Category : Real Estate

By OppGen

How to Find Motivated Sellers Now

What are Motivated Sellers?

A motivated seller is a person who is eager and ready to sell their property. Motivated sellers are typically looking to sell property quickly due to a time constraint and/or other factors. As a result of these kinds of constraints, motivated sellers are more willing to make sales concessions or sell their property at a lower price than what it’s valued at, making them ideal prospects for real estate wholesalers to find. 

 

Who are Motivated Sellers?

Anyone can be a motivated seller, regardless of where they live, educational background, and salary. But just because anyone can be a motivated seller does not mean that everyone is a motivated seller. Some motivated sellers are more motivated than others. You need to find the most motivated sellers and try to persuade those who are a little less motivated to sell.

Part of the level of a seller’s motivation may stem from why they are trying to sell their property, and there are many reasons as to why someone may be a motivated seller:

 

Foreclosure and Financial Issues

A foreclosed home is one of the most common situations a motivated seller faces. If a seller can’t afford their mortgage payments or is deep in debt, quickly selling their home can help pay off that debt sooner or be used to pay for a more affordable housing option. When facing serious financial issues and/or foreclosure, a seller is far more likely to sell their property before things worsen.

 

Age

People who are growing older and less able to get around the house and keep up with repairs may be looking to move to a retirement community or nursing home. But before they can move out, they need to get rid of their house. The level of motivation for this segment varies greatly, so be sure to gauge the homeowner’s level of interest or commitment as well as why they’re moving. Someone who feels they’re too young for a retirement community or is being pushed out by their kids may not be as motivated to sell as others are.

 

Inability to Keep Up with Repairs

For some sellers, they may have hit the point where it is less expensive to move elsewhere than to keep hiring someone for home repairs they are unable to do themselves. Rather than invest money into their home, they’ll look to sell it instead. Depending on the house’s condition, these motivated sellers may be willing to sell it lower than its market value.

 

Employment

A change in employment can create motivated sellers in a time crunch. This could be someone who was unexpectedly laid off and is falling behind on their mortgage, someone who just got a job out of state they can’t turn down, or needs to relocate for their current job. All of these situations require a quick sale in a very short period of time.

 

Divorce

Divorces can be messy and expensive affairs — especially when one partner moves out and the other is stuck in a home they cannot afford on their own. Things can get even messier when there’s a matter of dividing assets. Whenever there’s a divorce, there’s a need for new housing — and almost always a motivated seller.

 

Inherited Property

In some cases, people may inherit a home from a recently deceased relative. It’s fairly common for an heir to sell the property. Taking care of another property can be a financial burden and sometimes an emotional one as well. Heirs may inherit a condemned home that is not worth the upkeep or is unsafe to move into, so the best solution, then, is to sell the home ASAP.

 

Business Ownership

Not every motivated seller owns residential real estate — some own commercial and/or industrial spaces. Some business owners may decide to close one of their retail locations due to a merge. Maybe they are simply closing shop. Regardless of the exact nature of why they’re selling, these people are likely to be motivated sellers who need to get out of that space and quickly.

 

How Can I Find Motivated Sellers?

If you’re going to find motivated sellers, you’re going to have to stand out and market yourself with a 21st-century strategy. This means going digital and making it easier for motivated sellers to find you instead of you going out to find them.

Here are a few ways you can find motivated sellers and bring them directly to you:

 

PPC

Motivated sellers are what marketers would refer to as “low-funnel” prospects. Motivated sellers don’t need to be persuaded to sell their home — they’re already trying to do that. One of the first places they’ll look to for selling their homes is Google, so you need to make sure you and your wholesale real estate business are going to be what motivated sellers see.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can help motivated sellers see you when they search for particular keywords and phrases. It lets you choose where the ad can be seen, which is highly beneficial if you’re buying houses in locations that are not local to you.

You’ll need an excellent keyword bidding strategy and a solid understanding of how you can rank on the first page — and that’s not something everyone has, which is why it’s wise to hire a digital marketing company to create, run, and manage a PPC campaign. Contact OppGen to learn more about our paid search advertising program.

