Virtual Wholesaling Is A Reality

Here at Skip Genie we talk to virtual wholesalers quite often. Some of our clients live as far away as Canada and make a comfortable living by virtual wholesaling properties in the United States, but when a lot of people first hear about virtual wholesaling they don’t believe it’s possible. In fact, some people we know who have become successful at virtual wholesaling initially thought it was a boatload of crap when they first heard about it! After all, how can you wholesale houses that you can’t visit…? Make JV’s to make virtual wholesaling possible An essential component to virtual wholesaling is making good JV’s in the markets you get properties under contract. Your JV’s can go on appointments, walk the properties, and If the homeowner wants to meet, you can send your JV to their property on your behalf. Expect and accept commission splits True, having JV’s means that you’ll be splitting your profits with them, but there is plenty of money to go around when you learn how to virtual wholesale properties that are thousands of miles away from you. You’ll also be able to get more targeted leads because there will be more properties that meet your criteria (deceased, vacant, high equity properties for example) when your able to do business internationally. Simple metrics for virtual wholesaling If you’re interested in virtual wholesaling, following the metrics below will help you close deals: Find a certain amount of properties Make a certain amount of phone calls Talk to a certain number of people Generate a certain number of leads Get a certain number of properties under contract Rinse and repeat. It’s important for you keep at it everyday, and that you allow yourself to make mistakes. You WILL make mistakes while you’re learning how to virtual wholesale, but each mistake is what tutors you in how to become a successful virtual wholesaler. Weekly coaching calls As mentioned earlier, we have clients who are successful at virtual wholesaling, and sometimes they get on our weekly coaching calls and tell their success stories of how they used our Skip Tracing services to help them close deals doing virtual wholesaling. Their stories are full of gold nuggets, as they talk about solving title issues and overcoming common objections that they faced along the way to closing the deal. If you’re interested in accurate data that connects you with home sellers and good real estate coaching that covers a wide range of real estate investing topics, sign-up here for one of our plans. During these coaching calls you can ask questions, listen to success stories, and who knows…you just might learn a few tricks about Virtual Wholesaling.

Powerful Tip On Following Up With Elusive Home sellers

What do you do if a home seller ignores your direct mail and won’t answer the phone when you call? Better yet…let’s say you knock on the door and they still won’t answer you, but you’re almost sure they are living at the property… If you’ve done everything you can do to contact home seller and they haven’t responded, make sure you send them a contract. A lot of your competitors are mailing the same properties that you’re mailing, but not all of them will take the extra step of sending the home seller a contract after they’ve mailed and called. If the property you are trying to acquire is a really sweet deal and you still don’t get a response after you send the home seller a contract, then send them another contract as a follow up. We have gotten deals when the home seller ignored all of our marketing materials, phone calls, and they pretended not to be at the property when we dropped by to talk to them about making an offer, BUT they didn’t ignore the contract we sent them and that is what led to us getting the deal! So, if you did your due diligence and rei skip trace the homeowner and still were unable to contact them, make sure you follow up by sending contracts. In our competitive market every little extra bit of work you do can go a long way. Taking the extra step of sending the homeowner a contract can make the difference between getting a good deal and not getting a good deal.

