How to Build Your Buyers List

Mike: Welcome back to the flipnerd.com REI Classroom, where experts from across the real estate investing industry teach you quick lessons to take your business to the next level. And now, let’s meet today’s expert host.

Jim: Hey, everybody. I’m Jim Ingersoll. It’s good to see you. I’m host today for the REI Classroom and I’m going to talk about the power of building a big buyer’s list.

Mike: This REI Classroom real estate lesson is sponsored by uglyopportunities.com.

Jim: Now, first of all, if you’re wholesaling, you’re going to clean up in this market if you’re able to find great deals. This is a fantastic market to wholesale in because the deal finder is getting paid very, very well. But once you’ve got that deal, you’ve got to have the ability to quickly sell it or assign it and move it on to the other investors. So how do you build that buyer’s community? Get rid of the word “buyers list.” Go to buyer’s community.

You want to be the community manager for this entire thing, this entire buyers list. When I was wholesaling over 100 properties a year, I had a very large buyers list, and I built that one person at a time. And it’s important to know exactly what each buyer wants. They’re going to typically fall into a couple of categories. The landlord buyers and the flippers, right? And you’ve got to know which are which on your list so you could go out there and find the right properties for them. Personally, I like selling to landlords. They’re a little bit less picky, they just want cheap stuff, they don’t care as much about the schools and things like that. Their investment criteria is a little looser as long as it’s cheap. So get as many landlords on there as you can.

I was talking with Connor Steinbrook in Dallas, Texas just last week, and I asked him, I said, “Connor, how did you build your buyers list over 3,000 people?” He said, “It was easy.” He said, “Jim, you taught me that my network is my net worth. So I went out there and I networked and I built my entire buyers list, one on one relationships with people that I met.” He said, “I went to the REI investment clubs.” He said, “I actually spoke there. I networked there. And then what I did too, Jim,” he said, “I went out to every auction at the courthouse in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for a period of time And all these people would show up to buy a house and only one person would walk away with that property.” He said everyone else there received his business card. He added them to his list, one at a time, and he did all of that just by networking, to over 3000 people.

Now, here’s another great way. It’s the way I built my list, which was online. Personally, I like to use the Carrot Group, with Trevor Mauch and the guys over there are phenomenal. They have really high converting websites for both finding motivated sellers and building your list. So, I’ve got my own suite of Carrot sites. I work them. They work very, very, well. I’ve got good SEO on them and it’s very easy that way for me to go out there and collect people’s email, and then have a follow-up sequence with them, and then mail through MailChimp, or however else you’re going to mail them, and find out what they want, where they want it, what they’re willing to pay and how.

Here’s the last thing I’m going to leave you on buyers list today, and that’s landlords. I mentioned earlier, landlords are a powerful part of your list. They’re going to buy from you over, and over, and over, and over, and you want them out there doing that, sort of, like buying an oil well. They’re going to keep on pumping, keep on pumping deals, and they don’t have time to go out there and find them. So, how do you find landlords? Well, look for the rundown, crappy looking, “for rent” signs as you’re driving for dollars.

But beyond that, you can also go to Craigslist, you go to Zillow, look for the mom and pop type landlords, give them a call, ask them what they’re buying, and what they . . . maybe they’ll . . . maybe somebody to sell to you as well. And the last website, which people don’t normally talk about, is gosection8.com. Go on to there, pull up your local area, whether you’re in Raleigh, North Carolina, or San Jose, California, or somewhere in between, gosection8.com, figure out what those landlords that are renting houses may want to buy next, or you make pick up a deal that way as well. I’m Jim Ingersoll with the REI Classroom. That’s the power of building your buyers community.

Mike: HomeVestors, the “We Buy Ugly Houses” folks, is a franchised system of hundreds of real estate investors that have purchased over 65,000 houses. If you’d like to learn more about the most powerful real estate investing system in existence, whether you’re a pro looking to take your business to the next level or whether you have no experience at all, but a burning passion to be successful in real estate investing, please visit flipnerd.com/ugly to learn more.

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