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.

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

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.