 

SEO

A search engine optimization (SEO) strategy can help your business’s website rank on the first page of Google. Unlike PPC, which can quickly bump your real estate business’s ad to the top of the first page with a good bidding strategy in place, SEO takes more time and requires no money. Our SEO clients usually see significant improvements after 9 months of implementing the SEO strategy, but the results are well worth the investment.

OppGen Marketing can help you start a successful SEO strategy. Contact us to request more information.

 

Social Media

You can join groups dedicated to selling and buying homes on Facebook, which also happens to be one of the best platforms for advertising. Facebook allows several different kinds of paid social ads (i.e., combination of text, display, video, carousel, etc.), as opposed to Google or Microsoft’s text-only PPC ads, so you can get a little more creative. The ad targeting options on Facebook are more intuitive and specific, so you can easily narrow down your audience into one that’s more likely to have motivated sellers.

LinkedIn is an excellent place to network with people inside and outside the real estate industry. Your colleagues may be familiar with someone who’s selling and could introduce you to a potentially motivated seller. Like Facebook, you can also run advertisements on LinkedIn. You can target advertisements based on industry, job title, and even a specific company.

To start a social media advertising campaign, contact OppGen Marketing.

 

Public Records

The county courthouse might not be open 24/7, but some of their digital resources are. Reach out to your county courthouse and request records and lists for the following:

• Tax delinquency
• Probate
• Divorce
• Evictions

From there, you can begin to create lists of prospects you can contact.

Housing history and assessment records are generally available to the public, too, so make the best of that information when deciding how low you should go when making an offer. Don’t rely on the MLS database — look at multiple sources, including your county assessor and courthouse. Once a property is listed on the MLS, it’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to buy that property below its market value.

The more information you have, the better, and you have tons of information available right at your fingertips. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for or don’t understand exactly what some of the information on these documents mean, go ahead and pick up the phone or visit in-person.

 

Skip Tracing

Skip tracing is the process of tracking down a “skip” — a person who has “skipped town” and left very few clues behind. It may sound like the work of a bounty hunter or an investigative journalist (and it is often part of these jobs), but it’s also a tactic wholesalers use to find the owners of abandoned properties. These particular skips are not necessarily running away because they are dangerous or committed a heinous crime and are on the run from the law; they are most likely in a lot of debt. 

In real estate, the goal of skip tracing is to find absentee property owners’ alternative address. 

If you don’t have the owners’ names, go to the county courthouse and request public real estate information records. You should be able to find the most recent owners’ names. Run a Google search on their names and see what you can find. Check social media, too. Last but not least, there are people-finding sites a-plenty, like Whitepages. You may have to pay a little bit in order to view all of the information available. You may be surprised with what you find.

Sometimes there isn’t enough information online, either — some people will go a long way to ensure they’re not easily found. However, you may be able to reach them if they’ve set up a forwarding address. To find that address, send the owners a letter using the abandoned property as the address. You must include “do not forward” and “return service requested” on the envelope. The post office will then return the letter back to you with the owners’ current address on it.

In the case that the snail mail route fails and you still feel that finding the property owners is worth the investment, you can hire a skip tracing professional who does this kind of work for a living.

Skip tracing can help you find people your competitors can’t reach and/or find, and if these owners are in dire need of money, you’ve just found yourself some motivated sellers.

 

Networking

Networking is important in every industry, but for real estate wholesalers, the word “important” doesn’t even begin to cover how essential networking is. It’s good to have a network of fellow wholesalers, but it’s even better to have a network that expands outside of the real estate world. If you network with probate lawyers, you’ll know about who inherited property they probably do not want before your competitors do.

You can network online or in-person, and it’s to your best advantage to utilize both options. Once you’ve built a network, you can reach out to the people in it and see if they know of anyone selling or considering selling. As mentioned earlier, LinkedIn is a great place to start on the digital side of things, as are Facebook Groups.

For more networking ideas, contact OppGen Marketing.

