Starting with Investors

[Alexa Williams]

Can any real estate agents/brokers give me advice on how to get started working with investors? Investing seems pretty lucrative to the industry, and I want to know everything there is to know about how I, the agent, am beneficial for the investor. 

[Linda Quinton]

We work with Realtors, and there are several things that make us really love certain Realtors.

INITIALLY - showing us that you understand the wholesale, or buy and hold investment, or whatever it is you are focusing on, and that you have the know how and eagerness to work in this area.  That you aren't going to turn around and say it is too hard because there is too much work involved in getting deals for investors.  There is nothing worse than investing time and finding out the Realtor had no idea of what they were working with even though they said they did at the beginning.

FINDING PROPERTIES - Find suitable properties. We like to make many offers per week, and have to do numbers on all properties we are presented with. When we are given properties that don't match our criteria or are just randomly picked off the MLS it is a big waste of our time and we will soon tire of previewing your lists.

If you show us that you are finding properties that other investors may not have found yet, by using other methods than the MLS search, we get rather excited and focus more on those properties.

INFORMATION - many investors work out of the area that they live in, so are working remotely.  You are the agent in the area.  You know which areas or properties are promising and why.  Give an investor good information on a property and why it would be a good investment, and we will look at it more intently, otherwise it is just another number and might be by-passed.

It takes literally minutes to do some comps, give comps!  It makes our number workings quicker, and our offers more accurate.  Saves all of us much time.

CONTACT - as others have said, be easily contactable, quick to reply.  The minute an agent takes too long to send through offer contracts, or respond to a query, we lose interest.  Personally, but this isn't important to everybody, friendliness is very important to me, after all I work with you regularly and I want to feel good about doing so.

GUTS - getting good deals for investors requires guts.  You need to be willing to approach sellers, drive a hard bargain.  If you enjoy doing that, you will do so much better at it.  If you are going to just email off all offers, you will be spending too much time making offers that will have very low success rates.

They are just some random thoughts, hopefully of help.  Good luck!