Flipping Houses With Killer Technology
House flipping pros are not known for using high tech gadgets to help them make money investing in real estate...
In fact, most of the real estate investors and house flippers I know use old-school spiral bound notebooks to track their investments instead of some killer app on an iPhone or iPad.
Although there are a number of solid house flipping productivity apps available, I'm far more interested in finding a good way to leverage my house flipping business with a killer technology solution.
Yes, there are some real estate investing apps available, but quite frankly the ones I’ve tried have all fallen short in terms of tracking deals, keeping track of expenses or following foreclosures or homes for sales on MLS.
With the amount of deals my house flipping business does, I’ve been searching for a good technology solution for quite some time ever since I missed my first real estate investing opportunity over 20 years ago...
My All Too Common Flipping Houses Sob Story
Many real estate investors who eventually get into flipping houses have the same sort of story: a friend comes along with a “can’t miss” real estate investment opportunity over a few beers after a round of golf and despite the fact that it sounds like a great deal, you pass on it thinking it’s just too risky.
Meanwhile your friends who do invest make a killing!
Sound familiar?
In my case, my friends didn’t exactly “make a killing”…but they did make nice profit of several thousand dollars each. And back 20 years ago, that sounded pretty darned good to me.
At that time, I was too scared or too dumb to jump in on the deal…but I did witness firsthand the profits that could be made. So instead of getting angry, I vowed that someday I would do it on my own.
Back then, I never could have imagined myself flipping houses for a living like I'm doing now!
My Real Estate Investing Education
After working in the family business for the next sixteen years, one day I decided to take the plunge and go for it. It was that day that I also knew full well that if I was really serious about making money investing in real estate, I had to educate myself on the entire process.
So I bought the courses, went to the seminars, and sank some serious cash into my “real estate education”. Even though I spent money on courses that were a total waste of time, I tried to get at least something out of each one.
But of all the ways I heard about how to invest in real estate, from wholesaling, to buy and hold real estate investing, to mobile homes to storage facilities, I decided to just focus on one thing: flipping houses.
What's the Definition of Flipping Houses?
As we have discussed many times, the definition of house flipping is the act of finding a distressed property, purchasing it, improving it and reselling it at a higher price than what it cost to rehab it, buy it for and hold it. At House Flipping School, we purchase single-family homes cheaply, quickly improve them, and then sell them at a higher price than the original cost, rehabilitation costs and finance costs - all in less than six months.
Personally, I was drawn to flipping houses because it’s fast paced, you get your money back relatively quickly and you can flip houses with no money of your own. I fell in love with the idea of turning a run-down neighborhood eyesore that nobody wants into a beautiful home that creates an awesome space for someone to live in.
And best of all with house flipping, you aren’t tying up your capital for extended periods of time – and if you do it right, it can lead to consistently high profits.
The House Flipping Dilemma
However, learning how to find houses to flip isn’t that simple, especially the kind of property that can be purchased and flipped for a reasonable profit. Finding one that's at a great price, in the right location and has enough between the purchase price and the after repair value (or ARV) to allow for all repairs, carrying costs and still leave room for a profit for yourself, at times seems impossible.
It’s even more impossible to find good houses to flip when you don’t have an organized system to keep track of all the potential properties there are to buy.
So I started tracking all my potential house flip targets with folders, whiteboards and notebooks. I eventually migrated to excel spreadsheets, Word and Google docs. With this rudimentary tracking system, the first few months were a big improvement over my old spiral notebooks. I felt like I was keeping most of the names and addresses of properties we were getting and was following up with many of them in a timely manner.
The problem was that the busier I got flipping houses and run the business, far too many of the best deals I was tracking were falling through the cracks.
I can’t tell you how many times we made offers on properties that were turned down because my finger was just not on the pulse, so to speak. I kept making offers but I started to see an unnerving trend that some of the offers we made in the past were being purchased at lower prices than we originally offered.
To make matters worse, I wasn’t following up with so called “dead” leads. What was happening was that other investors were also making offers on the same houses I did, I just didn’t have a good follow up system that would keep me ahead of those guys.
What Every House Flipper Needs to Stay Organized
I really needed was a back office system that allowed us to keep track of all of my leads and I knew I needed something to help me filter it all and remind me when to follow up on properties. I absolutely needed something that allowed me to:
- Track all my marketing efforts
- Automatically build and help me manage my pipeline
- Analyze each of my potential investments
- Keep track of income and expenses
- Was comprehensive to grow as my business flipping houses grew
The House Flipping Solution?
So I started looking for house flipping tracking solutions online and I asked a few friends of mine in the real estate investing business what they were using. I found it hard to separate the fluff from the real good stuff a most of the tracking products and apps are junk. It was then that I stumbled on the 360° Real Estate Investor software.
Not only does this system do just about everything I need it to do, from tracking leads to integrating with my cash flow spreadsheets, there are so many more modules and plugins that we can use as my house flipping business grows. It’s all integrated from front to back.
I now use the system almost exclusively to automate many things that I used to do manually including:
- Running Numbers: I run the numbers on any real estate investment we find through it. I enter the financial details of the potential investment and enter a return investment that I feel comfortable with. The 360 tells me the price I should offer to achieve my desired ROI and then breaks down the numbers to show me exactly how my investment will payout.
- Deal Flow Management: The system can keep track of all the potential house flips I am tracking and tell me the best time to make an offer or to wait until the price comes down.
- Foreclosure Tracker: 360 keeps track of all the foreclosures in my area automatically so I can not only keep tabs on the ones I am tracking, but also add new ones to my target list.
- Update Contracts in Seconds: What's really cool is that I have my contracts loaded into the system and I use 360 to create my contracts. Now, contracts take seconds to produce instead of hours. This is huge. What's really cool is that anytime I make updates to my contracts, it’s super easy to edit my templates. This way, I’m only paying my attorney to do this once; then it’s included in my contract library forever.
There’s No Replacement for “The Human Element” in Flipping Houses
Although 360 is a huge improvement over how I used to track my house flips, the system is far from perfect. The one part I really need it to integrate with is QuickBooks. Apparently the company is now working on this integration, which will be a huge help, especially at tax time.
In spite of the lack of QuickBooks integration, it’s been a huge improvement over how I was tracking the properties in the past.
Another thing as well; there's no doubt that 360 is extremely helpful for anyone flipping houses for profit, but no matter how good a piece of technology is to a real estate investor, it cannot replace real estate experience, nor can it replace the human element.
It cannot create relationships nor do your networking for you. Relationship building and networking are essential elements in order to both build your real estate team as well as build your budding real estate investing empire. But this much is true: there's so much more I can achieve and accomplish in real estate investing when I have tools that help me keep track of potential deals while helping me maximize my deal flow.
And the 360° Real Estate Investor does help me do that.
Not All Real Estate Investment Systems Are The Same
Although most “real estate investment systems” are not perfect, the 360° Real Estate Investor software so far it has allowed me to better organize my systems and automate so many tasks that used to take up so much of my time. Time now I can spend maximizing my current deals or building relationships to lay the groundwork for my next deal.
And although real estate investors may find it hard to give up the spiral bound notebooks and yellow legal pads, 360 is a big step forward to push them kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
