1. A good real estate agent - Do you have a good agent?
2. Pre-Offer Phone Call - Did you call before you sent in your offer?
3. Clean Offers - Do your offers look and feel professional?
4. Speed - How fast did they get your offer?
5. Follow-ups - Are you following up if your offer wasn't accepted?
A Good Agent
Good luck finding one of those right? Instead of trying to find a good agent you're better off becoming an agent yourself. Good agents are rare and honestly it is tough finding one that will write a ton of low-ball offers and work as hard enough to make you successful.
The only way to change this is to become your own agent. This will put you in control of the entire process and you can now generate the transactions. Most real estate classes can be done online and only take a couple weeks to complete. My advice - do it!
Pre-Offer Phone Call
Agents rarely make contact with the listing agent before sending in an offer. If they get multiple offers with similar terms, which one will they take? The person who called or the one they know nothing about? Make the call!
Your goals on the phone are:
1. Will they take an offer lower than list price? What details can they tell you about the property?
2. What motivates the seller? Price, closing time, rent back for a month? Figure out the seller's motivation and cater your offer to it.
3. Establish rapport. More than likely your offer is coming in low so you need to make the seller's realtor feel comfortable about working with you. After all, they only get paid when they sell the house, right?
Clean Offers
Are you offers written well without any mistakes and have you provided all the necessary documentation? Moreover, have you removed all contingencies that would be a red flag for the seller? If you haven't written a clean contract, then your offer becomes more work for the cooperating agent and shows your could be difficult to work with.
The easiest way to streamline an offer is to create templates and use electronic signatures or stamps (this way you don't waste time or paper to print the contract). I use Adobe Acrobat, but there are several programs out there (docusign, hellosign, etc). I highly recommend creating templates and choosing a software to make writing offers fast and easy!
If you are asking for financing, appraisal, and long inspection contingencies, then you just shot yourself in the foot. I waive appraisal and financial contingencies and my inspection period are under 5 days (sometimes 0).
Make sure you send a nice email that outlines your offer. Below is the exact email I use when sending out my offers:
Pretty simple, right? The email does a couple things:
1. It outlines my offer - No concessions, large earnest, short inspection, quick close. This reinforces the positive terms for the seller.
2. The seller's agent can forward my email directly to their client without having to spend the time to summarize the contract. Agents love this!
Speed
9 times out of 10, the seller's real estate agent receives my offer first. How so fast? I use ReZamp (disclaimer: I am a cofounder). This is part of my strategy to analyze deals fast and make contact with the agent first. ReZamp allows me to do this by notifying me instantly when a good deal hits the market. Sometimes I call so fast that the agent hasn't even uploaded the property photos in the MLS! Have the speed to analyze deals fast and being the first to make contact will give you a big competitive advantage!
Follow-ups
Very few people do this and I'm not sure why. Most of my offers are not initially accepted. In fact, it can take weeks to get an offer accepted. Sometimes it just takes the seller a longer time period to become more motivated to sell. My average contract acceptance is 15 days after I originally submit my offer. My longest is 83 days.
Why again are follow-ups important? Because most sellers and agents think they can get a higher offer than what I offered. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. I send out weekly follow-up emails to all offers that I didn't get accepted. I use a workflow management system called Podio to track my offers. Find a tracking system that works for you and use it!
Good stuff right? Share your tricks below. I'd love to hear about them.
ReZamp is a nationwide real estate brokerage.
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