How to Get What You Really Want From Real Estate Investing

Scott Costello All, Blog, Featured, Goals, Guest Writers 56 Comments

It was exhilarating when I first got the thought in my brain that I wanted to try real estate investing. I didn't know about wholesaling or the many other types such as lease options or even probate. What got me excited was the thought of Money and Freedom. The other day I got an email from Todd Heitner. He has been reading my blog for a while and wanted to offer his words of wisdom on how he has achieved ...
google voice podio integration

Getting Google Voice Messages into Podio

Scott Costello All, Articles, Blog, Featured 6 Comments

In an effort to completely automate my business (or at least greatly reduce my work), I'm trying out the process of integrating Podio with Google Voice. I want to automatically have a lead created when I get a voicemail. It's a simple process and requires no other services (i.e. zapier, globiflow,etc). You basically just forward your Google Voice messages to your Podio App's email address...Yup it has one. Actually each App has a separate email address. Below I'll walk you ...

Hard Money Q&A with Investor Craig Fuhr

Scott Costello All, Blog, Featured, Guest Writers 10 Comments

This is part 2 of a two post series on hard money. In the first part I had a Q&A with Hard Money Lender, Jeff Hensel. In this post I wanted to get the other side of the coin and have an active investor's take on hard money. For this I welcome Craig Fuhr. I've know Craig for probably as long as I've been investing. Excellent guy and even better investor. He had some great things to say about Hard ...

Hard Money Q&A With Jeff Hensel

Scott Costello All, Blog, Featured, Guest Writers 6 Comments

This post is going to be a two part series about Hard Money. Today's guest, Jeff Hensel, is going to answer questions about Hard Money from the point of view of a Lender. Next week I will have an active investor, Craig Fuhr, answer the same questions from an investor's point of view. I'll be the first to admit that I know very little about hard money.  So when I was contacted by Jeff Hensel of North Coast Financial (www.northcoastfinancialinc.com) ...

Podio – Send Out Offer Letters with 1 Click

Scott Costello All, Blog, Featured 23 Comments

I've been on the hunt for a good crm for my small business lately.  So my Podio experiment continues and this time I take on one of the scenarios that i mentioned in my post about creating custom Podio Apps.  One of my readers, Charles, asked if I could create a process that did the following... ...Automatically create and send an offer letter to my Real Estate Agent when I change the status of one of my leads to Make ...

Podio – Creating Apps and Automating with GlobiFlow and Zapier

Scott Costello All, Blog, Featured 17 Comments

In my previous post I talked about my first impressions of Podio.  While I was a bit overwhelmed it was easy to see that Podio was a good option for managing your wholesale business. One of the big draws for using a system like Podio is how customizable it is. That is a great feature but it also can be a negative one if it creates to many complexities. After spending about 2 weeks figuring things out, I'm happy to say ...

My First Look at Podio (Day 1)

Scott Costello All, Blog, Featured 6 Comments

This post is going to be a part of a series of posts as I get into the world of Podio. Sometimes the first impression says a lot about an application. Quite often the initial look at an application causes us to get that overwhelmed feeling in our guts and we turn around and never come back. I have found this to be even more true if the application is FREE like Podio is. Mostly because you have nothing invested …

What I Figured out About Organizing your Leads with Excel + Free Tool

Scott Costello Blog, Featured, Lead Tracker, Tools 22 Comments

There are quite a few options when you are looking for wholesaling lead management software.  Probably one of the most popular lead tracking tools out there is simply Microsoft Excel.  I have seen countless forum posts on Bigger Pockets asking what CRMs other wholesalers use.  The one consistent answer that I see is to use Excel as a CRM.  It’s not necessarily the best, only that there is always a couple of people who swear buy it. In my efforts …

Direct Mail Campaign Tracking + Free Tool

Scott Costello All, Blog, Featured, Lead Tracker 22 Comments

THIS TEMPLATE HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED AS CURRENT VERSION OF EXCEL HAVE CAUSED TO MANY ISSUES Thank you all for your interest! ————————————————————————————————————- Two weeks ago I wrote a blog post about What Lead Information you should keep track of.  In that post I broke down the minimum data points that you would benefit from keeping track of over the course of a leads life.  What I didn’t go over is how to keep track of your mailing campaigns. When I …

How to Organize Your Wholesaler Leads

Scott Costello All, Blog, Featured 4 Comments

There are a few HAVE TO HAVES when it comes to being a real estate wholesaler as far as I’m concerned.  Relationships, Systems and Leads.  Everything else comes a distant second. They all work together as well to create a successful business. Having leads is must, but what is also very important is your ability to keep those leads organized. What leads do you need to mail to this month? Looking up a lead when they call Making sure you …

Rant: Who Has Time to Organize

Scott Costello All, Blog, Rants 5 Comments

New Monthly Rant Series:  I figured it would be insightful to share some of what bothers me about trying to run a side business.  It’s not all successes and happy faces.  It truly is a roller coaster ride and I think sharing that with my readers is going to cathartic.  It seems every month I hit a point where I say “Do i want to do this anymore?”   Thankfully I am pretty good at over coming those feelings.  Lucky or unlucky …

SI Lead Manager v7 is HERE!

Scott Costello All, Blog, Featured, SI Lead Manager - v7 Leave a Comment

I am happy to announce that the latest version of SI Lead Manager has been released…v7!  This latest update to SI Lead Manager is the biggest update yet.  The entire software has been recreated from the ground up in order to take it to the next level. I’ve listened to the suggestions and have put all my efforts into making this one of the most user friendly lead management applications out there. There are 3 main areas that I wanted to …

Reader Questions From Brian

Scott Costello All, Blog 2 Comments

Over the past 6 months or so I’ve been getting some great questions from people who read my blog.  I love answering questions about real estate investing and lead generating websites.  If you have any questions feel free to post a comment below or send me an email. Recently I got an email from Brian.  He had downloaded my Lead Manager software a couple years ago and most recently heard my appearance on the BiggerPockets Podcast.  Brian had some questions …

BiggerPockets has Invited me Into Their Home for Christmas

Scott Costello All, Blog, SI Lead Manager - v7 5 Comments

I’m very excited about 2015 and all the potential that it holds.  While 2014 saw my wholesaling business change dramatically I was able to pivot and keep it going.  I did not achieve all my 2014 goals (like releasing SILMv7) but I was very close! The relationship I’ve built with Brandon Turnor (of biggerPockets loar) has lead me to a couple opportunities that should really put me out there.  I’m a in introvert by nature so I don’t like directing …

5 Creative Ways to Find Motivated Sellers

Scott Costello All, Blog 6 Comments

Today’s post is going to be a little different.  I was lucky enough to have Brandon Turner, from BiggerPockets.com, write a guest post.  Not only does he regularly write incredible content over on the BP Blog, but he hosts the BiggerPockets Podcast along with Founder Joshua Dorkin.  Needless to say it’s an honor to have him author a blog post for Struggling Investor. He chose to write about a topic that I get asked about all the time…What are some …