More Unique Strategies to Locate Motivated Sellers

I am always excited by the opportunity to share as many ideas as I can with regard to locating motivated sellers for your real estate investing business. After all, without the sellers, there are no deals. I also like having the opportunity to share ideas for both the beginner investor and the seasoned investor alike within a variety of budget constraints. One of my favorite techniques is using flyers to get the message out there that I buy houses.

Flyers are a great way to target and locate motivated sellers. They can be used to target specific neighborhoods and subdivisions where you want to buy houses. You can either hire a company to hang them door to door for you, or hire older children to hang these flyers for you.

Do follow up by driving by the area to make sure the work got done. When using a company to lay flyers for you, make sure you get references from satisfied customers first. There are some companies out there that will take you money and not get the work done, so you want to check their reputation before hiring them. Flyers are a wonderfully inexpensive way to locate sellers and this technique can be repeated either monthly or quarterly depending on your time and budget. When we used to lay flyers door to door ourselves, we would take one weekend morning to do this. My husband and I would each take one side of the street and lay flyers door to door. We would keep a chart of the neighborhoods we had done so we could track our results. You always want to be tracking where your leads are coming from so you know which of your marketing campaigns are working best. Interested potential sellers will hold on to these flyers until their situation changes and they are ready to sell, so laying flyers door to door becomes one of your long term marketing techniques.

Billboards are another way to attract motivated sellers. Just remember that they can be costly and they will only target one very specific part of your market. One way to make billboards less costly is to go in with another investor on them and split the cost. You can have the calls sent to an answering service that can split the calls between the two of you. This method definitely makes it more equitable to do billboards. Also ask your billboard company about remnant space. What this means is that for a lower cost, the billboard company will put your billboards wherever there is an empty billboard available. This can be a good way for you to get your message out to your market in an inexpensive way. The only problem with the remnant space method is that you don’t know where your billboards will be located. The good part is that you get a lot of exposure for a lot less money. We have actually used billboards and the billboard company placed billboards on remnant space for us at no charge simply to fill an empty bill board.

Once again, continue to track the leads coming from your billboards in order to find out if they are a good source of motivated sellers for you. With billboards you also want to keep in mind that you don’t want to get tied into a long-term contract unless you know they are going to work for you, so start small and add on new billboards as you go if you see that this method of advertising works well for you by creating good leads.

One of the best ways to get the message out that you buy houses is to simply tell everyone you know what you do for a living and that you pay referral fees. This is the cheapest way I know to find houses people have for sale. Make sure you let everyone you talk to know what it is you do. For example, your hairdresser, dry cleaner, pest control person, grocer, toll takers, pool cleaning person, lawn person, Fed Ex or DHL delivery person, attorney, accountant, neighbors, friends, relatives, co-workers, vendors or anyone else you know or talk to might be a good source of leads for you.

The way I deal with these folks is that we pay a referral fee if we get a deal from their lead. You could also pay them by the lead if you would like. This is another way to keep these people motivated to bring you even more leads. The last two houses we purchased were leads that came from our roofer and one of our handymen. So you never know where a lead might come from. I also picked up a new private lender by having a conversation about what we do with my nail tech. So many investors forget that there are lots of folks out there who know people who have houses for sale and money to lend you for your deals.

Another good way to find leads is to use a “for sale by owner” list service. Basically what these folks do is provide you with a list of all the “for sale by owner” properties in your area on a daily basis. They will e-mail this list to you. The way I use this lead source is to give the person who works for me a telephone script I use for pre-screening and then I have her call on all the for sale by owners leads once a week. Though I find that there usually aren’t as many leads to be gotten this way, it is still a good way to automate your system by getting someone else to find and pre-screen these leads for you, and there are definitely some deals to be made using these lists. It is also a very inexpensive lead source for you to use. This list is also a good way to keep track of how much properties are selling for in your area which gives you a good idea of comparables on properties you are looking to purchase.

Another really good technique that we implement to find leads is to work with a couple of realtors in our area to provide us with expired listings. These folks have a house to sell and generally they are very motivated sellers by the time the listing is expired. We find that these are great leads for us and we do a lot of deals from them. We have systems in place to recompense our realtor for providing these leads for us.

Always remember to implement between three and five different marketing strategies at all times since you will be targeting your market in a variety of ways. For more information on finding all the motivated sellers you need for your real estate investing business, and sources for “for sale by owner” list services, visit my web site at www.marketingmagiclady.com.