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.

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.