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While I was looking around for an outsourcer for my web project, I remembered (I may have even mentioned it here once) an Open Source project called Joomla. Joomla is a content management system for web sites. What’s cool about it is that it requires little to no web programming, and there are tons of free templates out there for it, including Real Estate themed templates.

So, I went out and got an account with Blue Host. Blue Host has CPanel and Fantastico, both allow you to install packages, such as Joomla and WordPress, very easily. What’s nice about Blue Host is that they also allow you to host an unlimited number of websites, each as subdirectories under your main site and each appearing as their own site.

So I am in the process of migrating this site over to my new site…it is a work in progress. My new main site is FreelanceWisdom.com if you go there now, you will see the Joomla main page. Little by little I will be adding to it. If you go to FreelanceWisdom.com/projectnomad you will see my first attempt at migrating Project:Nomad to the site. I am not crazy about the wordpress template I am currently using; I’m still looking for a better one (let me know if you like it or not - I may just change the pictures). I will continue to contribute to this site while I am building my new site.

I have also created a site to rent my house. There are several components for Joomla sites, including slide carousels. I will use this to display pictures of the house and provide rental information.

Stay tuned…

First, an update on what I have been up to. As I mentioned earlier, the major work on the house is done and I had some left over little things that I need to finish. The problem is, I can only work on the weekends. I have been working late at my job, and I am just too tired to work on the house afterward. OK…I’m venting, but it hasn’t been easy. I also have been having problems finding a tenant screening service. The recent changes to the credit reporting laws make it impossible for landlords with one or two houses to be able to get credit information on prospective tenants.

Oh…and it’s tax time…need I say more?

I am trying to apply 4HWW to my situation though. I am working on a proposal to outsource the website design to market my house. It is just taking too much time to do it on my own, and really, it is something perfect to have someone else to do for me. I will post my experiences here on how it goes.

Now, before I get into my favorite sites (yeah, you’ll need to wait a little while more, but it will be worth it…) I want you to imagine the following situation.

Say you have a laptop. On the laptop, you have a basic operating system, and a web browser. That’s it.

No utilities, No applications (other than the browser), No suites…nothing… Basically you have what is known as a “Thin Client”.

The challenge is, can you run a business from the laptop?

Sure ya can, Sparky… just go here.

It is pretty cool. Everything you need, via Web 2.0 hosted applications. This is perfect for a freelancer on the move. I hope you find it useful.

As part of setting up my processes for marketing my rental property and handling prospective tenants, I am setting up a new website. I have registered a really good name, which I will put here when I get the site up and running. I am delving into web design books and getting ideas from friends who are also real estate investors.

I am also toying with the idea of moving this blog over to the new host. The host allows for multiple sites, and even though I don’t have a major following, it will give me the chance to experiment a little more, and eventually try to sell ad space. I am actually considering splitting the blog up into two parts, one continuing on with the 4HWW theme, and the second with my experiences as a real estate investor. This is a ways off, but I am looking forward to it.

On another note…tomorrow, the house will have new garage doors, and the landscaping will be complete. All that is needed is a new oven and a good cleaning and it will be ready to rent. I will then be free to move on to other projects. I want to get back to my goal of forming a virtual company…

In my next post I am going to list some excellent resources that I always turn to for freelance advice and ideas.

Yikes…I looked at the date of my last post and it was three weeks ago!

I apologize to the three or four of you that hang on my every word waiting for my next wacky adventure…

Seriously, I have been swamped…

The major rehab on the house has been complete, now comes the little details that need to be finished so I can get the house ready to rent. Today, I went to a local appliance store to get a stove top for the kitchen (I still need a new wall mounted oven and range hood); I also hung the fire alarms and started cleaning EVERYTHING!

The big to-do is getting the garage doors to work. My contractor could not do it, but gave me the name of someone who might. They have yet to get back to me…

I also have to get my “process” formalized. I know what the Georgia Landlord - Tenant law is, and I have a good lease. I now need to get a voice mail service to handle the calls from prospective renters and a way to run credit checks and criminal checks on any applicants. The devil is always in the details.

