Diary of a Newbie Real Estate Investor

with Mike Fitzpatrick and Jacqui Pietrzak

Since our last post Jacqui and I have been working closely with Peg and Bernadette to put together a plan for accomplishing our $50k profit rehab goal. Our focus right now is finding a property to buy. Recently we have been spending our time driving for dollars and meeting with local realtors to explain our goals.

If you have never tried driving for dollars, I think it’s fair to say your first time is going to feel awkward. It is hard to look normal when you are circling a neighborhood, slowing traffic and wondering if you look like kidnappers. Essentially our plan was to pull up to a distressed looking property, run out with our “we want to buy your house” flyer, wedge it in the door, then run back to the car as quickly as possible and drive off avoiding any human contact.

Realizing it is less creepy if we actually get out and speak to people, our second attempt went much better. Now that the weather is getting nice, something we are more comfortable with is “running for dollars”. We take our dog with us on the run as this makes us feel more “normal” and offsets the fact that we have a pocket full of flyers and a notepad to write down addresses.  People are willing to give you more information when you look like another neighbor walking around.

Time will tell if we end up with any leads, but it certainly was a good way to become more familiar with the neighborhoods in our area. Through some of these conversations we learned about other houses that were already being rehabbed. At first the thought of another rehabber in my target neighborhood was a bummer to us because we felt someone else beat us to the deal. But we are currently trying to get in touch with these other investors so we can learn from them and see if we could work together in the future.

We have also started setting up meetings with brokers in the metro-west area that are interested in working with us to find rehab and multi-family buy and hold deals. Anything within a 20-30 minute radius of Framingham is what we are looking at. If you are interested in working with us please drop us a message at mike@fitzproperty.com or jacqui@fitzproperty.com and we can set up some time to talk.

In the next couple weeks we are planning on launching our company website and first direct mail campaign. We are trying to narrow down our favorite logos for our company, stay tuned for a voting poll in our next blog post!

Mike & Jacqui