39 ways to find motivated real estate sellers
Real Estate Marketing Fast Track Blueprint for real estate investors
Welcome to Mr. investor, MyRealEstateDOJO gang, today’s topic is about how to find 39 ways so how to find motivated sellers some for free some for a little amount of money and some with a good chunk of money as we have talked about motivated sellers is where the money’s at. Let’s just dive into this and move forward because we have a lot of stuff to cover today.
Now I’m going to go through the whole list, there’s not one thats more better than the other there all going to work and if you want this to work for you you got to at least see three to nine of these ideas and implement them and when you make more money you want to put more money to the marketing machine to have more systems working for you to get more money. So let’s go number one, the first way to get customers is basically to use online classifieds. What do I mean by that? you can do back page, just do craigslist, there’s so many online classifieds out there and there’s two ways to do online classifieds. Number one is what I call passive okay and what the passive way is basically you make an ad you placed place it online like for example on craigslist and wait for the sellers to contact you which is very effective, but a better way to do it which I would recommend doing both ways is be proactive and the proactive way to do it is that not only going to be the passive way you’re going to place ads online but more importantly you’re going to get on the online classifieds like Craigslist and make cold calling to sellers or sending emailing to email to sellers okay so that’s number one way which is online classifieds.
The next thing you could do is basically do mail outs all right direct mail and now there’s a lot of different stuff to do in direct mail so I’m going to go through all of them for you so this is the mail out the number one thing you can do is to mail out to out-of-state landlords okay there’s two ways to basically get this information one is to go to the county clerk’s office and pull up the tax roll and do city I mean house street by street which takes a lot of time I don’t recommend that. The best way to do it is basically go to a mailing list dealer and buy list from them for you know a thousand or five hundred and two hundred whatever it may be and you ask them hey I needed to find um out-of-state owners in this zip code or in this county and don’t give me the list and what you’re going to do is send that flyer to them now out-of-state landlords are very very motivated because they may be making double payments on they may live in California and the property is in Texas and therefore they don’t have a lot of control of the property because there they can go visit it or more likely there accidental landlords which they had a job transfer or something of that nature.
So I love out-of-state landlords I love marketing to them I send them post cards, I send them letters etc. and another thing you can do is mail outs and what that is that when a seller tries to sell their home they hire a realtor they put on the market on the MLS and it does sell and it goes expired now the average person or investor like you and myself will not have access to the MLS therefore you need to get with somebody that’s a realtor and maybe pay them some money for work a deal with them say he if I buy a house I allow you to list it to get access to the expired MLS now the expired mills is a very very effective way to market to find motivated sellers is because these people have tried to sell the property for some reason they couldn’t because I need a lot of repairs or they priced it too high but whatever the story maybe. And now you’re getting a chance to market to them directly.
Alright my favourite and then the mail outs are or direct mail is divorces. a lot of couples that go through divorce and they buy a half by having two incomes the husband and the wife when they get divorced it can’t afford the house anymore um and so it’s a really good way to market these people and the only way that I really found to buy or you can’t really buy it is to get the information of people going through divorce is going to the county clerk’s office and basically pulling out the divorce records and cross-reference costs referencing them with the property and figure out where they live and sending them letters ok now it’s very effective but its time consuming but remember whatever it takes a long time it’s going to generate up you a lot of money.
the next mailout step you could do is basically to target foreclosures of course that makes a lot of sense before foreclosures need to sell their home quickly um so there’s two ways to basically get that you buy the list from once again a mailing list dealer or you go to your county clerk’s office and pull that data out and send it to them Impersonally don’t like doing foreclosure because there’s so many seminars teaching people how to do that but I feel like there’s a lot of competition in there and I don’t like it but it’s very effective I know other investors that had make money doing that so just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it but it’s definitely one of the 39 ways to find motivated sellers.
alright other stuff you can do with the mail house is to find people that are delinquent in their taxes and what I mean by that is that the way how to do this is I target people there are behind in taxes for three years and the houses vacant again there behind in taxes for three years and the house is vacant that makes them a lot motivated then doesn’t being behind just one year okay and the way to find out information is database mail out dealer or you could just pull it on tax roll for the county clerk’s office the comp controller tag section don’t have that information on you can pull it out its going to take a lot of work but remember with hard work comes a reward.
