Here’s an overview of the whole process of selling your house in a single weekend.
First step, you’re going to decide to sell your house in one week.
Next, you’re going to prepare your house and your marketing plan. Two different steps there. Marketing plan is one step and prepare your house for sale, making sure it is in the best possible condition it can be for the sale. You’re only going to do this once. So you only need to have the house looking really good for one weekend.
The next step, once you have your house ready to sell, is that you’re going to implement your marketing plan. This starts about a week before the weekend you’re going to sell it. A lot of the things we’re going to do – you’re gonna let your newspaper ads run for a week, you’re gonna start your mailings at about this time. So you can have all your marketing hitting one week before you’re actually going to be having the sale itself. Then on Saturday and Sunday, you’re going to hold an open house and explain the bidding process for interested potential buyers. And on Sunday night, you’re going to do the round robin bidding to sell your house to the highest bidder. And on Monday, you’re gonna meet, complete the sales contract and begin closing on the house. And with closing, however long it takes them to get their loan to actually close, so it could be another couple of weeks. But the house is sold in one weekend.
Let’s next talk about some pricing strategies. You should have your price set low enough to get people excited about the property. Now the price you’re starting the bidding at is not the price you’re going to be selling the property at. So, $100,000 house – you’re probably going to have your starting bid somewhere around $60,000 – $70,000. The general rule of thumb is 65% to 75% or so of the value of the house is what you should have your starting bid at.
Don’t inflate the price of your house. If you really think that it would sell with a real estate agent for $219,500, then your starting bid should be $143,000 – $154,000 – somewhere in that range in order to have your starting bid low, so that people think they’re getting a good deal, but realistic. You can’t start at a dollar and expect to get a lot of interest. It’s unbelievable; it’s not an acceptable number in their minds. Do they think they could get a discount of 20, 30, 40 thousand dollars? Possibly. But they’re not gonna think that they’re gonna get the house for a dollar. You’ll also get some people asking you, “If you only get one bid for $143,000, do you really sell the house for $143,000″? Well, yeah. If I only got one bid, yes, I’d sell it for that. But you’re not gonna get one bid. People will not allow the house to go for $143,000 if it’s really worth $220,000. Someone else wants to get that deal. They are gonna bid the house up to that value.
Now, there are some safety valves you can put into place. We will discuss some of those on the password protected website for our Real Estate Investor Bronze Members and the additional resources, but just be aware that you’re not gonna sell your house at the starting bid amount. You want to set it low enough so that you get enough interest on the house and you get people excited about coming to see it and wanting to be a part of the bidding process.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. If you have not yet seen the special free downloads page for real estate investors, check it out now.
Let’s look at the theory behind selling your house in a weekend. What we’re going to do, in the big picture of things, is advertise like crazy to draw out all the real buyers and get them to come to the open house on one weekend. We’re not going to spread it out and put a litle bit of advertising out and have people trickle in. We’re going to do one big advertising blitz. And then once all the people that we can get interested in the house – it’s only going to be like two or three people that are really interested with the ability to buy who would buy the house. So we’re just trying to find those people. Everyone else – it just adds to the emotional fervor of the weekend open house and getting people to bid. You’re really only looking for the real two or three people that are interested in buying the property.
We put out tons of advertising and get tons of people to call in on our marketing to get information on the open house. You get a bunch of people that come to the house on Saturday and Sunday. They look at the house, you explain to them how the bidding process is going to work. Then if they’re interested in bidding, ask them to sign up on the bidding sheet. They don’t have to put any money down or anything like that. And then on Sunday evening, after you close the doors for the open house, you call back people in order and then you get them to bid up the price of the house using a round robin bidding process. Round robin simply means that you call the person with the highest bid. You tell them they’re the high bidder. Call the next highest guy and tell them the high bid is at “this”, would you like to raise your bid? And they tell you “yes”, so the bid goes up $500 above what the high bid was. Or if they say no, say “No problem. I’m going to cross you off the list, and you can’t bid anymore.” Keep going down the list telling the new person what the new high bid is and they either keep bidding up or they drop out. You’ll find that you’ll get two or three people that are gonna bid the price up to the full retail price of the house, because it’s hard for someone to let the house go for $500 below market. So they keep bidding it up, bidding it up until they get to what the fair market price of the house is. That’s how the process works. And if you don’t get a certain number of calls by Friday, the night before you’re about to do your open house, cancel the open house and re-do your advertising, putting out your advertising correctly this time, getting the right number of calls and then having your open house.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. For more information on how to sell your house in a weekend, download the audio CD course.