Introduction to Texting Homeowners

More and more often we are getting responses from leads that we’ve already called several times after we text them. If they don’t answer our voicemail, or if we get a phone number with a full mailbox, then we follow up with a text message. A lot of our leads who didn’t reply to our phone calls are answering our text messages. This has been happening so much that we have decided in the future to officially measure what the number is of people who reply to our text messages. Why do people answer texts and not phone calls? The main reasons why people don’t answer your phone calls is because they don’t recognize your phone number. It’s pretty common for people to send calls to their voicemail when they don’t recognize the number calling them. Another reason why a person would respond to a text message and not a phone call would be if their voicemail box was full or not set up when we called. When you send a text message that clearly conveys your interest in a property the homeowner owns, the homeowner knows why you’re trying to contact them, and it’s easy for them to get back to you to let you know if they’re interested in selling or not. People not answering your phone calls is just a part of rei skip tracing.   What about text blasting?   Sending text blasts enables you to send text messages to multiple leads at once. It’s important for whatever software or app you use to send text blasts to have a mail merge feature. This way each one of your text messages will look unique and not spammy. A mail merge feature will make each person’s name and address unique in each text you send. Can you recommend any text blasting services?   Sure, two text blasting services we’d recommend are below:   Text Magic TXTimact Is text messaging legal?   While we cannot and do not offer legal advice, we can say that as long as a text message we send isn’t spammy that we are comfortable sending it. If you start sending leads text messages, make sure you check the TCPA to make sure you aren’t breaking any rules in your area.   Text messaging is a topic that often comes up during our weekly coaching calls. If you’re interested in learning how to integrate text messaging into your cold calling system, click here to view our plans and pricing. After you sign up, you’ll be automatically added to our list of clients who can participate in our weekly coaching calls, and you can learn more about the success some of our clients are having with sending text messages and the technology that they are using to send them.

What Job Qualifications Should A Good Cold Caller Have?

As real estate investors use cold calling to scale their business, there inevitably comes a time when it isn’t practical for them to make cold calls anymore. This means that it’s time to hire one or more cold callers so that you can better spend your time. The position of a cold caller is an important job that you want to fill with the right person. You want to hire callers who enjoy talking on the phone and who have other important job qualifications. This article answers some common questions we get about what makes a good cold caller and discusses some important qualifications they should have to be a good fit for the job.   How do they sound all the phone?   It’s really important how your callers sound over the telephone. You want callers who sound like someone you would want to talk to. How your caller sounds over the telephone is one of the most important job qualifications, so pay close attention to their voice tonality, how they speak, and the rhythm of their dialogue during your conversation with them.   Are they personable and friendly?   It’s really important that your callers have good mannerism and that they are polite while they are talking on the phone. This will help you decrease the amount of people who get angry when you cold call them and it will maximize the leverage you get from each contact you make. So, make sure that the person you’re considering hiring as a cold caller is both personable and friendly while you are interviewing them. If they aren’t personable and friendly towards you, then they probably won’t be personable and friendly towards the people they talk to when they’re making calls for you.   Would they cause someone to let their guard down?   A bonus quality to a good caller is their capacity to cause other people to let their guards down. Sometimes the leads you call will be guarded for various reasons. They will have their guard up to know why you called, how you got their number, and what the purpose of your call is. Sometimes the leads you call will have their guard up because they are embarrassed that they are losing their home. They are understandably guarded because their house may be going up for auction soon, so it’s important that your callers are able to put potential sellers at ease. You want the seller to cooperate with your caller, so it’s important for your caller to operate within the context that your company is trying to help them solve a problem. If the seller won’t put their guard down and acknowledge that there is a problem, your company cannot effectively offer them any solutions.   Do they need to have cold calling experience?   It’s nice when they have experience with making cold calls, but for us experience is not a necessity. Instead, we place more importance on the job qualifications discussed above. How much time should your cold callers spend making cold calls?   The time range will usually vary between 2 to 4 hours a day, but if you have the lead volume it’s fine if your callers make cold calls for full 8 hour shifts.   Are they good at autodialers?   If you’re using auto-dialers, finding a caller who is familiar with the type of autodialer your company uses is a bonus to consider when you’re hiring. However, if you find the right caller who sounds good over the phone and they aren’t familiar with your autodialer, you can always train them on how to use it. In other words, it shouldn’t be a deal breaker if they don’t know how to use autodialers.     Do you hire a professional company for cold callers?   It depends. If you decide to hire a company to make calls for you, make sure that you find out if they call both landlines and mobile phone numbers (some call centers that use power-dialers don’t call mobile phone numbers due to compliance issues). If they don’t call mobile phone numbers, this could make a major difference in your hit rate. Our experience has shown us that callers who we hire as a part of our team perform better than call centers. We did an experiment once by sending the exact same list to both a call center and a caller who works for our company. They called the same list, but our caller produced more leads.   Commission only callers vs Hourly wage callers   If you hire callers that you only pay commission to, make sure that a commission only pay scale is a realistic and fair model for them. If they don’t get paid enough, then their performance is likely to suffer and there will be a high turnover rate. You will consistently need to hire and train new callers to replace the old callers who have quit if a commission only pay scale is unrealistic. Paying your callers hourly and offering them commission is another option. An hourly wage provides security for them so that they will be inclined to stay longer, and the possibility of commissions ensures that they will put extra effort into their work.   Where do you find good cold callers?   We find our cold callers by posting jobs on Indeed.com and then we vet all the candidates.   What if I don’t want to hire a cold caller?   Knowing what job qualifications a good cold caller needs is imperative if you want to consistently generate business from making cold calls. Some investors don’t hire cold callers and make the cold calls themselves, but it’s important for them to evaluate themselves to determine if they have the qualifications to be good at making cold calls. If they’re making the cold calls without possessing the job qualifications and they don’t sound good over the phone, their business will suffer because they’re doing a job