Another thing you could do for them allows is to send out letters and postcards to people that are doing evictions what that means is that when an accident a landlord or even professional landlord has renters in their property the renters have not paid and therefore there going to the courthouse to evictees that be vendors a lot of times you can find accidental landlords are now really sick and tired of running their property because they have to do this eviction it’s a lot of stress on them to go to the court and the victim by more importantly making payments on the house is not generated many money where you can find these motivated sellers and market to them through the eviction process system the way you find that is basically going tithe county clerk’s office or the courthouse where the eviction happens for every county in getting that information okay.
another way to do madhouse is direct mail is to send letters to sellers that have code enforcement violations what I what that means is could be many different things but let me give you an example they might not be cutting their grass and the grass is going very long so the city will come give them citations and these things cost money ladies and gentlemen so you can mail out the people there have code violations and get business from that through direct mail now let’s go to some other ways to market and find motivated sellers the next way to find and motivated sellers is what I call contacting fist bones that Fib is somebody that owns house and there trying to sell their house on their own without a realtor okay for whatever reason and basically there’s two ways to do this is you contact one fist bows visible for sale get these are people there trying to sell their house themselves or you contact them people that are trying to do for rent so there’s two types of fishbowls people that are trying to sell their house themselves are people that are trying to rent their house themselves okay now both of these works pretty good so you got to contact them you contact them through direct mail you contact them by knocking on doors you contact them by cold calling them etc.
Alright the next way to define motivated sellers is basically through network. Networking yourself what I’m what do I mean by that you can find people there are bird dogs for example your hairdresser your personal trainer arm anybody that deals with a lot of different people or customers you can let them know that hey if you find motivated sellers you explain to sell it is if they refer you that customer she’ll give them some money two hundred bucks hundred bucks five hundred bucks won the deal closes okay
So networking is a very powerful tool alright the next way to find more motivated sellers is what I call fit for dollars and what I mean by that is that every morning or every afternoon you go out there in your neighbourhood and get up and walk or jog or rollerblade or ride your bicycles by yourself or your family or your kids, spend some quality time and just walking or jogging in your neighbourhood looking for motivated sellers. One of the ways you could do that is that’s why call it fit for dollars is because you’re getting fit plus you’re going making money so what you do is, what I do is I get up in the morning I start doing my job and I start looking in my neighbourhood I go to different directions every day looking for my neighbourhood houses that have tall grasses or houses that the roof looks like there’s patches on it that nobody’s taking care of or houses that have bunch of flyers at their doors which is a sign that the sellers’ not there and the house is vacant so I’m basically looking for these houses while i am jogging or getting fit and then what I do is I go to the county clerk’s office and I pulled that address up find out the name of the owner maybe they have a different address if they’re getting letters to and I said start sending them letters and contacting them that way okay or you could use a skip-tracer service to find those abandoned homes like we have talked about okay.
The next way to find motivated sellers is what I call driving for dollars now what that means is you know you get in your car and you just drive around your neighbourhood or whatever neighbourhood you want to buy property in and you look for distress houses once again houses that had big old grasses in front of them houses that look like they don’t get any love. Houses that have a lot of fliers on their doors you get the idea and you do the same step as a fitness for dollars you contact these sellers and try to work a deal with them alright.
The next way to find motivated sellers is called a bandit sign and a bandit sign is basically signs like this I’m sure you’ve seen them all over town that says we buy houses any condition and your phone number okay, actually my first deal when got into the real estate investment world was through a bandit sign. okay now let me warn you a lot of cities and counties are have codes against band and science so you’re not going to go to jail but maybe the code enforcement or the police will give you a call and write you a ticket okay now I’ve been doing been designing for many many years and at all those years I’ve only got one ticket. Now can you get a ticket? you absolutely can and maybe it’s not the most ethical way to advertise but for me it has work and the ticket i just added to cost of doing business just like anything else just like the cost of gas so that’s why they’re call bandit signs they work. But it’s up to you if you want to implement it in your business.
Another way to get or find motivated sellers is by doing a car wrap, if you look at my videos you see that we have a smart car that’s wrapped around since we buy houses that roughly cost us about 1,800bucks to wrap the car now you don’t have to go to the extreme, to wrap your card you could always do these little cheap magnet sighs when you can order online for 50 bucks or hundred bucks that says you know we buy houses put them on your car put them on your kid’s car put them on your wife’s car and every day that you’re driving you’re not just wasting gas and you more your actually advertising.
Another way, effective way to find motivated sellers is basically wearing t-shirts that says we buy houses wear these t-shirts all the time, when I go to the gym, when I go grocery shopping, when I go to Starbucks. when I go to to the park, family reunions, whatever it may be, I wear these shirts, and believe it or not people come up to you and said “hey you buy houses I’m trying to sell my house oh I have a friend that’s trying to sell their house” or whatever it may be you know wearing a t-shirt that says we buy house is a very effective way to find motivated sellers.
