My Short Sale Marketing Plan

[Lafi S.]

Hello all,

It's been such a long time since I actively contributed to BP so I thought I could get this going again by sharing my marketing plan for consistently getting short sales in my market. I hope some of the marketing experts can help critique it and some of the newbies can use this as a way to get more business if they are currently involved in short sales or are looking to be. Over the past 6 months I have been doing this on a regular basis and it has worked out really well for me so here goes...

Expired Short Sale Listings: This has been my #1 source of getting short sale deals for the last 6-8months. All you need is access to your local MLS, and/or sign up for an expired listing provider such as landvoice or the theredx. My expired leads come to me in an email every single day so all I do is open it up, read through the agent remarks and identify which ones are short sales and which aren't. After sorting through everything I cross check the addresses with the local tax records and change addresses if necessary. Once this is done I upload the list onto Click2Mail.com and proceed with a 5 step direct mail campaign that looks like this:

1) Flyer
2) Letter
3) Postcard
4) Postcard
5) Postcard

All of these are approximately 10-15 days apart.

Finally, I upload the list onto google docs to track the results. Now if you work with real estate agents on short sales, I highly recommend taking that extra step and contacting the agent directly. I cut straight to the point, tell them I am an investor that buys short sales and now that the listing expired my company decided to contact the sellers directly through marketing campaign. I also tell them that if they are interested in working together, they can help make the connection with the seller and still keep their full commission by working with us. Sometimes the agents are sick and tired of short sales and don't want anything to do with it, and sometimes they are willing to play ball, either way it just gives us an additional edge at maximizing our return on the mailers and ultimately getting the deal.

The upside: This entire process short of contacting the agents can be completely outsourced! The seller has already expressed interest in doing a short sale so that whole aspect of explaining it to them is taking out of the process. I put together a training guide and sent it off to a VA on Odesk and now this is being done every single day the leads come into my inbox.

The downside: Can get expensive, and a LOT of return mailers.

Hope this helps, and if any of the more experienced members here would like to chime in with their critique I would be happy to hear it!