What do I mean
by “Automatically Qualifying" Real Estate Leads?
I’ll explain in a second. First, however, you’ve got to understand that “screening and qualifying” of Buyers and Sellers is happening on many levels.
If you don’t want time wasters to call you, you must screen them out on several levels, starting from the classifieds.
1. The first level screening is done by your classified ads.
They have to see something in the ad that applies to them, or I don’t want them to call. You classified ads should have some qualifying sentences in them.
For instance, if you don’t want Buyers with less than $3,000 down, your ad should say:
“$3,000+ cash down payment required”.
If you want people who make $4,000/mo your ad must say:
“Minimum $4,000 income required to qualify”.
2. The second level of qualifying is done by the information on your real estate investor websites.
My websites’ addresses are plastered on all my newspaper classifieds, online ads, flyers, yard signs, etc. Besides I submitted my sites to all the major search engines.
I get visitors, both Buyers and Sellers to come to my websites. I have one for Buyers and another one for Sellers. While browsing my websites they read about my home buying and home selling programs.
A lot of them self-screen themselves out of the process right there, because they see that my programs don’t apply or can’t help them. As a result I never hear from them, never spend time on the phone with them.
3. The third level of qualifying is done by making them jump through a few hoops.
In my case, they have to fill out the applications (Buyers or Tenants) or Property Information Sheets (Sellers).
If they’re not willing to do it – are they really motivated enough for me to be interested in them? I don’t think so.
Doing business with motivated people is a piece of cake. Doing business with un-motivated prospects is a nightmare.
So far we’ve tested their motivation. Now, if they actually went through an effort to send us their information – we know they want to do something.
4. The fourth level of qualifying is done by evaluating their financial information.
It’s time to check if we can accept them. We can’t do business with every prospect.
Some Buyers don’t make enough money, have too much debt, can’t move quickly, etc.
Some Sellers owe too much or want too much for their home.
Some tenants have too big of a family to get approved for our rental units, etc.
Their information arrives to my e-mail box. I review it, pick and choose the best leads and follow up with them personally over the phone or over e-mail.
Think about it. By this stage, out of potentially 50 callers who’d want to inquire about a home for sale, I may have only ended up with 4-5 applications, with 1-2 of them looking pretty good, based on the criteria I have for accepting people.
You got to ask yourself a question:
“Are you better off talking only to those 2-3 pre-screened, pre-qualified leads, or do you want to take a chance and talk to all of the original 50 people who expressed a momentary desire to talk to you?
Just because on Saturday morning they happened to be drinking coffee at the donut shop, stumbled upon the newspaper and decided to scan real estate classifieds – isn’t a reason to spend hours of your valuable time on the phone with dozens of them.”
Do you believe they could have possibly taken anywhere close to the same amount of time to think about buying a home or selling a home – you did?
Common, you’re kidding yourself.
I answered this question for myself long time ago. I don’t want to hear from the other 48 un-screened, un-qualified candidates.
I could have easily spent 15-20 minutes on the phone with each of these 48 people answering their questions about my business, my programs, homes I have, pricing, payments, directions, how I buy homes, what my “standard discount” is, etc. --- without knowing if this caller has even remote interest or ability to buy what I have to offer or to sell me what I’m looking for.
Think about how much emotional energy it’d take me to go through that pile of sand to find one precious gem! I’d be emotionally drained just from all this phone work.
I don’t believe it’s worth it. My time and energy could be better spent on bringing more people to my websites, so I have more applications to choose from.
So, the big picture of automating your business with real estate investor websites is off-loading all the preliminary work of communicating with raw, untested, unproven prospects onto a carefully planned and designed website.
But that’s only the beginning… You can and should off-load much more on your automated marketing system. Let’s get down to little precious implementation details (and there’re a lot of them).
You too can master this craft, and free up 80% of your time!
