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Here is the blueprint or checklist we use. We buy houses nationwide and sell our house in days in a new market with zero buyers. So, you don’t need a massive real estate cash buyer’s list to get started in real estate wholesaling. But it is good business to build a list of real estate cash buyers to market your properties to more people, which will lead to more offers, and get your houses sold faster and possibly a bidding war. For us, we use these 34 ways to build a large cash buyer’s list. We let our cash buyer’s list know that we also are looking to buy more houses to keep as rentals or for renovation projects. So for me, my cash buyer’s list is also a lead source to buy houses. There are three ways to build a list: online, offline and in person. First, How to Capture Cash Buyer Leads Online First well start with online ways to build a real estate cash buyer’s list 24/7. There are two ways to capture leads online for your buyers list.
Lead capturing website is a standard website with a form that captures information. You can capture a lot of information on your real estate cash buyers or you can capture name and email. Years ago when I was wholesaling in the Philadelphia market only, I wanted to know more about my cash buyer’s list so I captured as much information as possible. An example is the picture below.  For all this information I gave way a free report for the buyer. I asked for all this information to better understand my cash buyer’s list and segment it. I did not want to spam people with wholesale houses if they did not buy in that area. At the top of the long form investor webpage (not shown) I have a 2 minute video that has me being interviewed with a realtor to add credibility to me. It also has another call to action message to sign up for my real estate cash buyer’s list. Another example is more of a short form. This is what I use for my nationwide wholesale deals website. I ask for their name, email, phone number, and what states they buy houses. I segment my real estate cash buyer’s list by state. I do this so a buyer will not receive emails from me in states they do not buy houses.  The second way to capture leads online for your real estate cash buyers list is a Squeeze page with an Irresistible Offer. A Squeeze Page is a website that is one page and a person fills out their information and they receive something in return for providing their contact information. A cash buyer has to enter their name and email to get a free report or watch a video (Irresistible Offer) and they’ll be added to an email list. Once the real estate cash buyer submits their contact info, they will be redirected to another website to gain access. If your offer is a Free Report then it needs a powerful headline. Example: The secret to buying houses 40-60% below Fair Market Value. A video would need an attention grabbing headline and description as well. You can purchase easy to develop websites (squeeze page and traditional websites) for a reasonable price. You will also have to pay monthly or annual fees for hosting or to use their tools (such as web development). There are tons of companies out there to use. Search some or talk with people to learn which company they recommend. You will also need to register your domain (www.XYZ.com). Online Ways to Find Real Estate Cash Buyers Now that you know you need a website to easily capture data and create a cash buyer’s list, how do you drive people to your lead capturing website? (1) Podcasts: if you are already a real estate investor get on other real estate podcasts. Direct people to your website or create your own podcast. This will create exposure and add credibility to your marketing. (2) Videos or Blogs: create videos and blogs based on keywords that people search (example “investment property for sale”). At the end of your article or video the call to action should be to join your cash buyer’s list. (3) Real Estate Forums: You can find real estate cash buyers on BiggerPockets and other real estate investor forums. In BiggerPockets Marketplace you can create ads for cash buyers. You can network and connect with other real estate investors and add them to your cash buyers list or have them sign up via your website. You can post your wholesale property deals on these real estate forums as well. (4) Social Media: You can find real estate cash buyers on Facebook and LinkedIn. You can contact them and add them to your cash buyers list or have them sign up via your website. You can post your wholesale deals and rehabbed homes for sale on all your social media sites. Start off by briefly introducing yourself to the group or to an individual. Ask the real estate investor where they invest, what they buy, what type of investor are they, etc. Then ask them to join your buyers list.
