In order to have a successful real estate investing business, it is necessary to have leads coming in to fuel your business. These leads convert into clients, motivated seller, buyers or private money lenders.

So how do you make sure you have a constant supply of leads for your business?

1)      Target your leads

This is the first thing to do. You must decide who you want to reach in your business. For example, if you are looking for wholesale deals, you are likely to target neighborhoods that are older, say with houses ten years old or more. The price range is likely to be medium range.

If you target owner financed properties, then you will probably target properties that have no mortgage. Similarly, if you target subject-to deals, you are likely to target newer properties that need few or no repairs.

Unless you narrow down your market, you are likely to waste a lot of time following the wrong leads,  and money marketing to the wrong people.

2)      Polish your marketing message

The message you send your leads must be powerful enough to convince them to sign up with you or call you.

No matter which marketing method you use, you must make sure the message has an instant appeal to the prospects and a call to action that makes them give you a call or sign up on your real estate investor website.

3)      Use multiple marketing systems

How do you reach your prospects? There is no single method that is all-ultimate when marketing to your prospects. The response to each method will vary from month to month.

You must therefore use all methods at your disposal – letters, post cards, online advertising  like Craigslist, bandit signs if they are allowed in your area, newspaper classifieds, TV, radio, etc.

This will keep the leads coming in from all directions; when one method may produce a lot of leads now, another one might do better tomorrow. Even though you might have a favorite method, it is a combination of your marketing methods that will keep the leads coming in all year round.

4)      Capture and manage your leads efficiently

So where does your call to action in your marketing message take your prospects? You must give them access to your real estate investor website and phone number.

The prospects that go to your real estate investor website are likely to be fully pre-educated for you and convert leads that are sitting on the fence to people that do business with you. If your website is well designed, once they sign up, you receive a fully pre-screened pre-negotiated deal that requires very little of your time to follow up or move on to the next one.

A good real estate investor website also has an inbuilt marketing system, that automatically follows up with people who have not converted into motivated sellers. This happens without any input from you and converts such leads into people that sell you their houses.

The ones that just pick up the phone are likely to have lots of questions that need answers to, because all they have come across if a short marketing message.

A good website for real estate investing is suggested at the end of this message.

5)      Analyze your marketing

Unless you know where the leads are coming from, you are likely to spend your money in the wrong marketing outlets, and waste a lot of time with marketing that yields poor or no results.

Analyze and measure your marketing and you will have leads coming in all year round with very little input from you.

 Evaluating your deals before you buy them is crucial to the success of any real estate investing business.

 It is therefore important to learn how to evaluate your deals no matter what your business model is.

 The article teaches you tips of evaluating your deals so you make offers that make you money.

 Obviously your business model dictates how you evaluate your deals.

So in this article we will look at some general scenarios which should be a rough guide as to how you make your offers.

 Let us take each business model at a time:

1) Wholesale real estate investing
The general rules for buying a property you are going to flip to other real estate investors is 65 cents on the dollar minus repair costs minus your profit.

In other words when you flip a property to another real estate investor, you must make sure there is enough profit in it for them, or they will not be interested in buying it.

Secondly, you must take your profit into consideration.   The money you make after you sell it must be taken into consideration before you buy it.  Otherwise there will be nothing for you or cannot even flip it if nobody is interested in buying it.

 I prefer to go below 65% of after repaired value in a poor market.  The lower you can get it the better.

2) Buy fix and sell
 This works like wholesale real estate investing, without thinking about flipping profit.

 Since you sell properties at a discount when the market is poor, I still recommend you use the formula for wholesale real estate investing.

3) Subject to’s and lease to own real estate investing
 You can afford to buy properties at a higher price when taking over payments.

 Some people will argue you can still make money with not equity; however, my best advice is to stay out of it.

 When you take over payments, the perfect scenario is when you make money when you acquire the property, get a positive cash flow each month and cash out with a big pay day.

 Cashing out means your lease to own buyer refinances and owns the property.

  The price when your lease to own buyer refinances must therefore be acceptable by lenders.

 In a downward real estate market, you must therefore buy houses with equity.   If the market goes down, this equity will shield you.

 More so, these properties should not require repairs and should have at least 25% equity.

4) Rentals
The general rule of thumb for rentals is that your buying price divided by your yearly rent is less than 10. The less the better.  Of course this is assuming there are no repairs needed.

Successful real estate investing dictates that you buy houses at the lowest possible price, spending less time, money and effort. Learn how a good real estate investing website can automate your business and make you a more efficient and successful real estate investor.