Unfortunately, most investors fail to recognize one of their biggest weaknesses which costs them many deals, many dollars and many points on their reputations each month. No, it’s not social media, pulling comps or rehabbing…
You can be great at sourcing great bargains on properties, negotiating sweet deals, assessing repairs and marketing your properties like a real estate investing pro but if you are failing to win on the follow up and closing the deal when showing homes your model is broken and you are bleeding away tons of potential profit and business everyday. Whether you are flipping houses, building a rental portfolio or both there are 3 holes in your real estate investing business you need to fix.
1. Follow Up
You can have the slickest marketing in the country, be number one on Google, have a million website visitors a month and 100 incoming call and emails a day on your properties but if you don’t keep on top of follow up you are killing your real estate investing business. Hire a small army of virtual assistants to answer phone or return emails if you have to but not replying on time is not an option. Perhaps you don’t need the extra business today but every burned prospects is worth a thousand referrals and before you know it people are going to start avoiding your listings like the plague.
2. Showing Properties
Who is showing your properties? It certainly shouldn’t be you. You need to be focusing on growing your real estate investing business, not doing low level busy work. If you are great at flipping properties you should have your properties pre-sold, sight unseen. If not, this leaves two options. The first is to bring in a strong closer to meet prospects at the property not just a body, you can’t afford that. The second is to save the cash and put keyless locks on your properties to make them look cooler and enable instant showings. Making sure that you close on every opportunity could mean flipping at least one more deal a month. Multiple that profit by 12 and there’s that brand new Benz or beach vacation you have been dreaming of.
3. Rental Application Fees
May be they work for you but seriously work the numbers before you collect another one. They are a huge turn off, especially when coupled with long approval times and worst of all it is often the best tenants who don’t apply because they don’t feel they should have to wait or jump through the hoops. Ask yourself what is more valuable for your real estate investing business, $50 for an application fee or $400 in cash flow from renting the property today?
