I keep hearing about how hard it is to sell houses today, or to even get people to come out and look at them. The vast majority of these complaints come from completely passive people with no selling experience or skills who either don’t list their properties and try to sell them without paying a real estate commission; hoping that a sign and a few cheap ads will get their house sold; or from those who list the house with a Broker and sit back to await results. Real estate can be a very lucrative business for passive investors and owners during a boom, but it takes imagination and a lot of energy to make money when sales slow. Certainly, you can buy houses for a lot less money and with creative financing, but unless you can sell that same house, you’re going to run out of money and credit pretty fast. You’ve also got to find a way to produce qualified buyers who can pay back your investment and produce a profit for you.
I first entered real estate as a real estate salesman and a Broker. I was inordinately successful because I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to work hard at what I did. So I found my listings first by identifying neighborhoods where the houses had originally been sold with FHA and VA financing, then by cold-canvassing every house in these neighborhoods twice a year.
This boiled down to my walking every street, looking at every house, leaving a flyer on every door, and calling back in the evening to see if anyone had read my flyer and was interested in selling their house, or knew someone who might have been interested. At one point, when I had 36 listings with irate owners calling me several times a week to complain because their house hadn’t been shown, I decided to change my tactics.
Continued next time.