 

Start Finding Motivated Sellers Now

This blog is only laying out the foundation of how you can find motivated sellers. You can always add more to what’s here, and contacting us for more in-depth advice is a great place to get started.

By OppGen

How to Create Engaging Real Estate Testimonials

If you’re a real estate investor who’s constantly on the hunt for motivated sellers, you know how satisfying it feels when you’re finally able to close a sale with one of them. There’s a lot of work that goes into prospecting, connecting, evaluating, and closing deals. At the end of the day, you want your efforts to pay off, and you want people to know about it.

That’s why creating engaging and effective real estate testimonials is paramount to success. Without testimonials, you’ll be left to compete with all the other real estate investors at the same level. If you take the time to create high-quality testimonials that you can share online, you won’t need to worry about the competition.

Although both written and video testimonials are important, there’s really only one type that provides unparalleled value, and that’s video. 

If a prospect is browsing your wholesaling website and comes across a video testimonial, they can both see and hear the satisfaction you brought into someone’s life. That’s invaluable, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t be capitalizing on video as a medium for your marketing strategy.

We’re going to show you what an effective real estate testimonial looks like, and how you can start creating them yourself.

If you need more help, feel free to contact us.

 

Step 1: Have a General Testimonial Script Outlined

Before you start recording testimonials with every person you successfully closed with, it’s good to have a general outline or script written out. This will help keep the flow of conversation moving smoothly and it will make the testimonial seem more natural.

The questions you have for a testimonial should be good questions. Good questions receive good answers. Asking a client “Did you enjoy working with us?” is not going to get you a good answer. Asking “What was the best part of working with us?” is much better. It is more specific than the first example and doesn’t allow for a simple yes-or-no answer.

The best thing to do when coming up with questions is to keep writing them. If there’s a question that could be better, leave it be or elaborate on it. The questions will get better as you go down the line. Then you can pick and choose the best questions. Those are the questions that will get you solid answers that could have a future client convert.

In the meantime, here are a few questions to get you started:

• What made you choose to work with us?
• Why did you choose to work with us?
• What was the highlight of your experience?
• What was the best thing we did for you?
• What was the most effective thing we did to buy/sell your home?

 

Step 2: Take Advantage of Closing Day

Closing day is one of the best times to get an engaging testimonial. Your clients should be excited; they’ve either bought or sold their home. These are huge milestones for you and your clients, who are probably on cloud 9. Clients in a very good mood are more likely to agree to do a testimonial and sing praises about your services.

Closing day is also an excellent time to get B-roll footage (video footage that’s played over audio of someone talking) and photos. You may want to take pictures of the house and maybe even a photo with you and your client outside the house. Film B-roll footage as you walk through the house using a high-quality video camera or possibly with your smartphone and a tripod. When you go back to edit the testimonial, you can play that walkthrough video over the audio of your client speaking.

House flippers should also film a walkthrough of the house before starting renovations for a quality before-and-after video.

 

Step 3: Have Other Content Options Available

Some clients are going to be camera-shy and may not want to be featured on your website. Sometimes technical issues happen in the filming and/or editing process. Technology isn’t perfect, which is why it is always a good idea to have other testimonial options available.

When technology fails or a client isn’t comfortable being filmed, send them your script or outline with the questions intended to ask over email and ask for a written response, and if the client is comfortable to do so, a photo of them. Edit the responses for misspelled words and add them to your testimonial page. Don’t worry too much about improper grammar — this actually makes the testimonial believable. (However, if poor grammar makes it too difficult to read or understand, then by all means, clean it up.) Written testimonials are not the most ideal, but they do have a place when things go haywire.

Even in cases where the filming and editing go well without any issues, it may be a good idea to go back and transcribe the testimonial. You may find some powerful quotes you can highlight on your website’s testimonial page or on other promotional material.

If you’re dealing with several clients at once, send out a survey with a nice incentive (a chance to win a gift card in a drawing) to make them follow through with a survey. Google Forms and SurveyMonkey are easy tools you can use to create and send surveys and review answers.

