How to advertise your investment properties and business

HomeReal Estate

  • Author Alan Cowgill
  • Published January 31, 2011
  • Word count 886

You need to let yourself be known in your community. You also need to have property sellers coming to you and not your competitor. We advertise in many different ways. I have to say that there isn’t one certain way that stands out. I wouldn’t ride one horse.

If all you did was put out signs you might get a couple leads. But you’re going to miss a lot that you could be getting by doing other things.

The biggest thing to do is to understand how much you’re going to be able to spend. Do multiple things to get the message out there. Let people know that you are there or you will miss prospects. That means that you will miss that potential to make money. Making money is what flipping houses for profit is all about.

One technique that we have used is magnetic signs on our cars. Kevin has one on his car that reads "We Buy Houses."

There are people with some pretty elaborate wraps on their cars. There whole car turns into a billboard. It certainly grabs attention.

We’ve experimented with flyers. We just took a regular photo copy and put it on doors. It is a pretty simple process; you wad the paper up and put it in the door handle. You can have Boy Scouts or somebody from the local college go out and distribute them for you.

Typically, they go out, put it on the door, walk away, go to the next one put it on the door. So there’s no confrontation and it gets people’s attention. They have to walk up to the door and open the door handle. If it goes out as a mailer in the mailbox it goes in with 50 other different things they got that day, it just ends up in the trash.

We migrated away from the flyers because of our weather. Storms can make a single piece of paper fly away.

I’ve tried bus signs and I don’t know that I ever got a house from it. I am pretty sure that it did not work. Maybe if they were on the back of the bus people would pay more attention. They might have to follow it for a few miles; they start to look at it more often.

I am a stickler on managing what’s on the sign. If there’s too much writing, people can’t read it as they’re driving by. You can’t read the phone number. Now that doesn’t do any good.

So I use an 18x24, I like the yellow with the black letters. There isn‘t too much writing. I even drop the area code on the phone number. I want it to be blunt.

Try using the nails that have the green rubber circle around the nail head when nailing signs to a stake. If you try something else, the sign is going to pull itself right off.

Also, don’t forget that your office will need a hammer. You’re going to be hammering a lot of signs in this business.

If you’re putting out signs and you’re putting them out in a certain area and you’re not getting any calls you have to decide whether you want to keep doing it the same way. So monitor and track what’s working and what’s not working. If it’s not working, you have to decide whether to change it or whether to keep doing it.

As you can tell, we love signs.

I have to say that there are positives and negatives to using signs. We get a ton of calls from people who don’t like the signs near their property. Also check with your county, township and beware of any regulations on signs.

Signs will stay up in place for a period of time but sometimes they’ll come down because of weather or something else. We have even had our competitors taking them down.

Just remember, signs are good. But they have challenges that come along with them.

Door knockers are another advertising idea. They also reach people because they have to open their door. It’s a lot like the concept with the flyers. You just get someone to go around and put them on door handles in certain neighborhoods.

We also advertise for people to put up signs. We have placed classified ads for somebody that would be able to do outside work and has a vehicle.

I have been able to get college students or people who are just out of work in our area. That’s pretty easy to find right now. I’ve never had a hard time finding somebody to do signs. They don’t stay around very long because after they’ve gone out and done it a couple of times they’ve had it. We pay them for the signs put up.

So you hand them 25 signs they get $25. They get excited about it, they love it. The problem of it is you get them one time maybe two. They don’t stick around a long time so.

Develop a good system with your advertising. Find out what works for you and go with it.

E. Alan Cowgill is the owner of Colby Properties, LLC. and President of Integrity Home Buyers, Inc. Since 1995, Alan has bought and/or sold hundreds of single family and small multi-family investment properties. His home study system, 'Private Lending Made Easy', shows others how to find private lenders for their very own real estate business.

His website is http://www.supercoolsystems.com

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