If you do not have money to start out your real estate investment career with, you can find choices for you to take that don’t require money but will require time. One method that we are going to go over is called the Bird Dog.
If you don’t have money to execute the deal, you can definitely find the deal for another real estate investor and get paid at the same time. The way it works, in its simple form, is that you do the leg work to find a great real estate deal, get it under contract, and then sell that contract to a real estate investor.
Before you go on, let’s give you a little formula. This formula is used to figure out how much you should offer on a house. Do not exceed the percentage of 65%. The lower you go, the better chances you have at selling your deal to another investor.
ARV x 65% – Repair Cost = Offer
$175,000 x 65% = $113,750
$113,750 – $15,000 = $98,750
So let’s start going over this. Say for instance, you are looking for houses that can be rehabbed. Now, after doing some work and researching, you find a house that you can get under contract for $98,750. You did your homework on this house, and you find that the total cost to repair the house is $15,000. After making the necessary repairs, the value of the house will be $175,000. Because you either do not have the money or you do not have the experience necessary to successfully execute this deal, you will get the property under contract, and do what is called “flip the paper”. You will be selling a contract, not a house.
Technically speaking, you can obtain a house under contract using only one dollars put into escrow. Even though it is not always the case, some homeowners may want you to place more cash down for deposit like $500 and up. Thus what you do, is you make your offer to the homeowner to buy the property for $100,000, and you also offer to put $300 or more into an escrow account. Make sure, and this is extremely important, that you put a clause within the contract that it’s subject to inspection. This means, that in the period of the inspection of the house, you can pull away from the contract in case you are not satisfied with the final results of the inspection. If you do not have this inside your contract, it implies that you’re liable to lose the cash which you put into escrow.
So now, you have the right to buy this house at $98,750. You will be making your money by selling this right to another property investor, but you will raise the price to generate your money. Let’s imagine as an example, you add $3000 for the purchase price for the investor. The investor’s price tag to buy the house will be $101,750, and the repairs will cost $15,000, leaving the total amount to buy and rehab the property at $116,750. Right after doing the calculation, dividing the acquisition price and repair cost by the after repair value, you are going to get the ARV percentage. With this example, that percentage equals 66.7%. A number of investors will be using hard money, and hard money lenders usually like deals to be between 65% and 70%.
Now, there are a couple of ways that you can sell this contract to another real estate investor. You can either perform what’s called a double close at the escrow office, or you can use the clause “and/or assigns” next to your name on the contract. For example, on the contract it will say “Tim and/or Assigns” will be purchasing the house. That clause means you can assign the contract to anyone. If you only had your name on the contract, you must be the one to purchase a house. In that case, you’ll have to do a double close at the escrow office.
Now let us go over how to perform a double close. Not every escrow company will be able to execute a double close for you. Numerous people at the escrow company usually do not even know what a double close is. Say for instance, you didn’t use the and or/assigns clause, and you’ve got your real estate investor ready to buy a property. What we do, is get the escrow company to draw up a purchase agreement for a purchase price of $101,750 (which includes your $3000 profit). So you are sitting down at the table, and you’ve got two contracts at hand. The deal is going to have to work in this specific order: The investor will buy the house for $101,750, the escrow company obtains the money, and after that they’ll use those funds to buy the house from the original property owner for $98,750. So your real estate investor covered the home, and you in turn pocketed $3000.
Carrying out a double close is a great strategy when you do not want the real estate investor that’s purchasing the contract from you to know how much you are really earning from the deal. Although it doesn’t occur that often, a few investors might be deterred and not wish to purchase the contract knowing that you’re making a substantial amount of money from it. For example, in the event you located this same property for $88,750, and you are offering the contract for a return of $13,000. Despite the fact that the deal can still be beneficial to the real estate investor, a few might be fussy and not want to do a transaction with you. Therefore in that case, doing a double close is perfect.
So that is a general understanding of how to be a bird dog.
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