I recently had the opportunity to purchase a property that was mild fire damaged. I bought from the owner after the insurance paid off. Is there any way to find more of these deals. I purchased it for under 10,000.00 and without doing anything it appr. at 48,000.00 . The damage from the fire will take about 15,000.00 to fix, mostly in the kitchen area from a grease fire. then smoke in the rest of the house. do any of you buy from insurance companies, and if you do how do you contact them?
You can continue buying from owners as you have been and probably do ok. If your local newspaper is like mine their is a fire reports section like the police reports that lists incidents that the fire company responded to. You can follow up on those addresses for anything that is an actual fire (not cat in tree incident or a gas leak). You can also drop off some business cards at the local fire house and have them call you when there is fire damage to a home. If you are paying them $500 for each sucessful lead they will call you. Most of these guys are regular bluecollar guys that volunteer and could use the extra cash. If I were you I’d get the address and start hitting it with direct mail about 1-2 weeks after the fire (give the insurance company time to start on the payoff) then start hitting them weekly after that, maybe after 4-5 mailings go out to monthly.
hey thanks, I will give it a try… :biggrin
Armando Montelongo said he used to follow fire trucks to the house that was on fire and made offers to the homeowners right then and there…Then he found out it wasn’t a real good time to talk to them…He’s a jerk but I had to laugh at that!
omg - I’m surprised he doesn’t also stake out cemeteries to speak to families of the deceased. :rolleyes
Who said he doesn’t???..I wouldn’t put it past him…lol
I think he needs to refine his strategies. You can follow the firetruck but definitely write down the address and start a directmail campaign later, like at least 2-3 weeks as it will take some time for the insurance company to get started on the details.
Burnouts are one of the best type of properties that you can find. becuase they work with any kind of RE investor(passive of active). Active REI can pick up good houses for under 15k and rehab less than 40K on total burnouts and make a great profit flipping. A passive investor cannot get better than buying a 10k burnout and putting in 15k and having a 25k property that can probably cash flow better than the 1.2% ration. and have good equity.
But hte downside to burnouts when rehabbing them is having a good contractor that will not nickle and dime you to deathy and a good relationship with the city inspector as well
Any ways sorry it was so long but I am a big fan of burnouts and pick them up every chance I get. And by the way I am a contractor so I cut my cost quite a bit by handling the day to day operations
Thanks for the post
Phil