to handle paying a contractor for the estimate.

Option A

You can be cheap and try to get the estimate for free pretending that you are actually going to use them to do that work. (you are not). This will result in a very short relationship and you will be looking for a new contractor soon.

A Contractor is not going to continue to give you free estimates without ever be awarding any of the jobs.

Option B

Or you can establish a long term relationship with the Contractor, tell them exactly why you need the estimate and that you want it to come in on the high side and Negotiate a flat fee for providing the estimate every time you need one. This will make your life so much easier by having a contractor on your team you can rely on to get these done for you when you need them done quickly.

I recommend you go with Option B

The licensed contractor estimate is a critical part of your short sale package and your BPO package.

Just get it done and you will be happen with the results of your short sales.

Committed to Your Extreme Success,

D.C. Fawcett

The Business Building Coach to the Foreclosure Industry

Leave your comments Below:

When I saw the front of the paper yesterday, I had to show it to you.

 There are 2 lessons here.
 

Lesson # 1.

They are using post it notes on the front page of the paper to fill seats at their upcoming auction. Post it notes are a great way to get in front of alot people fast and very cheap. You can use post-it notes to fill your open houses for your round robin auctions or your live auctions too. or to drive people to your website to build your buyers list fast.

The best part is, the newspaper will do all of the work for you. Don’t let them design the post it note though. That is not their specialy and they don’t understand our kind of marketing.

Lesson # 2

If you are not using Ushomeacution.com to build your buyers list, shame on you. They are spending Millions of dollars on advertising to fill their seminar seats. Their marketing works. They have thousands of people in their auctions. If you haven’t read my previous post on how to build your buyers list using ushomeauction, go to:

http://www.realestateforeclosuresinvesting.com/blog/how-to-leverage-the-marketing-dollars-of-us-home-auction-ushomeauction-com-redc-to-find-buyers-for-your-real-estate-short-sales/

Here is the post it note on the front of the paper:

 To get my FREE Foreclosure Investing CD, go to:

http://www.realestateforeclosuresinvesting.com/free_cd.html

I was at a marketing conference a few weeks ago with Gene Simmons and during his presentation he said that “this is the time everyone should be buying real estate because you can get it for pennies on the dollar.’

See Gene is a contrarian like me. When everyone is selling you should be buying.

We are in the best foreclosure investing market that we may see in our lifetime. This foreclosure boom is not going to last forever though. In five years we’ll be back to half way normal. We’ll still have foreclosures but the vast opportunities we have now will be gone.

Gene had an awesome presentation and is a brilliant business man. Did you know is behind the whole “I am Indy” campaign? He actually owns the marketing company that promotes the indy car race.

Gene Simmons Says we are in the best Real Estate Investing Market we may see in our lifetime.

BTW, Today I received all of the home study courses I bought last week. I was surprised at how basic these parenting books and courses are. Who do they make these things for? I was looking for something that I could use to help Hannah, our 2 year old, skip a few grades.

Anyway, my buddy Arcadio Diaz Recommended I take her to Kumon to start learning reading and Math so that’s the plan. He told me his Daughters are already a grade level past everyone else in their class. We started watching the Spanish home study course and they’re pretty cool. She’s already saying the words. And it beats watching Barney. i can;t figure out why kids like that purple dinosaur so much.

Talk to you tomorrow.

The Hardest Working Foreclosure Coach on the Planet,

D.C.

Are you using social networking sites like myspace, facebook, and linkin for your real estate investing business? If you’re not, you should be.

Well, there’s a whole group of social networking sites specifically for real estate that can give you some great information and you can connect with local professionals for your dream team. you can easily find, appraisers, mortgage brokers, attorneys, title companies, Realtors, all at the click of your mouse.

These sites offer you a great way FOR FREE to get leads for short sales, leads for workout clients, leads to sell your properties and network with other in investors. You can get your own webpage on these sites for free.

Here are the sites you should be on and while I’m at it, I’m going to give you the direct link to my page on these sites so you can connect to me.

RealEstateInvestor.com Real Estate Network

ActiveRain Real Estate Network

FaceBook General Social Networking

WannaNetwork Online Real Estate Community

Lemme think, any more? that should be good for now.

Talk Soon

D.C.

Yesterday, Sarah dragged me to Babies R Us to do the baby shower registry for our new baby on the way. Actually, she didn’t drag me. I was happy to go. She is 26 weeks pregnant and the due date is for September 10th. It’s amazing how much STUFF they have in that place. This was a new experience for me. Actually everything that’s happening with this pregnancy is new for me.

Sarah says I’m having more cravings than she is. Probably true. I Love it when we go to the doctors to see the baby. They have this machine that they can take 4D pics of the baby, not 3D but for 4D. one of my coaching members, Matt Raab, told me to ask them to take pictures with this machine. This machine is made by GE and Matt used to be a salesrep for GE before I trained him. Now he’s unemployable!!!

When we were in the store, the fun part was that I took the registry scanner gun hostage and I got to scan everything. It reminded me of when I had to do inventory at the dry cleaners only this was much more fun. I can guarantee you that every piece of clothing that says “Daddy’s Little Helper” in Babies R Us got scanned. Oh yeah, Did I forget to Mention “It’s a Boy.” This kid is going to be buying foreclosures before he turns three. Did you know little children are a great tool to bring along while you are doorkocking for luxury homes?

When we got to the book section, I noticed something where they were completely missing the boat. There were no home study courses or at minimum books on CD. I don’t have enough time to Read one of the 500 page books they have for sale there. However I am committed to being a supportive father of my child and I know that I don’t have the knowledge I need to have in order to help my son develop as fast as he can and be a superhuman like I am.

If the store had any books on Cd or home study courses, I would have bought them all on the spot. Because I know how powerful information is and once I download it into my brain, no one can ever take that away from. That goes for all information whether it be money making info, personal development info, foreclosure investing info, or baby and child development info.

I have committed to myself to be a lifelong student and you should to. You should never stop learning. You should always have Cd’s in your Rolling University (your car), always learning more ways to develop yourself and make more money. That’s what I do and it works!!! I owe a lot of my success to the countless Courses and CD’s I have bought over the years. I have one bedroom in my house that is completely full of home study courses. Now I’m on a mission to find as many baby and child development books on CD that I can get my hands on. If you know of any good cd’s or courses, let me know by posting a comment below.

Whenever you are learning something new, you need to seek out as much information as possible and take it all in. This is the law of abundance. I’m not going to buy one Book or one cd or one homestudy course to learn about child development. I’m going to find as many as I can and I’m going to get them all. This way I can learn a lot more and I can learn faster. Did you know that it’s much easier to teach a child multiple languages before they start going to school because the child learns faster at younger ages? So why wait until high school to teach your child other languages?

Also, to make it easier for you to get my foreclosure investing money making info, I’ve put the info on Cd for ya. You can get a copy of my FREE CD titled, “How to Make a Fortune in Foreclosures in a Slow Real Estate Market.” These CD’s have been goin fast and we have less than 50 left in stock. Grab your copy before they run out.

Go here now:

Free Foreclosure Investing CD