How To Ask Sellers The Right Questions On Your First Day Of Making Offers

Joe: In this video I’m going to show you how to ask sellers the right questions on your very first day of making offers. This is just sort of a cheat sheet for anyone who’s making offers and needs to make sure they get the right questions answered. And this is also something that you can give to a telemarketer if you hire to deal with your leads and they can ask all the questions and then all you have to do is go in and do the close on the leads that are most qualified

Joe: If you go into the CRM in the Automarketer, and let’s just take one of these leads here and you look at the, look at the lead properties it’ll start with, there’s no properties here, and you can add a property. If you add a property it’ll ask you to name that property. And I’ve got a, I added a test property here, so I’ve just called it Test. And if I go to this Test, it opens up a questionnaire. This questionnaire gives you access to a lot of really great information. First of all, it tells you to fill in the information, it tells you what you need to do. It also gives you the different things that have happened in this particular timeline, the different messages they’ve received, the different phone calls you’ve made to them, the different notes that you’ve made, whether or not they’re in the follow up system, and you can scroll down this section here and you can read all about that or you can type in a date range and find it there as well, or you can search for a key word. You can also search for it by the type, if whether it’s a call or a note or whatever, you can find notes within this section.

Joe: Then you can scroll down here and this is a place where you can upload property images so if you take pictures or they send you pictures you can upload them and keep them in the system with the property. This is going to be your property sheet, so all the questionnaire information is going to be here and all the information about the property is going to be on this page and you can keep it all in one place that way.

Joe: But if you scroll down to this, this actually has dialogue that you can use if you’re brand new at this, or if you’ve got a telemarketer who’s doing it, “Hey, I’m Joe. You responded to my email about, or my text about selling your house rent to buy. I’m an investor and I’d like to make you an offer. We buy homes a couple of different ways.” And it goes in through this text and it allows you to start asking them questions.

Joe: Now, you’re going to want to get their information, their contact information. You’re going to want to get the address of the property for sale. And one of the things we’ve added for this property for sale information is it allows you to verify these addresses and then get more information about them. Let me type in real quick and address of a property that I know about and we’ll verify and then I’ll show you the different types of details that you can get for that property. All I typed in real quickly was the address and the zip code and then click here to verify property address.

Joe: And it goes into the database and looks for that address through a Google database. And it also finds it on the map. So now I can find it easily on a map alone. I can also save my progress so I don’t lose this information. If they live at this property then I can apply these changes so that it shows up up here. If I already have written on in here and I want to apply it down here I can copy it from up there. So it gives me this information and makes it all very quick to access it.

Joe: Now, the other thing that this does, once I log this information in, I can pull it up on Google Maps. So I pull this up, it actually opens up a new window on Google Maps and now I can see a picture of the property in question which is pretty cool. And of course, you know, you’ve all used Google Maps before, so you can look up and down the street and you can find out more about it. And you can find out where it’s at in the town that you’re in. So, it’ll give you a better idea about where these properties are. So it makes you look a little bit more intelligent and a little bit more aware of the neighbors, the neighborhood that you’re working in. So that’s the Google Map.

Joe: But it also has a way to link into Zillow. And Zillow pulls up another map and it shows the address, it shows bedrooms and baths on it, it gives you the Zestimate, so that’s the guess that Google has on its value. It gives you information about the property, the square footage and when it was built, what they think the rent is going to be, the Zestimate on the rent. These are all really handy pieces of information if you’ve never been into Zillow. This is really nice to have. Also, down below, you can get other information. You can get tax, history on the property, you can get which school system it’s in and you can also find similar homes for sale to start looking at comps. So Zillow’s a really nice thing to be able to open up. Google Maps, you can open up, and you can also open up Rent-o-Meter and you can see what Rent-o-Meter says on the estimate for their rent as well. So this suddenly puts you into a great place with this process to give you a pretty good idea of what’s possible.

Joe: There’s another button on here called “Selling Options” and if you open this up this is all the options that you have for selling this property, or that the seller has for selling these properties. If they continue to sell it For Sale By Owner, here’s the brief explanation, but you can also open this up and you can see the pros and the cons of selling it For Sale By Owner. You can see the analysis of why you might want to do it. And you can almost read this stuff to them as you go. Because remember, one of the things that you’re going to help them with is to understand exactly what their options are so that they can pick the best option. Maybe it makes sense for them to continue selling it For Sale By Owner. Maybe it makes sense for them to sell it with a real estate agent. This shows what it means if they sell it with a real estate agent, what it’s going to cost. They show the pros and cons of it. And it gives it a little bit of an analysis so that you can appear intelligent about this particular option, even if you’re not an agent. You want them to know what their options are because often the type of offer that we make is going to be the best option for them.

