In some other recent posts I’ve been discussing selling your house in a weekend. This continues that discussion by talking about using your buyers list.
Step number nine is to contact your existing buyers list. We talked about this a little bit when we went over voice broadcasts, about being able to voice broadcast to all the people that have ever called in before on your properties. But let’s say you have a list of names, addressses and telephone numbers. You could do several different things; you could do a direct mail piece, where you actually send out postcards or a letter or something to people on your list to let them know that you have this property for sale. If you’re collecting email addresses, you could do an email blast to them to let them know you have this property for sale. If your list is small, you can go and look through and see the people that are in this price range that wanted houses before and call them specifically to let them know you have this house for sale, and you could do a personal call that way. I do not usually do ALL that stuff.
I use lots of simple tools to leverage my time. I use voice broadcasts; I would do a postcard mailing, because it’s easy for me to take my list, export it to the US Postal Service website, put together a quick postcard and have it sent out without having to worry about it. I can get all that done within 30 minutes to an hour. So it’s very time effective, and I can just get it done and put it out there. Make sure you contact your existing list in order to let everyone else who has ever worked with you looking at buying a house that you’ve got another house for sale.
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.
When preparing for an open house, you need to contact buyers with whom you have a previous relationship and that are interesting in possibly buying a house. You will have more success trying to sell your house to someone who has previously done business with you. Even if you don’t sell it to someone you have a previous relationship with, they may refer a friend or family member to you.
In order to keep a current list of previous buyers, you should have a 24-hour recorded information line set up. This system can capture names, addresses and telephone numbers of potential buyers who call into the information line. You can use this information for voice broadcasts or to send out postcards, letters or other direct mail pieces to advertise your upcoming open house.
Another way to collect contact information is to have people sign in when they come to your open house. Have a sign-in sheet ready for potential buyers when they walk through the door. They can give you their name, address, telephone number and email address. That way, if you get their email address you can also send them an email blast the week before the open house. If you do not want to use this idea, you can have only bidders give this information on the bidding sheet if you are using a round robin auction to sell your house in a single weekend.
When your current buyers list is small, you can personally call each person to inform them that you have a house for sale and to give them the details of the open house (and round robin bidding process). The more open houses you have the longer your list of current buyers will be. This list should always be your first stop when deciding who to send marketing pieces to regarding your house that you have for sale.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Interested in learning how to sell your house in a weekend? Or, perhaps you are interested in our free downloads for real estate investors?
Use the Email Blast to Buyers List Checklist to send out emails with new properties out to your list of retail buyers.
The checklist includes steps and helpful reminders for sending out emails of new retail or rent to own properties to our retail buyers list.
In the checklist you will find tips on how to write the email. Plus you will find reminders of what you should check before you send off each email. This should help prevent some of the more common mistakes investors make when sending emails blasts.
WARNING: Sending commercial emails like this requires you comply with certain laws and best practices. The checklist briefly reminds you never to use your regular email service, Outlook, Thunderbird or anything like that to send out these types of emails. Definitely do not just list all the emails on your list in the to field, the carbon copy filed (that’s the CC field in your email program) or even the blind carbon copy (that’s the BCC field in your email program). This is, without exception, a very bad idea and a blatant violation of the CAN-SPAM laws.
Always use a professional Email Broadcast Service to send out your email blasts to maintain your legal compliance, get maximum deliverability of your email, staying off the ISP blacklists and avoid losing your regular email account for violating their terms of service whether we are sending to our wholesale buyers list or our retail buyers list. You should too.
Until my next post,
James
Similar to the Marketing to Sell Checklist, the Marketing to Rent Checklist is used to occupy properties quickly.
The checklist utilizes the same three key marketing methods for attracting buyers and renters to your properties as shown in the diagram below.
Just posting ads on CraigsList (and your other local Rental Websites), using Yard Signs along with directional signs leading to the property to all major roads and your internal buyers list will ultimately be responsible for 80% or more of your results.
Of course, going the extra distance and doing extra marketing will help expand your buyers list, give you a larger pool of potential tenants to choose from and possible occupy your properties even faster.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. If you have not downloaded our Secret Property Management Tips and Tricks real estate investor audio course you may want to take advantage of the limited free download of that program that we are offering.
The Marketing to Sell Checklist is our primarily checklist when trying to sell properties.
It includes the industry best practices for selling houses quickly including ads on CraigsList, yard signs and directional yard signs and, of course, your in-house buyers list. These primary marketing methods will be responsible for 80% of your results for selling a property (unless you decide to add listing it in the Multiple Listing Service as well).
A key component of the checklist is building a buyers list both to send information about this particular property but also to market additional properties you may have to as well.
This list and marketing method is especially important when wholesaling properties. When we are wholesaling we refer to this list as our wholesale investor buyers list.
Until my next post,
James
I am a huge advocate of building up a list of both Wholesale/Investor Buyers and also Retail or Rent To Own Buyers (depending on your real estate investing business model). Today, I am going to share with you a new checklist that I just added to the Real Estate Investor Wiki for our Real Estate Investor Bronze Members about how to Email Blast To Your Buyers List.
First, I want to point out that I am only recommending you do this to your personal list of buyers that asked to be notified about properties you have for sale. Do NOT buy a list of send e-mails to people that did not sign up to receive information from you. That is not what this is all about.
In the new checklist above, I discuss some of the companies you can use to send out e-mails including which one I personally have used and what I am using now. I will also keep that updated as that changes (which we have changed 3 times in the last year alone so I suspect it might happen again).
A key part of e-mailing your list is to do it frequently enough so that they know who you are, but not too much to alienate a large portion of your list. I find a few times a week for most lists is acceptable. What do you do if you don’t have that many properties? Offer to send out deals from other investors or helpful tips on things relating to real estate, home buying, rent to own, etc.
If Bronze Members have any questions about the checklist I have above, please do go ahead and leave a comment below and I will address it here.
Until my next post,
James
