Phone Game & Real Estate Investing

When you’re trying to make good money as an investor part of your success hinges on how well you communicate with the home seller. Communicating effectively with the home seller includes a lot of basics that most of you are already familiar with, such as building rapport. You need to get the home seller to want to sell their house to you instead of anyone else who is trying to buy it. This is why having good phone game is so important for real estate investors. Through a simple phone call that is laced with some good game, you can make yourself stand out from the competition while you educate the owners of  distressed properties what their options are and what will happen if they don’t take any action. Use phone game to overcomes objections   In our business, good game over the phone includes the ability to overcome objections. Through a phone call you can overcome objections that other marketing mediums such as direct mail can’t even begin to address. For example, a lot of owners of distressed properties believe that they aren’t able to sell the property because the bank owns it. They think that the property went into foreclosure so that they no longer own the property. When you have good phone game you are already prepared for such an objection and how to overcome it during your phone conversation.   Another common objection that you can overcome through a phone call is when the heirs of the property don’t know (or they don’t believe) that they have any interest in the property you are trying to buy. You need to be prepared to overcome these types of  objections. Knowing what the common objections are over the phone and how to overcome them while you’re on the phone is imperative to having good phone game. Use the phone to put skeptics at ease   It’s really important to know how to add credibility to yourself as a reliable home buyer who can get the job done. Phone callers with good phone game are prepared to demonstrate their credibility to any skeptics they may be talking to.. For example, while you’re on the phone with a skeptic you can direct them to your website or you can tell them you’re approved by the Better Business Bureau. The key is that you are prepared to nullify any skepticism you face during any phone call.     Good phone game isn’t just about what you do or say over the phone. It also involves what you don’t do or say over the phone. Below are some examples of bad phone game that you can integrate with rei skip tracing: Don’t tell the homeowner you’re an investor   It’s poor phone game when you risk referring to yourself in a way that the home-seller finds offensive. It may not be a turn off to every homeowner, but we’ve had plenty of experiences of losing potential deals because one of our callers would tell the homeowners that we were investors. As soon as they heard that  we were investors, they would say something like, “Oh, your investors? I don’t deal with investors”. Click….   We also usually don’t tell people that we’re cash buyers. Instead, we tell the homeowners that we buy houses in their area. By using the right terminology on the phone you will differentiate yourself from the shady people in the real estate business who lowball homeowners and aren’t able to close many of the properties they get under contract.   Don’t ignore the homeowners pain points   Part of your job as an investor is to solve the problems other people have. Distressed properties are often a problem to the people who own them, and it’s bad phone game when the investor fails to demonstrate over the phone that they are actually trying to help the homeowner by buying their property. You can convey that you’re trying to help by making the owner aware of the pain points associated with the property they own.   If you’re talking to a homeowner who lives in another state from the property you’re trying to buy and the property has tax issues, make the seller’s pain clear: Let them know that If they don’t do something with the property it will continue to accumulate taxes and become more and more of a financial burden.   If you’re talking to someone who owns a distressed property and they want retail (or close to retail) for the property, make it clear to them what their options are and how painful and expensive it will be for them to repair the property so that they can list it at retail value. Let them know how much time that whole process can take and that as time continues the distressed property will become more of a financial burden.   If it will cost the home-seller more money to repair a property and pay off any liens or taxes on it than it would for them to sell the property to you, then educate the home-seller of the pains that are associated with the distressed property they own. Educating the homeowner while you’re speaking with them over the phone is good phone game.   Don’t waste time calling the wrong leads   Some investors have great phone game in all areas but one: they spend too much time calling the wrong leads. You may have a list with thousands of leads on it that you want to skip trace so that your team can call the whole list, but some of the properties on your list are going to have more distress signals than others (not to mention more equity), so why not prioritize your list so that you can spend your time going after properties that are the most likely to become deals? If you’re spending a lot of  time calling the properties where the numbers won’t work even if you did get the

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!

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.