Posting Ads To Find Deals On Craiglist

So, you have decided to invest a little time in posting an ad or two on CraigsList to find motivated sellers and ultimately great real estate deals. Congratulations!

Let’s take a look at exactly how I post ads on CraigsList to generate a steady trickle of motivated seller calls. You might have noticed that I said a “steady trickle” and not a flood of calls. Part of my job is to set your expectations. If you post an ad that you buy houses on CraigsList, you are not going to get a flood of phone calls or e-mails from motivated sellers. It just doesn’t work like that.

With that being said, I should also point out that if you put up an ad and get no inquiries that is not to say that it doesn’t work at all. With response rates as low as they are for these types of ads on CraigsList, you should realize that posting up an ad every 3 days (10 ads in a month), may generate a couple of inquires. If you read that slowly and carefully, you will realize that it means that 8 of the 10 ads you put up might not generate a single call or inquiry. It means that you need to consistently put up an ad every 3 days like clockwork and even then, you are not going to be bombarded with calls.

Now, you may be in a city that is the exception to this rule and you may generate a nice steady stream of inquires, but I would not count on it and just be pleasantly surprised if that happens.

So, here is one example (of many variations) of an ad that I run to buy houses in my market:

If you are looking to sell a home in Fort Collins or Loveland, I am a local real estate investor looking to buy in Northern Colorado.

For a free special report on how to sell your home to me in 5 to 10 days, go to:

LIST_YOUR_WEBSITE_HERE

Sincerely,

YOUR_NAME
YOUR_PHONE_NUMBER

This ad is a very simple, TWO STEP marketing message. The first step is the classified ad that we posted on CraigsList. In this case, I am running this ad in “Real Estate Wanted” in my local market.

I encourage people to go to my website for additional details about how they can sell their home to me in 5 to 10 days. I then include my full contact information for them to contact me on my website once they have read my full marketing message.

If I wanted to, I could put my entire website message on CraigsList and make this a ONE STEP marketing message. They read the entire message in one step on CraigsList and then contact me. You can test this to see which works better for you, but I have found it is easier to get my ads to stay up on CraigsList if I use a shorter message. It does mean that less people read the message (or have a chance to read the entire message).

To generate inquiries from motivated sellers, I recommend posting ads of this nature in both the “real estate wanted” and “real estate services” sections of CraigsList.

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Sometimes you need more than just static how-to information… sometimes you need the on-going training and support and that is what our Real Estate Investor Bronze Members get. Sign up for Real Estate Investor Bronze Membership today.

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