In almost every real estate investing seminar I’ve ever attended, a lot of time has been invested in teaching real estate investors and potential real estate investor on how to find good deals. Because deal-finding is so crucial to ones investing success and longevity in the real estate investing business, I recently decided to chat with a real estate investment friend and look back and see which methods have generated the most deals and the best deals for him.. In reviewing the 200 properties he has bought or flipped over the last 5 years, I was surprised to find that many of the “traditional” sources of great deals haven’t worked for him, while some less obvious methods have been great lead generators. I’d like to share with you the results of my study.
The Multiple Listing Service. The MLS is essentially a catalog of all the properties listed for sale by brokers. Needless to say, some of them are good deals for investors, and some aren’t. Sometimes there is a great foreclosure in there, sometimes not. The trick is to ferret out which properties have motivated sellers without making offers on all of them. I’ve honed this skill through years of translating agent lingo like, “Handyman’s special” (looks bad, smells bad, has at least one major system that doesn’t function), “needs TLC” (ugly, but not smelly, and everything works). What you’re going to find is a lot of cost, markup and competition has set the price. As an investor, you really want to find ways around the ‘traditional real estate sales’ databases if at all possible.
Properties listed in the MLS are for sale. To anyone, including the real estate investor. This may seem pretty profound, but some of the other methods touted as great ways to find deals involve locating owners, then finding out if they want to sell. Properties in the MLS also have the advantage that all of the information about the property is pretty much laid out for you – a major time saver. For the average real estate investor, time really is money. And, with the sophisticated, computerized access available to your agent, it’s a matter of a few keystrokes to view all of the properties that are handyman’s specials, or bank-owned, or in estate, or priced under a certain dollar figure – whatever youd like to concentrate on. The disadvantage is that if you’re after foreclosures, you may not find the deals here.
Another reason that the MLS has worked so well is that generally the market for really ugly properties is where real estate investors may want to be, otherwise the deals for good real estate investing values just won’t be there. Coincidentally, these are the same properties that most agents prefer not to spend a lot of time with. In many cases, they’re downright cooperative – particularly when I’m offering all cash and a quick closing.
Direct mail to real estate agents? At one point, we did a mail out to 1,200 agent names from the Board of Realtors and generated a 3-part mailing to send to every agent in town. For the real estate investor, this might seem like a respectable idea, however there are drawbacks.
The theme of this campaign was this: if you, Mr. Agent, have a property listed that fits a specific real estate investment criteria, I’ll make an offer and you get to keep the entire commission. Out rolled a brilliant campaign -all posted first class, incidentally – and in numbered the telephone calls. All 9 of them. Thats correct. The workweek after the 1st letters got out, we got 9 calls. We had already produced offers on 3 of the houses; 2 were out of our price range; and two were overpriced listings soon to expire. Not a beneficial take for the average real estate investor seeking to realise a living with real estate investment .
The succeeding mailing gave even more answers – about 16 replys – all basically in the same classes. The final mail out, a postal card, encountered no notice at all. Basically, we consumed close to $1700 on a campaign that gave nothing for our real estate investing concern.
I still guess that this idea has some merit, but if performed again, we would make some substatial shifts. Initially, we’ll target only the 350 or so brokers who name the kinds of real estate investment properties we would purchase. Then, we would do a better job of composing the marketing collateral, underlining how the broker and his seller could gain from doing work with our real estate investment business. Finally, we would make the campaign a continuous one throughout the next twelve months, trying out dissimilar letters for reception and sending the best to the same real estate agents over and over. And lastly, to personalise the campaign by following up with a telephone call to the 30 or so preferred candidates. Target marketing our real esatate investing marketing attempts.
Ads in the Yellow Pages. For half dozen years, we have featured an ad in the “real estate” section of the Yellow Pages. Each calendar year, the ad has possessed some variation of the phrasing, “We purchase homes – all cash. This advertising only yields 3-4 calls a calendar month, but for some grounds the caliber of the telephone calls is better than those that are produced by whatever other means we have ever practiced. The sellers incline to be incited, cooperative, and bear unlisted houses. All of these items are precisely what the real estate investor is wanting in investment properties.
What is great is that you get to look at with these ads once a calendar year, then leave em. While they usually are pricy – 1000s per 12 month time period – the telephone company will regularly charge you every month for the price. In addition, as one of the very few ads in the telephone directory that promises to buy investment properties, You have not got alot of competition. This works out, but getting connected with people that own the houses in hand: banks, any mortgage company that possesses (and does not want) foreclosures, key real estate agents, any one that recognises the market and recognises you embody the real esate investor that understands the marketplace. Both cases, you succeed. Yellow pages, you pay for the leads, the word of mouth, time is payment for the great real estate investing leads.
Advertised FSBOs? Properties For Sale By Owner,
a.k.a. FSBOs, are a preferent means for a number of real estate investors. For us, on the other hand, have never bought a holding from an owner who promoted his property for sale rather than ringing me. Sounds like a deal for the budding Real Esatate Investor who purchases homes for a living right?
We have found various issues with straining to purchase FSBOs. The 1st is that many are not actually for sale. Some FSBOs are just “trying out the market to ascertain what variety of offers he’ll acquire. Other FSBO sellers are very moved to sell, but do not list because they need to keep all of the money from the sale. They do not wish to pay a commission – but they do not desire to receive a lower price, either. And sometimes a seller opts to try to sell their holding by themselves because they owe too much to bear a 5%-7% commission, even if he sells it at full price. For the real estate investor, obviously there is no economic value here.
If you are purchasing expensive properties creatively, these sellers are ripe for the variety of answer you propose. A majority of real estate investors schemes is to buy ugly real estate cheaply and for immediate payment, and you just do not witness this type of deal in advertized FSBOs.
fFiers to Targeted Neighborhoods: Last calendar year, we delivered 14,000 double-sided “We buy real estate” circulars published. We employed an individual to set this flyer in the threshold of every single, two, or multi family residence they saw in the prospective region. Every three calendar weeks or so, 5,000 approximately of these flyers were delivered, and the reply from qualified sellers was first-class. For a price of less than $500, we gained 3 deals that clearred over $8,000. For a new region for the experienced real estate investor or just examining a dissimilar way to ‘farm’ the real estate investment outlooks in a given area, this is very good and popular way to find out if there are any sound real estate investment deals to capture.
Billboards in the same neighborhood? Here is a object lesson in messing up a beneficial thing: hot on the heels of our massively successful circular campaign, I settled to spring for 4 large billboards in the same vicinity. The trouble was that my marketing budget is only so large, and purchasing the billboards signified stopping the fliers. Still, I envisioned that the billboards would get more attention anyway, so I handed over the $1,800 and acquired…
No response.. Nothing……
The Point? Keep with What does work. This is the number one rule of obtaining good real estate investment properties.
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Employing only one lead source at a time. In my experience, it is best to use at least a few dissimilar techniques of lining up deals at the same time: preferably 2 youve practiced before with some results, plus 1 that you are screening. Which takes us to:
Not understanding which of your deal-finding techniques are producing, and which are not. If you are going to expend money on fliers or ads or phone pole signs or whatever, it is very significant that you give attention to which methods are getting good leads, and which are not.. For any real estate investing occupation, and business in general, one needs to monitor and try out the outcomes of a marketing campaign. If you are not tracking your lead sources to expose which are producing leads and which you should give up, youre wasting away time and money that could be set to use giving you deals.
