My top 2 questions used to be:

1. 1. How do you find motivated sellers?
   2. How do you get started with no money or credit?

Now… my single biggest question - hands down - is “How do I find buyers?” Whether you’re looking for wholesale buyers for your quick flips or you’re looking for retail buyers (or renters) for your existing properties.

My partner, Brandon, is working on a comprehensive book with all the tactics and strategies we use to find buyers (we were actually out today with 2: one for a million dollar property and another for a $300,000 property) And they were “end” buyers.

So, how do you go about finding these people? We do all sorts of things like: Craigslist (see November’s Real Estate Rant for specifics on Craigslist), Bandit signs, MLS, open houses, etc. However, there is one tactic that very few people know about, let alone talk about. And that is individual property websites.

Sure, there are lots of places you can get a “property” website put up for you, but the sole purpose of this website is to sell a particular property. You are not a Realtor trying to appease a seller. You are an investor that wants to move a piece of property. So, it is essential that you have a very clear way - and reason - for people to contact you. So, let’s talk about how to do that…

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by Reggie Brooks

Listen in as Heather Seitz interviews Reggie Brooks

When I began my career as a real estate investor in 1985, I stumbled across a little known area of real estate that had the potential to make us a ton of money. This was an area of the market that went unnoticed by most people. This was the area of abandoned properties.

How To Profit From Abandoned Properties

You might pass these properties on a daily basis, but just never paid much attention to them. You could be passing up hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits! These are properties that the owner has walked away from for whatever reason. It could be a divorce situation, an illness, a death in the family, a job relocation, or any number of other reasons. Do we care why? Absolutely not! Don’t waste your energy trying to figure out why sellers do what sellers do. (more…)

There are essentially 5 steps to being successful in real estate marketing. Before we go into the 5 steps of real estate marketing, I want to encourage you to become a student of marketing. The moment that you are able to find your own deals - on demand - the more money you will make! It’s a direct correlation. When I started out in real estate, I didn’t understand how to “really” market for deals. I was depending upon real estate agents, local real estate investing groups, etc. I did a lot of deals, but I realized I wasn’t making the kind of money I knew I could in estate.

Follow these five steps to successful real estate marketing and you’ll be on your way to filling your own funnel full of five-figure deals.

1. Define Your Target Market:
   You must be focused… If you run in too many directions, focusing on too many real estate markets, you’ll always be skipping around, never getting ahead. You need to learn overcome objections; you need to know how to handle the different situations that arise. Once you master one market, then you can duplicate your system across market after market. For instance, you may choose to start working with foreclosures or out of state owners. Once you get the real estate marketing system in place for one, add the other. Then, you can simply duplicate it over and over again!

   The single most important thing to remember is that you MUST target motivated sellers…. PERIOD.

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by Vena Jones-Cox

http://www.realestatetrainingacademy.com

This one of those questions that must be answered by another question, to wit: what’s a good deal? And this is not a facetious question, because the answer depends on:

1) Your exit strategy.
2) Your financial resources.
3) Your skills.
4) Your goals.
5) The risk and hassle involved in a particular property.

So let’s say this: I’ll let you in on my favorite ways to find good deals—after I explain why they’re good deals to me.

First, let’s talk about exit strategy. If I put a property under contract, one of two things is going to happen to it. If it’s in very poor shape or out of my “farm”, I’ll wholesale it to another investor for a quick cash profit. If this is the case, a “good deal” is a 1-3 unit building that I can get under contract for about 60% of its “as is” value. The other thing I might do is to close it and lease/option it for a year or two. In this case, my (more…)

Everyone is looking for a foreclosure “deal” these days – and there’s lots to choose from these days, but be careful… just because a property is in foreclosure, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a “deal”. In fact, nowadays, it takes more time to sift through the leads to find the really good opportunities within the foreclosure market.

The more potential foreclosure properties you have to sift through, the higher your chances are for finding a deal.

The top 5 ways to finding foreclosures are:

1. Bandit Signs
   Bandit signs are plain white or yellow corrugated signs with metal stands that stick into the ground. You can find preprinted signs or you can buy plain signs and handwrite your message on the signs. Place them on corners of busy intersections or in neighborhoods in which you want to purchase a foreclosure home.

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Recently, Brandon and I were elected to chair the marketing committee at Keller Williams. The company model doesn’t include a marketing “budget” for the office. Marketing is the sole responsibility of the agents within the office to orchestrate and execute.

Despite that, agents all agree when they sign on to have $50 taken out of every closing to pay for office marketing. A decent model when listings are selling. However… when the market comes to a screeching halt and sales dip, the marketing budget dips too! We were running an ad that cost nearly $5000/month largely paid for by individual agents that wanted their listings showcased in color in the Sunday classified section once/month.So… here’s what happened! We got “elected” to the committee at the end of January. The first meeting we were able to pull together was the first week of March. In the interim, prior to having our first meeting and even recruiting our committee, we immediately slashed the ad! The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results! This is absolutely true when it comes to marketing! (more…)