Still, I am excited. So far (knock on wood) I have been able to handle any problems that I have encountered. It has been crazy leading a double life, programmer by day, real estate rehab project manager by night, but I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Of course, that doesn’t mean that life as a landlord isn’t going to cause headaches, but financially, it will ease a lot of pressure having someone else pay the mortgage - assuming I find a tenant. Then comes the next house…

Keeping productive given my situation has been a challenge, and I have been surfing the net for productivity tips. I have found a really good article here. I hope you find it helpful.

Gotta love this Atlanta weather…Last week I was wearing short sleeve shirts, today as I look out my window IT’S SNOWING!…Being a yankee, I kinda miss the snow - not the shoveling though. Of course, there was a run on bread, milk and eggs at the metro supermarkets. People panic real easily here when they hear the words “Winter Storm Warning”…never mind that by tomorrow, the snow will be gone. But there is the infamous “Black Ice” in it’s wake.

Work on the house is coming along nicely. It is about at the midway point. I have some additional stuff that I decided needed to be done - there is no insulation in the crawlspace, and those leaks I mention earlier. It will cost, but it will save my tenants a lot in energy bills - happy tenants = good tenants; plus it will have to be done eventually anyway. In a day or two, I will meet with my lawyer, who himself is a landlord, and I will take a crash-course in Georgia Landlord-Tenant Law, and soak up as much knowledge as possible.

My Day Job, on the other hand, has been driving me crazy. I find myself in a situation where I am getting pulled from many different directions, and it is causing a lot of stress.  This has given me renewed motivation to get away, if only for a while. I am still working on a way to move to a freelance position.

While planning my escape, I found this great article on living long term and rent free. The travelzine itself is a great resource, so I have added it to my blogroll.

First of all, I would like to wish any and all visitors to my site a Happy, Healthy, and Prosperous New Year. Regardless of what you do I hope you have a blast doing it, and if not, I hope you find the determination and courage to change your job to something you do find rewarding. New Year = New Beginnings…

As I mentioned in my last post, I got the house. In the last week or so, when I was not with my wife and kids celebrating the holidays, I was in the process of getting the house ready for rehabbing. This meant getting the utilities squared away, and, as of today, getting a new furnace installed (Since turning on the water, I have already found four leaks!). We have had sub-freezing weather here in the Atlanta suburbs and ice was forming in my toilets and water lines. I have started insulating the pipes as a precaution. When they installed the furnace, I installed a programmable thermostat to help save money.

So now the house is ready for repair. My crew starts tomorrow and the work should be done before the end of the month. During this time, I am going to meet with my lawyer who is also a landlord and pay for an hour of his time to get me up to speed on what to expect, and how to handle it. Yeah, I’d rather be on some tropical beach, laptop in hand, slinging code, working remotely, but this opportunity came up and I had to take it. I have a one year interest-only mortgage. At the end of the year, I’ll either re-fi or sell the house. Either way, I did it right and made the profit going in, so I should be ok.

I still intend to find a way to become location-independent; it’s just going to be a little harder.

Now, keeping in line with my goal of making this a good resource for people, I have found a really good article entitled “The Ultimate Guide To Not Choking Under Pressure“. It was written with software developers in mind, but the principles are universal, especially for freelancers.

Over at Bootstrapper, there is a great post on creative ways to find new clients. You can find it here. Also adding the site to my blogroll.

I have been really busy coordinating the closing for my house. The lender I am using wants to use their lawyer to do the closing, this after my lawyer has already done a title search. So now I have to pay both lawyers for two title searches on the same house; plus two appraisals! Don’t even get me started on my insurance!

What I’m getting the house for: $90,000

What I thought the house was worth: $135,000

Look on my face after getting the news from the appraiser that the house is really worth $156,000: Priceless…

Ok…so I have to put in about $15,000 in repairs & closing costs, but still a sweet deal….

First of all, those of you joining me from Lea Woodward’s “Location Independent Blog” welcome! I hope you find this a good resource; fell free to browse past entries…

So…the bank has accepted my counter offer for the short sale. They are getting some money back for the house without initiating foreclosure, they are forgiving the loan, so the owner is relieved, and I am getting a nice house in a decent neighborhood - win-win-win.

