I’m changing my ‘accountability’ days to Tuesday. I think that will work better for me. As far as last weeks goals, I made progress on all of them and completed a few of them. This list is really working as before I typed this I finished the last task that I had incomplete, because I didn’t want to write about postoning it.

1. Ramp up the remaining aspects of the advertising plan; flyers, post cards, business cards, news ads, etc.

(still in progress as a lot of my advertising copy will depend on the outcome of the meeting I have with my new lawyer this week)

2. Acquire a pre-foreclosure list from either the County Recorder or SalesTeamLive.

(I may be able to share access to the online County Records with another investor, negotiations are pending, this beats driving to the office)

3. Follow-up with local Title Companies

(neither of these chumps will return my phone calls and I’m not even doing business with them yet, is this a sign?)

4. Find additional Realtors to work with. I’m only working with two at the moment. I think one of them has been avoiding me since our first meeting, after she found out I was new to investing. The other seems to be out of town often. I need to not limit myself here.

(still diversifying here, they are all so slow to respond. I need to clone myself and renew my license, then I’d be straight)

5. Contact and perhaps arrange appointments to meet all of the other local investors. There is a good possibility that business can be done between us all.

(I called all 12 of them that are advertised. So many don’t answer the phone it’s a joke. What if I wanted to sell my house fast? I left some messages and actually spoke to one guy out of Decatur. He’s willing to reciprocate leads with me, so that’s good)

6. Find out how I can legally build a birddog army. But not only birddogs who find property, but more-so birddogs who can help find property buyers. Find new lawyer to speak this over with.

(I’m meeting with my new lawyer this Friday about this. Hopefully he tells me what I want to hear.)

7. Purchase some additional stationary for the Ad campaign.

(This additional stationary is no longer needed)

New Goals for the week of July 21, 2009:

1. Narrow my focus even further to single-family properties in Southwest Champaign. I have two big-money buyers that are local that desire this area, so this is where I’m going to hone in at the very start.

-I’m going to launch a direct mail campaign to all owner occupants of single-family residential properties and in the direct mail piece I will convey that I would like to buy their home now or even as far as 3 years in the future (I would sell my option to buy).

-I’m going to drive the neighborhoods and look for FSBO’s, then make direct offers to them.

-I’m thinking about door-hangers, but I’m not sure about all the walking time involved.

-I need to find access to the expired listings in the SW Champaign area, I could then make those property owners direct offers.

-There’s also another method of targeting the single-family properties that I’m going to try out this weekend. I’m keeping it a secret for now. But I’m going to take video of me doing it. Hopefully I won’t get shot. At least if I do, the shooter will be on camera, so that’s a plus.

2. I’m going to try and schedule the podcast interview with a local realtor this week. The interview will be about why folks should choose Champaign-Urbana to invest in real estate. I’ll throw the audio up on a squeeze page as incentive so I can continue building my international buyers’ list.

3. After meeting with my attorney, I’ll be able to properly structure my ‘marketing matrix’ as a key component of the matrix is to gain property seller AND property buyer birddogs. If I can legally build a network of birddogs in Champaign, I’d soon be crowned king, I guarantee it! But I’m kind of gridlocked now because I can’t move forward with my design of advertising scheme without this counsel.

This is a short list, but I think it will keep me busy for the next week.

- Justin