Successful foreclosure investing requires more than simply locating properties and contacting the owners. In most cases, you’re going to need a plan for consistent follow-up.
Remember, foreclosure investing requires a particular response from the property owner. Namely, you want to negotiate a deal that gives you control of the property at an attractive price, while at the same time helping the owner avoid full foreclosure proceedings. Putting together a deal that meets these specifications will take more than one contact with the owner.
To begin with, the owner is under a lot of stress as they face the prospects of foreclosure. There’s a good chance that the foreclosure has come about as a consequence of poor financial management or wrong financial decisions. This may make the owner reluctant to make any more decisions about money, even if it appears to be in their favor.
Foreclosures are often only part of the owner’s overall financial situation. They may be enduring numerous calls and letters from creditors and collection agencies. Your initial contact with the owner could easily get lost in the flood of communications the owner is trying to deal with (or ignore).
Even if your contact does rise above the roar, the owner may view your offer with suspicion. Any offer to help at this point in their situation will seem too good to be true, so they may fear a scam of some sort. Your only alternative in foreclosure investing is to be persistent. You should have no expectation of a quick response from the homeowner. You will need to plan for repeated contact attempts.
The secret to successfully getting the owner’s attention is lots of regular, consistent contact. In fact, you need to plan to correspond with the owner every other day, and you need to keep it up until the scheduled public auction. That’s a lot of contact, even if you’re only working on one property. If you are tracking more foreclosure investing opportunities, that will multiply the number of follow-ups you need to track. You’re going to need some sort of system for keeping up with each contact and where each property is in the stage of the foreclosure process.
Foreclosure investing requires regular, consistent follow-up with multiple property owners who may not be interested in what you have to say. Follow-up contact is not an optional activity. Your communication with them must be designed to create the desire within them to avoid foreclosure. If you fail in your efforts to contact the owner, there will be no deal for the property.
This may sound like a great deal of work and it will certainly take organization. But when it comes to foreclosure investing, the fortune IS in the follow-up
Rich Urban
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