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Jared Pomranky ~ Detroit Foreclosures

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Build Your Online Niche for Your Real Estate Business

07-20-10
Jared Pomranky ~ Detroit Foreclosures

Build Online NicheAs of 2008, Google had indexed over a trillion sites. Since then they have continued indexing more and more websites each day. There’s not an exact number right now but it’s safe to say that the Internet is enormous. When considering the vast number of pages, how are you going to stand out? It’s no longer a viable option to always go after generic search terms in order to get the most traffic. Unless you have large capital reserves that you’re going to pour into a very expensive ongoing internet marketing and SEO campaign for years, you need to find your Online Niche.

Your goal is to be a big fish in a smaller pond, which usually equates to being on the first page of Google for some relevant search terms. Most people don’t look past the first page of Google with some estimates putting it at 90%. If you’re not on the first page of Google, you’re missing out on traffic. It’s much better to get 50% of 500 searches a month as opposed to getting 1% of 1,000 searches a month. Also, as you’re building your niche for your site, you’re also optimizing it for the general search terms in the long run. An optimized page for the term “Detroit Michigan Mortgage Lender” also includes the more general search terms “Michigan Mortgage Lender” and “Mortgage Lender”. My favorite online niches to build for clients are: Geographic, product/service specific, and marketing specific.

Read more on Building Your Online Niche in Real Estate
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Where Is Your Focus?

04-22-10
Jared Pomranky ~ Detroit Foreclosures

What do you do all day? Where is your focus? Do you work hard every day and are always busy but don’t seem to ever get much completed? If so, you’re not alone. Many people suffer from the information and technical overload that is so prevalent in today’s society. We are bombarded by news, email, twitter, facebook, blog posts (keep reading this one!), and all sorts of electronic media that takes our attention away from what we should really be doing. Many times these small tasks and interruptions keep us from doing the one thing that could make a significant impact on our business.

I got the following from Brian Tracy’s book, “Eat That Frog”. What he says is that when you get into work in the morning you need to identify the 1 thing that will make the most significant impact on your business. It may not be something that you really want to do but it’s something that will help your business out the most. You need to sit down and complete that task before you move on to anything else, which includes before you talk on the phone, check email, tweet about reading a great blog or update your facebook status. Get the task done then move on to the next task that will make the most significant impact on your business.

Focusing in this manner will force you to complete your most difficult tasks but also the tasks that will create the biggest impact. You’ll then find that you end up fitting in all of the small tasks in about an hour in between the big tasks. A laser like focus is key in these situations because we have so much that can distract us. So many times when you let something small distract you, you end up skipping from small task to small task and eventually forget what you were doing in the first place!

You don’t have to get it perfect right away but make sure that you realize when you’ve gotten off task and lost focus. In this way you will be able to pull yourself back and see where you lost the focus.

What are some techniques that you’ve found keep you on task and focused?

Be a Renegade,
Jared Pomranky

First Time Home Buyer Investment Program

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Email Marketing for Real Estate

04-05-10
Jared Pomranky ~ Detroit Foreclosures

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Email Marketing for Real Estate
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Here you are with all of these great deals and you don’t have anyone to sell them to. How did you get in this situation? First off you didn’t listen to Drew when he told you to build your wholesale list and second you’re probably not effectively marketing via email.
Let me clear up a few misconceptions on email marketing:
    Emailing to a bunch of people in the BCC field of your email program is not effective email marketing
    You shouldn’t add someone to your list just because you found their email address, you need to get their permission.
    More emails is not always better.

Permission Marketing

We’re talking about permission marketing here, props to Seth Godin, which means we’re getting someone’s permission before we add them to our list and start marketing to them. Makes sense. To do this we will utilize a email list marketing company that provides us with easy to use sign-up forms for our website. Also, if we add someone to our list, it sends them an e-mail asking for their confirmation before getting added to our list. This is called a double opt-in list. All of this is building a list of people that are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. If they are no longer interested, they can unsubscribe from your list.

What to send your subscribers

You might think the best thing to send your subscribers is just a list of houses each week of what you’re selling. I’m here to tell you that you won’t keep many people on your list doing that. What about the person that wants to learn a little more about what you do and real estate in the area. They’re not going to buy right now but they will probably buy in a couple of months. Well… you should keep that person involved.
Provide content in your newsletter about investing in your area. Give them the local real estate perspective along with tips for being successful. How about tips on how to buy properties in the area that you’re selling properties or what you have to look out for? Information like this will keep people involved and as you build your list, you’ll start to convert these subscribers to buyers.
You of course want to send them your properties that you have for sale but don’t just spam out your properties to everyone. Add some value to their day with some information and you will end up selling more houses.

Email Marketing Service Recommendation

I highly recommend Aweber as the best list marketing service out there. They not only have the best deliverability rates for their messages but they also have more templates and easy to use form builders than anyone out there. Anyone. Designing and implementing forms on your website and hover forms to capture even more leads is as easy as point and click.
Many people like iContact as a single opt-in list provider, which is fine if you already have a large list of subscribers that you want to upload, but I would still recommend Aweber. Urban Detroit Wholesalers switched to Aweber a couple of years ago and although we lost some subscribers, the move has been more than worth it.
Either list service will be good to get going so check out either iContact or Aweber to get your list marketing going now. You will see your sales soar.

