How to build trust with motivated sellers

So you're an investor looking for discounted properties. Whether you're wholesaling, flipping, or buy and hold... you are looking for sellers motivated enough to sell their property for a discount.

In this short post i'd like to focus in on one of the key elements to purchasing discounted properties which i believe is often times left out of many investor's minds when they are on the hunt for properties, and that is building trust with the seller. Of course step one of purchasing the property is to find the motivated seller whether you find them through probate lists, water shut-off lists, pre-foreclosure, tax delinquent, driving for dollars, Facebook ads, Google search, and the list goes on...

But step two, after making contact with the motivated seller, is building trust with them. They need to feel that they're being taken care of by a company who is here to help and has their best interest in mind.

So how do we accomplish this? One of the easiest ways to make a seller feel comfortable with you is simply to give them all of their options, and yes i mean every single option. Let them know that they could possibly rent the property out, they could fix it up and sell it for a profit, or they could even list it with a trusted agency and receive more money for their property than if they are to sell it to you. If they're truly motivated, this information will not phase them one bit other than giving them a sense of security knowing that you are looking out for their best interest and your transparency will push them further towards selling with you. And if they decide that one of the other options sounds better and don't end up selling with you? GREAT! You just helped someone out and they're typically very appreciative of your assistance. They may even refer friends or family to you! And if they do need to sell to an investor like yourself in the future, guess who they're almost certainly going to? You guessed it, you!

Arguably the most effective way to build trust with a seller is your online presence. In the technology age we live in, the first thing most people do when deciding whether they'd like to work with a company or not, is go to Google and punch in your company name. I'm willing to bet you probably do the exact same thing, right? So it would be silly to think that the sellers you work with aren't doing it as well. 

The more presence you have online and the more content you put out, the better. I suggest creating a quality website for your business, sign up on every social media account, Youtube, Yelp (and all websites similar to Yelp), and get your company out there so that if you are Googled then it will build a sense of trust with the seller. One of the best pieces of content you can put out is video content. Videos which explain the process of selling to your company are great as well as videos which help sellers through questions they might have themselves asking during their selling process (such as "How do i sell my house during a divorce?"). Learn how to do some search engine optimization or pay someone to do it for you so that you can get your website ranked high in Google, this attracts more sellers and builds more trust with sellers. A quality website (such as ours for example) is going to give the seller the impression that your company is a well-established business and further build that trust. 

And last but not least, reviews and testimonials pull an extreme amount of weight in building trust with the sellers. The best kind of testimonial you can have is a video testimonial. After closing on a property, ask the seller(s) if they'd mind doing a quick video review with you, and post it on your website as well as every other platform you're on. This is the nail in the coffin for building trust with sellers.