(8) Post Ads on Craigslist: You can post ads for cash home buyers in the real estate services and real estate wanted sections of Craigslist. You want to use the same marketing techniques I teach (5 M’s of marketing) when posting Craigslist ads to sell your houses. (9) Search on Craigslist: You can search for real estate cash buyers on Craigslist in the sections: real estate wanted, real estate services, real estate for sale by owner. Gather their contact information and once you have a property you can contact the cash buyer. (10) Post Your Houses for Sale: The best way to build your cash buyer’s list online is if you post a great house deal on Craigslist (real estate for sale section), Zillow, Facebook marketplace, and real estate forms. If it is a deal then the cash buyers will be calling you!! Get all of their info and add them to your cash buyer’s list. Also, you can create a call to action in your ad to have them sign up for your cash buyer’s list to be notified of future deals, if this house is not for them. (11) Google: search for common investor keywords, then pick up the phone and call them or enter their contact info into your database. So for example, run a Google search for:
(12) GoSection.com: this is where landlords list their Section 8 properties for rent. Search in your city or county and you will have a list of properties with a person's name and phone number. Call these people and ask if they are interested in purchasing your property for sale and add them to your cash buyer’s list. (13) Google Adwords (Pay Per Click): Google’s PPC marketing can absolutely be one of the most effective and fastest ways to get your offer in front of people online. But it can also cost you a lot of money if you’re not careful. Take the time to educate yourself and some trial and error to have success with Google AdWords. So first you will need to learn how Google AdWords work. There is plenty of free and paid training online. Determine the keywords phrase and geographical area you want your paid ad to show up for. You need a good headline and subheadline to capture someone’s attention. Once they click, they will go to your lead capture website where they can sign up for your real estate cash buyer’s list. (14) Facebook Ads: Well like Google, Facebook ads are Pay Per Click, but one of the biggest benefits Facebook has over Google is how granular and specific you can get drilling into specific types of people with your ad. There is location specific and interest specific. Location specific is for example people within a 10 mile radius of you. Interest specific searches if someone likes real estate investing books or part of a specific Facebook group. You need a good headline and subheadline to capture someone’s attention. Once they click, they will go to your lead capture website where they can sign up for your real estate cash buyer’s list. MLS: You need to have access to the MLS or have a real estate agent who’ll work with you. Two ways to find cash buyers on the MLS. (15) First, when running comps on properties, for the properties that sold for cash copy the address and paste into a file. Later you can look up the address and find the entity or person and if their mailing address is different than the subject property that is most like a real estate cash buyer. (16) Second, check out the recent cash sales in your area. Search all solds in the last 6-12 months where the financing type was “cash”. If they are not owner occupants (mailing address is different from the property address), then they are real estate cash buyers. If you see multiple cash buys these are obviously the big time real estate investors. (17) HUD Home Store: www.hudhomestore.com is a place we and other real estate investors bid on HUD houses to buy. However, if you select Bid Results you can sort by Purchaser Type = INV. These are real estate investors. Gather the property address in each investor sale into a spreadsheet. Then check the property address in public records to get the investor’s name and mailing address. This may take a few weeks or months after the sale, for the county website to show the new deed with the new investor owner. That wraps up online marketing for cash buyers. Next we’ll cover offline marketing to build your cash buyer’s list. Offline Ways to Find Real Estate Cash Buyers The second way to build a cash buyer’s list is via offline marketing. Let’s learn some offline marketing techniques to increase your buyer’s list. (18) Local Radio or TV Ads: I don’t do this but I know people that have and it works. My radio equivalent is Podcast shows. Me and Paul have been on some shows with many listeners. After the show they called or emailed us after the Podcast. (19) Newspaper or newsletter advertisements: posting an add in a local newspaper or a local REIAs newsletter are good ways to find buyers especially if you are in a rural market. You can also sponsor a REIA event or a meetup group. (20) Mailing List: You can purchase different lists such as out of area owners or cash buyers. Then you mail a letter or postcard to recent cash buyers or out of area owners with multiple properties in an area. You can mail them a property you have for sale or let them know you have future house deals coming. When marketing your current property for sale make sure you tell people to join your cash buyer’s list. Below is an example from one of my postcards. I actually get a ton of cash buyers this way…they might not want my house I am selling now but they are interested in future houses I will have.  (21) Driving for Buyers: If you are driving around and see a dumpster and contractor trucks on a property then take the address down and check online if an investor recently bought the house.
