We currently have a list of 500 delinquent tax properties with suits filed, and found phone numbers for about 100. I am a little nervous about what to say to the owners when I call. I know they will have obvious questions like “how did you get my info?” and things like that. How should I start the convo to find out if they are interested in selling or not?What would you say?
Thanks in advance.
I’m going to assume you mean property taxes and after that I can’t assume anything. Might have a better idea if I know what state your talking about but I guess you don’t live in one or are ashamed of it.
In the states I’ve done business in the owners like to wait until the last possible moment to do anything.
My best luck has been calling the owner of record and not mentioning the problem but saying, “hi, I’m Brian are you Mr. Jones? (yes)Good, I think your the person I was trying to reach. I was looking for properties in the Oak-tree area and someone told me you own a property on Smith Street you may be interested in selling is that true?”
(I might be, what are you willing to pay?) Well Mr. Jones I can’t say without seeing it of course, and at this point I don’t even know which house on Smith Street it is, could you give me the house number? Great, I’ll drive by and take a look, tell me are you living there now…and keep digging but not to hard for info, keep it on a friendly basis. Of course I had already looked to see if it was something worth dealing with.
The deal making gets more serious on the follow up call." Hi Mr. Jones, this is Brian again, I got a chance to drive by your Smith Street property and of course I have a ton of questions you could help me out with, do have a few minutes?"
I tend to agree with Brian’s response. Just also keep in mind that you want to appear to help them more than appear to help yourself. You wanna keep the spotlight on the fact that your providing a service that looks to rid them of any debts and possibly avoid foreclosure. If it appears that way, it should result in a willingness to deal and more business.
Try to rate the properties. You can follow a rating system from a professional or make your own system.
I’m in Houston, Tx definitely not ashamed, but thanks a lot for the info. Trust me I will use it.
Thanks.
I’d send a “yellow letter” (to the houses that interest me) and let the sellers call me.
It is definitely a good idea to call the 100 that you have phone numbers for, but I wouldn’t make all those calls personally if I were you, unless you simply don’t have anything else to do or need the experience talking to sellers. I’d just hire a VA to do it. Give them a simple script similar to what Brian said, and have them get the vitals on the house. You can probably get a VA in the Phillipines to do this for 89-99c an hour. Check out odesk.com to find one.
But yeah, whether you call or not, I’d absolutely mail every house that interests me.
Champstar2727
I hope you know that location shot was in a teasing mode. That’s the trouble with written communication, you can’t see the smile or hear the tease. But I was serious about how helpful it would be to know a location because once in a while I have the knowledge for the specific area and can give a specific answer.
Now I don’t know about your area specifically but in California where I first started chasing delinquent tax property leads the majority of them were a waste of time because the penalties for non-payment were so low that tons of people used them a cheap loans, they weren’t having any problems of any kind, so I had to wade through hundreds to find one good one. That changed somewhat when they finally increased the penalties.