How to Find Motivated Sellers Easily
Every successful real estate investor knows that you make your money when you BUY the house. If you can get the right price on a house you can flip or sell it and make money. But if you pay too much, you’ll either lose your shirt or simply have to cancel the contract.
The way you get the “right price” is dealing with the “right seller.” And in this business, the right seller is a “motivated seller.” They’re the lifeblood of your business.
There are many reasons a seller may be motivated to sell their property at a discount. But this guide will give you several ways to simply FIND MOTIVATED SELLERS.
Here are some of the best traditional methods for finding leads and getting your name out there.
(Keep reading if you want a shortcut to a more advanced and easy method of finding them)
Cold calling
This approach requires dogged persistence, and a high and healthy self-esteem, which should be enough to handle frequent rejection. It also requires time – to find motivated sellers, create lists, gather information, make phone calls and follow up with any leads.
Direct mail
Direct mail is a helpful, but labor-intensive way to get the message out. It requires a bit of creativity, someone who is marketing savvy, and a quite some amount of legwork. That’s because the most effective way of using this tactic is not blanketing entire neighborhoods with mailings, but predetermining potential motivated seller leads and targeting them. This requires research, which takes time and effort.
Canvassing neighborhoods
It doesn’t get more old school than driving around neighborhoods in search of properties that seem promising; boarded up windows, overrun gardens, and obvious vacancy are all good signs. This obviously takes a good deal of time and is a pretty hit-or-miss tactic. To do it effectively, it’s helpful to have a good working knowledge of the area, the area comps, and the ability to quickly size up a property’s potential. That way, when you contact the owner, you know what you are dealing with beforehand.
Placing ads
Placing ads is relatively simple, but it does require some planning and forethought. You have to come up with the right message – one that will attract the attention of sellers, convince them that you’re the real deal, and encourage them to contact you – all in a limited amount of text. Then you need to determine which advertising venues are most likely to get you a return for your efforts. There is no point in wasting resources on long shots.
Strategic signage
Placing the right sign in the right spot can pay off in a big way. Signs work best when placed in spots that can be easily seen by people, such as bus stops, red lights and stop signs. Of course, you have to create the signs, do the research to find out where they can and can’t be placed and get the manpower to help you place them.
Chasing leads
This is an integral part of any old-school method of finding motivated sellers. Once you’ve put all of your feelers out, you have to keep track of each and every lead, chase it down, and see what comes of it. You may have to head down a lot of dead ends before you get one good lead, but that one good lead can pay big – big enough to all be worth it.
Ultimately, people still use old school methods because in spite of the fact that they take a great deal of time, energy and research they do work. Savvy real estate investors, however, use systems when they want to take their game to the next level.
All of these methods work (if you pursue them)… But is there a faster, easier, more effective method to find motivated sellers?
Yes…(keep reading)
As one of the nation’s leading real estate wholesalers, my family and I flip approximately 600 houses per year.
We’ve done each of these methods (at least we used to) until we systematized it and found a better way.
We even documented our entire process and allow you and other investors to peek behind the curtain and how we started and scaled a very high volume real estate wholesaling business by dealing with only the MOST motivated sellers.
