What is the best way to contact "motivated" sellers?

[Tony Marcelle]

Which of these works best when contacting motivated sellers of vacant homes or home owners in a crisis situation? Call, text, email, or direct mail? That is if a skip trace has been used to find their FULL contact information such as phone number and email.

[Cornelius Garland]

@Tony Marcelle I stopped cold calling a long time ago because I found that I either caught the seller when it was a bad time, or I got their voicemail. I tallied the time I wasted in cold calling, and I spent over half of my calls leaving voicemails. The other half were either not able to speak at the moment or very unmotivated. Cold calling is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Honestly, technology has progressed to the point where we really don't need to do this anymore. Too many investors have a shotgun approach when in actuality, we can leverage technology to use our time more wisely and scale cost-effectively.

What I do now is send targeted text messages to sellers to see if they want to sell their house. It looks very much like a real person that is texting them. I found that credibility and first impressions are very important. When you cold call, the first impression that the seller has from you is that this person is interrupting my day and I want to get off the phone as soon as possible. Just think, you're calling them randomly and asking them about selling the most expensive asset they own. I always drop my website in the initial text, and then I send the people that don't reply a series of texts that build off of the previous ones. It doesn't look or sound unprofessional. When I cold-called, I usually found most sellers responded around lunch time, so I send off my seller engagement sequences off around 11 AM.

I used to be terrified of talking on the phone. Like, it's crazy because I was in the Army and deployed to Afghanistan...but when it came to cold calling sellers, I got very anxious and it made me nervous. It got easier over time, but it never sat well with me with not knowing how the seller would respond. Since I've started sending these targeted text sequences, I've found that, in fact, it typically isn't the best time to chat on the phone whenever I text them. Even the motivated sellers that wanted to sell would tell me to call back at a later time. I'll show you an exchange I had with a seller the other day. (It's in reverse chronological order)

They wanted to sell, but if I called them randomly then that could have turned them away from doing business with me. Imagine if a Filipino cold called them; they would butcher it and I could have missed out on this deal. Oftentimes, we just jump in the conversation without asking the seller if it's a good time to talk. This is something that I've tried to train VAs previously, but they just didn't get it. 

The key takeaway here is that you always want to be a "welcomed guest", not an "unwelcomed pest". Following this formula will take a lot of the stress out of marketing. I actually was able to get rid of a few virtual assistants and other unneeded members on my team because this is much more manageable. I'm able to do the same amount of deals as previously and cut down on the stress and headaches that I was dealing with previously. Hope this helps!