Five Easy Steps To Jump Start Your Real Estate Career
Article 4: Follow-Up
by Mike Jacka

In the third article of this series we explored the importance of constructing and presenting offers, in the fourth installment we will focus on the significance of ?Follow-Up.? If you're making offers and they are all getting accepted the first time, then you are probably offering too much for the houses. If not, then you will have to follow-up on the offers you have already made, but have not yet been accepted. Follow-up consists of about 50% or more of my business.

Follow-up is one of the hardest parts of this business or any other business for that matter. But constant follow-up will generate twice as much business.

They say most people will buy after 5-7 contacts. And the same is true with real estate. Most people will not be ready to sell you their house on the first contact. It happens, but not that often.

If you are doing the items listed in Step 1 of this series(from the March 2006 edition of The Investor Resource) to generate the leads, you will have your hands full talking to people, looking at houses, and constructing offers. But, what if your offers aren't getting accepted? Then you are doing something right.

The worst mistake to make in this business is to offer too much. When you start offering too much, you will get houses. However, you will have also paid too much for them. I would rather see you not get a few deals, than get one or two bad deals because you paid too much, and now you are having a hard time selling them to make a profit.

Now you need to place the offers and property info into a follow-up folder. Next month, go back to your folder and go through the offers you made last month. Get back in touch with the sellers. Find out if they are still trying to sell their house. Their motivation may have changed by now, and be a little more open to your solutions (offers).

Sometimes you have to keep this follow-up process going for several months. Keep following-up every month until you either buy their house or they sell to someone else.

As time passes, people's expectations lower and their need or desire to sell gets stronger.

Have you ever been a motivated seller of a house, a used car, or even a garage sale? Then you understand how motivation and urgency seems to increase the longer you hold onto something. And a house can be a large expense to hold onto, especially if you have already bought another house and now have two monthly payments each month until you sell this one.

If they have not received a good offer after a month or two, they may get to the point of just giving you the house, just to get rid of it. It has happened to me many of times. If the sellers would have just accepted my initial offer, they would have gotten more money from me and they could have saved all those monthly payments in the mean time.

In next month?s edition we will conclude this series with Step 5, ?Sell Quickly.? We will discuss how to sell your newly acquired houses quickly.

Mike Jacka is President of the Minnesota Real Estate Investors Association, also known as MNREIA. He became a real estate agent in 1992 and has since had a diverse real estate background that includes general contracting, rehabs, single family homes, multi-units, rentals and land trusts in addition to acquisition of wholesale, foreclosure, subject to and short sale properties. To contact Mike Jacka and/or learn more, please visit www.realestatepromo.com or call (866) 779-6446.