Be a Renegade,
Jared Pomranky

First Time Home Buyer Investment Program

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The Times They Are a Changin'

03-11-10
Jared Pomranky ~ Detroit Foreclosures

The fear you let build up in your mind is worse than the situation that actually exists. ~Spencer Johnson, MD author of “Who Moved My Cheese”

Fear and uncertainty still seem to rule our economy and real estate market. This is still due to changes in the markets and a general lack of adaption by people in those markets. When your business was making money and things were good, you didn’t think about change. When your way of doing business started to not be effective anymore, what did you do? Hopefully you not only thought about change but you grabbed the bull by the horns and took it head on. Times for small tweaks or fine tuning are gone. Make far reaching changes and innovate or be left behind. It’s interesting that this advice not only works for businesses but also is key to positive growth in the City of Detroit and Michigan as a whole.

What would you do if you weren’t afraid? ~Spencer Johnson, MD

If you’re letting fear lead your business or your actions, you might as well give up now. It may be hard if you’ve been burned but you have to make sound businesses decisions, innovate, and push the boundaries constantly. You may be able to rest on your laurels in other markets but not here in Michigan. Sitting back and watching what’s happening puts you out of business as so many people have learned. I don’t want to scare people with my assessment right now as I’m more optimistic than ever.

Those of us that are willing to put ourselves out there in our businesses and life have an amazing amount of opportunity surrounding us. I’m talking to businesses every day that are having there best years ever because their competitors that failed to change and innovate are out of business and even with a smaller market, they have a much bigger piece of the pie now. Just don’t take anything for granted, work for it. If you have to get down and dirty and hustle to get things going, do it. You will set yourself up for not just a better tomorrow but an amazing tomorrow.

Take what others have done and learn from it. Take what you have done and learn from it. Put together a plan and work that plan. If you’re bumbling around from one activity to another, you’re only doomed to repeat errors and not truly grow. Innovate. What can you do better and how can you do it better? How do you add more value to your clients?

While someone may have moved our “cheese”, we still need to move on. With more opportunity than ever, our motivation should be more than ever. Be strong and be unafraid.

Be a Renegade,
Jared Pomranky


First Time Home Buyer Investment Program
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Has the Housing Market Bottom Passed?

11-24-09
Jared Pomranky ~ Detroit Foreclosures

I just saw a post from a Realtor quoting RealComp statistics in his post Four Positive Signs That the Real Estate Market is Recovering in Metro Detroit that the housing market has turned around in Metro-Detroit. Some of the points he quoted were:

All MLS October ‘09 sales at highest levels since 2004

Lowest on?market inventory levels in any month since January 2006 (42,785 in October 2009, 48,059 in January 2006)

NonForeclosure Sales Top Foreclosure Sales in Metro Detroit. For the month of October, the total nonforeclosure sales were 3,483 compared to 2,938 foreclosure sales….

…Months supply of inventory (MSI) has dropped by nearly 50% ? from 11.9 month supply last year to 6 month supply this year

I am an optimistic person and I know that the real estate market WILL turn around. This is great new, right? Well, any way you look at it, this is good news. Let’s just chose which points we look at to get that good news…

The first point above that you can look at for good news in the market are that October ‘09 sales are the highest they’ve been since 2004, which means there are buyers coming to the market. The second is that there were 3,483 non-foreclosure sales in October. The points about foreclosure inventory levels being low and foreclosure sales being low is an artificial statistic.

If you read my post in August about The False Real Estate Market Bottom in Detroit, you’ll remember that we are looking at a false bottom or an artificially inflated market. This all has to do with the foreclosure moratorium by mortgage companies and the State of Michigan. What this did is create a huge backlog of foreclosures that will be dumped on the market in the next couple of months.

In the post I predicted that the the foreclosure flood would hit Metro-Detroit in November of 2009 to January of 2010. It no longer looks like November will be that time but I feel confident on a January-February 2010 flood of foreclosures hitting the market (barring any government intervention, which would be a bad idea). Banks are not good at foreclosing on and getting REOs listed, which you’ve most likely seen working in real estate, and these foreclosures are no exception.

Per RealtyTrac, Michigan is still #7 in the nation for Foreclosure filings. Looking at the Wayne County information, which is what I used in my original analysis, foreclosure filings for August, September, and October of 2009 are the highest they’ve been this year. This all points to more foreclosures on the market.
Wayne County Michigan Foreclosure Filing Informationn - Realty Trac

Inventories are down but foreclosure filings are up. That points to future inventory growth and towards other intervention (the government), which created artificially low inventories.

Where’s the Opportunity?
I’m a strong believer in finding the opportunity and not spreading doom and gloom like the national media. What you need to know is exactly what’s going to happen when a flood of foreclosures comes on the market. There’s going to be increased inventories, decreased prices, and lower buyer confidence in the market. This is only going to be temporary because sales are still strong and the inventory will get eaten up but all of them at once is going to cause these activities to occur.

While the market and most people are reactive, we need to be proactive and see this for what it is. A temporary phenomena. Taking action when these foreclosures come on the market in buying the foreclosures and fixing them up to rent out or flip is going to put you in a very good position. There will be plenty of inventory to choose from and by the time you get your property stable and rented for awhile, the rest of the market will catch up. By that time inventories could well be on their way back down.

We have a window of opportunity coming up that you will never see in metro-Detroit real estate again. What are you going to do when presented with this opportunity; take ACTION and invest or kick yourself later for not doing so?

Be a Renegade,
Jared Pomranky
Free Report on Detroit foreclosure investing "how to"
Detroit Real Estate market Detroit investment properties

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