Pre-Foreclosures can be very profitable to list. I like them. This is an area that if you put in a certain amount of time, then you will get out a certain amount of income in return. You can put in a lot of time trying to list REOs or do a bunch of BPOs, and might end without any new listings. That is why I like listing Pre-Foreclosures. They pay off fast, and are motivated sellers.
The biggest reason a Pre-Foreclosure won’t list with you is because they want to stay in the home. You will get the listing if you happen to be the person in front of them when they do decide to sell. There are so many Pre-Foreclosures out there, and enough of them are deciding to sell at different times that it makes sense to contact them. I have found that anywhere from 10-20% are open to listing at any given time.
Here in Florida the foreclosure process takes 4-6 months, and sometimes as much as a year. I haven’t seen a foreclosure case go faster than 4 months. When I first stared, I got a list of homeowners in foreclosure and started mailing and calling them. I was surprised at how easy it was to list these properties.
Alex Brown called me from a letter I sent him in the mail. I spent over two days writing and re-writing that letter. He called me, I listed the house, and it sold a few months later. The interesting thing is that he was calling me to reduce the price. This was before I knew the importance of price reductions. Another Pre-Foreclosure I listed and sold was Frank McCombs.
Whenever I drive to or from work I will stop by and knock on the door of a foreclosure, expired, or other lead. I knocked on his door because his house was in foreclosure. He didn’t want to sell his house, but he put his mother’s 10 acres on the market. His parents lived with him, and they were going to give him the money to catch up on the payments of his house. We priced the 10 acres very competitively and it sold two weeks later to a buyer off of Realtor.com.
Here is what I have found works best to list the foreclosures. I mail them one week, call them a few days later, and then mail and call again. I got started listing these properties in 2006, when the market first started to slow down. Sellers were reluctant to reduce their price. I had listing of two side by side vacant 5 acre lots that the seller wouldn’t even answer my calls about reducing the price. I knew that I had to find sellers more reasonable and willing to price their home to sell
Got questions about short sales? Just ask. Sign up for daily tips at:
http://www.shortsaleagentadvocate.com
Ben & Chris Curry The Short Sale Agent's Advocate
Comments(0)