(22) Post Bandit Signs: When you have a property under contract, placing signs on the property and in the neighborhood of the property will always get your phone ringing. Some of the calls will be new cash buyers. (23) Call Bandit Signs: if you are driving around call the other “We Buy Houses” bandit signs. Most will be real estate wholesalers, but some will wholesale and actually buy houses. In Person Ways to Find Real Estate Cash Buyers You learned online and offline marketing ways to increase your cash buyer’s list, now let’s learn strategic networking. So How do you find cash buyers in person to add to your buyers list? (24) Local REIA: You can attend local REIAs to network with other real estate investors. So join your local REIA. If you need to find where one is in your area, Google REIA and your area. A list will come up. There is a broad spectrum of investors at the main meetings. You’ll meet people that have never done a deal to people that have been real estate investing for 40+ years. I have bought and sold houses with people from my local REIAs. Before you attend any networking event I recommend you have goals. For example “I want to meet at least 7 active cash buyers tonight and add them to my list”. With anything in business you need goals. If you have experience in real estate investing and a good story that can educate people, ask to speak at a REIA main event or a subgroup. That will get you a lot of exposure quickly. (25) MeetUp.com: There are other real estate meetings in your area as well. I used meetup.com to find them. Just search real estate investing in your city and you find other meetings to attend as well. Since I am nationwide, I won’t be in person but I call people and introduce myself. In addition to real estate meetings, look to network with other industry professionals:
(29) Closing Attorney or Title Company: contact the title companies you use and see if they have any cash buyer clients that would be interested in your wholesale property. (30) For Rent Ads: I mentioned GoSection8 earlier and this is the same tactic. Look in newspapers, Craigslit, Facebook Marketplace, etc. for properties that are for rent. Call these people and ask if they are interested in purchasing your property for sale and add them to your cash buyer’s list. (31) Auctions: Each month or quarter your local county will have Sheriff Sales and annually or semi-annual they will have Tax Sales. A sheriff's sale is a public auction sale of property held by the sheriff pursuant to a writ (or a court order) of execution to seize and sell the property and to satisfy (aka pay) a judgment, after notice to the public. The highest bidder is required to immediately submit ten percent of the winning bid while at the auction. The rest of the money must be paid to the Sheriff's Office no later than thirty days following the auction. If the money is not paid, the house/property will be auctioned off at the next sale. Go to these local auctions and look for the players (or people actually bidding) and find out where they buy and what they buy. (32) Join Mastermind or coaching groups: Me and Paul wholesale nationwide we join invitation only mastermind groups. We pay $5,000 to $25,000+ to join one but it pays for itself quickly. We have a great real estate network of buyers across the country through mastermind groups. (33) Hard Money Lenders: They advertise at local networking events, real estate newsletters, or just Google search Hard Money Lenders and your area. Call them or email them with your wholesale property. They will have cash buyer clients that will be interested. (34) Local Real Estate Agents: This is easier to do if you purchased your wholesale property already and still haven’t found a buyer. Have your virtual assistant find all the local real estate agents and their contact information. Then you can email them your property for sale and tell them you will pay 2-3% commission if they have a buyer. So this is how I find cash buyers nationwide and in new markets all the time. Which of these methods do you use? Is there any that I missed? If so let me know. To watch a video on article, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DZPBbu2I50
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Today I want to talk about virtual wholesaling. This is a really hot topic right now in real estate investing and it started getting attention in 2016-2017. We have been virtual wholesaling since 2009, so we have been doing this for a while. Technology has really changed and helped us do more. Technology is continuing to change for the better and that allows us to analyze and buy houses easier.
If you want to learn how to start getting into virtual real estate investing and you are a beginner in real estate investing you are probably thinking “How do I do this? How do I invest in property when I'm in Texas and I'm buying property in Nevada?” In order to really get a good idea of a real estate market, there are basic things you can do online. There are good resources. Zillow is the best real estate website out there right now. Another good real estate website is Redfin. Redfin will give you good data. If you want to pay for some data, Realtytrac will give you some good real estate data. There are other good companies to purchase real estate data out there as well. What you are looking to do is find out what type of real estate market the area is. For example, what the demographics are? Is the real estate market a good area for buy-and-hold properties, or is the real estate market good for fix and flips? Personally we like real estate markets that are a combination of both homeowners and renters. St Louis for example as a pretty good real estate market where you're going to have rental properties. Properties the cash flow. You will also have properties that you can fix and flip and make profits. One of the reasons we like those types of real estate markets better is because we're going to have a bigger pool of home buyers. Which means you can market to real estate investors that fix and flip properties and real estate investors who buy and hold properties. You will have potentially twice the amount of home buyers, than you would if you were in a market like Phoenix Arizona where not many people are buying cash flow properties. Investors in Phoenix are looking for appreciation, so they're going to fix and flip in that real estate market. Tucson Arizona you can cash flow properties. Otherwise a real estate market like Phoenix you're not really going to be able to buy cash flow rental properties. St Louis, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Detroit Michigan and many midwest cities some you will be able to buy cash flow rental properties. This is important when you are first looking to get into a new real estate market, to have as many potential cash buyers as possible. Everybody is worried about not having boots-on-the-ground. If you're doing a direct mail to get potential homeowners to sell to you, you will probably need to have someone