Finding Motivated Sellers: A Key To Goal Setting For Real Estate Investors


by James Orr - Date: 2007-01-14 - Word Count: 937 Share This!

If you are a real estate investor or considering becoming one, you know (or soon will know) that real estate investing is all about finding truly great deals and that starts with motivated sellers.

So, why does it surprise people when I speak on goal setting that I spend a lot of time on goal setting regarding motivated sellers. If you need motivated sellers, to achieve most if not all of your other goals, then doesn't it make sense to focus on the motivated seller part of your goals, at least at the beginning?

Anyone looking at my portfolio of audio CDs and courses will quickly find a pattern; over half of the titles are about finding motivated sellers. Why is that? Let's think about it.

Let's say you have a goal to make $10,000 per month from owning rental property. To find rental property that will give you excellent cash flow, you need to buy the houses that have strong rents and try to buy them as inexpensively as possible. How do you buy houses inexpensively? You need to find sellers who have a reason to trade you equity they have in their house for a solution to their problem.

The cheaper you can buy the house, the more cash flow you can generate from the house and the quicker and more safely you can achieve your goal of generating $10,000 in rental income. Try buying houses for full price and generating rental income from them quickly. In all but a few markets, it is very difficult to do (if not impossible).

But wait! You say your goal is to generate income from wholesaling property... you do not need to generate cash flow as a rental. Well, motivated sellers are even more important to you.

Have you ever tried to put a house under contract with a un-motivated (read that as inflexible) seller? It can be tough. If you are trying to put a house under contract so that you can wholesale it to another investor for a 4 or 5 figure payday, you NEED to accomplish two things:

1. Make the deal very attractive to the investor you are wholesaling it to (low price, great terms or both) 2. Gain control of the house so that you can "show it around" without risk of losing it

I am suggesting that you need motivated sellers--sellers with a need to sell--to be able to buy houses at a discount or who will allow you to put the house under contract with a 30 or 60 day closing period so that you have time to find your buyer.

Motivated sellers should be the key to your real estate goal setting. So, do you believe me? Great, so here are 3 tips about motivated seller goal setting.

Tip #1: Motivated Seller Quality Comes From Quantity

While you may have goals about converting x number of potential sellers to actual sellers, you need to realize that you need to sift and sort through lots of sellers to find truly motivated ones. The chance of you finding a motivated seller after talking to half a dozen sellers is pretty low. Even with super marketing materials and a wide range of what I can work with, we typically need to go through about 10 sellers to find 1 that is motivated enough that we can make the deal work.

Tip #2: Write Down A Specific Number And Track It Daily

"My goal is to talk to a lot of motivated sellers." Utter nonsense. You need to have a specific number to talk to in a specific period of time and track the results daily.

"My goal is to talk to 50 motivated sellers each month." Getting better. Each day you need to see if you are on track to achieving your goal of talking to 50 motivated sellers that month. If not, you need to ramp up your marketing to get more motivated sellers calling.

On our Real Estate Investor Database (the ULTIMATE contact and business management tool for Real Estate Investors), we have a little graph at the top of almost every page that shows you the "goal line" for the number of motivated sellers you need to reach your goal and where you are. If you are not meeting, the goal it shows up red. If you have met your goal for the day, it is green.

Tip #3: It Is Far Better To Sift and Sort

If you've have tried to make a marginal deal work and found out the hard way that it can cost you large amounts of time, money and energy you might start getting more selective in your deals. Here's some good advice that I received from several of my mentors:

"Don't try to make a marginal deal work, go find a better deal."

If you have 10, 20 or 30 sellers calling in every week, it is a lot easier to say no to a property that you are not 100% sure of... maybe the value of the property is questionable. Maybe you do not like the looks of the condition of the roof. Maybe you don't trust what the seller is telling you. When you have dozens of other sellers to talk to, it is much easier to say, "I am going to pass" and move on.

By the way, you'd be surprised at how much better the deal gets when you really do walk away and they come back to you a week, month or several months later.

So, as you begin to set your goals, keep in mind that while other goals are important, the most critical and key goal for real estate investors is the goal you set for motivated sellers.


Related Tags: goal setting, real estate investing, real estate investor, motivated sellers, flipping, finding deals

James Orr is a professional real estate investor and marketer. To get more information about the LearnToBeRich.com Affiliate Program and James Orr's marketing blog with a plan for affiliates, check out:

http://RuthlessAccountability.com

Your Article Search Directory : Find in Articles

© The article above is copyrighted by it's author. You're allowed to distribute this work according to the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.
 

Recent articles in this category:



Most viewed articles in this category: