Thread: Marketing system to find short sale sellers

I want to tell you about something that has worked very well for me in terms of finding motivated short sale sellers. I sort of stumbled upon it by accident however i do believe this could potentially be very effective for those who are aggressive and willing to go out there and get business. I thought i would share this because i cant possibly come close to servicing all the homeowners in my County much less one or two high NOD zip codes.

First i was able to find a great source for NOD data. The data was extremely detailed and included everything about the homeowner as well as the property..homeowner name,..lender, original loan amount, transfers, NOD dates, delinquent amount, home data(beds baths etc) , approximate value, equity position etc etc.

So what i did was get homes that were from .25 to .5 radius from my own home. Even affluent zip codes are fine, you just go a little further out radius wise. The number of records were about 30 homes in a .25 radius from my house.

What i did then was on evenings and weekends i went directly to the doors of these homes. I would knock on the door...and when somebody answered male or female i would ask "Are you Mr or Mrs Jones"?...when they said yes i would say......hello my name is Mike and im from (Real Estate Company) and im here regarding your loan with (Washington Mutual)......I was wondering if you would be intrested in lowering your existing intrest rate?" Most of the time they said sure..........and/or proceeded to explain to me their story regarding their home.

At this point i would begin to assess what their needs were....did they want to stay in the home etc.....Then i would go over their options....loan modification, Short Sale etc...... and if they would like to see if they qualify for a loan modification. Most of the time at this point they invited me in. At their kitchen table i would do an intake of their income and expenses and tell them i would be back in contact.After that I gave the data to a loan modification company that i really trust who have completed several loan modifications of my clients including my own loan mod. I then told the homewoners I would be back in touch and get their phone numbers.

I repeated the process to the next homeowner and the next etc. What i found was that 50% of the people wont be able to qualify for a loan modification for various reasons- no income ...expenses to high...etc. Consequently they would eventually become short sales.

The result from the 30 homes was the following

10 homes.........nobody in the home.....vacant

3 homes listed for sale already(though it was interesting to see that the fidicuiary duty of agents was neglected in that 2 of these people would qualify for under the Obama Plan yet ther agents told them their only option was to sell)

7 homes Tenant Occupied- i was careful not to let them know their landlord was in trouble but in sure some of them figured it out.

2 homeowners werent intrested..and felt they had it under control

3 homes the owner were convinced they would be able to do their own loan modifications with their lenders. I asked them if i could continue to stay in touch with them to make sure things work out(lord knows there lender may do nothing)

5 listings obtained by me over the course of 2 months.......the "follow up" was critical because as i stayed in contact with these people i was able to earn their trust over this time as i educated them on their options and let logic and reason take over for the homeowners as they realized they are better off getting their home "short sold" rather than foreclosure or "walking away"

2 Loan Modifications were approved by the loan mod company i trust)consequently I made the commission

The point is that 7 out of 30 is a high conversion rate. Granted i still have to "close" the short sales, but all of them have offers on them and i already have lender approval on 2.

The great thing about this was that most of the homeowners were very happy to see me and were thankful i was there to give them options. Sure i do have a good background on the loan modification process as well as the short sale process, but thats something that can be easily learned if you attend the right seminars or webinars

In a supposed bad market im making lemonade out of lemons. If you are aggressive enough you can do the same thing! Good luck!