Before we get too far into the details, I do want to take a step back and let you know a little bit about my marketing philosophy. You may look at some of the information provided here and decide that you are not comfortable with the principle of doing a round robin bidding process to sell your property at the fastest pace possible. Even though we’re going to talk about safety valves to make sure that you have a successful sale and that you get the price you need, maybe you still don’t feel comfortable with it. That’s OK.
What I do want you to learn about though is the marketing side of how to sell a house in a weekend. Even if you decide you want to do a traditional sale, look at all the different marketing we do in order to sell a house in one week. You can use that as a model to sell your houses traditionally, if you’re not gonna use the round robin bidding process. Now, there’s lots of variations of the round robin bidding process, too. After learning about the strategy, maybe you may come back say “OK, now I understand the big picture of what’s going on, but maybe I want to try a variation”. Some of the variations include: instead of people bidding up the price, they can bid up a down payment. So you could be doing a rent-to-own with this round robin bidding process and have people bidding up the down payment. Or you can have people bid up the monthly rent amount, so they feel comfortable. Or a combination of monthly rents and the down payment, if you’re going to do a rent-to-own. These are just different options you can jump off from once you understand the basics of doing a round robin bidding process.
In any event, try to learn from the marketing strategies for selling a property in a weekend and then decide whether to implement them on a round robin sale or using a more traditional sales methods.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. For more information on how to sell your house in a weekend, download the audio CD course.
The first thing I’d like to discuss is why speed matters when selling. I think that it matters for three reasons.
The first reason is markets are changing all the time. The second reason: holding costs. And the third, getting in and out quickly means you could do more deals a year.
Let’s talk about each one very briefly. The first one: markets are always changing. Prices can be dropping, markets could be slowing down. Now, if you’re out there and you’re buying a house and it’s taking you two or three months to sell the house, could you see that if the market is slowly slowing down and prices are not going up and the prices may even be going down how it can be a big impact on your bottom line if it takes you three months to sell a house? Well, that’s one of the reasons why being able to sell a house in a weekend with a round robing bidding process is so important for you to use.
The second reason we talked about was holding costs. Now, if you’re taking three months to sell a house and your holding costs, which are not just your mortgage, taxes and insurance but also utilities and maintenance – I mean, I’ve had vacant houses over the winter and the snow kept piling up and kept having to pay to have the driveway shoveled. The house is vacant and I’m trying to get it occupied, and I’ve got all these maintenance costs, so you gotta really be careful with your holding costs when you’ve got all these properties. Being able to sell a house quickly in a weekend using a round robin bidding process can significantly improve your bottom line. You’re saving, on a $200,000 house – between the mortage and all the other expenses, $1,500 – $2,000 a month in cost. So, instead of taking three months to sell a house, let’s say you can get the house sold in the first weekend and it only takes three more weeks to close, you have just saved yourself somewhere between $3,000 – $4,000. Over the course of a year, if you’re doing four or five deals a year, that’s pretty significant money. You’re talking $8,000 – $10,000 or so of savings that you’re adding to your bottom line.
Holding costs can become significant if you don’t take time to sell something quickly. The third thing we talked about is by getting in and out quickly, it means you could do more deals. How many more deals could you do if you didn’t have to hold a house for three months at a time to sell it? If you can get in a house, get it fixed up and get it sold in the first week you try to sell it and then wait three weeks for the closing, you could be out there looking for other houses while you’re waiting for your closing to happen. You could be doing maybe two or three extra deals a year. Two or three extra deals, if you’re averaging $20,000 a deal, that’s $40,000 – $50,000 in extra profit just by being able to sell houses quickly. It’s critical that we learn as real estate investors to be able to sell houses as quick as possible, and this round robin bidding process is going to get you the full market value for your house very, very quickly. It’s a one step, one shot – I’m gonna get the house sold type of model.
Sincerely,
James
P.S. For more information on how to sell your house in a weekend, download the audio CD course.
Tonight’s webinar at 7 PM MST called Marketing To Buy, Sell, Rent, Rent To Own and Private Money will cover:
- Marketing to buy houses including low and no cost methods as well as highly effective direct response methods used by professional real estate investors.
- Marketing to sell houses quickly even in our current market.
- Marketing to occupy houses on a rent to own where you are agreeing to rent the property to your buyer while they are qualifying for their loan.
- Strategies for raise private money for your deals.
I expect the webinar to be between 30 minutes and 60 minutes with lots of references to existing checklists and systems you can access as a Real Estate Investor Bronze Member who can use the checklists and systems we have on the Real Estate Investor Wiki.
