As a real estate investor it can sometimes be tough to find motivated sellers. Increasing competition, declining home values and a soft lending market make it tough on investors.
With thousands of layoffs being announced and a dismal economic forecast locating motivated sellers is like taking candy from a baby. In the end, there simply is not. How do you track them down?
I found that an excellent way to find motivated sellers is on the internet. If you look around even a little you’ll find plenty of services offering motivate seller lead lists. I’m talking about an online presence that the owner controls and has exclusive access to. Basically, a motivated lead funnel, or website, that you own.
How do you put an enterprise like this into action? It starts with an excellent web presence. It should demonstrate that you are a serious buyer and know how to solve their problem. It should illustrate that you have solved dilemmas for other motivated sellers. You’ll want to use convincing copy writing techniques to convince your visitors to want to contact you. It should contain avenues for them to submit their property details and contact information to you.
Firstly, design an excellent looking site designed to persuade your visitors or hire it out. As an alternative, you can get a free or low-cost template to modify. Creating a design from scratch or modifying an existing template will take some HTML and other coding skills. Unless you have a brother-in-law in the business you must have to have capital to hire someone. You should put a dollar amount to your time and choose whether it’s worth it. Should you allow yourself to make $20 per hour to create the solution yourself? Do you have time on your hands and not much money?
Convincing testimonials should also be included. If you’ve been using any sort of credibility kit when you meet with sellers just transfer it online. Video testimonials are very persuasive if you can get them. Additionally, streaming audio of customer testimonials works great. Nothing is more persuasive than a happy customer.
Use convincing sales copy to prod your visitors to complete your online forms. It’s no secret that Dan Kennedy is a great person to emulate when writing your copy. He’s head and shoulders above the rest for writing copy. Get his book for some great ideas, The Ultimate Sales Letter, and pour through it. Be certain to write your copy with a compelling call to action at the end of each page.
Last but not least be sure to liberally place lead generators. These are online forms that your visitors complete. The fields on the forms will capture important property and contact information. You’ll want to store the data so some additional database work will need to be completed to tie the form fields to the database.
Once the website is up and running the last item to check off is getting visitors to it. A great way to do this is to advertise using Yahoo Search Marketing. This can be accomplished with paid advertising or SEO to gain top rankings. You may find you’ll need to change up your copy a bit after you start getting visitors. If you’re not getting as many leads as you would expect simply tweak your copy and/or rearrange the layout and test. Increasing your conversions can be accomplished by using squeeze and landing pages.
With a good overal web solution and effective PPC and SEO campaigns you’ll be receiving the motivated sellers you need to increase your bottom line.
