Guerrilla Move to Find Qualified Contractors
The purpose of this blog is to share the lessons I’ve learned in the trenches—fixing and flipping houses, building houses and landlording.
My goal is to provide an additional form of value to our hard money borrowers–small business owners that do these kinds of real estate deals.
In my last entry entitled Life's Too Short for Thin Deals, I alluded to hiring a new contractor back in 2015 for a job. At the time I had a go to GC but wanted a back up. Ok, real talk here, I hired the wrong way for this job. I placed an ad on Craigslist, met a bunch of contractors at the house, collected bids and hired one.
Here’s the good news for you. You don’t have to make the same mistake as me. There are three ironclad ways to hire contractors. Today, I’m going to talk about the first.
Trigger Alert: this approach as it’s a bit sharky.
Identify a few active competitors whom you respect
Determine one house you know they previously bought
Look up how their title vested on that house
Have a title rep/service pull a list of addresses of their recent purchases
Visit the houses
Meet new highly qualified contractors
The beauty of this approach is you know that these contractors are familiar with working with investors. They get that investor pricing has to work differently than the white glove service some contractors bring to owner occupants.