I will walk you through the Daily Marketing Checklist which includes the marketing systems for buying, selling and renting and raising private money and also point out great audio training materials that cover those specific areas.
At the end of the webinar, I will open up the lines for any investors that have questions about this or any other investing related topic.
This is a free webinar for Real Estate Investor Bronze Members and while I do intend to record it and place it online on the Real Estate Investor Wiki I do need to warn you that last week the webinar did NOT record due to technical issues so it is always a best practice to try to be on the call live in case we have another technical error.
To register for the webinar, just select the Marketing To Buy, Sell, Rent, Rent To Own and Private Money link from the Upcoming Live Webinars section on the homepage of the Real Estate Investor Wiki. On the page for Marketing To Buy, Sell, Rent, Rent To Own and Private Money is a link to register.
You can also register for the other webinars we have scheduled for this month on the Real Estate Investor Calendar in a similar manner. Right now, we have three other scheduled webinars: next week we have a free Private Money Webinar, followed by webinars on Working With Sellers and finally Working With Buyers.
I hope to see you on the webinars.
Until my next post,
James
Jassen: So, the next step is this whole mental thing. Staying focused, motivated, you know, working on; you know really keeping with it…
James: Oh, come on this is all touchy, feely kind of stuff; this doesn’t really matter, does it?
Jassen: Oh, yes it does. Hey, what was it you said on the inner game call, something about if you’re not touching, feeling now, you’ll come around eventually?
James: That’s right.
Jassen: Isn’t that what you said, James.
James: I did, I think I did say something like that. A lot of people, they hear this stuff and they immediately just turn us off so, if you’ve zoned out because we’ve started to get all philosophically on you and stuff sorry to hear that, but you know, listen to the CD again, and maybe in a few months maybe you’ll come around by then. But, it’s a hugely important part of being in business.
Jassen: It is and you know, in the interest of time, I only want to touch on one thing in relation to this.
James: Okay.
Jassen: And we do have bonus downloads and you know, entire CD’s to talk about…
James: Yeah, what section is the bonus download for this? Is this under…
Jassen: That is a good question; I need to look that up.
James: Oh, Goals and Personal Development.
Jassen: There we go.
James: Okay.
Jassen: Goals and Personal Development actually covers this step and the next step.
James: Okay.
Jassen: So, you know, that’s where the inner game stuff is, we have another CD called Inner Game where we talk about this in depth, but the big thing here is this whole thing called the law of attraction.
James: Yeah, this is really hot right now.
Jassen: It is because of a DVD and a book called, The Secret, a lot of people are… There’s this huge buzz about the law of attraction and I’m curious to see how long that’s going to last…
James: Yeah, you know, it’s so funny because this stuff has been going on for hundreds of years, there’s been authors writing about it there’s you know, all of the self help and personal development type people have been talking about it, but they haven’t’ been pulling it out and saying, okay, law of attractions the big one…
Jassen: Right.
James: …it’s all been part of this process and, you know, people want to talk about it, but now that this one book has come out there’s been a lot of buzz about it and yeah, I’m curious to see how long it’ll stay in the limelight as well.
Jassen: Yeah, so just to define the law of attraction, it says that you attract into your life that what you think about most.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: So, if all you ever do is worry about your bills, then you’re just going to get more bills.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: Whereas, if you kind of change your mindset and this has been an ongoing process for me…
James: It’s ongoing for everyone.
Jassen: Even for you?
James: Yeah, everyone. Yeah.
Jassen: Well, you’re saying you’re not perfect and you’re not there yet?
James: I’m constantly improving. So, even where I was five years ago I feel like I’m a lot better off now, but I’m still trying to make better improvements.
Jassen: Okay, the core of that is, and I like using the debt versus the wealth mentality to give you an example, but if you think about debt you’re just going to get father in debt, whereas if you focus and concentrate and dwell on building income, you know, generating an income, building wealth, then that’s what you’re going to attract into your life.
James: Okay, now that’s like the philosophical way of approaching it…
Jassen: Exactly.
James: …I’m very, you know, if you don’t want to get into the philosophical feely stuff then look at it purely from a practical sensible point of view.
Jassen: There you go.
James: If you start looking at what can I do in order to get myself away from this situation, focus on where you want to go, well guess what, you’re going to take action and to do things that are positive.
Jassen: That’s right.
