3 Proven Steps To Weed Out
Unmotivated Sellers
By Sean Flanagan
The author has permitted the reprinting and redistribution of this
article.
3 Proven Steps to Weed Out Unmotivated Sellers in 30 Seconds or Less
and Save Your Valuable Time
Most real estate investors have no idea what their time is truly worth.
One of the most common mistakes investors at all experience levels make
is wasting time with unmotivated sellers.
If you make an average profit of $20,000 per deal, how much is your
time worth The sooner you learn how to quickly get rid of unmotivated
sellers, i.e. time waster, the better off you will be. For simplicity
sake, let’s break Seller leads into 3 categories.
1) Slam Dunks
These are leads which have two important ingredients. First, the seller
is very motivated. Second, through your creative problem solving
strategies, you can help the seller and still make a profit.
2) Worth Following Up With
These are leads which don’t meet your buy criteria for one
reason or another, but could in the future. For example, if the seller
is only one month delinquent on his mortgage payment and has some
equity, but just isn’t very motivated yet. Even though the
seller doesn’t want to sell at a large enough discount to
make this deal attractive today, he very well may in a few weeks when
the mortgage company files for foreclosure.
3) No Deal
These are leads that just aren’t worth your time to follow up
with. For example, a seller with no equity and a week before the house
goes to auction. Instead of pursuing a short sale you decide this deal
is just not worth wasting time on.
If you want to be successful in this business you absolutely cannot
afford to not pursue the first two types of leads listed above. A
follow up system of some sort is necessary for you to succeed. I
typically follow up with sellers at crucial dates based on their
situation. For example, a couple of months ago I put a house under
contract that I had been following up on for 4 months. When the seller
first called me after seeing my Lucky Buys Yucky Houses®
infomercial on TV he was only 2 weeks behind on his mortgage payment.
He just liked the commercial and called to “test the
waters”.
After speaking with him I quickly realized that he was not motivated
enough yet to sell me the house at an attractive price. However, I knew
that there was a good chance he would be soon. So, I followed up with
him in 3 weeks and then again in about 6 weeks.
Finally he realized he was in a bad position and I negotiated a nice
deal. I helped the seller to avoid foreclosure and walked from the deal
with a $14, 397.00 pay check.
If I would have just walked away from that seller the first time we
spoke I would have never made a dime. However, I made a few phone calls
and ended up making almost $15,000.00.
Now revisit the question I asked earlier. How much is your time worth
if you can make these kind of profits from a few simple phone calls
This is why it is absolutely imperative that you have a system in place
to quickly eliminate time wasters i.e. no deals.
To determine what is a deal vs. what is not, I use a pretty simple
formula.
1) Determine the approximate value of the seller’s house
2) Find out what they owe
3) Ask the seller what kind of work needs to be done to bring this
house up to perfect market condition. Note this is an area where the
more you can probe the better, because sellers tend to get in a better
mind set to take a discount after thinking about the headaches of
making repairs to their house
4) Determine how much I can resell the house for if I were to purchase
it
From here it’s a pretty straight forward process. I simply
subtract the repairs to be made from the value of the house and then
subtract the amount to be paid to the seller. This leaves me with my
potential profit.
Granted, there is more that goes into the process if you are going to
end up turning the lead into a deal, but this simple formula saves me a
ton of time. I can at least get a very good feel for where the seller
is mentally and whether the lead is worth pursuing.
By getting the answers to these 3 questions I can usually get a real
good idea if I should stop wasting time with the lead or keep pursuing
it. If I feel the lead is a “slam dunk”, I sign it
up right away. If not, I investigate further and then either a) sign it
up or b) put it in my follow up file.
I believe in the KISS formula (Keep It Simple Stupid). With the system
I use to generate motivated seller leads, I simply get to many leads to
waste a bunch of time with unmotivated sellers. If I get 500 leads in a
month and I am busy driving around and talking to sellers who
aren’t motivated enough I will go broke. This is a lesson I
learned real quickly when I started using mass media to advertise. It
would behoove you to learn this lesson quickly as well. Your real
estate success depends on it!
Sean Flanagan went from dead broke, to a self made real estate
multimillionaire in under 2 years time. He now shares his secrets with
thousands of students across the country. httpwww.YuckyHouseSecrets.com
also Visit his Blog httpwww.yuckyhouseleads.comblog
If
you would like to take advantage of the market and learn how to invest
in real estate and you are local to the Dallas Fort Worth area, I know
a really great teacher and mentor here in Arlington Texas. Please take
a look at his web site: DennisJHenson.com,
Dennis has a great Mentoring and training program, I know because I am
one of his former students. I learned a lot from his one on one
teaching technique. - Michael Harman 817-457-7572
mchfun.business@gmail.com
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