How to Attract Sellers When Buying “Subject to”

[This article is Step One in the series “10 Steps to Subject to: Get Paid to Buy Pretty Houses in Nice Subdivisions.”]

It’s time to order your signs and flyers. It takes about two weeks to actually get your signs printed, delivered, and placed in the right locations. We use this simple ad:

We Buy Homes

xxx-xxxx

You see, we don’t want to educate our prospects with a sign. We just want to get them to call. So we don’t put an extensive message on the sign. The more information you put on your sign, the FEWER people will call. So make your message simple to get more calls.

Where should I put the signs?

Picture this: A prospect gets fed up with his boss. He seeks new employment and gets an offer from a new employer in a new city. He sees your sign as he pulls into his subdivision. That’s where you should put your sign–at the entrance to the subdivision. Put them up high if possible. Put them to the left, right, and centered at the entrance.

A spouse gets into an argument and is thinking about a divorce. As the car pulls out of the subdivision, he looks up and sees your sign. Get the idea?

We use flyers, too. Lots of flyers? Thousands. We distribute them into the subdivisions where we want to buy homes. We do this over and over again, every four weeks.

A couple gets their property tax bill. Wow, it just went up over $500. Then they get your flyer that says you’ll buy their home in seven days.

What should the flyers say?

Your flyer should have a call to action, examples of homes that you have acquired, your phone number, and statements like…

“What have you got to lose?”
“Call now”
“No obligation”
“Offers within minutes”

We place signs where drivers will see them entering and leaving the subdivision. We use flyers that touch on major issues that will make an impact the sellers.

What are those issues?

First is our credibility. Would you give a real estate investor the deed to your home based on a single page flyer? Probably not. That’s because our flyer gets their attention, but it doesn’t give us credibility. So we must establish a message on the flyer that conveys our credibility.

We provide our flyer in our course, Profits While We Sleep. It works. It overcomes the seller’s main objections about calling us. Next, we use a flyer that has a call to action. We want the recipient to call us NOW. We simply and frequently say, “What have you got to lose by calling us?”

Finally, sellers are pounded by Realtors looking for a listing. So we say “We don’t want to list your home–we want to buy it.”

Be careful not to use phrases like, “We pay cash.” Why? Because that may turn off the seller who has no equity. Do we buy homes with no equity? You bet we do. If you use the AutoProfit software, you’ll see that we’ll still make over $20,000 on deals that have no equity.

Remember the purpose of the sign and flyer is to get the phone to ring. Don’t try to educate the seller on your technique. You can do that when they call. Remember that sellers want you to be credible, but you need to reinforce their desire to sell their homes.

How often should I send out flyers?

Pick the location where you want to buy homes. Pick a specific subdivision with three-bedroom homes and saturate the homes every four weeks. If you don’t get any calls, move on. Our experience shows that if the subdivision has homes that are listed with Realtors, then we’ll get calls.

Do other forms of advertising work? Sure, but not to the extent and predictability that these two techniques do. When using flyers, you can determine where and when you’ll get your calls. We like that degree of control.

PS. If you don’t get any deals from those calls, continue to read these steps because what you say on the phone is messing up the deals. Read Step Two: Use Your Business Phone to Maximize Results

By CREOnline Contributor

A content contributor to the original CREOnline.com.