 

Step 4: Make Testimonials Believable

If you have to rely on written content, you’ll want to make it as believable as possible. This does not mean it is acceptable to write a fake testimonial. People are smarter than you may give them credit for and are pretty good at telling apart a fake testimonial from a real one.

That said, you’ll want to use a client’s full name — first name and last name — whenever possible. If you can, include a brief bio, the city and state name of a client’s residence, and their photograph. 

Testimonials should also be specific and include information that can identify you: your name, your location, what you did and how you did it, etc. It’s difficult to force that information, but you may be able to request that they include your name and general location somewhere in one of the questions.

 

Step 5: Motivate Your Clients to Create Testimonials

There are many ways to encourage your clients to review your service and create testimonials. Consider entering them in a drawing, giving a housewarming gift with a note attached, or taking them out to dinner.

The ball’s in your court, so get moving and motivating!

 

Step 6: Upload Testimonials to Your Website

Whether you’re working with video or simply with written testimonials and a couple of photos, your website should have a testimonials page that is easy for prospective clients to find and link to the testimonials page on your website’s main navigation menu or part of a drop-down list on that menu.

You’ll want to update this page whenever you’ve completed editing a testimonial. If you have photos, be sure to resize them so they don’t take up the entire page and slow down your website as a whole.

Do not directly upload videos to your site — videos are typically large files that can slow down your website’s performance. Save bandwidth on your website by uploading your video to a video hosting and sharing platform, like YouTube or Vimeo, and embed the video to your website. We recommend YouTube because more people tend to use it and are more familiar with it, and it makes embedding videos a breeze.

Once you’ve updated the page, your testimonial is good to go!

 

Need More Testimonial Tips?

If you need more ideas or assistance for creating engaging real estate testimonials, drop us a line or fill out our free digital audit form today.

---

Raffle bowl image © Oceanview Med Spa via Flickr, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Upload keyboard image © GotCredit.com via Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0

By OppGen

5 Wholesale Real Estate Marketing Tactics That Make You Stand Out

Wholesale real estate businesses are everywhere, now more than ever due to the internet. With a market that continues to grow, you’re going to have to find a way to stand out from everyone else.

These marketing tactics can certainly help your wholesale real estate business stand out from the crowd — for the better.

 

1. Find a Niche Wholesale Real Estate Market — and Own It

One of the best ways to stand out in a market is to be one of the few businesses in it. If you’re able to find a niche wholesale real estate market, get into it before there’s competition. This market may be more difficult to segment depending on your location, but there are more niche options than you may think.

Most wholesale deals occur in low-income neighborhoods that are starting to become gentrified. That said, it’s worth breaking into other niche wholesale real estate markets. Consider focusing your efforts into one (or some) of the following niche wholesale real estate markets:

• Foreclosed homes
• Condemned houses
• Fix-and-flip houses
• Inherited properties
• Townhomes and gated communities
• Apartment complexes
• Pet-friendly housing options
• Vacation homes
• Beach-front property
• Single-family homes
• Multi-family homes
• Green or sustainable housing
• Rural land, farms, and ranches
• High-end, high-income homes

When possible, work in a niche you’re passionate about. Passion can make a lot of the work you’re doing feel a lot less like work, and passion can be what persuades someone to sell you their home.

Specializing in a niche is a practically guaranteed way for your wholesale real estate business to stand out from local competitors. OppGen’s real estate investor marketing program can help.

 

2. Build Your Brand

One of the biggest difficulties wholesalers face is a bad reputation, from real estate agents and brokers to home sellers.

Real estate agents undergo training for a certain amount of hours, which vary from state to state. They also must take a written exam. For brokers, the requirements are more rigorous: they must have a real estate agent license, undergo more training, and take a more in-depth test. Wholesalers, on the other hand, are able to circumvent these requirements by receiving a broker license under their state’s contract law.

Brokers and real estate agents may be more competitive with wholesalers in part to these lower barriers to enter the industry, but also because they compete directly with wholesalers. Wholesalers, brokers, and real estate agents all try to find properties before anyone else can and are not going to share information about any “off market” listings. However, if there’s a time when a broker or real estate agent is having trouble moving the property after listing it, they may reach out to you and see if you know anyone who’s looking to buy.