local. Otherwise you will have a lower closing rate if you only try to have a homeowner sell you a house over the phone. However, if you want to get into virtual wholesaling where you don't need boots on the ground, you can buy property from MLS in different real estate markets, bank REOs and auction properties. We can teach you how to buy at online auctions at REO Auction Academy. If you want to have boots on the ground in a real estate market then you need to have or make contacts or maybe have relatives in a certain market where you can start investing there. This would allow you to do direct mail to homeowners. However, direct mail will have costs. For example, if you're trying to market in St. Louis, you may have to spend $3,000 to $5,000 a month in direct mail marketing in order to get your first property. It will take anywhere from two to six months in all likelihood for you to get your first property under contract. Since it takes time, it's really that fourth touch, that fourth letter that the homeowner receives that the homeowner reaches out to you. If you are like me, I don't have the patience for that. I really don't want to wait four to six months, so I would buy off the MLS and auctions. That would be the way I would get into real estate. Then I know I can get a property probably under contract in 30 to 60 days. Potentially have my first deal pretty quickly and have no marketing cost for buying a house. The only marketing cost I might have is on the resale of a property with marketing it to cash buyers in that real estate market. To resell the property that's going to be your marketing costs and that's not going to be very much. You're probably talking about $500 or under. There are plenty of free ways to sell a house. You can create a listing on Craigslist which is a great source and Zillow. You could do a flat fee MLS listing. So if you buy a house on the MLS for $79,000 and you bought the house for $42,000, you get it under contract and purchase the house. Then you can re-listed on the MLS again for maybe $59,000 and you will make a quick wholesale spread. That is what we do, we buy in several real estate markets where we don't have as much competition. It takes longer to sell some of these properties and the banks are willing to take bigger reductions in price in order to get rid of the property. We sometimes invest in these rural areas and we have a different disposition model than anybody else. MLS is one way to sell a house but in these different real estate markets in rural areas where you have aging populations there are other ways to market your house for sale and to get your phone ring as compared to just listed on Zillow or Trulia. Most older people aren't on Zillow or Redfin looking for properties. So if you want to learn more about how to do this we could teach you at REO auction Academy. We created a YouTube videos on this topic at https://youtu.be/9BcEfXhE3Co. Today we're going to talk about closing a virtual wholesale deal. As I mention in other blog posts a lot of people are really interested in Virtual wholesaling. It is my favorite part of the business far and away. Now I do fix and flips in my local real estate market and buy and holds (rental properties) and I do buy and holds in other markets (out of state investing) but my favorite real estate deals are virtual wholesaling. There's nothing that gives me Greater Joy than that.
So what you're going to end up needing to do is to contact your title company when you get your property under contract. Let say you live in Pennsylvania and you are selling real estate in Casper Wyoming. You are not going to fly to Wyoming and spend $1,500 flight plus your hotel stay plus your Uber or rental car fees so you're not going to want to do that. You contact the title company and let them know this is an email closing. The title company will email you the documents and you are going to print the documents out. Then you are going to take the real estate documents to your local bank. Your local bank will notarize the documents for you for free or whatever bank that you bank with...have your checking accounts with. They'll take care of it. Other alternatives are the UPS store but just warn you they charge $8 per page that is notarized. Some title companies might want 10 pages notarized so that will become expensive. I would avoid those places. You can go to a local notary as they will be far less expensive but your bank is your best option. There is almost always a notary in a bank. Next you will have to open up a FedEx, USPS, or UPS account so you can overnight the real estate documents. I used them all. I prefer UPS and FedEx because they guarantee delivery. They get there quicker but know that there's sometimes delays. I have had weather delays. I sent real estate documents out to Spokane Washington for a real estate closing. It goes into Western Washington and then they got to drive over to eastern Washington but they had fog so that delayed the time to get there and the closing was delayed a day. Assume you will have settlement on the 17th. Try to get the title company to get you all the documents by the 14th or 15th at the latest. You can get them signed, get them notarized and overnight it. The real estate documents will be at the title company by the 16th so they're all prepared and have everything for 17th. Make sure you follow up with the title company. Use the tracking number and you could see what the status is of the delivery of the real estate documents. You will not attend real estate closing, so let your title company and buyer now that you are not local. Many times buyers don’t go to the closing either. The buyer just wires the funds and signs the documents before closing. Most of the time there is not much to notarize on their end. This is how a virtual wholesale closing works. It is pretty quick and simple. There is no point in attending a settlement (closing) when buying properties out of your area. It will cut into your profit margin and waste your time traveling. The beauty of this business is your learning how to buy houses from your bedroom. If you enjoyed this article, I created a video on this topic as well. https://youtu.be/ILioQ1uRAYM Hello and Welcome to our blog.
Paul and Michael buy and sell real estate virtually all over the United States! Virtual real estate investing couldn't be easier with today's technology. We have transitioned from a single market fix and flip investors to virtual real estate investors that are willing to buy anywhere in the country! We will cover virtual wholesaling, virtual rentals (out of state), renovation projects, owner financing, private lending, and more. We even interview some of the biggest players in real estate to find out what lessons they have learned along the way and what made them successful. We primarily buy via county auctions, online auctions, off the MLS, and from real estate wholesalers. Look for two new Real Estate Investing blog posts every week! |
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