if they call and you start grilling them w/ your 30 questions you are going to sound like a time life operator.
people don’t want to be asked by someone they don’t know from adam things like " how much is your mortgage balance", “what are your payments” etc.
dangle a carrot out there to get them talking about their situation, then zip your lips and listen.
you should be more interested in their “situation” and less in loan balances, payments, etc. at the onset.
in the initial contact the less you talk and the more they talk, the better.
BP
I have just sent out my first direct mail campaign to absentee owners with houses tax assessed at the county median price and lower. I am starting to recieve calls from my letter.
Now I have a list of thirty or so questions that some are answering such as property info, mortgage info, motivation and so on.
The houses in my target area I intend to wholesale to other investors.
What sould I be looking for before returning calls.
Eric - although good advice from before you still need to get enough information to see if the house is worth seeing. Three good ones to ask are - ASK - ARV - OWE. ASK-What are you asking for the property? ARV-How much is it worth if it were to be appraised? (ARV =After Repaired Value)& OWE-How much is owed on the property? Of course you will want to soften it up and be polite, but if they give you static about these questions chances are they are looking for all cash at full price. If your intent is to wholesale, you want to make sure that the investor you are going to try to sell it to can buy it from you, do the repairs and still be close to or under 70% loan to value. This means that you will want to apply the following formula to your purchases: (Appraised Value x 70%) - repairs = Your MAXIMUM offer. Of course you will want to start well below this figure as your investors will not pay more than it. So if you have a house worth $100k and it needs $20k in work you should buy it for or below $45k. This gives you a $5k profit on the wholesale to the investor. ($100k x 70%) - $20k = $50k You will get investors crawling for this at $50k so you will want YOUR purchase price to be $45k or below. You sell it for $50k and take the $5k to Vegas and put it all on black. Hey -easy come easy go.