In such cases, you need to do everything you can to show others in the real estate industry that you know what you’re doing and that you’re worthy of their trust. You need to build a brand. A brand is so much more than your logo or colors. It’s how you conduct business, how you communicate, how you hold and present yourself, how you treat clients, and so on.

Not every brand is a good one. Some wholesalers tend to low ball their offers, which does not do them any favors in the eyes of home sellers. This can hurt the industry as a whole and give wholesalers a bad reputation.

By acting professionally, actively listening to home sellers’ concerns, and being honest and ethical when evaluating homes and making offers, you’re marketing yourself and your wholesale real estate business as being better than others. 

If you’re able to change prospects’ perceptions of wholesalers, you’re standing out in the best way possible — and OppGen’s marketing program may be able to help with that.

 

3. Invest in a Website

It’s 2020, and every business needs to have a website in order to succeed. Websites can help people discover your business, learn more about your credentials, and how they can contact you for your services. It also proves to prospects that you are a real business and not a scammer.

You don’t need to know HTML or CSS; you can use website builders like Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress to build a professional website using customizable templates. Although these are great tools and resources, using one of these sites is not going to cut it when it comes to making a well-designed site. Not everyone has the eye for design, let alone what constitutes good web design. 

Run a Google search for wholesale real estate companies, and you’ll see that web design is not an area many wholesalers excel in. Better yet, look at these three real-life examples below of sites in this industry:

Of those three sites, which one would you be willing to sell your home to? Probably Site 1, right? Ask yourself why that is.

It’s probably because Site 1 looks clean, uses only a few colors that look nice together, has appealing images to catch your eye, and doesn’t use too many fonts. It’s easier to navigate than Site 2. Simply put, it looks clean and professional. It looks like a wholesale real estate business that knows what it’s doing. It feels like a company you can trust.

Site 2 looks like it was thrown together last minute in an attempt to make a quick buck from wholesaling. It doesn’t look like whoever made it cared much about what they did or how it was done. It fails to make prospects trust the wholesalers.

Site 3 is in the middle; it isn’t as poorly designed as Site 1, but it certainly doesn’t feel like a company you can trust. The images on the right-hand side look like spammy ads — but they aren’t actually ads. Many wholesalers’ websites look like Site 3.

Some wholesale site designs are outsourced and/or designed by a marketing agency. Certain agencies will give you cookie-cutter sites, which will do relatively little to help you stand out from competitors that are also using those agencies. Some agencies will also keep ownership of the website, which traps their clients into sticking with them.

Despite these issues, we still recommend working with a professional website designer or digital marketing agency when possible. Not all marketing agencies’ website design programs are terrible. Some (like us) will customize businesses’ websites and continue to optimize them to improve conversion rates, as well as hand over site ownership to clients.

Design isn’t everything, either (although it is still very important). If you want to rank high on Google’s search engine result pages, you need to have a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, and what you build your website on can impact your ranking. You’ll need to ensure your website works well on mobile devices and is lightning-fast. If your website loads slowly and is difficult to navigate on a cell phone, Google is sure to keep you off of the first page of results.

A professionally built website will go a long way in making your business stand out and build your credibility.

OppGen can build a website for your business from the ground up. Contact us for more information.

 

4. Maintain Your Digital Presence

Wholesalers should have more than just a website; they should have several places they can be found online. Social media sites are a must if you’re to stand out, as is a Google My Business account. In terms of social media sites, LinkedIn and Facebook are the best ones to use in the wholesale real estate industry. YouTube is also a fantastic resource where you can upload and share videos about all sorts of industry topics.

You’ll want to ensure that your website and social media accounts share similar messaging. You don’t want to have the exact same message, but the tone and quality should be as consistent as possible. On your website, start writing blog posts about topics that are relevant to your industry and share them on your business’s social media accounts.

