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Marketing for Sellers
What's the best way to find people wanting to sell their homes?
We started years ago by driving neighborhoods that we liked, looking for For Sale by Owner signs and calling. We also walked neighborhoods putting out flyers on mailboxes (which we now know is illegal) and talking to neighbors.
These methods are very effective and certainly inexpensive. They can be a good way to get started or to find your own personal residence. But, they're time consuming and not the best use of your time if you want to buy properties as a business.
The best way we've found is direct mail marketing. We target neighborhoods or zip codes we like and drill down to specific properties that we are interested in owning. For example, we mail to single family homes, owner occupied, the specific price point we want to own, 10 years old or newer, etc. That way, when someone calls about selling a home, we know it’s a house we're interested in.
There are many ways to market. Different methods work better in some areas than in others. Wherever you market, it’s best to use a "layered" approach, more than one method at a time, so you are seen at different times and in different ways. Most sellers need to be contacted at least 4 times before they will remember you and contact you back. They need to know you're for real and a trustworthy entity.
Here are 36 marketing options to get you started:
1. Read the Newspaper:
Classified Ads – Properties for Sale
Classified Ads – Properties for Rent (sometimes landlords want to sell)
2. Business Cards (hand them out to everyone)
3. Flyers (to put out wherever you can)
4. Market Bulletin Boards (post your flyers &/or business cards)
5. Signs (such as "I Buy Houses” – very inexpensive, check sign ordinances in your area)
6. Public Speaking (Rotary, Toastmaster, Lions Club, etc.)
7. Networking (everywhere you go with everyone you meet!)
8. Foreclosures (research at courthouse)
9. Real Estate Agents
10. Post Cards (direct mail marketing)
11. Radio Ads or Radio Show (expensive and hits a broad area)
12. TV / Cable (can be expensive)
13. Pizza Boxes (sometimes they sell ads on the lids)
14. Banks & other Lenders (even if they don’t own properties, they may know who does)
15. Estate Sales (will the house be sold as well?)
16. Moving & Yard Sales (have you sold your home yet?)
17. Vacant Properties (research & send letters)
18. For Sale by Owner Signs
19. Out of State Owners or non-Owner Occupied homes (landlords may be ready to sell)
20. Eviction Filings
21. Burned-Out Landlords (often have multiple properties to sell)
22. Probate Court
23. Divorce Cases
24. Tax Liens
25. Internet Newsgroups (use Google to find them in your area)
26. Attorneys
27. Auctions
28. Home Builders (may sell to investors at a discount)
29. “Blue Tarp” Houses (may mean they can't afford the repairs)
30. T-Shirts & Caps (to wear or to give out)
31. Obituaries
32. Car Signs (Magnetic Door Signs)
33. Office Signage (does the public know what you do?)
34. Auto Wrap (makes a mobile sign! Park in busy store parking lots on weekends)
35. Painted Signs on Van (pay monthly or for leads generated to van owners)
36. Buy lists from list brokers – (foreclosure, out of state owners, non-owner occupied, etc.)
Be creative!
Try different ones to determine which you like and which works best for you. Mix it up a bit.
What can you add to the list? What have you tried? What works for you?
Unique Ways to Sell a Home
In case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of homes for sale right now. How are you going to get yours noticed? How are you going to get yours sold?
In today’s market, it will take more than painting and trimming the bushes to get noticed, to stand out, to make your home memorable. Dropping the price is something everyone’s doing. What can you do that other sellers aren’t? What can you add that’s different?
Here are some ideas I’ve tried:
1. Get lighted signage that’s illuminated even after dark.
2. Serve light snacks at open house and hand out something your lookers will remember. You want something that will be a positive reminder of your home. I make sure to at least have pens and keychains with our name and contact information on them.
And, I try to do seasonal gifts. For now, I’ll have packets of herb seeds or small herb plants to hand out.
3. Create an information flyer with all the local conveniences you can find: shopping, schools, universities, hospitals, malls, restaurants, gas stations and attractions in the area, local police and fire stations, even school bus pick up locations. Assume your lookers doin’t know the neighborhood.
4. Hand out comp information on your home as well as information on the other listed properties in the area showing that your house is the best value.
5. Do some staging to make sure your home looks its best. Springtime is so easy. Sit out potted plants. Have lemons and limes in bowls or in vases. Make it feel like springtime – light, airy and fun!
6. Offer incentives, any and all you can think of!
- Give gift certificates to Lowes or Home Depot
- Pay for a year’s worth of yard care or a free session with a landscape architect.
- Offer $1000 landscape allowance. Now’s the time everyone’s looking at their yard!
- Pay a year’s homeowners fees.
- Offer $1000 for new appliances or any home improvement. Let buyers spend it on what the choose!
- Offer new carpet allowance. Let buyers pick their own.
- Give free lawn service for a year.
7. Paint the garage floor (concrete paint)
Of all the renovation tricks we’ve used, this one gets the most “ahhhhh”s! It makes the whole house feel newer when the garage looks clean and fresh.
8. Offer owner financing or to carry back a second.
9. Send letters to all the neighbors inviting them to “pick their neighbor” with information about your home and the open house. Give them an incentive to talk about it to others (ie. $200 gift card if they find your buyer).
