Tamera is a real investor, trainer, and coach in California. Tamera started investing in Stockton California in 2003 and from that time, has done over 500 flips. In this episode, Tamera will tell us how she got started in real estate investing, how lease options work, and how you can become a successful real estate investor as well.
Tamera had always known since she was young that she didn’t want to work for other people. While going to college then working in retail, she had saved up $2500. After doing market research on providing a service to sell clothes to old people by bringing the clothes to nursing homes, her business, Clothes To You, was born. She got a rack of clothes and bought her uncle’s truck to take the clothes to her first appointment in a nursing home where she sold $500 worth of clothes.
The business ran for 10 years. She was living her dream until the government didn’t want nursing homes to be handling money and the market turned. Following a divorce, bankruptcy, foreclosure, and the death of her mom from cancer, she was facing a very very hard time. A car accident made it worse.
After stumbling upon the book “One Minute Millionaire”, she learned about multiple income streams. She realized then what she had done wrong, which was putting everything in one basket.
A $5,000 coaching program and 11 months of hard work later, she landed her first big deal.
Not getting the help she needed from the group coaching, she had to figure everything out by herself. Back in 2003, she sent around 20 handwritten letters to people in pre-foreclosure and knocking on doors in San Joaquin County. One of the people she wrote to got back to her and told her he was ready to sell his house. She got a realtor’s contract filled in and used tax records to estimate the property’s worth. The owner told her he wanted $20,000 over the mortgage he had.
With some friends loaning her money, she was able to fix and clean up the house. She made mistakes though such as spending money on the house before she owned it and not putting a dollar in the contract as consideration to make it binding. She made smart decisions too when she stuck the contract on the title and put a “for sale by owner” sign at the front of the house.
Then the market started to go up, and somebody wanted to buy the house quickly. She asked the title company if she could just use the buyer’s funds to purchase the house from the original seller. She found out that what she did was a double closing, which got her an $80,000 cheque resulting in $60,000 in profit.
Her first flip was a success and she credits that to having a can-do spirit, finding solutions, reaching out for help, doing the best she could with what she had, and not giving up. Her advice to those new in the business is to give a contract to everyone to show that you’re serious about buying their property.
Tamera bought another house and ended up doing a lease-option on it. But she made a mistake of allowing the seller to continue living in a pre-foreclosure house she was now fixing up and selling.
Later, she started working with some builders after she found out she could get into a contract with just $1,000. She got 5-10 houses at $1,000 each to hold them while they’re being built. This is called assigning the contract or wholesaling. She sold the contracts once the houses were built.
Tamera thinks people should just copy those who’ve already found a successful way to make money. One of the ways she got started online was when someone said she could make $20,000 a month from a teleseminar. So she called a lot of gurus and interviewed them and made a $197 course. They made $20,000 from that before they recorded their first teleseminar. In fact, her first site massiveprofitsinforeclosures.com is still up and making money.
As far as her income goes, 75% comes from her real estate investing and 25% comes from her online business.
Tamera doesn’t believe in buying and holding on to a property because it takes a long time to get a return on your investment from rental income. Investors have different exit strategies, and she prefers to make money faster on her investments by flipping. With the difficulty of getting cash flowing properties and strict landlord laws forcing her to pay to evict a tenant, she does lease options instead.
Before, it used to take her 3-4 months to flip a property in 3-4 months. Now, it takes 4-5 months, sometimes even reaching 6 months. She even lost money on a new build in North Carolina.
Tamera chose to have a second exit strategy by turning to lease options. When she buys a property, she makes sure that she can keep it up using its cash flow, in case she couldn’t flip it.
Tamera bought a 900 square feet house in Stockton for $175,000, remodeled it for $25,000, then placed it on the market for $239,000. Her goal is a 20% profit on her deals.
Being in the business for so long, her family and friends let her use their money to do her flips then they share in the profits.
Tamera talks to everyone she can to get referrals. She relies on referrals a lot not just for deals but also for recommendations for contractors. For new investors, she suggests going around, introducing themselves, and talking to people. Propertyradar.com is also a useful tool for getting mortgage information.
She also spends $5,000 on direct mail marketing. A customer calls a number and gets an automated message. The customer’s number is taken note of and her virtual assistants will call them. Any leads that come up will go to her. But, she doesn’t do that for inherited leads.
Lease options are better than traditional rentals because you get a significant amount of money upfront, and the renter will maintain the house because they own it. The title stays in your name until the renter is able to purchase it.
Tamera has another way of doing lease options which is to take over the payments on a loan from someone who found themselves unable to pay the mortgage. Then she’ll find someone else to rent the house, and she’ll receive payments from it. In a year, the owner gets a full price.
For lease options, you want a property that you don’t need to fix, so expired listings are a good source. Tamera approaches those who have been in the market for 6 months already. Usually, people want market prices. What she offers is giving them monthly payments then maybe in a year, they’ll get full price. Plus, they don’t have to stop marketing their property.
This setup works for the people who don’t qualify for the traditional methods of owning a house.
When it comes to finding buyers, one way is through leasingtobuy.com.
People can plug in addresses for FSBOs and make $1,000 when Tamera’s investors end up buying the property. First, they need to call and verify with the seller that the property is still for sale, and it has to be a desirable property. The leads go to Tamera’s investors.
Those wanting to learn about the business can even use the site cheaphousefinder.today to play around with the lead scraper in their system.
Get a coach or find someone doing deals, follow them around, and do some work for them. And ignore the naysayers.
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