Competitive Home Market – Tips

In a competitive home market, it’s all about relationships and the number of offers you make. The more offers you make, the more homes you will buy. Figure you’re going to buy 1 home for every 35 offers you make. This will keep your expectations real.

Here are a few simple tips:

• Set up your offer making templates on your computer. Get your system down so that you can produce a contract in seconds. Have it set up so that you only have to fill in the variables; Seller’s Name, Address, Legal Description, etc…Everything else is boiler plate. Carry a boiler plate copy with you at all times. Don’t worry that you may have to handwrite to fill in the blanks. A contract is a contract…just make sure you write clearly.

• Get great relationships going with 2 or 3 highly motivated realtors in your area. One will rise to the top. It never fails.New and aggressive agents tend to be the most willing to make the number of offers you’re going to be making. Take as much work as you can off your agent. Don’t require them to drive to every property. Write the contracts for them. Offer to do the MLS searches yourself if they’ll teach you how. Your agent may even share their PIN# with you so you can gain access on your own.It’s not that I don’t want your agent to earn their money, it’s that I want YOU to be independent and to be able to change realtors at will. You will move through Realtors over the months and years.

•  Forming a “relationship” means having lunches with them, attending sporting events, or inviting them to holiday parties; a real relationship. Whenever you find properties that are already listed…drag them in on the deal as an extra added bonus. You were going to pay 6% anyway, so get your  realtor team 3% of that money.

• Find young, eager “wannabe” investors to help you find houses. Pay them to drive, address, stamp, mail, search MLS, shotgun offers…$8/hr. They get paid to learn RE investing.What a deal for them! The chances of any of them buying anything for themselves in the first 2 years are almost zero. The odds aren’t much better after that. Emphasis on “young” (don’t believe they can find money) and “wannabe” (a talker, not a doer). You can train them with pride…and they’ll never do anything but help you find deals.

• I personally like to get off the beaten path. In San Antonio I can find about 100 vacant houses in an 8 hour day of driving around. I like dealing with individuals as apposed to realtors and banks.This is where the real deals are made in my opinion. Real people have real problems and they have to be solved in real time frames with real money real fast.

• This is the climate you need to make some really, really good deals. Banks and institutions are not under such pressures. The government owned properties are surely not in a hurry to cut their losses…it’s your money they are wasting so they don’t give a hoot how bad the house gets or how long it sits.person your dealing with doesn’t give a dang either…it isn’t their house!

• Mail letters to the taxpayers of record. The ones that come back “Return To Sender” are the diamonds in the rough. If you can find those owners you stand a good chance of making a deal. The harder the tax owner is to find, the better deal you stand to make. Why? Well it’s not all that complicated…you have no competition. No one else is making this hermit an offer!

• Talk to the neighbors. If you read my book you already know a sure fire way to find the owner of abandon houses almost every time for $1.If you don’t know what I’m talking about then go to www.1000Houses.com and think about buying my book. This little piece of advice is too good to give away.

• Be interested in everyone who contacts you. Get VERY INTERESTED in the ones that don’t contact you!

• I buy a lot of average deals through Realtors and the MLS. I buy good deals from realtors that I have relationships with and who tell me about houses before they hit the market. I make great deals from people that don’t have the time to say the word Realtor.  Back-Pressure on a deal is your best find. Learn to smell Back-Pressure. Almost 100% of my owner financed acquisitions have been deals that had no Realtor involved.