Smart marketing to find lease option deals

Did you know that you can get a deal right now?  All you have to do is to put the word out.  If you don’t do marketing or advertisements for your real estate business, such as “We buy houses,” “We take over your payments” then no one will really know to call you to sell you their house or to do a lease option with you.

People in our real estate seminars and business opportunity seekers always ask this question more often than anything else.  They say, “How do I find these deals?”  You find these deals by advertising for them, just like you would advertise to sell an old bike or an old drum set.  You put it out there to the world and you put it out there in a specific place and in front of the right audience, and you will get you phone ringing. 

Effective ways to find deals for your real estate investing business opportunity are through signs.  You can put signs on your car as you drive, magnetic signs that go on the left and right side of your car.  You could put signs on the road that say, “We buy houses,” “We take over payments” along with your phone number.  Attendees should know that to get deals is with Bandit Signs are a form of . They are those cheap corrugated plastic signs that you see tacked up on the side of telephone poles. You’ve seen Bandit Signs everywhere, with messages like “For Sale,” “For Rent,” “Garage Sale,” signs that direct drivers to a location, and just about anything else you can imagine. They are an easy way to reach a lot of sellers and you can do it while driving for dollars. You could also pay someone a $1.00 per sign to put them up. Now these signs are not really welcome in most neighborhoods so a great way not to get in trouble is has someone put them up Friday after 5pm and take them down Sunday night so be sure to put them out only at these times because the city sign police may call you and fine you. In this case you will pay them $1.00 to put the sign up and $1.00 to take it back down and keep inventory for the next week. A good goal is to put up 50-100 signs pure week. You can also use wood stakes pounded to the ground to stick your signs in the grass. One of the best ways to use bandit signs and get a great response is to have the sign be handwritten. You can have Bandit Signsactually print handwritten signs for you. Bandit Signs are a simple tool, but they are very good and fast at  getting the phone ringing and helping your real estate investing businesses boom. They are also one of the most cost-effective way to market your business. 

You can send out postcards or letters.  You could work with real estate agents who have expired listings.  Take it upon yourself to begin contacting Realtors in the more distant areas in lieu of the homeowner, after their listings have expired. And fax to the Realtor essentially let’s them know that that if they can resurrect their relationship with the seller and help you make the deal, you will buy the property under your own take-it or leave=it terms and conditions, and see that the agent gets paid for their services: i.e., a commissions they’ve already kissed good-bye.

Obviously this approach garners great interest from Realtors who see their hard earned listings and commissions going down the drain, because of not having been able to perform under the terms of the agreement with their client. This also affords the Realtor an opportunity, and reason, to re-contact their lost client with a real live prospective buyer in hand and perhaps even get a renewal on the listing. Prepare a sample cover letter and a sample offer that can be mailed or faxed to the Realtor. The cover letter is designed to neutralize objections before they arise, and the offer explains the terms and the conditions and financing process under which he is willing to proceed. If the letter is not answered, nothing is lost, and he may contact the owner directly: if it is, then that’s another property owned.

You could look at houses with “For Rent” or “For Sale” signs in front, and approach the seller by knocking on their door and saying, “Hey, I notice your house is for sale, or for rent.  Can you tell me more about it?”  When you are driving around, going where ever life’s path is  happening to take you, do you take note of all of the golden opportunities that you drive by everyday? You should! Each time you get in your car have a pen, pad, and preferably a camera ready for action and a video camera if you have it or most digital cameras have built in video functions. Look for houses that has overgrown grass, mail piling up, old ratty newspapers, or a ton of deferred maintenance. Since this is essentially a home based business and when you go about your errands or when you find one, STOP! Write down the address, make some notes about the property so you remember it, and take a picture. Your going to use this information later try to find the homeowner. An awesome way to get 500% better results is to knock on the doors of the 2 houses next to the vacant house and the 3 houses directly across the street. Your mission: Look for the Talker! Odds are out of those 5 houses you will find at least one neighbor that will spill the beans on what happened to the homeowners and how the house got like that. They may even have a name and a number where you might be able to contact the owner…you never know! O… and go home and do research to find the seller.

Direct mail is the perfect follow up for driving for dollars mail a letter or a post card to the seller of the vacant property. Some tips for letters and postcards - use a live stamps, hand address the homeowners address and the return address,and whenever possible use an odd shaped envelope. Sometimes if it looks too legitimate and corporate from a major business than it may not be so personal. The key is although you are a home based business, keep this in mind and keep it personal when sending direct mail. These tips will explode your response rate for direct mail. After you find vacant houses send them a letter and wait for a response. If you get the mailed returned to you vacant it is possible they will have the forwarding address for the seller on the envelope, at that point you will send out another letter or postcard to your prospect. If that fails go back and do a skip search like we talked about in the last strategy. You could also mail the pre-foreclosure list, probates, people coming out of bankruptcy, and there are many other lists of motivated sellers that you could target and direct mail. It is always great to have a phone script prepared to handle the calls that come in from your direct mail.

There are numerous other ways you could find deals.  One of the very good, intelligent, and strategic ways to get deals is via the Internet.  We use the Internet more than ever these days.  Yes, you can find deals via the Internet.  Somebody comes to your website, fills out their information, and then it is submitted to your email or your phone, and you can call these people back and say, “I’m calling you back.  You were on our website.  How can I help you?”

There are deals out there.  You just have to market for them.  That also applies to finding buyers.  People want to rent houses and they also want the option to purchase.  Unless you put out there that you have a house for rent with the option to buy, folks won’t call you on it.  A house that has the option to buy allows you to be better in the marketplace than houses that are just straight rentals.  That option to buy is a premium and buyers are looking for that extra option.  They’re willing to pay more for that, upfront and option money for the monthly rent.

How do you find deals?  How do you find the money?  You advertise and you market for them.  Make sure that you business opportunity is strategically planned out 3, 6, 9, or 12 months in advance, how much money you are spending on marketing and also plan out your week, your month, and even your daily activity - how much you plan to put into the business.  If you do those two things, you’re definitely investing the right resources into your business.  Marketing is where it all starts and if you like to find out more about how to find more deals go to www.GuaranteeProfits.com