What If The Homeowner or Heir Is Incarcerated?

Every once in awhile you’ll come across a property where the owner (or heir) is doing time in prison. You can still buy the property, but there are a few extra hoops you’ll need to jump through in order to get the deal done.   Find out where they are incarcerated   The first thing you’ll need to do is find out what prison the owner or property heir is doing time at. You can find out what prison they are at by looking at your state’s department of correction criminal justice website. On this website you’ll be able to get their DOC (department of corrections) number along with the address of that prison.   Contact them and make an offer   You won’t be able to initially drive down to the prison to visit them because in order to visit an inmate or correspond with them on the phone you need to get put on their visitation and or phone call list.   You will need to either send them a letter or an email through JPAY (click here to learn about JPAY) that has your contact information, so they can reply to you, telling them you are interested in a house they own. Make them an offer on their property, and make it clear  that you can put some money on their books if they agree to sell.   Follow-up with them   You may need to have several conversations with them so that you can explain all of the details that will be involved with buying their property, so be prepared to either talk to them over the phone or visit them in prison. If you decide to talk to them over the phone, then you will need to accept their collect calls when they call you. Whether you visit them in prison or talk to them over the phone, you can overcome any objections or concerns they may have about selling and get them to accept your offer. After they verbally accept your offer, the next thing you will need to do is send them a contract in the mail which they can sign and send back to you. These are some general guidelines to follow when you’re trying to buy a property from an incarcerated homeowner.   Learn more through our coaching calls   Acquiring a property from someone who is in prison is uncharted territory for many investors we speak with during our weekly coaching calls.  If you’re interested in learning more about how to cash in on properties that are owned by people who are incarcerated, you can find out more during our weekly coaching calls by becoming a client and using us as your data provider. Click here to view or plans and pricing. We offer weekly coaching at no additional cost to all of our clients that enables you to ask questions, listen to success stories, and learn about the intricacies that are involved with closing complicated deals, such as when the homeowner of a property you want to buy is incarcerated.

