Negotiating With A Distressed Seller

[Kyle Scholnick]

I was wondering if there is some type of checklist anyone uses when they are negotiating with a distressed seller. Say you find a house through direct mail or driving for dollars and the seller is interested. Now I show up to speak with them and try to get the price down...How do you do that? What types of topics do you bring up? The roof? The benefits of not dealing with a realtor, etc? How do you phrase these? What types of things do you say?

Does anyone have any general scripts they use with these sellers to get them to lower their price?

Thanks!

[Micah Copeland]

@Kyle Scholnick

Hey Kyle, I do not use a script but I can give you a quick run through on how I get the price down.. first let me state that there are some people that are just not going to lower their price no matter how logical your argument is...

In this business you have to find the motivation and attack it to lower the price, and that is why I don't have a script. I probe and ask questions such as..

"So tell me more about the house"

"So what are you planning on doing with my cash once I buy the house? You going to retire!?!"

"So if you were buying the house tell me what you would want to know about it"

"Any major repairs needed or coming up?"

"How are the tenants treating ya?"

You get the gist.. Essentially keep probing with questions until you find out the motivation! Once you have the motivation you can use that to drive the price down.

To wrap it up I will use something like..

"So you want about 150k for the house right? That isn't an unfair asking price but knowing that I have to put in 50k of work (or whatever number it is and make sure they agree with the number as you are walking through the house doing your inspection) what is the best you can do for me?" or... "Knowing that I am going to take over and go through this eviction process with your horrible tenants whats the best you can do for me?"

Hope this helps. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.