The Key to Real Estate Success: A Marketing Plan by Ben Innes-Ker, IN Part 1

Five years after buying and giving back about fifty units and newly penniless, I discovered this thing called creative real estate. Control without ownership, solving people problems, use your brain to buy property - not your cash.

I had an acute appreciation for it, given my (expensive, and painful) landlording odyssey, but it seemed even with all this wonderful knowledge, I was still in very much the same position I had been in when I first got started.

The same position I stayed in, until I wised up, and the same position most real estate investors struggle with year after year because they don't know any better.

That is: "I know all this stuff inside and out. I know 100 different creative ways to buy a property. But I've got to suffer through things like lackluster advertising results, cold-calling, talking to hundreds of testy uninterested people, and dead ends before I even get the chance to talk to someone who is half way motivated to sell.

This is a crossroads--the proverbial "brick wall" for most of us. And this brings up an important point, possibly the most important point to really "get" here.
Knowing how to find motivated sellers is far more important than knowing 100 different ways to buy a house.
You see, your business (and therefore your life) is going to be frustrating, stressful, and unfulfilling unless you find a way to create a non-stop flow of motivated sellers calling you, every day. Now, that's obvious isn't it?

Well it can't be that obvious because not many people actually do it. You see, what I'm trying to point out is that there is a mental shift that needs to occur in your mind, a paradigm shift if you will, before you are going to make any serious money as a real estate entrepreneur. And what is this shift? It is:
Instead of being a real estate entrepreneur, you must become a marketer of your real estate business.
That's what it comes down to. If you are in business, you need to make this shift in your thinking. No business is going to prosper without a lot of customers. Making this shift in thinking about who you are focuses you on the singularly most important and financially rewarding aspect of business--marketing.
The money is in marketing the business, not in doing the business.
It may take a while before you really absorb this. You may have to think about it for a while before it really sinks in. Read it again. Once you change your thinking to accept that you are a marketer first and a real estate entrepreneur second, you'll finally be able to start making the kind of money you really want to make.

Accepting your role as a marketer is the thing that will move you out of the rut of occasional mediocre deals and up into a level of sustained success that would not otherwise be possible for you. And this is true of anyone in any other business or industry. The person or company who is most on top of their marketing, makes all the money and dominates their market.

Look at Domino's, a marketing machine! Very average pizza, but aggressive marketers, and they virtually own their market.

Look at Bill Gates. If you saw Accidental Empires, a PBS documentary by Robert Cringley, you'd know that Gates was just one of hundreds of fanatical "techies" who were trying to make this computer thing work. With his astute positioning and relentless marketing he rode Microsoft up over IBM to the $80 billion company it is today.

Of course, this doesn't mean you just market better and let your buying, negotiating, and selling skills go to pot. You've got to be the very best property buyer you can be and run your office well, too. After all, your sellers and buyers deserve the very best treatment from you. But more importantly, doing something so well that people can't resist telling others about you is the purest type of marketing in and of itself.

Remember, it doesn't matter how good you are if you have no motivated sellers to talk to. Buying houses from motivated sellers with little or no money out of your pocket is the name of the game; and marketing is the thing that brings in the motivated sellers.