Get Higher Quality Apartment Leads w/ This Active Marketing Approach

Dylan Borland – listen to my full interview with him here – is a fix-and-flipper turned apartment investor. He currently controls $10 million in real estate and is aiming to control $100 million of the next five years. His best ever advice and what he believes to be the key to his success is his unique prospecting approach.

The typical marketing approach for finding off-market deals is building a list of owners, sending out a direct mailing campaign and sitting back to wait for the phone to ring. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this tactic, Dylan prefers to take a much more proactive approach to finding deals. Instead of sending out mailers, he calls the owners directly.

Dylan obtains his list from CoStar. It includes the owner’s name, address and phone number. However, it doesn’t really matter where you get the list from, as long as it includes the owner phone number. Click here to download your free copy of 24 Proven Ways to Get Off-Market Deals, or check out all of my blog posts about lead generation to start building a list of motivated sellers.

On rare occasions, the CoStar list doesn’t include the owner’s phone number. If that is the case, Dylan finds the phone number by doing a reverse address lookup using either White Pages Premium or Vulcan 7.

When Dylan makes the phone call, he opens by saying, “Hey (owner name). I just want to introduce myself. My name is Dylan over at the Borland Group. We’re looking at buying properties in your particular area, and that’s how we found out about yours. We wanted to see if you have any interest in selling?”

Similar to direct mailing or any other prospecting technique, the majority of people won’t be interested in selling. But, you are looking for the one that does. All the person has to say is “Yeah, I have a slight interest” or “What would you offer me?”

If there is any inclination that they are interested in selling, the next step is to collect the relevant information – profit and loss statements and rent roll – to underwrite the deal and determine an offer price.

Dylan’s prospecting approach is easy and straightforward – just pick up the phone and ask if they’re interest in selling. However, he did admit that it can be frustrating. Generally, 99 out of 100 owners won’t be interested in selling. But, since we are dealing with larger properties, you don’t need to have a high conversation rate. You just need to hit 1 out of 100, or even 1 out of 200, especially since you can easily make 100-200 phone calls in a week.

An additional advantage of this strategy is that since you are taking an active approach, you control how many conversations you have, rather than hoping an owner calls you. And then it is also less costly, because you don’t have to pay for letters, envelopes and stamps. Besides the cost of his CoStar subscription (which he pays $350/month through his brokerage), Dylan’s overall marketing budget is $1000 per month. If you find that one deal out of 100, 200 or more, you’ll more than recoup your costs.

To add to Dylan’s approach, if a specific owner isn’t interested in selling, don’t give up just yet. Follow-up by sending the owner a letter. Reference the phone conversation, provide your contact information, and tell them that you will reach out again in X months (2, 4, 6, whichever you decide is best) to see if they are interested in selling.

If you have any comments or questions, leave a comment below.