Put Driving for Dollars on Steroids

Driving for dollars is an excellent way to make good money, especially if you maximize its potential by combining it with Dialing for Dollars. You see, way too many investors are sending mail to the exact same properties, and many of the high-margin deals you find while you’re driving for dollars are non-owner-occupied. Returned mail = Potential goldmine If you’re mailing properties that aren’t occupied, no one is living there to receive your mail! But did you know that the post office does you a BIG favor when they send you back returned mail pieces? Each piece of returned mail is a potential goldmine, because many of your competitors have given up trying to find the homeowner as soon as they receive a returned piece of mail indicating that the homeowner isn’t living there for whatever reason. Skip trace your returned mail If you have a good REI skip tracing provider, you should skip trace each one of your returned mail pieces so that you can get the homeowner on the phone and make an offer on the property. Fortunately, dialing for dollars isn’t always easy. For example, if the homeowner is deceased you can’t call them with any more success than you could if you mailed them. Run deeper reports on the deceased With Skip Genie, we have built into its data set what we call, “The deceased indicator”. The deceased indicator tells you if the person you’re trying to reach is deceased. If they are deceased, we have the perfect tool for you built into our software! We had a button created that enables you to run a relationship search on the deceased homeowner (or any homeowner). This report will immediately give you the phone numbers of the homeowners relative. Dialing for dollars literally means that you would call each phone number for each relative you need to call until you get ahold of someone who will get you in touch with the heirs or person controlling the property so that you can make an offer. No one likes making cold calls We know that a lot of people simply don’t like making phone calls. To be honest, we don’t like making phone calls either, but our mindset is that there is a LOT of money at the other end of that phone. So, we dial and we dial until we get that money. If you know the right distress indicators to look for, driving for dollars is a good way to find solid leads for your business, but it’s important to have a robust system in place to get in contact with the leads that you generated while driving for dollars. Leverage the competition Our business is more competitive than it used to be, as our market has become saturated with investors who are targeting the same properties with direct mail. This is why it’s important to put Driving for Dollars on steroids by combining it with Dialing for Dollars so that you can have an edge in today’s competitive market! Interested in learning the ins and outs of Dialing for Dollars? Sign-up to Skip Genie and you’ll have access to a weekly coaching call that gives you all the training you’ll need to start closing deals by Dialing for Dollars. We also pride ourselves in the accuracy of our data, and there are no contracts or compliance hassles when you do business with us! This means that you can start dialing for dollars in the next 5 minutes and start contacting the home-sellers your competitors have given up trying to find. Our plans and pricing are here Sign-up directly from our website and get started now!

$150,000 Assignment Fee

Skip Genie cofounder Larry Higgins found this lead and tried to get in contact with the owner of the property, but when he looked them up our skip tracing software had informed him that the property owner had died. After some more digging, he found out they owed like $30,000 in taxes. This was in the Houston area. The owner had died so Larry looked up her son and it turned out that her son had died also. He had no siblings, no wife, and no children. Her husband had died like 30 years prior. The next step Larry took was to hire a genealogist. He hired a genealogist because there were no close heirs to this property. He also paid the genealogist an extra fee (the average bill with her is is $100-$150 bucks) to put a rush on the research she was doing, so the genealogist gave him this lady’s name and phone number to call. He called her and left a voicemail. She called him right back, and he had to tell her that her cousin died a few years ago. He also informed her that under Texas law she owns a legal interest in her cousin’s deceased property in Texas. She was 1,500 to 2,000 miles away in the state of Alaska, and she had no idea how to take care of the heirship or the title issues. To make things more interesting, Larry found out this house had squatters in it. He wanted a clean deal and he wanted them out by the time of closing, so he gave them $1,500 to incentivize them and get them out. He also ended up giving all the heirs $3,000 (to them it was like free money falling out of the sky). Then, he double closed on it (he didn’t necessarily want his buyers to see what he was making off it). This sweet deal was a $150,000 deal. Larry was right under 150,000 all in, and he sold it for $200,000! You may not find a deal like this every month or every few weeks, but these deals are out there and if you know how to look for them you’re eventually gonna find some of them. If you don’t give up and all the signs are there (like in this case there was a huge tax problem and no close relatives), dig a little deeper and it’s going to be risk reward at some point. Interested in finding out more about how to use REI Skip Tracing to close deals with juicy assignment fees? Join Skip Genie now and take advantage of our weekly coaching call with Larry Higgins that comes with your membership. You can ask any question you want and get the guidance you need to close high margin deals your competitors don’t know how to touch.