The downside is that it is putting a damper on my plans for starting a virtual business. All my energy is now focused on due diligence and lining up a team to get the house in good condition to rent (this in addition to working my full time job!) My original exit strategy was to flip it, but that was before the sub-prime mess. As I mentioned earlier, there is still the possibility of getting a management team to handle the rental, but it is not worth it for just one house; I will need to get a few more rentals for this to be feasible.

Still, I am actively looking for ways to outsource as much as possible.

The longterm goal is to build multiple streams of income to get me out of my job and free up my time; this is just one step toward that goal.

Bear with me, this is probably going to be a long entry…

Back when I first decided to get into real estate investing, I read a book by Robert Allen called “The Challenge”. Basically it’s about him taking a group of ordinary people and teaching them how to buy investment property in the period of one month (kind of a “Buy a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime” sort of thing)…

Anyhow, in the book, he mentioned the story of “The Blue Vase”. It is about a young man who is given a seemingly simple task, purchase a specific blue vase at a certain store, but in fact, he faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles at every turn; yet he persisted. (You can view a movie of the story here; it’s a little campy and runs about 20-30 minutes, but it gets the point across). The thing is, for me the story “stuck”. It was the one major thing I really got from the book, and I always remembered it.

Flash forward to April of this year.

A friend of a friend had twelve houses going into foreclosure. He bought them in a package from another investor (there were nineteen houses altogether, he managed to get rid of seven). Three of the houses were just too far away for me to be interested, which left nine houses. So I plotted the locations on my map book (yeah, I know there’s a thing called GPS; what can I say, I’m an Analog guy in a Digital world…but I digress…)

Starting from the house furthest away, worked my way back home, looking at each of the houses.

Here is where the serendipity part comes in…

In trying to find the last house I got lost; I turned up the wrong road. I followed it a bit and realized I made a mistake and decided to turn around and head back the way I came. So I found a spot where I could turn my car around - right in front of an abandoned house.

For a real estate investor, an ugly, abandoned house can be a potential goldmine. Something else pretty cool, next to the house was a very large undeveloped lot. I got out and took a look at the house from the street. I could not find a house number so I went to the house next to it and wrote that number down.

I finally found my way to the last house, but all the while, I was thinking about the abandoned house. The other houses I looked at did not fit my investment criteria, but the abandoned house showed promise. So I went home and began my search for the owner.

The really cool thing about the county in which I live is that pretty much all of the records are online, and free to access. I went to the county property tax database and looked up what I thought was the house address. I got a name, Fran (names and addresses changed to protect the innocent). I looked up her name online, found her, and called her. I asked her if she owned the house at 123 Oak Street. She said there is no house at 123 Oak Street, just a vacant undeveloped lot which she owned.

Turns out I was one lot off on the address; the abandoned house was at 124 Oak Street. Something else she admitted to me, even though the property at 124 Oak Street was not in her name, she owned it as well. I asked her if she was interested in selling either the house or the lot and she flatly said no. I gave her my number and told her to please call me if she changed her mind, and she told me she doubted that would happen, that she’s trying to acquire the property around the house…click…

This really got me interested. I looked at the plats (the county maps that show the lots in a particular section of a county) and saw that what I thought was two lots, was really three lots. And in fact, there were three vacant lots behind these three lots! So, looking at the land from street level where I had parked, I saw a vacant lot to the far left (122 Oak), another vacant lot in the middle (123 Oak), and a lot with an abandoned house on the far right (124 Oak). And then, behind these three lots were the three other undeveloped lots.

After digging a little deeper, I saw that not only did she own 123 & 124 Oak, she also owned the lot behind 122 Oak. I then went to look for the owner of 122 Oak, and here is where things got a little strange. The address of the owner was care of the County Tax Assessor…hmmm… The owner was a guy named Hank. I called the county tax assessor and they were a little perplexed about this as well. They put me on to someone else who told me that the taxes on the property were unpaid since 2000. Most likely, Hank was dead. Why the property didn’t go through probate, I don’t know, but there it was. I asked how much was owed in back taxes, she told me: $580! Now I was REALLY interested. I looked up the Social Security Death Index and saw there were two Hanks with the same last name that lived in the same town. Both died a while ago. So I was back to square one.