10. FSBO? List your home on the MLS which gets your home on a lot of the multiple listing web sites.
11. Put up signs in the yard and as many directional signs as the neighborhood allows.
12. Put out flyers in surrounding shopping areas.
13. Video your home and put a virtual tour on the web.
14. Put ads on Craigslist and on any free online listing site you can find (Google).
15. Email HR departments at local companies. Many employees prefer to live close to their jobs but don’t make time for house-hunting. Make it easy for them to find yours!
Please let me know any additional ideas you come up with and how these work for you!
The IRS is Liening Hard
When times are good and cash is flowing, Congress tends to pick on the IRS. Times, like now, when the government is out of money, Congress prefers to ignore any IRS pursuit of the public.
Look out, here comes the IRS.
To give you an idea of their added zeal, in 1999, the IRS issued 168,000 liens. Last year, in 2009, they issued 966,000. Your odds of hearing from the Internal Revenue Service have improved.
I live in
From the US Department of the Treasury: “Our Budget request provides nearly $250 million for new enforcement initiatives aimed at reducing international tax evasion and noncompliance by businesses and high net worth filers. By the time these measures are fully in place, we estimate that they will produce additional tax revenues of nearly $2 billion a year. This will mean $9 in additional revenue for every additional enforcement dollar spent.”
Yes, the IRS is going to spend $250 million going after people who have under-paid on their taxes. The belief is that they will be able to raise an additional $2 billion from their efforts.
Publicly filed tax liens can destroy your credit as well as wreck careers and businesses. They can attach to your car, home, other real estate, even accounts receivables if you own a business. As far as collecting their debt, the IRS is ahead of anyone else who may file a lien against you.
And, in this economy, many more employers are using credit histories to screen applicants, even though credit reports are to determine credit-worthiness, not job-worthiness. Repossessions, collections, high credit card balances could cost you the job you want.
Recorded tax liens can seriously hinder your ability to earn a living, pay off your debts, even stay off government assistance! Once you do the right thing and pay off your tax lien, it can stay on your credit for 7 years.
This is not the news any of us wants to hear, however, our growing monetary deficit is pressuring the IRS to get even tougher.
If I can make a suggestion, pay your tax bills before you pay anything else.
www.KarensPerspective.com
Should Realtors Work with "Flippers"?
I read an article by Scott Thompson in the April 2010 edition of the National Association of Realtor's Realtor magazine entitled “Short Sale Ethics: 6 Temptations to Avoid.” One of the recommendations was to avoid selling to flippers. "Unless the investor in a flip is prepared to add substantial value by fixing up the property, don't participate in a flip. Short sale flips benefit only the investor who's clipping off money that could go to an already bleeding lender."
I do not understand why anyone would make such a recommendation.
I am an investor. I purchase a lot of properties. Many of them are flips. I am doing a lot more flips now than ever before because there is just so much "junk" on the market - so much that needs renovation.
One of the concerns in the NAR article is that "flip" means you are taking advantage of the lenders, the seller and the buyers. I don't believe we take advantage of anyone.
First of all, most of our flips are not short sales. Most of our flips come from sellers who have allowed their properties to deteriorate to a point where they cannot be sold to the retail market. Why? As many reasons as there are sellers. Some people, amazingly, live that way. We have purchased homes from sellers who are living in them and we, literally, cannot walk all the way through because of trash and odor. Yes, I said they are living in them.
Some are from landlords who have not done any work but just let them deteriorate around tenants (slumlords, I call them). Now they're done with the house and, again, can't sell it to the open market. One purchase was from a landlord who literally lived across the street from his rental house and, when we were buying, he swore he had no idea how badly the tenants had destroyed his property. Interesting.
At any rate, we harmed no lender in any of these transactions.
The sellers? They are thrilled that someone is taking the property off their hands. By definition, a flip is in pretty bad shape when we buy it. We must buy low enough that, even after $30,000, $40,000 even $50,000 out of our pocket for repairs, we can sell at a discount to move it and still make a profit. Not many retail buyers have this amount of cash to sink into a new purchase.
The buyers, the people we sell to? Again, we aren’t harming them or they wouldn't buy, would they? They have plenty in today's market to choose from. Why do they choose our houses? Because they've been renovated which means the buyer will have no major repair costs for 10-15 years. They typically get a house with new roof and HVAC, often times with new plumbing and electrical as well.
The buyers have a pre-purchase inspection so they know the condition before they buy. Add to that the fact that we sell well below market value because we want our houses sold, not for sale.
This, to me, means a big win for everyone. Why does Mr. Thompson warn against this? Realtors can make a ton of money working with investors, especially if they hook up and are really willing to work for an active investor.
I know, in the not too distant past, "investor" had a really bad stigma. I rarely used a realtor to buy or sell because realtors weren't interested in the fact that I had to offer low in order to do all the work and sell at some profit. (Why would I do this if I couldn't make a profit?) And realtors wouldn't show my houses because I'm an investor.
In the past 12 months, the market being what it is, realtors show our houses all the time and have brought buyers to almost every house we have sold in the past year. We always pay their commission. I would think the NAR would ENCOURAGE realtors to increase their business by hooking up with investors.
If we weren't out there buying the junker properties, the "flips", there would be even more deteriorating neighborhoods and house values would be even lower. We believe, absolutely, that we help the real estate market.