Skip Tracing – 3 Common Mistakes People Make

Skip tracing can be a lucrative and very low cost marketing medium, but if you don’t know what you’re doing it’s inevitable that you’ll make some mistakes. There isn’t necessarily a steep learning curve to skip tracing, but there is a learning curve. Here at Skip Genie, we’ve been skip tracing for a long time. We’ve done a lot of skip tracing and had to go through a lot of trial and error before we found out what really works. This article discusses the 3 most common mistakes people make while Skip Tracing: Mistake #1 – Using cheap data providers I don’t know if “cheap” is really the right word…. but we tried using data providers that offered an unlimited amount of searches for a nominal monthly fee. They didn’t give us good results. We got exactly what we paid for. Actually, using a poor data provider can do more harm than it does good. There are few things as frustrating when your skip tracing as thinking you’ve got a good phone number for a homeowner only to later find out you’ve been persistently trying to call a homeowner who has deceased! Having good data as a starting point is essential, especially when you consider the nature of vacant properties and returned mail. Mistake #2 – Giving up too soon Let’s face it: It isn’t always easy getting ahold of someone. Even if you have a good number for them, they still may not answer the phone. Or, you may get a message that their mailbox is full… or on other occasions the phone rings and rings and no one ever answers so that you’re not sure if you’ve got a good number for them or not. It happens….. A lot of people give up when they actually need to try harder and dig deeper. We highly recommend that if for whatever reason you are unable to get in touch with the homeowner that you run a full relationship report on them so that you can also call the homeowners relatives until somebody gets you in touch with who is in control of that property so you can make an offer. Mistake #3 – Not prioritizing their list One of the best things about being able to do skip tracing in bulk is that you can use your search results to prioritize your list so that your time is spent going after the highest margin deals with the most distressed property indicators. Skip Genie has a data set built by investors for investors, so with our data it is easy for you to prioritize the lists you’re calling based upon: deceased homeowners, out-of-state mailing addresses, the age of your subjects, and financial distress indicators. Prioritizing your list is one of the most important things you need to learn how to do in order to get the most value from it. List prioritization is so important that we take the time to help our clients prioritize their lists and go over the data set to help them filter their list based upon the property distress indicators our software provides. Interested in shortening the learning curve that comes with skip tracing? Sign-up to one of our plans and as a special thanks we’ll give you access to our weekly coaching call with Larry Higgins so that you can ask questions and benefit from our experience.

Dealing With Squatters – This Squatter Improved The Property

We had found a property with about $40,000 worth of tax issues that was worth $90,000 to $100,000. At some point it was a deceased vacant property. We contacted the homeowner, and they were going to just deed the property over to us. Her and her brother had grown up in the home, and they had rented the property out for awhile but they couldn’t afford the taxes. We were glad they were willing to just  deed the property over , but we told them we would give them something.  We needed to walk the property so we pulled up to the house and surprisingly the yard was well kept. The door was locked so we went to the garage door and knocked and this guy who was in his 20’s answered and asked if he could help us. We knew he was a squatter, but we didn’t call him out on it. Instead, we told him that we were going to buy that property. We knew we showed up completely out of the blue, so we didn’t ask him to leave right away. We just told him, “Look we’re buying this house and we need to get in here in the next couple of days”. He told us that wouldn’t be a problem, so the next thing we did was ask if we could walk the property. He cooperated and went with us into the backyard, where there was a pink playground. It turned out this guy was living at the property with his wife and 5 year old daughter. At this point we really wanted to help them. We weren’t going to kick them out of the property with a 5 year old daughter living there, so we tried to owner finance the home to them but they couldn’t afford the payments. So, we paid a deposit for them to move to an apartment. The homeowner had initially gotten angry when we told them that a squatter was living in her house, but the squatter actually improved the property. He had painted the house and done other improvements to it that made the home even more marketable. We gave each of the heirs about $250 to $500 a piece and the taxes were paid at closing. We made about $15,000 dollars on this deal, and the squatters were cooperative with us the whole time. A key takeaway from this deal is that all we needed to do was skip trace the homeowner and get them on the phone… they were willing to just deed the property over to us. It was that easy, but there were still a few obstacles involved with moving the property. In this case it was squatters and the discomfort we had with just kicking them out of the property when they didn’t have anywhere else to go. If we had to do that, then we wouldn’t have taken the deal, so we were glad to have helped them get into a new apartment by paying their deposit. Every property you’ll ever acquire will have its own story, and many of these stories will involve people who need help. If you make it a goal to be in the helping business as much as you’re in the business of buying houses for cash, it will do great things for both your business and the people you help along the way. Our weekly coaching calls are peppered with stories about how specific deals were closed with their own unique set of obstacles. You can learn a lot from other investor’s stories that you couldn’t learn from conventional coaching programs. If you’re interested in skip tracing for deals and learning about how to get unstuck from stopping points that often get in the way of your assignment fees, click here to see our plans and pricing.