James: If you focusing on woe is me I’ve got bills, then guess what, you’re not taking action toward a solution. So, I am personally the touchy, feely, you know I believe all that stuff, but at the same time I used to be like, you know that’s such a… just give me some practical stuff to implement.
Jassen: Right.
James: Okay? Well, it’s both and I’m showing you how to look at it, that if you can’t get into it on a touchy, feely level then go for it on a practical… Listen, if you look at where you want to go and you say, okay, now what can I do to get there and you start taking action toward that don’t think about the negative side of it, don’t worry about the debt, just move forward and practice that then I think that’s a very practical way of thinking of the law of attraction.
Jassen: Yeah, I mean, in a practical sense it’s like you’re saying, basically to what I’m hearing is what you focus on is what you’re going to take action on.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: So, you’re better off taking action on building a business and generating income and wealth than you are to focus on debt and generating more debt…
James: That’s right.
Jassen: …through either activity or inactivity.
James: Alright, you got bills? Stop spending, and start focusing on earning more money.
Jassen: That’s right, a pretty simple equation.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: Okay. Step six is all about personal development. You know, the first the majority of this CD was steps one and two talking…
James: Hold on one second.
Jassen: Okay.
James: Do we have two steps sixes?
Jassen: What’s that? Yeah that’s right, I forgot I mis-numbered them.
James: Oh, okay so we really had seven steps. Lets do this we’ll have six steps and we’re going to give you a bonus step.
Jassen: There you go the bonus step.
James: Yeah, so this is the bonus step we’re talking about, which if you’re keeping track is step seven.
Jassen: I’m sure we’ve complete confused listeners by now.
James: I’m sure. So, this is the bonus step.
Jassen: The bonus step; personal development.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: You know, the first two steps talked about setting up your business and that’s when we talked about the majority on this call because it’s kind of the real meat here, but once you’ve got something set up don’t just stop, keep learning. Learn how to improve things. You know, we talk a lot about continuous and never ending improvement.
James: Yeah, that’s from Tony Robbins, he calls it CANI, it’s based on the concept of Kaizen.
Jassen: Okay. The, you know, continuous systems improvement, learning more about business and you know, I talk a lot about this…
James: Yeah.
Jassen: …the most important thing you can learn about business is probably marketing.
James: Oh, yeah, marketing, focus on marketing first, yeah.
Jassen: I mean, once you understand marketing, a whole new world opens up to you.
James: It does.
Jassen: Now, there are many schools of thought about marketing, there’s a lot of stuff out there, but I personally believe that for an online business what people should focus on from, you know, if they have limited time, a full time job, you know, family responsibilities, etc…
James: Go where the fish are.
Jassen: Exactly.
James: I mean, doesn’t that make sense?
Jassen: Yeah.
James: You don’t really have time to really learn marketing and get traffic to your website…
Jassen: That’s right.
James: …go to websites where there already is traffic. Go to Ebay, go to Amazon, go to Google Base, go to a Yahoo Store…
Jassen: Right.
James: …go to these different places that already have people that, you know, you already have eyeballs on the website now you just want to put your pay job where eyeballs are going to be looking at your thing.
Jassen: Right, and once they do have the time to work on their marketing, education, and self knowledge; this is kind of my list, direct marketing…
James: On the internet?
Jassen: Yeah.
James: Okay.
Jassen: Well, okay, let me ask you, James, is internet marketing any different than regular direct marketing?
James: You know, I think I mis-heard you. When I heard direct marketing I immediately thought of direct mail.
Jassen: Oh, okay.
James: Are you talking about direct response, like you know…
Jassen: I’m talking direct response to marketing.
James: Okay. Okay.
Jassen: Which is what internet marketing is.
James: I would agree, it’s measurable, you know, if you want to put out something and find out what your results are and hold it accountable.
Jassen: Right, and you know we have an entire marketing CD. Another individual that puts out a lot of incredibly great information and about direct response marketing is Dan Kennedy.
James: Oh, don’t tell everyone his name, he’s too good. 
Jassen: Oh, come on.
James: Yeah, Dan Kennedys’ got great stuff he’s got some really inexpensive books and some very expensive boot camps…
Jassen: Right.
James: …and full courses and stuff, so start with the books and I think you’ll like what he has to say.
Jassen: Yeah, and another area where I think people can really help them boost the response rate in ratios on their listings is copywriting.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: Learning copywriting is a really great skill to learn.
James: Now, let me just give a quick example because I know we’re running low on time, but here’s the idea of copywriting. If you have, you know, you put up an auction on Ebay and it gets, you know, twenty-five viewers, if you’re converting one out of twenty-five well then you’ve got that sales ratio.