I decided to look up the deed for the property using Hank’s name and something funny happened. I didn’t see the deed for 122 Oak, but there was a deed for 121 Oak (which had a nice house on it). There were three people on the deed, a woman named Mary (same last name as Hank) a woman named Eve (different last name) and a guy named Hank Jr. (with the same last name). It turns out, Hank’s family owned two plots of land, one that his wife and kids owned, that was later sold, and the vacant lot that Hank Sr. owned. The two Hanks in the Social Security Death Index were Hank Sr. and Hank Jr. So that left Mary and Eve. I assumed that Mary was Hank’s wife, and that Eve was his married daughter (explaining the different last name).

At this point I did another search on the Social Security Death Index for Mary and Eve. I got a hit on Mary - she died in 2005, but no hit on Eve. I tried both her maiden and married names - nothing. This meant she could be alive. So I went through every resource I could to find Eve. I was able to find old addresses and phone numbers, but nothing current. Back to square one again.

I was beginning to lose hope, when I stopped and re-thought the problem.

Mary died pretty recently, maybe the local paper had her obituary. I went online to the AJC (Atlanta Journal Constitution - our newspaper) and looked in their “Stacks” section (this is their Archives). I knew the exact date of death, so I looked a few days after and sure enough I saw a brief entry with just the mention of her name. To get the full entry cost me $3.

I paid, got the full obituary, and saw the words that even today bring tears of joy to my eyes…“survived by daughter Eve” followed by a new last name…(turns out her husband died and she re-married).

I did a lookup of the new name and sure enough, there was an Eve of that name living relatively near to the vacant lot. I called her, introduced myself verified that Hank and Mary were her parents, and asked her if she knew that her father owned a vacant lot. She said no, she didn’t. I then explained to her about the lot and how I found her. I asked her if she would be interested in selling the lot, she said yes.

We closed in late June.

I then called Fran (remember her?) I told her I was the new owner of the vacant lot next to her property, and if she was interested, I would be willing to sell her my land (at a nice profit of course). She told me she was not ready to do anything yet. I gave her my contact info (again) and told her to call me if she’s interested.

I haven’t heard from Fran; I will probably call her this month and see if her situation has changed. I may even offer to buy her lots if she’s wiling to let them go. In any case, I am the proud owner of a .25 acre lot in a nice area of town that I can either develop, or sell, and I got it at a really good price.

The point of this particular tale is this, never give up. Never.

A lot of times, we run into an obstacle - real or imagined - that causes us to quit. I am convinced that there is always at least one solution to every problem we encounter in life. It may not be pretty, it usually is not easy, but it’s there if you are willing to look for it. If you are stuck, stop for a bit, sleep on it. Our minds are amazing at solving problems, if we just take the time to use them.

End of Sermon… :o)

Every quarter, publicly held companies are required to issue a report showing their progress for the past 3 months. This report is called a 10-Q.

Just over three months ago (last quarter), I finished reading The Four Hour Work Week, and I decided to work the principles into my life. The purpose was to create a virtual company, where I would subcontract the work to freelancers (or become a freelancer myself), with the eventual goal that I can run this company from pretty much anywhere in the world I choose to live.

Here now is my personal 10-Q…

The plan was to use multiple streams of income from the Internet, and possibly Real Estate investing (which sort of is counterintuitive because you need to be around to manage your properties, but I’ll get to that in a minute) to finance my endeavor.

Internet

I ramped up my education in Internet Marketing by taking the Thirty Day Challenge in August. My first attempt at applying the principles from the challenge ended with two outcomes; the first outcome - not desirable - was that I didn’t get any sales from my affiliate link on my blog. The second outcome - desirable - was that I placed on the first page of Google when searching for my keyword phrase. Yes it was at #10, and yes it was only for a couple of days before dropping off, but in my defense, I did not apply all the principles I learned and didn’t put a whole lot of effort into it. Seeing it on Google did boost my hopes that it was possible to make it happen, and motivated me to take more action. Like everything else in life, you get out of it what you put into it.

