Lili Invests Blog

I do NOT like cold calling!

I've only done it one other time, but because of popular demand from you guys and because I don't want my nerves to make me miss out on some potential great deals, I'm doing it again.

Today, we are going to do some live cold calling as I try to get some off-market wholesale deals.

Up until now, all of my wholesale deals have been on-market, meaning there are properties listed for sale on the MLS through a site like Redfin or Zillow.

Now, I really like these types of deals, but not everyone likes wholesaling on-market because you have to deal with things like real estate agents, proof of funds letters, and high earnest money deposits.

I also think it's worth targeting some off-market properites, because there is this possibility that those deals could have higher wholesaling fees than the ones that are on-market.

So, I'm doing it live on camera for you guys, right here, right now. Let's see how it goes.

Today, I'm gonna be cold calling “the secret Zill...

Let me show you how to find on-market distressed properties.

The first thing I'm going to do is go to Redfin.com. 

I like using Redfin for this type of work.

The first thing that I want to do is I actually just want to come over here to the on Redfin tab and I want to click it until the arrow points down and what this tells me is the properties that have been on the market the longest.

Right now I'm going to have vacant lots, I'm going to have houses, I'm going to have apartments, all of that stuff. But I want to come up to more filters on the right and I want to put houses, multi-family, and townhouse.

That's specifically what I'm interested in and now this is kind of my first layer of looking at these.

New build and ready to build properties are not investor specials.

What I want to do is scroll down and I want to look for something that has a lower price per square foot than the other things around it.

This is searching all of my city. You can draw an outline for what area i...

If you're interested in wholesaling, you know that finding motivated sellers is the name of the game.

I'm documenting myself trying to get my first wholesaling deal and I'm going to show you guys why I've stopped driving for dollars in the new list that I'm targeting, which has had some success so far.

After house hacking my first duplex, I've now moved on to getting into wholesaling to build up my experience but also to build up my cash to use on my next investment property.

In this post I'm going to talk to you guys about my lack of success driving for dollars.

I started my wholesaling journey like most people by driving for dollars. This is where you're looking for vacant, distressed, or abandoned properties in your area. It was actually pretty fun.

I got my mom to go with me and when our eyes were peeled for those types of properties, we actually did find a lot of them.

There were overgrown lawns, holes in roofs, and we even found a property that had just sold for five thousa...

Today I got a pocket listing from a local listing agent that I've been working with.

When agents are excited to work with you, they'll give you access to their pocket listings, which are MLS listings that they haven't actually put out to the public yet.

This is how you can use the double dip strategy to persuade them to submit offers for you on the distressed properties they find.

What is the MLS?

When you see a property that's for sale on the MLS, unless it specifically says "for sale by owner" or "FSBO" it means that that property owner has signed a contract with a real estate agent and that agent has the legal and ethical right to represent them for that house sale.

So when we're looking at on-market properties, we're not skip tracing the homeowner to try to go directly to them. We want to do things above the board, we want to stay legal, we want to stay ethical.

And in my opinion, it's actually easier to work with the real estate agent than it is with the homeowner and I'll ...

I want to show you how I find properties that aren't listed for sale. 

Do this at your own risk.

Some people say you should, some people say you shouldn't…

What's up everybody, it's Lili Thompson. 

I’m a real estate investor documenting my journey to financial freedom through real estate.

Today I'm going to show you how I research properties by finding different things like owner contact information, tax information, blueprints of the properties, and more.

The first thing I want to tell you about is realtor.com.

Let's just imagine we're looking for a property in Phoenix, Arizona.

Although I use Zillow for most of my MLS research, I do like one thing on realtor.com, which is that you can search by property type.

So if you're looking for a multi-family property because you're wanting to house hack, then realtor.com might be a good place for you because you can find them right there right at the top of the screen. 

I'm going to go over some of the things that I do on Zillow and ...

If you're here, you probably want to know what earnest money is, how it works, and most importantly how not to lose it.

As always, I'm here to break it all the way down for you.

If you're new here, my name is Lili and this is where I talk about real estate investing and personal finance to help us all achieve a little bit more financial freedom.

Today, we're going to talk about earnest money. We're going to dive deep and define what earnest money is, if it's even required, how much you have to put down, and of course what you have to do to make sure that you don't lose your earnest money.

So you're probably interested in earnest money because you're thinking about purchasing or wholesaling a piece of real estate.

Whichever one it is, I'm going to start off with this very important point: I'm not here to teach you ways to get around putting down earnest money.

If you're trying to buy or wholesale a house, that's an asset that costs tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands o...

If you're just finding this blog, my name is Lili and this is where I document my real estate investing journey and bring you along with me.

Today, I really want to talk about some of the questions that I get a lot that I also had when I first started wholesaling, and that I don't hear a lot of the big wholesalers answering.

Something that I learned and that I want to share with you guys is there was a lot of trial and error in the process of getting my first wholesale deal. 

Although I knew a lot of the big things to do from watching Youtube and reading books, there were a lot of the small but still very important details I had to learn by  messing up and going through the process.

Me saying that the big wholesalers don't answer those questions is not throwing shade at them.

I just think that sometimes they are so big and they've been in the game for so long that they forget to answer those questions that come naturally to them.

But they're super important questions to a new inv...

What's up, guys?

And welcome to the most authentic, transparent and real real estate investing blog around.

At least that's my goal.

If you're new here, my name is Lili, and this is where I've been documenting my real estate investing journey and bringing you guys along with me, with all the steps from house hacking, to wholesaling, to now buying and renovating my own houses. 

The question you're probably asking, is how could you get funding for your own deals?

Well, you're in the right place because I'm going to completely break down a few different methods that you could use to fund your property renovations.

We'll break down all the numbers, talk about the pros and cons, and all the things that you need to know so you can get into the house flipping game.

And if you stick with me and do the math with me, you'll see that you can actually start flipping houses a lot sooner and with a lot less money than you might think.

And if you're wondering where you can find distresse...

What is your largest expense right now?

Is it food, clothes, streaming services? What about your rent or mortgage payment?

For most people, the place you live is also the place that puts the biggest strain on your pockets.

When I was finishing up my basketball career and preparing to live in the real world for the first time, I heard about a little known way to buy a house for free and live in that house for free.

And today, I'm going to tell you exactly how I did it at just 23 years old.

What's up, guys? My name is Lili, and before I scaled my real estate portfolio to be worth over $1.3 million, I was a Division One college athlete, soon to be college graduate, and I had a pit in my stomach over my imminent entrance into the real world to get a real job and pay real rent.

But then one of the best things ever happened to me, and it put me on the road to real estate induced financial freedom.

I tore my ACL.

Okay, let me back up a little bit.

I remember my very first bas...

PropStream is like a good Swiss Army Knife.

It does so many different things for real estate investing, and when you don't have it, you just feel lost.

Finding ARV and Comps

If you want to find the best part of town to get deals in, a good tool to use is PropStream.

To find those hot pockets in your market, you can use their analytics tool in the upper right hand corner of the maps and that's going to color code the map based on whatever you're selecting.

So if I wanted to know the parts of the city with the highest valued properties, I could see that they're clustered on the north side. But if I wanted to see what parts of the city had the most growth in the last year, I can kind of see that that's clustered on the south side.

They even have preset lists that you can look at.

So if I wanted to know where most cash buyers were active, I could do that as well. I could also do even more specifically and look at Flippers, which means a property that was purchased for cash but then...