Pre-Screening Sellers For Your Real Estate Investing Business – Part 1

I strongly believe that pre-screening sellers is one of the most important tasks you will undertake in your real estate investing business. The more quickly you learn to pre-screen prospects, the more money you will make in your Real Estate Investing business. This article is focused on teaching you how to tell a good deal from a time waster in 30 seconds or less.

If you don’t learn to pre-screen prospects quickly and efficiently, you will get burned out of the real estate investing business by working with sellers who won’t sell you their house, no matter what you say. Your job as a real estate investor is to very quickly determine the difference between a prospect and a “suspect”, meaning someone who needs to sell versus someone who just wants to sell their property.

People who just want to sell will either reject you immediately (don’t take this to heart, it just helps you move on quicker) or they will jerk your chain with a bunch of excuses as to why they won’t sell to you. Don’t waste your time with these folks!!

I know from first hand experience that motivated sellers will make themselves known to you quickly and they are a whole lot more fun to work with. Their attitude is more like “Please take my house off my hands…..now!” They are usually pretty easy to identify once you ask the right questions.

This is why I suggest using a specific letter when you are mailing to these sellers and a specific telephone script when speaking to motivated and non-motivated sellers. The answers to the questions you need to ask will very quickly identify for you whether you are working with a motivated seller or a time waster. And if you did your direct mail campaigns correctly in the first place, you usually have most of the information from these sellers already in order to make that determination. So that just removes one more obstacle for you.

When speaking with sellers, don’t worry too much about being perfect. In fact, if you are not “perfect” or totally professional, you are probably more likely to build a better rapport with a motivated seller. They are much less likely to feel like they are being taken advantage of, even when they aren’t. So relax and enjoy your conversations with these motivated sellers.

When you are working with a truly motivated seller, they will hang on your every word and do pretty much whatever you need them to do in order to get the deal done. They will be glad you came into their lives in order to relieve them of the stress the property is causing them and they are counting on you to help them out of their current situation. This is your job as a real estate investor.

Remember, usually you will be contacting a seller who has already contacted you in another way, such as responding to a direct mail piece you may have sent them or some type of advertising you have implemented. If the seller contacts you first, you are much more likely to make a better deal.

As a Real Estate Investor, when you do speak to a motivated seller, make sure to take plenty of good notes so you don’t have to try to remember what they told you later. It will be important for you to have all the facts when you get to the point of actually structuring the deal.

In my next article I will discuss the basics to determining whether or not a seller is truly motivated. In the meantime, feel free to visit my website at www.marketingmagiclady.com to check out all of the products I have available for finding and following up with motivated sellers.

I also have a wonderful product to help you called “Kathy Kennebrook’s Magic Seller Conversations” which is a group of recorded conversations with both motivated and non-motivated sellers to help you learn to quickly pre-screen sellers. I actually analyze each deal for you to show you the specific reasons why I did or didn’t buy the property. This is an incredible tool for the Real Estate Investor just starting out or the seasoned investor looking for a really effective training tool for your business.