Marketing to Landlords

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. This is Jim Ingersol with the REI Classroom again and I’m going to talk to you about a really relevant topic today and that’s marketing to landlords.

Mike: This REI classroom real-estate lesson is sponsored by UglyOpportunities.com.

Jim: Now, when you’re thinking about marketing to landlords, you’re probably thinking about the traditional marketing, reaching out for burned out landlords, but I’m going to also talk to you about building your buyers list with landlords and I’m going to show you how to do marketing to do both of those really at the same time. I’m going to give you four specific, maybe five specific steps that you can take today so be sure you’ve got a pen and are ready to take some notes.

The first one is I want you to go to a website called GoSection8.com. And 8 is the number. It goes G-O-S-E-C-T-I-O-N 8.com. This is where landlords hang out online that are looking for tenants to fill their Section 8 property. And if you go into your area where you’re in, say you’re in Houston Texas, drill down and you’ll see all of the properties listed by landlords in Houston, Texas. And many of these are mom and pop type landlords that have two, three, four houses that they’re looking to rent and they’ve got a vacancy.

So they post on there looking for their Section 8 tenant, but what’s really cool is all of their contact information is totally public. So you can reach out to them, you can email them, you can call them and just say, “Hey, I see you’ve got this property for rent in this area of Houston, Texas,” or wherever you’re at, “would you be interested in selling it rather than renting it?” And just see what they say.

Now, if they come back to you and they say, “No, I love renting it,” which I do, it’s what I would say, you could say, “Well, do you have any other property you would like to buy in the next few months?” See that way, you’ve covered both the sell and the buy together. If they say no to you, that they don’t want to sell, ask them if they want to buy. And if they want to buy, add them to your buyers list. See how easy this is?

All right. Number two. When you’re driving around town and you’re doing your driving for dollars, everyone is taught to look for the boarded-up, vacant house, high grass, no shoveling of the snow or whatever it is to show that it is vacant and run-down. It’s a hot mess of a house. While you’re also looking around for that hot mess of a house, take a look for “For rent” signs. I have bought so many houses from calling people on “for rent” signs, it would make your head spin. All you do is give them a call and say, “I saw your ‘for rent’ sign. It’s obviously a non-performing asset at this point. Do you have any interest in selling it?”

This works especially good if the house that you’ve noticed has been vacant for more than 30 or 60 days. It’s just sitting there, they probably can’t get a quality tenant because the house needs a lot of work and it needs to be sold to an investor.

All right. Another one is to just go to Craigslist or maybe Zillow, zero in on the housing and then look for the houses that are for rent. And again, just reach out and call those landlords on the phone, send them an email, and say, “Hey, I see your house is for rent. Do you have any interest in selling it to me? I’m an investor.”

Now, another clever way that you can reach out to a whole bunch of landlords at the same time is to use a service such as VoiceShot.com. And what you can do is you can load in a whole bunch of phone numbers from your newspaper, Craigslist, Zillow, wherever you want. Load in about 50 of those phone numbers into their site. Pre-record a message, it will drop a voicemail into their phone system and you will be shocked at how fast your phone starts ringing back to you.

So that’s three or four ways that I’ve given you today, I’m going to give you one last one. This works amazingly well. Go to your online tax records. Do a search for owner name. Now, you may not know the owners name of who owns the rentals in your market, wherever you’re at in LA or San Diego or wherever. But here’s what you can do. You can do a search for a partial string of characters. So type in the words invest, type in the word renovation, type in the word LLC, and you’re going to start seeing a whole ton of people in your market that own big groups of property.

From there, you’re going to want to go to either your State Corporation Commission website, search down, get their contact, or go to a site like TLO.com and do a skip trace, get their phone number, give them a call. You’ll be surprised you can pick up a package of 5, 10, 15 houses doing this method. You can do that today and all of it is free. I’m Jim Ingersol with the REI Classroom. Thanks for tuning in.

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