Jassen: Right.
James: If you can change what’s written on that page and not convert one out of twenty, well, now you’ve improved what you’re getting from the same auction.
Jassen: Right.
James: So, that’s a good way to improve it. You don’t have to bring anymore traffic, you’re now trying to convert more people for that particular page.
Jassen: Right, and by copywriting we’re not talking about, you know, the “c” with the little circle around it…
James: No.
Jassen: …and the next to it.
James: Yeah, we should just call it something else. We should just, you know, writing advertisements.
Jassen: Yeah, that’s what copywriting really is, it’s kind of the psychology and the science of how to write advertising.
James: Yeah, write sales letters, writing sales copy, yeah, we should try to differentiate that in the future.
Jassen: Sure, we should. Now, I do want to put in a plug for one of our other projects.
James: Which is?
Jassen: We have a blog where we do all kinds of marketing tests and we test all different kinds of headlines and you know, a lot of what we do is really testing different marketing messages…
James: Yeah.
Jassen: …and different marketing media.
James: And that’s the video, audio stuff that we have on the…
Jassen: Yeah, we have all kinds of audio visual stuff, text on the blogs and you can access that, it’s completely free and you can access that at ruthlessaccountability.com
James: Okay.
Jassen: Last thing I want to talk about before I sign off.
James: Okay.
Jassen: Once you have started building a business, you know, you’ve got some things out there and you’re starting to set some goals, work on your inner game, the whole, you know, mental stuff, you’ve got your record keeping, you’ve got an entity formed, and you’re kind of chugging along. Start looking at ways to grow your online business. We talked a lot about this with the niche selection thing, but look at related niches, different products within your existing niche. Look at additional market platforms…
James: Yeah.
Jassen: If you’re making $500.00 a month on Ebay, well, why not carry that same thing over to Amazon?
James: Yeah, I would agree. You may not do $500.00 a month on Amazon, you may only do $300.00 a month, but it’s $300.00 more.
Jassen: Exactly, and all of a sudden you’re at $800.00 a month…
James: Exactly.
Jassen: …with really not a lot more in fixed expenses.
James: Yeah, now, you know, for people that are having a hard time with some of the numbers we’re using, lets say its $100.00 on Ebay and now you can go to Amazon and make $50.00.
Jassen: Right.
James: Okay. So, use those numbers.
Jassen: Yeah, so, you know, expand into different niches, products within a niche, add, you know, an additional market place by which I mean sell stuff on another website, you know, learn more about marketing, lets see learn more about marketing, learn more about marketing…
James: Let me sense a pattern here. Do you maybe want people to learn a little bit more about marketing?
Jassen: Yes. Marketing is where it’s at, there’s a reason, James, where I always say marketing is our favorite topic to talk about.
James: We always end up talking about it.
Jassen: You know, it doesn’t matter what we’re talking about, we can be talking about starting an online business, we could be recording a real estate CD, we always come back to marketing and there’s a reason for it.
James: So, you mean the accounting and finance calls about marketing and the business selection calls about marketing…
Jassen: Actually, I think we did spend quite a bit of time on the accounting call talking about marketing.
James: Well, that’s the thing, we have to try to like get ourselves back on track and so I say ‘ok lets talk about accounting again’ because marketing is so important and it’s related to all these things .
Jassen: It is and, you know, a lot of people that start say a local business, you know, take an electrician; an electrician can be incredibly great at being an electrician.
James: He could be the best.
Jassen: He could be the best electrician in town and by background I’m an electrician…
James: Really? Oh yeah, okay.
Jassen: Yeah, I was an electrician in the Navy for five years.
James: That’s right.
Jassen: And that’s why I use that example all the time, but by trade, I’m trained as an electrician. Well, you can be the best electrician in the world and you can have the best service, you can have the best rates, you can have the quickest response time, but if you can’t put out marketing to get clients to call you…
James: You’re going to starve.
Jassen: You’re going to starve.
James: Yeah, that’s true.
Jassen: So, no matter what business you’re in everything comes back to marketing eventually.
James: I agree.
Jassen: So, have we hammered that home hard enough, you think?
James: I think so and I think we’re way over time.
Jassen: We are we are. James, I appreciate your time, thanks for joining me on this call.
James: You’re welcome, I had a great time.
Jassen: Yeah, this was a great call and I look forward to talking with you in the future, probably about marketing.
James: That sounds good, alright thanks, Jassen.
Jassen: Thank you, James, bye, bye.
Until my next post,
James
