How To Get In Touch with Potential Buyers

by Neal & Cory Barnett

So you’ve got a pretty good handle on how to talk a bank into selling you a property for far less than its appraised value, and you’re really taking off in the short sales arena. It turns out you’ve got a real knack for presenting your case, and you’re beginning to think that this could really be BIG.

Now, to the next step: presenting your case to your buyers.

So far, it’s gone pretty well, but you’d like to step your operations up a notch. You’ve got a great product (those bad-for-banks deals are Great-for-Sales deals), but, like all motivated and successful people, you want more. More profit, more deals, more revenue, more of all the good things you’re starting to get a taste of except…more work.

You need to expand your reach and contact more potential buyers, but there’s only so much networking one person can do. You need to consider alternatives. We’ve established who wants to buy your houses, now let’s consider how to reach those buyers.

Clearly, you need to advertise.

1. Put an ad in the paper. If you are working mostly locally, you may have already placed an ad in your local paper soliciting information from homeowners facing foreclosure. However, did you put in a notice for investors looking to buy foreclosures at a big discount? They read the paper, too – much more avidly than most people who skim the classifieds! You may want to consider advertising in several papers, since many real estate investors’ operations are not confined to their immediate locale. (This may be a benefit you’re getting an idea of as well – thanks to technology, a lot of your work in short sales can be done just about anywhere)
   

2. Search the Web – and take notes. A lot of real estate investing happens largely or even entirely online. There may be local or national databases that you are not aware of, but you can bet savvy investors are. Make sure that you’re aware of all the resources at your disposal for advertising your property – remember, it’s in an investor’s best interest to be accessible to you just as it is in your best interest to be accessible to a distressed-home owner.
   
   Make sure you’ve covered all your bases. You might even want to set up your own page that you can refer potential buyers to; if they’re on top of things (and those are the buyers you really want) then they’ll check periodically to see what you’ve got going on.
   

3. Put up signs. Again, you probably did this in order to get in touch with the owners of the pre-foreclosures, but you’ll get immediate attention from professional investors and the uninitiated alike if you state your business (maybe…Homes For Sale For Thousands Less Than Appraised Value) on a sign just for them.
   

4. Keep Networking. It might be tempting to retreat into a multimedia shell and never come out, but you can never discount the value of you. To reach the heights you’ve set as your goals, you need to expand, but remember that your personal contacts can help you reach these goals as much as the unnamed masses that you’re now addressing.
   
   Keep in touch with people who’ve helped you – or bought from you – before, because it may be that they have an audience that you want to reach. You have a good product, so your buyers will be happy. And happy buyers come back.

Our names are Neal and Cory Barnett and we haven’t always made a lot of money. We are two brothers who came from a large family raised in a small town in beautiful North Carolina. We came from a family of factory workers and farmers because that was about all there was to choose from that far out in the country. TO find out more go to www.discovershortsales.com