Hey Moguls, JP Moses here…
I’ve been in real estate investing for almost 15 years, and in that time I’ve learned a heck of a lot about this business. For some of you who might be struggling in the area of getting buyers to work with you, I have a few tips, because I know what it takes to get deals snapped up.
Capture the Mindshare
One of the things that you need is to be able to capture the mindshare of your buyers.
Mindshare is: When they think of a certain category, your name pops into their mind immediately.
Let’s think of an illustration. What if I were to ask you to name several brands of toilet paper – the first ones that come to mind? Even though there may be 30 or more brands…most people can only come up with about five at the most. This is because your mind has only captured the mindshare for a certain number of top positions in any given category.
Now try this on several other products and see what happens. Try products such as toothpaste or frozen pizza. The ones that come to mind represent the mindshare of that product.
Being in the top Three
Can you see that what’s needed here? The brand of your business – or you, personally, if you are your business – needs to come to the mind of your cash buyers.
If someone asked them to name the first wholesalers who come to mind, think how powerful it would be if you were in the top three. This means you have captured the top of their mindshare.
While all of this sounds great, I see mistakes that many wholesalers make that, instead of building the mindshare, actually destroy the mindshare. These mistakes can reduce credibility and cause you to be ignored by buyers.
What I want to do in this lesson is give you a hand up in your ability to capture the mindshare of your buyers. When you do this, you’ll be closing more deals and making more money.
Top Three Reasons why Buyers may be Ignoring you
1. Too Spammy
Take a minute and assess your marketing campaigns – whether it’s personal voicemail blasts, voice broadcasts, text messages, emails, or even the flyers you take to your local REIA meeting – take a close look. If your marketing approach smells like Dan Kennedy, chances are you’re going to turn a lot of buyers off.
In my experience, most legitimate cash buyers just want a no-nonsense person who can give them a no-nonsense snapshot of any given deal. Yes, you want to be descriptive, but cash buyers don’t need you to gush on and on in your audio, or use tons of bold, italics, exclamation points, and yellow highlighters in your print copy.
These marketing techniques might work once or twice, but they will not work on a consistent basis. When overdone, it will produce what is known as marketing blindness.
Think about when you go to a blog site and it has banner ads at the top – the first time or two, you might pay attention to them. After that, it’s like you don’t even see them. They might as well not be there at all. They lose all impact. This is not the response you’re after.
What you want is to come off as a “real person” rather than a slick marketer. The more real you seem and the less like a marketer, the more effective you will be. You are more apt to get their attention – and their mindshare.
The art here is learning to be an effective marketer without seeming to be a marketer. You will find this balance by being the average Joe in all your different marketing campaigns.
2. You’re Offering Marginal Deals
This is a mistake I often see with beginning wholesalers.
Let me illustrate this by sharing something I learned from my friend Robert Norton. Bob wholesales houses to the tune of six-figures a month. He often works with one of the top REO brokers in Detroit. One day when I was in the company of the two of them, I asked the broker this question:
“What does it take for an investor to have credibility with you?”
His answer:
“You have to give me the one thing I want most. And that is to close.”
This successful broker then added, “When you put a contract on a property, then you go to closing and you actually buy that property, you now have my attention. That spells credibility to me.”
Now let’s apply that concept to your cash buyers. The quickest way to earn their trust and respect is to be known for providing what they want the most – and that is smoking deals. Can you be the source for those deals?
If instead, you’re a source of marginal deals – ones that are good only for a few newbie buyers – your bigger players will smell that and shy away. If you do happen to have a few marginal deals, take a tip and don’t offer them to your big players.
Put them out there on Craigslist, or direct mail them to the general cash buyers, but don’t even think about bothering your favorite five with them. If you keep sending marginal deals their way, sooner or later they’ll stop paying attention to you.
3. You’re Offering Recycled Deals
Recycled deals are the deals that can be found on every other wholesaler’s list. This will kill your credibility. You look like a typical newbie who’s scratching for your next dollar. Believe me, this is not the image you want to portray.
Let me be clear on this – there’s nothing wrong with co-wholesaling.
It’s a great practice and I do it. But you don’t want to toss out there any and every property that you come across from other wholesalers on your inventory list. If buyers look on your list and see a deal that they saw just last week on another investor’s list, then all you’re doing is remarketing other people’s deals.
If you’re going to co-wholesale, make sure you are doing it individually, without adding it to your inventory list. Especially if it’s on other people’s inventory lists.
Extra Tips
There you have it – the three main reasons that buyers may be ignoring you. And here are a couple of extra tips…
Be as personal and as real as you can. If you leave a voice blast, talk directly to that person. There are a couple of different services out there that let you talk directly to that individual’s voicemail. Try something like this:
“Hey, it’s JP here. I’ve got a property under contract at 123 Main Street and I thought of you. Before I market it to my mass mailing list, I wanted to run it by you 24 hours in advance to see if you’re interested. Otherwise, in 24 hours I’m going to go ahead and broadcast it to the masses.”
This sounds very real and very personal.
Also try to be memorable. Humor can work in this area. Oftentimes humor can break the ice and make the interaction more lively and fun. If you have a natural propensity to make people laugh, use that to your advantage.
Personal and memorable can help win the deal!
Holla at us
Did you find these tips helpful? Have you changed the way you do wholesales because of this info, and you were successful in a deal because of it? We wanna hear about it in the comments section below.
Stop being spammy; instead be real.
Stop adding marginal deals to your inventory list.
Avoid recycle deals.