Ask house sellers you’ve bought from in the past for a testimonial and/or review. Testimonials and reviews can make a huge difference, and the higher the review average, the better. Higher reviews, particularly when compared to competitors with lower reviews, can be one of the final decision-makers for prospective sellers. If you receive a negative review, reply with an individualized response to that reviewer, not a copied and pasted response.

Being active on multiple platforms can help you market your wholesale real estate business in more places to reach new home sellers and different audiences. Click here to learn how OppGen Marketing can help you get started.

 

5. Expand Your Network

If you really want to stand out, you need to stay ahead of everyone else. This means you’ll want to know about homes going up for sale before anyone else does. The best way to have that knowledge is to have people in the know: a network.

Building and expanding your professional networking takes a lot of time and effort, but thanks to the internet, it’s a lot easier than it’s ever been. 

 

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the place for networking with professionals from just about every background. Naturally, wholesalers are no different and can be found there, too. LinkedIn makes it easy to find your fellow wholesalers but also to reach out to people in other industries that may be helpful in hunting down some home sellers. Specialize in foreclosed homes? Do some digging and find bank employees that specialize in housing loans. Connect with probate attorneys to see if anyone who recently inherited a property they don’t want.

If you’re running a national wholesale real estate company, you’ll have no problem networking with people all over the country. Have some cold call messages prepared for the people you want to connect with. It’ll take time to build up those connections, but it will be worth it.

 

Facebook Groups and Events

Facebook Groups are a digital location to have water cooler conversations. You’ll still discuss topics related to your business and share articles, but they tend to be a little more laid back. These groups can help you network in a slightly more casual manner, but you’ll still want to follow the groups’ rules and be professional. There’s a Facebook Group for just about anything, so you’ll have no problem finding one (and realistically, more) that’s ideal for your niche.

Some groups may host events from time to time, so if you’re in any local groups, it’s certainly to your benefit to attend these events. Check for wholesale real estate and real estate investor networking events every so often, too; not all groups have events, but there’s a good chance there are networking opportunities happening close to your backyard.

If there aren’t any Facebook Groups or Events pertaining to wholesale real estate or real estate investors, take initiative and start your own. Anyone can create and run a group or event, and it’s free. Plus, running a group or event shows that you are a local leader in the industry or are at least willing to start leading others.

Consider creating a webinar or seminar for people who are interested in wholesale real estate or for people just getting started. 

 

Meetup

Meetup is an app and website that can help you, well, meet up with groups of people who share similar interests, from book clubs to beer and wine aficionados. Of course, this also includes several networking opportunities, many of which include real estate investors and wholesalers.

If there are no local real estate investor or wholesale real estate groups, start a group on Meetup. However, it may be more beneficial to host an event, like a webinar, using Facebook first, as running a group on Meetup does incur a monthly expense. (Meetup is free for group members/general users.) Using Facebook’s free services is an easy way to gauge interest and to see if it’s worth investing in creating a Meetup group, too.

 

Wholesale Real Estate Industry Conferences and Expos

One of the best ways to network and market your wholesale real estate business is to attend conferences in-person. Though conferences do require a pretty solid investment of your time and money, they are worth it.

You’ll learn from and meet with some of the most successful wholesalers in the nation. You can learn about how they market their wholesale real estate businesses and try to apply those to your own tactics. You’ll see some previews of upcoming trends and changes in the industry before non-attendees do. You’ll make connections and expand your network and maybe even find a business partner. 

There are several conferences and expos: the National Association of Realtors Conference and Expo, Inman Connect events, and IMN conferences. And those are only a handful of what’s out there.

 

Wholesale Real Estate Mastermind Groups

More experienced and successful wholesalers should invest in being part of a real estate mastermind group. These are almost like conferences, except they’re smaller and require a hefty fee to gain entrance. Real estate mastermind groups can be found all over the country and tend to have high-level investors involved. If you’re making half a million or more a year, investing in these events can give you access to big-name investors and other successful wholesalers.

 

Start Standing Out in the Wholesale Real Estate Market Today

This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are always more tactics you can utilize to market your wholesale real estate business and make it stand out from the competition.

To discuss more wholesale real estate marketing tactics, contact us or fill out our free digital audit today.