Alright another way to find motivated sellers is through business cards you know you could have business cards like this which says we know we buy houses on the back and then you put these out everywhere you go you put them out at the grocery store you put them on the library you put them out at Starbucks whenever you get gas you put it on top of the gas counter whatever your imagination allows you put these cards out and you will get calls from them people want to sell their house or buy a house or rent house okay.
Another way to find motivated sellers is to buy leads from lead generation websites there’s a lot of websites online to generate leads but not in the business of buying houses during the business of generating leads and for a couple hundred bucks or ten bucks or twenty bucks you can just buy links on these individuals and then work these leads all right.
Another way to find motivated sellers is basically using YouTube, you can make videos that says “hey I buy houses any condition” yells yells yells “please give me a call or click on our website” if you want to do a search for example go to we buy houses Irving in Google and you’ll see me on their saying that we buy houses and so one way that I figured how to do this is very effective is to do a YouTube video for every city in your county for example I live in Dallas Fort Worth County so I have about 30 videos about every city Irving Dallas Plano fresco etc. and it says we buy houses and the city name okay that very effective another way to find motivated sellers is basically by Google images for example are the picture of the car that we have this is less rap you know we say we save that image as we buy cars so when somebody does a search not only is there the sponsors were people that pay per click but there that organic search and then there is videos and then there’s images so if you save images by keywords Google is going to pick that up and spit it back in the search results which may get you some calls or some leads all right guys.
The next way to find motivated sellers is to do search so if you have a website you can do search to be able to rank organically on a search result what I mean by that is if somebody types in we buy houses in Dallas if you have good rankings on your website youre able to come up on the first page hopefully number one number two number three who knows its getting more and more competitive so it’s hard to come up but if but doesn’t mean you can’t do it in your city or location okay.
Alright guys another way to advertise to find motivated sellers is through bloggers there’s a lot of bloggers out there different industries that have thousands of thousands and thousands of thousands of viewers or followers okay and what Alike to do is go contact these leader bloggers for example to have 5,00010,000 few years or even a thousand followers and say hey buddy I’m going to give you 50 bucks a month I’m willing to give you a hundred bucks a month whatever you guys can negotiate and say every time you post a blog put signature of my company’s information or put my banner there or in the email email blog casting that you do put on there just a little Texas as we buy houses in our phone number. Okay this is very very effective is a very very cheap way to get a lot of eyeballs from somebody else is hard to work so again bloggers.
Another way to find motivated sellers is to basically called pay-per-click again pay-per-click you use Google you can use Bing you use yahoo and basically when somebody there’s a search in Google that as you see on the right hand side or at the very top usually the first or second as you see on the very top that’s called pay per click and you can find customers that way for sometimes very cheap sometimes very expensive depends what your location is if you’re in California is can be a lot more expensive than if you’re in some little town in the country okay so it’s very effective but depends on your location.
Another way to find motivated sellers for small amount of money is basically to target people on Facebook and people on Twitter that have what i call Facebook leaders or tweeter leaders and what you do again is you find people on Facebook that have lot of followers a thousand followers 10,000 followers and you say hey buddy willing to give you excellent amount of dollars every time you post an ad on Facebook put my that at the bottom of it as a signature same thing with twitter ok. So in a nutshell you find leaders in Facebook who have a lot of followers and you work a deal with them give them some kind of small conversation or some kind of money in return to going to advertise your company for them I found that very effective and very low cost to get customers okay and talking in Facebook.
Another way to get fine motivated sellers or basically for free only through your sweat equity is basically doing social media marketing now this is different than finding Facebook leaders this is your own Facebook page this is your own Twitter page okay where you connect with other people on Facebook and you let them know what you do or you let your family know what you do through Facebook so this one is different than the other one that I just previous mention was just finding Facebook leaders this is your own Facebook account where you’re out there advertising what you do and bringing value to your own followers and letting them know that you buy houses alright.
Another one that cost a little money but it’s a lot cheaper than it was 10 years ago it’s basically radio advertisement, now when I say radio I’m not only talking about FM and AM which cost more money but there’s also now satellite radio there’s also internet radio okay internet radio is a lot cheaper didn’t satellite of FM and and with today’s technology any Bob or Jose can have their own radio show okay and you can find radio shows there that have only thousand listeners or two thousand listeners or ten thousand listeners listeners okay. For many cultures from the Asian community to the Persian community or a Hispanic community and if you contact these little guys to just one man show but there pumping good information on the internet to their followers and you contact them say this work a deal out every time you run your radio announcement, my company information that we buy houses and willing to give you x-mini dollars fifty bucks hundred bucks whatever it may be okay or you go all the way to FM and AM radio and pay. Remember you could negotiate to get lower price because there’s so many different types of radios today were ten years ago it wasn’t like that here.
