Building a Buyers List

Now that I have my first property under contract that I’d even consider wholesaling (buying and immediately selling to another investor for a profit), I need to start building a list of other investors in the area that I can market this and future properties to. I’m not positive I’d be able to (or want to) wholesale this deal, as it sat on the MLS for a while at the most recent asking price, and even though I think it’s a steal, it didn’t get much activity. Perhaps because it had a misspelling of its address or perhaps it was the horrible pictures, but regardless, the $29K list price didn’t seem seem to get all the other investors too excited.

That said, I want to start posting ads on some real estate websites, and start putting out signs to market this property to other investors, and it would be very nice to have a list of investors in the area that I could contact directly. The first step to accomplishing building this list was to create a web-based sign-up form so that investors could submit their info to me. Of course, to do that, I needed some sort of reasonable web presence for my business (a random web-page with a sign-up sheet isn’t going to garner much trust).

So, I quickly rebuilt my Lish Properties website from scratch…

Next, I created a web-based form that other investors could fill out and submit to me…

And lastly, I put an ad on Craigslist looking for other investors who might be interested in getting included on my mailing list…

Within about 12 hours, I had 74 people click through to my site, and 8 people sign up for my “Buyer’s List.” Apparently I need to do some optimization to get people to sign up once they get to the sign-up page, but I’m guessing a lot of people were more interested in seeing actual properties for sale than they were to get added to a mailing list. Point noted, and I’ll use that to hopefully improve my sign-up rate. Additionally, I’ll use other marketing tools to drive traffic to this sign-up page, and hopefully build a much larger list.

Tomorrow — once I actually get access to the duplex, as no-one seems to know the lockbox code — my brother and I will start putting up signs advertising the duplex deal, and if I can find a buyer in the next week or two that will allow me my desired profit, I’ll make a quick sale. If I can’t find a buyer at my asking price, I’ll likely board the place up, throw it on the MLS, stick a “For Sale” sign out front, and wait. At some point, either a buyer will come along or the market will improve and I’ll figure out another exit strategy. It may take a year or two or five, but for $22K in this town, I’m sure I’ll make a good profit on this property at some point.

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