I got sidetracked a little with my “day job”, but I am on track to make another attempt at a successful Affiliate Marketing project. This time I’m all in.

The second Internet project I am working on is some sort of Information Product, like an eBook or Video. This is still in the early stages, but I have a couple of ideas I will explore, and document in later blog entries. I think this holds a lot of promise, because it doesn’t take a lot to produce, and if marketed right, it could produce a nice stream of income, with a minimum of maintenance.

Finally, something that I have not mentioned at all in this blog. Using an old PC I had lying around, I built an Ubuntu (Linux) server. Along with Linux, it had Apache - a web server, MySQL - a database application, and PHP5 which is used to create Web based applications (collectively called LAMP). I am getting up to speed on web page design and creation. This falls in line with my freelance aspirations. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection, and you can run a business.

Real Estate

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, I have a pending deal on the table. If the bank accepts my counteroffer, and there are no surprises in the inspection, I’ll have a nice house in a decent neighborhood. I originally intended to rehab and flip it, but in the current environment, I may either wholesale it to another investor, or change my strategy and rent or lease purchase it. Yes, if I rent it, in the short term, it will mean that I have to be around to manage it. Not something I can easily do from a beach in Nice…or the Italian Riviera…Still, in this market, I am thinking I can pick up one or two more houses, and if the numbers are good, I can hire a team to handle the property management. This, I can run remotely.

Plus there is no rule that I can’t do a little of everything, Internet Marketing, Web Design & Creation, and Real Estate investing.

The overall goal is to quit my day job to free up my time to do the things I want to do with it.

So…that’s the current state of Project Nomad, Inc. :o)

This first Quarter was primarily goal setting, education, exploration, and some action. The outlook for the second quarter is to take more action to move me closer to my goal of independence.

In late November, 2006, a guy saw one of my bandit signs and called my answering service regarding selling his house. This was the beginning of the sub-prime fiasco, and he got caught up early on. He lost his job and could not afford his payments. After meeting with him and his wife, I initiated a short sale with the bank.

A short sale, for those of you who don’t know anything about real estate investing, is when you offer the bank an amount much less than the outstanding balance owed. If you can prove to the bank that the house is worth substantially less than what’s owed (possibly because of neglect), and that the owners were in a hardship situation and could not meet their obligations, the bank may take the offer rather than initiate foreclosure and take ownership of the house.

Banks are in the money lending business, not the real estate business, plus they have to put an large amount of money in reserve for each house they take back; that’s money they can’t lend.

The practice of short selling is usually common with second mortgages when the first mortgage is foreclosing, because all junior liens are wiped out after the foreclosure. There is a big incentive for the holder of the second mortgage to settle (usually 10 cents on the dollar) so they get something- anything back. What’s great is that you automatically build equity into the deal, which is why you see “No equity, no problem” on all those bandit signs in your neighborhood.

The problem was, there was only one mortgage on the house, which makes it harder to deal with the bank. Sill, I went ahead because it looked like a good deal.

Now, keep in mind, the process usually takes a couple of months, three at the most. In the initial documentation from the bank, they even said it takes approximately 30 days.

Six months later, mid-May, I heard from the bank…”Sorry, your offer was too low”…crap…I re-ran my numbers and I figured I might be able to sweeten the offer. I did, by $10K (which should really have been $5K but I wanted to make the deal happen). When I made the offer to the bank, I asked them if it was going to take a long time for their response, they responded that they will fast-track the analysis.

Five months later (last week) they finally called me back. They are “conditionally” accepting my offer…yea! (conditionally :o)…

Now…a lot has happened in the last five months, including a penalty on an unpaid property tax bill, and of course that nasty little sub-prime business. So I am going back to the bank to negotiate another $5K off the price. Yes, I can afford the higher price, but it’s the principle of the matter - and I need to practice my negotiating skills.

So, the moral of this convoluted story, is that sometimes you just need a little patience…