Inman

Agent as investor: How to blur the line and snag listings

Thomas Cafarella is absolutely crushing it in the Boston real estate market. Cafarella and his team pull in between 50-100 listing appointments per week with a simple strategy: reach out to sellers with cash offers in hand.

Thomas Cafarella

By reaching out to sellers with cash offers, you’ll have no trouble getting their attention and potentially getting their listing. On the off chance that a seller accepts your cash offer, you’ll be getting a great deal.

To hear all the details on Cafarella’s cash-offer strategy, listen to the podcast below.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/hibandigital/Thomas_Cafarella.mp3

How to use cash offers to get more listing appointments

When you open to a seller with an offer to buy their home, you’ll have their undivided attention. Even if you have no interest in personally buying more property in your market, you can make this strategy work.

 

Here’s how to do it:

First, determine whether or not you’re willing and able to invest in real estate. If not, you’ll need to partner with a real estate investor to make this strategy work.

Once you know how you’ll be funding your cash offers, it’s time to start reaching out to sellers. In the seller’s markets of today, the following three methods tend to work well:

  • Direct mail: Sure, direct mailing can be expensive, but it offers one benefit that most other marketing methods don’t — the ability to reach out to the specific sellers you know you want to work with.
  • Cold calling: Cold calling is cheaper than direct mail, but it’s also far less effective. When you are able to get a seller on the phone, at least you’ll still know who you’re talking to and have details on his or her property.
  • Internet marketing: Internet marketing is great for touching both buyers and sellers, but it’s less targeted and less suitable for making cash offers. Still, because Facebook advertising is very affordable, it’s worth including in nearly any marketing strategy.

With all of the aforementioned marketing methods, the message is roughly the same. It should explain that you want to make a cash offer on the seller’s property. Emphasize your ability to buy it for cash and close on the sellers’ timeline without inspections, fees or other hassles.

Once you’re in front of sellers, explore your cash offer with them as promised. In most markets, taking an investor’s low-ball offer won’t make sense to the average sellers, which is fine.

When this is the case, you can then offer your services as a listing agent to get the sellers top dollar for their home. Either way, you’ll be making money.

Learn more about making money as a real estate investor

As you might have guessed, Cafarella is more than just a highly successful agent; he’s also an accomplished real estate investor. For nearly 10 years, Cafarella has been investing in real estate and generating consistent profits.

If you’d like to learn more about purchasing investment properties and positioning them for profit at resale, check out his website. There, you can watch videos, read blogs and hear additional advice on the art and science of real estate investing.

To learn more about offering cash in order to get more listing appointments, listen to the complete podcast interview with Thomas Cafarella.

Pat Hiban is the author of the NYT bestselling book “6 steps to 7 figures: A Real Estate Professional’s Guide to Building Wealth and Creating Your Destiny,” the founder of online real estate sales training site Rebus University, and the host of Pat Hiban Interviews Real Estate Rockstars, an agent-to-agent real estate podcast with Hiban Digital in Baltimore, Maryland. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter.

Email Pat Hiban