How to Find A Seller Now

There are always sellers in the marketplace. There might not always be a lot of sellers motivated to sell on a lease option agreement but there will always be more than you need if you know how to find them! Today, the broad market is slowly changing from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market. This means more opportunities for investors.

This is the right time to learn how to find a seller now. There are several ways to go about this and if you’re an experienced investor you probably already have resources in place. If you building your investment business, these tips help you stay on the right track.

The Basics of How to Find a Seller Now

For the most part, investors aren’t looking for traditional “retail” houses. Investors are looking for properties that soon-to-be homeowners aren’t normally interested in. Investors want distressed properties and discount properties. Still, different investment strategies target different properties within these subcategories. For instance, fix and flip investors mostly target distressed properties. Properties that can be bought cheap, repaired, and flipped for a big profit.

Lease option investors are looking for a different property type. Sandwich lease option investors are not going to own the property. They don’t want to invest a bunch of money in repairs. How to find a seller now for a lease option generally comes down to the equity the seller has in the house. You are looking for either one of these conditions:

• 1.The seller does not need their cash out of the house.

- Or -

• 2.The seller does not have any equity in the house.

The other two common conditions that usually go along with these are that the seller needs to leave the house or the house is already vacant. These don’t guarantee the person will be interested in a lease option but if these conditions don’t exist, the seller isn’t likely to consider a lease option. If you don’t have these conditions, save yourself a lot of time and effort by moving on to another prospect.

How to Find a Seller Now Means You Offer a Solution

How to find a seller now means that you need to be offering the seller a solution that she/he is looking for. Your offer is what I call “Good Debt Relief”. You must understand what you bring to the table so that you can fully explain it to the seller. She/he needs to understand what’s in it for them.

Good Debt Relief is pretty simple. The seller has an already vacant or soon to be vacant house that they have to make mortgage payments on. The house is not producing an income. The debt payment is a big rock they have to carry without relief. When you offer a lease option, you offer an income stream to pay that debt. That income stream is Good Debt Relief.

You might think that severely limits the number of sellers interested in a lease option. It does thin the crowd but that’s a good thing because this enables you to focus your energy and efforts to sellers that are much more likely to close the deal. And there are a lot more candidates out there than you might first realize.

Good Lease Option Seller Candidates

How to find a seller now has an abundant number of candidates. People or couples that own two or more houses but only live in one of them make great candidates and there are more than you might think. How many people in these situations do you think you can find?

• vRecently or are about to transfer to a job in another city.

• vRecently married with the bride and groom both previously owning a home.

• vBuilt or bought a new home without selling their previous home.

• vInherited a home in another city or the person has no need for the inherited home.

• vLandlords that are burned out from dealing with calls about a plugged kitchen sink on Thanksgiving from tenants who never pay the rent on time.

• vLandlords that are ready to retire.

• vVacation homes that are not used or the owner retired to it and has a vacant second home back in the city.

• vThere are many others.

Do you see the common thread here about how to find a seller now? That thread is that these people own at least two homes but are living in only one. They probably don’t need the money because they can afford to pay two mortgage although they probably don’t want to pay two mortgages.

These make natural headlines for your marketing campaign to find qualified sellers. Especially in free classified ads where you can run multiple advertisements with different headlines. Most of these people won’t see themselves in classified ad headlines reading, “Lease Option Sellers Wanted” or “Looking for Seller Contracts”. However, they do see themselves in more targeted headlines like “Do You Want to Sell Your Second Home?” or “Do You Want to Sell Your Rental House?”, or “Stop Paying Two Mortgages”.

There are still many, many possibilities for how to find a seller now. Others worth considering include real estate brokers, estate lawyers, maybe even mortgage brokers who turned down a loan for a second home. Real estate brokers can easily be shown how to find a seller now. Your local MLS probably doesn’t indicate if a house is vacant but brokers usually know or can find out. You can also look at interior photos on MLS to see if the furniture has been moved out.

Do you want to know more ways of how to find a seller now? The entire second category of “The seller does not have any equity in the house” wasn’t even covered here. To learn more about how to find a seller or other real estate investing strategies please visit my website www.wendypatton.com or email [email protected].

What you need to do is TAKE ACTION NOW!

By Wendy Patton

For more than 30 years, I've used the Sandwich Lease Option System to earn myself and my students millions of dollars. From my experience, I know there is plenty of room and opportunity in the real estate investment market for everyone wanting to participate to find profitable deals. It's because of that fact and my personal success that I share the Sandwich Lease Option System with others.

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