Catering To Sellers’ Needs: Going Beyond Motivation
By JD Esajian on June 18, 2014
In the world of real estate investing, time is your biggest asset. How you spend your day and the types of deals you work on will either bring you success or get you tied up in knots. If you spend hours every day working on deals that will never close, you will end up missing out on other opportunities that can come your way. Much is said about working with motivated sellers, but sometimes motivation is not enough. Many distressed sellers are certainly motivated to improve their situation, but fail to take any action. In evaluating if a seller is serious or not, you should want them to act with desperation instead of simply having motivation.
Within the first few minutes of talking to a seller, you should find out exactly why they are considering selling. There could be a number of reasons ranging from money to foreclosure to relocation. In addition to finding out why, you should find out when they want to sell. Many times you will find out how the rest of the transaction will go just by asking these two questions. If they are selling strictly to make a profit, they may have a set number in mind that will get them to sell. You should be able to extract this number rather quickly and either move forward or move on to the next deal. The quicker you know if they want an unrealistic number, the quicker you can find other deals to work on and save yourself some time. You can always revisit the seller a few weeks or a few months down the road, but if you want to maximize your time and your business, you need to know when to move on.
There will be times when the seller will need to act based on a foreclosure or another specified date. Even though these dates are in place, they are far from etched in stone. Anyone who has worked on a short sale or foreclosure over the past few years knows that these dates can easily get extended and changed. If you base your business on closing a deal in May to get the property on the market and sold by the end of summer, you may not be dealing in reality. You have to see when your seller realistically wants to and will move out. There are times when they want to stay until the end of a school year or until a specific holiday comes. If you stress the importance of being up front with these dates, you can help them with the process of finding somewhere else to live. If you can nail down a specific date, it will help you organize your business and continue the flow of deals coming in and out.
Motivation is good in theory, but many people are motivated to do things and rarely act. In regards to every seller you work with, you need to figure out just how desperate they are and what they require to sell. If not, you will find yourself wasting time on deals that will never close.