So what you need to do is use both online and offline marketing to drive deals to you. Do your advertising and have those deals coming to you.

2. Investors don’t brand themselves. In other words they don’t come up with a company name that their customers are going to easily recognize. Every company in every other business I know brands themselves. You want an identity so that your customers can see you differently than your competition. In the real estate world it seems that everybody wants to be "we buy houses" and "I buy houses". That’s crazy, especially when you consider the fact that a consumer that doesn’t have any other means to make a decision will use brand familiarity to choose their vendor. So in other words, this is not just about real estate investing, this is about any market out there, if a customer has no way to discern a difference between one product and another product they use brand recognition to make a decision. Motivated sellers definitely fall into that. They have never ever had to be in this situation before, so they now don’t know how to pick an investor. They go out there and see all these signs I buy houses, we buy houses, sell your house in 5 days, stop foreclosure, but how do they select which one to call. If there is one person who has branded themselves, they’ll stand out against the others. That is the one that the motivated seller is going to call. Shouldn’t that be you? Shouldn’t you brand yourself and separate yourself out from the competition? 3. They waste time looking at houses they are never going to buy. I see investors drive all around town looking at houses listed in the paper or MLS. They look at fifty houses in the course of a month and they think wow look how productive I have been. The chances of buying any of those houses is very slim so you wind up wasting a lot of time. An idea I hear all the time is driving around and looking at preforeclosures and homes that are in foreclosure and knocking on the doors. That is just a methodology that I can’t stand because it is a big waste of time. I hear the teachers of that system saying well if you knock on 50 doors you’ll get one deal. And that deal is going to yield you let’s say $10,000 minimum. Wasn’t it worth your time to knock on 50 doors to make $10,000? When you look at it from that logic I understand it. My point is that there are much easier ways to locate those deals so why would I drive around and look at 50 different houses that I don’t think I want to buy. What I would rather do is have those leads coming to me and have a prequalification process. That’s what you need to do, prequalify your leads. If you are marketing and your leads are coming to you, then from your desk you are able to prequalify those leads and determine whether two things exist: 1. the caller or the owner of the property is actually motivated and 2. whether or not the numbers are actually going to work. If either of those things is not existent, then there is no deal there so why go out and see the house. Remember in this business we want to make it fun. We want to make it easy. And we want to make a lot of money and not waste a lot of our time. We want to be able to take our time in order to go have fun. 4. Investors don’t see their deals through the eyes of the potential buyer. They get so excited with the potential of the deal that they forget to look at it through the eyes of the buyer. For instance, let’s say you are looking at a wholesale deal. If I am looking at a wholesale deal, I might get excited because I got a motivated seller that really wants me to purchase their house and we got into negotiating and I got excited with the whole art of the deal and I negotiated something with them and they said yes and we wrote up the contract. But who is my buyer in this case? My buyer is an investor buyer and what are they looking for? They are looking for significant profit. And perhaps what I did here was follow a basic formula and say ok I put in there $15,000 in profit for my investor buyer so that should be enough. But did you look at the big picture. Maybe this is a $700,000 house. And you are asking them to come to the table with $700,000 and then do another $10,000 worth of renovation and they are going to make $15,000. That just doesn’t make sense. From their standpoint they are not going to want it. Let’s change it a little bit. Let’s say you are purchasing the property and you are going to sell it to an owner occupant. They are going to move in. Now are you looking at it from that person’s point of view? Are they going to want this house? Does it meet what a family is going to look for? For instance, are the bedrooms large enough? How does the yard look? Would a family be comfortable living here? If you are only looking at the potential profit of the deal, but not at whether your family would be happy living there then you are going to make a mistake. Common ones I have seen are the bedrooms being too small, the layout not working, or not a great surrounding area. You can’t just look at the numbers. You have to consider your potential buyers and what they will be looking at when they see the house. The best suggestion I have for this is just step back a moment when you are looking at a potential property and look at it through the eyes of a buyer. What are they going to see and how big of an issue is that going to be to them? Can that issue be overcome by price or more renovation? If so, have you allocated that into your formula so that you are buying at the right price to make a profit?

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