Help Finding Motivated Sellers

What is the best way to find motivated sellers in your wholesales business. I have heard marketing to absentee owners, probates, bandit signs, and FSBO listings. I am wondering what is the best way to do each of these techniques. Some have said aggregate mail over personal letters. Some have said hand made bandit signs over pre-made signs. Thank you for your input!!

They all work. You really should do at least 3 different things at once. Your business should always have more then one way to get wholesale leads. But to answer your question, signs worked the best for me. But when the city got all over my case it forced to to do other things to get my wholesale deals done. Good luck.

I am a newbie and I just started a 20 dollar marketing compaign by using the expired listings on the mls. I sent out 47 letters and got 20 back frm vacant houses and got 6-7 offers so far in less than 2 weeks. Im pretty proud of myself!

nice job robdedgar!

One other way is to call the for rent ads. These can be either seasoned or newbie landlords both of which get motivated to sell quickly if you make them an offer.

My best lead generator besides using bandit signs is mailing to rent court landlords.
Once the newbie landlords get a few licks from their “professional tenants”, they can’t wait to unload their properties. :biggrin

target preforeclosures-people who have defaulted on their mortgage but are not in the foreclosure process yet

All these methods work.

The difference is that you have to have several going at the same time.

I’ve even had a mailing campaign targeting people behind on their car payments. Why? Next is the house!

Using this method, you caught sellers 3-4 months ahead of the game and were able to establish a rapport.

Think in terms of reverse engineering: what causes foreclosure?
Find these tell tale signs and create your own lists that no one has.

Works for me.

Dennis

Dennis, how do you get people that are behind car payments to mail them after? those seem to be great future leads.

You will need to research the court records. Usually it shows an Abstract of Judgment from an auto finance company.

that’s a trigger to let you know that there are bigger things on the way.
Remember it usually goes this way: behind on credit cards, then car, then house

Dennis

I’m a newbie, and have also had difficulty finding motivated sellers. I tried a direct marketing campaign in which I mailed 100 letters to homeowners in pre-foreclosure, I have posted 100 bandit signs in my target areas, I have gone knocking door to door on the weekends (no one is ever home!), I have e-mailed real estate agents on websites like Trulia.com, and I have posted ads on Craigslist. I don’t get it!

I have only gotten 2 motivated sellers in about 8 months, and even thoughs deals don’t seem to be working out because the homeowners aren’t getting me the paperwork I need. Can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? My market is NYC (Queens) and Long Island. Could it be that NY is just too tough a market? Please help.

What’s the $20 marketing campaign and how is it working? :question