Another good way to do marketing to find motivated sellers it’s what I call co-marketing and what you could do is secure an investor, you get with the realtor you get with the roofing company or a construction company or a mortgage company or whatever and go to these people and say hey buddy let’s put our money together and we’ll do advertisement and well split the leads for example we’ll go ahead and print outcome flyers and will divide them up into three pieces one is going to be for you Mr mortgage broker one it’s going to be for you Mr contract worker and the other ones going to be for me. That we buy houses, that way you guys can put you pull your money together and get more area covered for the price of one person can do okay it’s called co-marketing. I love this because it really works it helps out the community it helps out multiple people and then you build a relationship with these people that are doing co-marketing and you guys can even generate leads and pass it to each other for everybody to make money this is what I call a win-win-win.
Alright another way I love doing which doesn’t cost a lot of money is basically flyers you can printout flyers and hit a zip code or hit a subdivision that you want to buy property in or you can make out flyers and put it at the gas station put at the library, at the grocery store put on peoples cars, put in a gym so on and so on its very effective alright.
The next way to market and find motivated sellers is what I’ve created I love doing this is called the human billboard is what i call it. The human billboard and basically you go to the sign shop for about a hundred bucks you get a big old sign that you do where you just hold like this and you go touring traffic hour, rush hour okay for lunch or in the mornings or afternoon and you stand in front of the traffic or on the side a sidewalk of work busiest intersections are and you just hold the sign up. Where you just wear this time has the front in the back and you just walk around and people do call you and then what is this thing on the sign? simple things as we buy houses all cash any condition please give me a call or something just like this okay and you will get definitely calls from that.
Alright another way to advertise and find motivated sellers for very small amount of money and this is something I have done using my creative side is basically in some towns this is not going to work but other towns like big cities like for example in Houston and Dallas. I couldn’t do this, I couldn’t do this in Dallas but in Houston I did do this, a lot of homeless people out there, there’s a lot of people that pedal for money on the corner of the streets and so what I did is that my other company, I bought all these homeless people shirts like this that says you know name of my company says are you moving on name of my company and the phone number and so these little homeless people are basically walking everyday peddling for money wearing meet-shirts it’s a great way to help the homeless people out it’s a great way to help myself out it’s a great way to help people that need my services once again this is what I call a win-win-win everybody wins so in a nutshell you just make shirts give it to homeless people that are pedalling for money on the corners and 24/7 they’re advertising your company’s name out there while they’re begging for money per se for people in their cars. I love this idea is a win-win, definitely get results out of it.
Another way to find deals or our market to find motivated sellers is through other whole sellers basically whenever you’re driving around you see bandit signs as we buy houses you give these people call or if you’re on craigslist you see other investors as we buy houses you give them a call and say hey buddy can you put me on your buyers list and what that means is that whenever he finds a deal they got to shoot you an email or send your tags call you and say hey I got X deal do you want it and of course you got to pay them some money but on the other hand the benefit for you is that you don’t have to do all the footwork the advertisement, answering all the phone calls going to look at each of the houses and giving offers all day long so you’re just buying the deals. So if you’re trying to whole sell you really don’t want to do this but if you’re a fix and flip guy investor or if you rebuying hold investor buying deals and hustles is a great way to go and so you don’t spend a lot of time with your sweat equity.
Another way to get deals or define motivated sellers and its very affordable or I call even free its basically door knocking so what I mean by that when you’re doing fit for dollars or if you’re doing drive for dollars or when you’re driving and you see a house that has a this bow on it or a house that has the grass too high just go knock on this sellers door and say introduce yourself hey I’m Mike with Mr investor I was wondering if you want to sell your property something like that okay its very simple doesn’t cost a lot of money and you can do it all day long or you get a list from list dealer and instead of mailing out to them through direct mail you can just go knock on doors it’s a lot cheaper than sending thousands of mails out there because it costs money you have to pay for the flyers you have to pay for the envelope you have to pay for the stamps if the paper the time to stuff these items you could do it or you can pay somebody else to do it but either way there’s a cost to it or if you don’t have that much money door knocking is a great way to go another reason why i like i love door knocking for new people is that it builds you the courage to get rejected it builds you courage to talk to people it helps you to think fast on your feet okay so there’s a lot of benefits to door knocking.
