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Why Most Real Estate Entrepreneurs Don’t Make Consistent Profits and What To Do About It

By Ben Innes-Ker

Go to just about any town or city in the country and you’ll find real estate entrepreneurs and investors like yourself working far more than they should for the return they are getting. And this despite all the promises of "fast cash" and "easy money" that sold the courses that got them into the business in the first place.

You see, the reason many Real Estate Entrepreneurs don’t do so well is not because of lack of intelligence or their willingness to work hard. It is simply due to being focused on the wrong area of their business. We come out our training very "deal" focused, and not motivated seller focused.

If there is one thing that is the mark of someone experiencing problems in our business, it is that they cling to marginal deals. This is directly related to not having enough qualified leads to work with. You know. You only got two or three interested sellers even talking to you in the first place, so if you want to eat you better close those deals! And that sets up the worst of all scenarios; a desperate buyer chasing a luke-warm seller.

The solution to this problem is to have a continuous flow of sellers calling you so that you have a choice of who you want to work with. With so many people calling, you are in the position of not needing any one of them. If any particular seller is inflexible or difficult to deal with, you can legitimately walk away from them knowing that you having another seller to move on to right around the corner.

Where this leads in your deal-making and business is after a while you only talk to the most motivated people with the nicest houses where there is the most potential for maximum profit, people who are almost pleading with you to take their house! After all, it makes little sense to speak to anybody else.

These deals are the cream of the crop. People whose houses have diminished in value in their eyes because they now want something else more, and their continued ownership of the house is preventing them from getting that something else.

These are your motivated sellers. And they are the only people you should ever consider dealing with. Try calling a seller who is still emotionally attached to their house with an offer involving creative financing. Your offer is an insult to them. But it is a godsend to a seller whose life is elsewhere now and no longer wants his house.

Well how do we get so many people to call? And how do you get the right people to call?

The answer lies in the basic principles of Direct Response Marketing, and Emotional Direct Response Copywriting.

As business owners our overarching goal is to make the most profit, incurring the least cost, with (preferably) the least effort. As Real Estate Entrepreneurs that means talking to motivated sellers as much as possible, avoiding time-wasting unmotivated people as much as possible, and using a system to deliver those results predictably and consistently for us.

Nothing achieves this better than Direct Response Marketing! With Direct Response we decide who our best prospect is first, attract only them, then put a message in front of them that is more difficult to ignore than it is to respond.

A very successful direct marketer named Gary Halbert sums this up succinctly by asking a question. The question is: "if you were in business, say the restaurant business, and you could have one ultimate advantage over the rest of your competition, what would that advantage be?" People usually fumble around with things like best service, best food, etc. But no, that’s not it. The answer? "A starving crowd". So obvious. So simple.

By targeting precisely the high probability sellers (i.e. the starving crowd) you want to go after, putting a piece of paper in front of those people with a message on it that speaks directly to a burning frustration they are experiencing, and then tells them exactly what to do to get relief from that pain, your odds of being on the phone with a motivated seller go way up, as the odds of you wasting time with unmotivated people still in love with their house go way down.

That’s what we want. Only real motivated ("starving") people calling us one after the other, uninterrupted, so we can concentrate on our most profitable business activity; CLOSING DEALS.

Mastering the basics of Direct Response Marketing will take you from wherever you are now to a rare place in the business world; having predictable, reliable, profitable marketing systems that will provide you with all the deals you want.

(c) 2000/2004 Power Marketing, Inc.