How Newspaper Classifieds Can Deliver You Motivated Sellers
By Larry Goins
When you purchase my course, The Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine, you receive a whole bunch of bookmarks to help you build your real estate investing business. One section is called newspapers and it provides you with valuable sources to find any local newspaper anywhere in the United States that has any sort of internet presence. This saves you having to buy all those newspapers and lets you go straight to each newspaper directly online. You can find them very quickly. Newspapers are a fantastic research for located motivated sellers.
The bookmarks are exactly how I utilize the 10 or 11 different newspapers in my surrounding area to search the classifieds. Once the bookmarks are installed from your Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine course, you can go directly into the newspaper sections. I actually set my bookmarks directly the real estate section of the classifieds, to save even more time. So now I sit down at my computer, click the bookmarks, and quickly scan the classifieds for each newspaper.
This way, I can search all the newspapers for real estate in areas that I am interested in just about fifteen minutes. There is another section of the paper that you will want to look at, too. “Businesses for sale” often will show commercial property available or real estate holdings available from companies that are for sale. You will also want to look at the “For rent” section as that could lead you to landlords who are tired of trying to rent out their property or fed up dealing with tenants.
Using these tools, newspapers can provide you with a lot of great leads for motivated sellers.
Another way that the classifieds can be helpful to you is in running your own ads. Some newspapers use a clearinghouse source such as www.abracat.com which is another great short cut for searching for properties. I have also provided this short cut for you in your UBM bookmarks.
An online version of newspaper ads is www.craigslist.com You can use the same keywords below to find motivated sellers on Craig’s List with property to sell. And www.realestate.yahoo.com is another online source.
There are some specific keywords that you want to look for when searching the classified ads for motivated sellers. Owner transferred, obo (or best offer), divorce, owner financing, no down or low down payment, owner flexible, below appraisal, investor special, handyman special, fixer upper, lease option, rent with option, take up payments, or owner desperate; are just a few of the words that can key you in to a sweet deal as a real estate investor. Another good thing to search for is out of town phone numbers. Out of town owners are often more than ready to unload a piece of property.
I recommend using Mozilla Firefox as your web browser, as it allows you to highlight the keywords that you are looking for. In my DVD tutorial I show you exactly how to utilize this tool.
Another great trick when searching the classified ads is to check the paper on the day that is not the primary real estate day. In our area, Saturday is the day most real estate ads run and Sunday is the day most car ads run. But a lot of advertisers don’t know this – so be sure to check your classified ads on the off days as well. You could very well find motivated sellers who don’t have their phone ringing off the hook.
If your newspaper also has a legal section, that is a great place to search for real estate. Newly filed foreclosures or judgments are great leads for motivated sellers. Also divorce listings can lead to properties available cheap. In our area, properties that are under code enforcement – meaning that it has a code violation and doesn’t meet minimum housing standards – and the owner cannot be located will have a public notice published in hopes of finding the owner. This can be another great source of cheap properties, because the owners don’t want to go to the expense of fixing the property up to meet the code requirements.
With a little bit of practice, newspaper classifieds can be a great source of motivated sellers. Before you even run your own ad, the newspaper can be finding properties for you!