Another way that you could find motivated sellers is basically the newspaper now you can run it up in the biggest newspapers for example like Dallas Morning News or you wish I don’t recommend unless you have a lot of money yup the other thing like to do is to run as in a small newspaper is like I’m in from Dallas Texas so there’s a lot of small companies like the green sheet the Penny saver things of that nature or local cities like white rock our Valley Ranch these little cities in this in the Dallas area they have their own little newspapers that they send out and talks about what’s going on with the cities and the football team is doing it example of that nature and you just target these little magazines or newspapers and have you had grown after that it costs a lot less but at the same time there’s not that many eyeballs so remember more eyeballs cost more money or more chances of getting deals okay.
But a very still a very effective good bang for your money another thing you could do is basically do promotional items, like what do I mean by that? you can do t-shirts you can do pins you could do cups calculators and then you give these out okay you go to the job fair you go to different places and just give them out for example I do pins and every time I go to a restaurant I dropped 56 pins for the waiver and guess what that waiters seeing maybe hundreds of people a weekend every time somebody signing their bill to get to see a we buy houses and if they want to sell the house guess what they’re going to just take that pin think pins a very effective way to market I leave them on the gyms I leave them up the gas stations anywhere that I go that people need a sign in credit card or debit card very effective doesn’t cost a lot of money but it’s still it there’s not a free way to advertise but it’s a very good effective way to advertise okay and find motivated sellers.
Another way you could market which doesn’t cost a lot of money is through email marketing now you can buy email list which I don’t recommend, you could create your own list through online classified ads or you could set up feeders for example you go to Google and set up a feeder you go to Craigslist and set up a feeder that anytime somebody posts on craigslist for example that says you know I must sell that you’re going to get an email notification and then you can email that seller say hey we buy houses are just Google that and there’s a lot of people are going to show you how to set it up okay.
Alright another free way to advertise is called cold calling okay now cold calling is hard for many people just like door knocking but once again is a very cost effective way is absolutely free the only thing have to pay for is your cell phone or landline whatever it may be and you’re going to call people you’re going to sit there and make 300 calls a day you know highly recommend making a hundred three hundred calls a day if you have no money no capital then your own left withhold calling and some of the other options that we talked about earlier creative marketing okay so cold calling you’re going to call you call you go and get a free newspaper and open it up and call all the people in the rental section or you call the people in the for sale section okay so cold calls a very effective way to find motivated sellers and it’s called cold calling because your basically listening to people that don’t want you to be solicited to and that’s why it’s called cold calling. Warm calling is to call your own leads one for example you do some of these marketing ideas that I just talked about somebody goes to your website and then shoot you an email or they fill out your online form. In warm calling they’re actually inviting you to call them whereas cold calling is you pick up in Dallas Morning News somebody’s sister trying to sell that house and you just give them a call and now you got to go to a lot of people you got to go to a lot of dirt to find the gold nuggets but you got to do what you got to do to make it happen for yourself. if your wise big enough you’ll make it happen because that exactly what I did when I didn’t have any money and I started the business okay I had to do a lot of cold calling.
Alright another way to find motivated sellers just gets a little more expensive is that you could do a TV ad okay now TVs become a lot cheaper because of the online TVs okay or you get apps on them to watch TV so instead of maybe running an ad on the cable you could run the ad on the apps okay or on the internet TVs and so they’re becoming more affordable than there used to be 10years ago but TV is definitely a way to go but if you have no money I wouldn’t recommend that. If you have money and you don’t want to do sweat equity, TV ads are a good way instead of running again and on that cable you can run an ad on heap of that TV station or you run it on the online version of that TV station okay it’s a lot cheaper.
Well gang I’ve given you 39 ways to find motivated sellers some of them will cost very very small amount of money, some of these ideas marketing ideas will cost zero dollars, and some will cost significant amount of money now it’s up to you to go out there and take action and make your dreams come true. Remember don’t listen to the naysayers don’t listen to the negative people in your life, might be your family, might be your friends, it might be the newspaper, might be the radio, don’t listen to them if your why is big enough if you know why you got to hustle and bustle, go out there and do it.
I’ve just given you all the tools you’ll need to find motivated sellers and as we talked about if you’re not dealing with motivated sellers it’s going to be hard to make money as a realestate investor but if you deal with motivated sellers you’re going to get deals all day long even if you don’t know rock from my atom if you don’t know left from right you talk to a motivated sellers they’re going to give you the deal for free okay. So your job is to go out there market, take action, action, action to market, set up appointments and go meet motivated sellers.
Okay this is Michael Mr Investor with MyRealEstateDOJO. Talk to you later gang.