One Tried and True Method To Get Motivated Sellers Calling You Today!

One Tried and True Method To Get Motivated Sellers Calling You Today!

You’ve been to the seminars, you’ve got the books and tapes, you’ve spent hours at your real estate investment club, and you’ve listened in on all those conference calls. You have never been more ready to buy!

You’re ready to take all of the knowledge that is stored up inside your head and turn it into a pot of gold. And that’s what it will turn into if you could just get one thing…some one to sell you their house!

There is one sure fired, tried and true method to get your phone ringing and put you on the road to closing your next deal and that is …SIGNS.

Before you think to yourself “I know all about signs…” read further and find out how signs have become a corner stone of our successful marketing plan.

I’ve done over 450 rehabs in just over 6 years. 200 for myself and 250 for lending institutions. Of all of the rehabs that I have done for myself, almost ½ of the sellers came from signs. Not just one type of sign, but a variety.

At the seminars that I teach on how to systemize your real estate investing business using checklists, forms and contracts, I show the class copies of a $231,000 check, a $181,000 check and $104,000 check that I received at three different closings.

The sellers of all three of these houses called from our signs.

When ever we get slow and need a couple of houses to buy, we go out and put up 30 – 50 signs and wait for the calls to start coming in. And come in they do. Sometimes before we even get back to the office (since the telephone number on the signs go directly to my cell phone).

There are many different types of signs to use. The most popular and probably the most effective are the telephone pole signs or the signs that you stick in the ground. We put them on telephone poles at major intersections, on highway off ramps and outside Home Depot stores (that’s how I got the $231,000 check).

We use 12”x18” signs made out of corraplast. We use a yellow backing with red letters. They are large enough to see and small enough so that they do not bend in the wind. We nail them in with roofing nails and we put them high enough so that you can not reach them with out a step ladder.

All of our signs say the same thing

We Buy Houses
CASH
Fast Closings
1-800-555-5555
1-555-555-5555

We make the word “cash” stand out big, to grab people’s attention. Then we make sure that the telephone numbers are big also, so that they can write them down. A lot of people make the mistake of writing the telephone number small. Why? I don’t know, other than grabbing the persons attention, it’s the second most important part of the message.

We use two phone numbers. An 800 number so that it doesn’t cost the seller to call us, thus taking down a potential barrier of sale. We put up the second local number so that people know that we are “locals” and that we are not some out of state or national company. Remember, people want to deal with people who are just like them.

Don’t stop at telephone pole signs. Put signs on your vehicles. We’ve bought several houses off of our vehicle signs. Sometimes people beep at us and pull us over. We recently bought a house from a woman who waited out on her front porch for one of our trucks to come by because she was used to seeing it go by at a certain time of day.

She was upset because we hadn’t been by in a few days and she wanted to sell her house!

Not only do we put the signs on our vehicles but we ask the contractors who work for us to put them on their vehicles as well. This is a win/win situation because the more houses we buy, the more work they will get.

The truck signs are also yellow with red letters and say the same thing that our telephone signs say.

We have a smaller version of our sign that is a peel and stick. They are 6”x6” and we stick them onto the door of any house that looks abandoned. Of course sometimes they are not abandoned and we do not know this until we get a call from an irate homeowner! This is why we only peel off a corner to stick it to the door, its very uncomfortable trying to peel off an entire sticker when an angry homeowner is staring you down!

Regardless of the risk, these little peel and stick signs work very well for us.

When ever we buy a property, the first thing that we do to it is install a 2’x3’ yard sign, letting every passing car know that “We Buy Houses”. We’ve gotten a lot of good deals this way and the best part about it is that our city ordinance allow it.

We have had trouble with the competition stealing our signs, so what we do now is take a metal chicken wire fence post, insert it into a 5 gallon bucket of concrete and let it dry.

We then attach a 2’x3’ piece of plywood to the fence post and nail one of our signs to each side. Then we bury the concrete bucket in the front yard. We have yet to lose one of these signs!

We also have a 20’ banner that we do a number of things with. Sometimes we will drape it off the porch of a house. Other times we will hang it off a truck while it sits all day on a job site. I have gone to an overpass on the highway during rush hour and hung it over the side.

Being bright yellow with red letters, it attracts a lot of attention and makes the phone ring!

So if you want to get motivated sellers to start calling you today. Get out there and get some signs up. If you’re to embarrassed to do it, pay the neighborhood kid to do it for you. However you do it, do it…signs work! But they only work if they are seen!

by David Lindahl