Joe: It also shows them how to do a fire sale or a short sale or doing subject to, land contracts, and lease options because these are all the options that these people have. And if you understand what these are and you read through them and you become conversant with them, you’ll be able to speak intelligently to your sellers.

Joe: Now, before you pull up this selling options section, you probably want to ask the rest of the questions, or at least have your telemarketer do it. So you want to find out how much they want for the property, how much they think it’s worth. How did you come up with the price? You want to find out if they are just guessing or if they’re using comps, or if a realtor told them or if they’re using a Zestimate. You want to have a pretty good idea of where that value came from so you can know whether or not they’re being realistic. You want to know how much they think it’ll rent for. You’ve got the Zestimate if you go to the Zillow window, on the rent, but you’d like to see what they have to say. You want to know whether it’s vacant or not, does it need repairs? And if it needs repairs, how much is that going to cost?

Joe: And you want to know how long they’ve owned it because that’ll give you a pretty good idea of what they still owe on it. And of course as you go you want to continue to save your progress. Do you have a mortgage on the property, yes or no? How much is the balance on that mortgage? What’s the payment amount? Usually we’re asking for a PITI, principal, interest, taxes and insurance. How many years left on the pay off and what’s your interest rate? All these things are valuable. And, also, is there a second mortgage on the property? Are the currents on time? If they are, or are they late, because this’ll affect the way you can make the offer on it.

Joe: Why are you selling? What is their level of motivation? Why are they trying to sell it or what are they trying to accomplish? How can you help them accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish? Do you have to sell it or would you consider keeping it? Again, it’s a motivation question. And, also, you’re helping them understand whether or not they want to keep it or not. And if they don’t, they’ve got to start thinking about what they’re going to do if they’re trying to sell it For Sale By Owner, because we know that For Sale By Owners, 85% to 95% of them don’t succeed. Which means they either have to take it off the market, sell it with a realtor, or do some other option which is a thing that we’re going to suggest.

Joe: Are you moving out of the area, and where, and how soon do you have to move? And then this goes into some other things, other questions that you can ask to find out if they’re willing to do lease option, or if they’re willing to sell it on terms. And it gives you an opportunity or your telemarketer an opportunity to schedule a call. So if you’re brand new at this, sometimes it’s nice to do this two-step process because it gives you time to get off the phone, or, you know, look at their situation and try to determine, okay, what’s the best offer I can make them that would make sense for me to make me a profit and still solve their problem and be able to think through it clearly.

Joe: Because when you’re just getting started sometimes it’s hard to think on your feet. So being able to do it this way, it sometimes is easier and certainly it’s easier if you have a telemarketer who’s doing it for you who doesn’t have the kind of closing skill that you’re going to have to develop in order to be able to work with these folks.

Joe: So I’m not going to spend time reading through all this right now, but this takes them through a dialogue process to qualify them so that if they’re working for you as a telemarketer, you’re going to know whether or not these are real leads or not. And then down below we’ve got information down here where you can put the bedrooms and baths. Eventually we’re going to try to set this up so a lot of this is populated for you directly from Zillow. It’s not in that situation yet. So you can add all these details here and put additional comments and then you can save it.

Joe: And then what you can do is email this data to the accountant holder, that’s you, or the person who signed up for the Automarketer, and it’s going to put all this information into an email and send it directly to the account holder which is a really handy thing to be able to do. That way you can, they can send you a hot lead immediately and you can follow up on it.

Joe: So the beauty of this system is that anybody can start with this and almost on your first day you can start asking the right questions so that you can do a proper analysis of their deal and then be able to make them an offer based on the zero down structures that I teach. And it doesn’t have to be just the For Rent Method, doesn’t have to be just lease options. It can be subject to, multi-mortgage, land contract, assignable cash offers or lease options. So you’ve got a lot of different zero down structures that you can work with if you understand the structures. And this lead sheet will give you all the information you need in order to make any of those offers.