Hey, what’s up guys? Joe McCall, REI In Your Car podcast.

Today’s episode I think is part five or step five of my one page, how to do a lease option series. And we’re all going to be talking about how to advertise and market the contract or the property depending on what you’re doing for lease option deals. Cool. You Ready? It’s a beautiful day in Saint Louis right now this reminds me of San Diego weather. Oh my goodness love it. In the middle of kids jump camp at church and just having a blast. I am tired. They call it a jump tired when you’ve been as a volunteer been working. It’s a special kind of tired called jump tired. But anyway, I’m a have some business meetings today, so I’m actually, I left early today just to go to some business meetings. But yeah, I wanted to talk to you guys about step number five.

Step number five is about marketing the property or marketing the contract. So if you’re doing an assignment, you’re going to be marketing the contract, right? If you’re doing a sandwich lease option, you’re going to be advertising the property because you’re staying in the middle. Now this is really, really simple and I like to manage as much of everything as I can on a checklist, right? You know, if you’re a pilot and I’m not, but I’ve heard that everything pilots do is in a checklist. Like there’s a checklist for everything and it should be the same with some aspects of our real estate investing business we should have checklists. I know when I used to camp, we used to have a motor home and we’d travel for months at a time around the country. And we don’t have that camper anymore, but we did a couple, three months. No, we did one three month trip while we were looking for a house.

We lived in it for about three months and um, and then we did about a month trip down to California. So I’ve been in this camper a lot. And when I first got it, I created a checklist because as you’re walking around the camper, you want to make sure you remember things like disconnecting the power, disconnecting the black sewer and the gray sewer line, right? You want to make sure you’ve removed the chocks that are holding the wheels. You know, you want to make sure that you pulled everything in, all your slide outs. You want to make sure your awning is not still out. You may think, well duh, like you should know that, right? Well, here’s the problem. It is so easy to forget. In fact, it got to a point where even after I had my checklist done, I got really, really familiar with it, right?

And I stopped really kind of doing my checklist, but then I found myself still forgetting things at times. And so I got to a point where I asked my, I always ask one of my boys to walk around and double check my work and make sure everything was disconnected and put away. Like you also have pins in your hitch when you’re, you know, you’re hitching it, you got the pins in there and there’s like, I counted six or seven things I had to check on my hitch every time I pulled away before I pulled away. And so I started off having a checklist and it was really helpful because if you start pulling away and those one of those things are out or still connected, you could have, you know, thousands of dollars in damage and oh, if you’ve got some time, maybe I’ll tell you the stories about how I, yeah, jeez, pretty crazy gross things have happened with a camper.

Anyway, okay, so you need to have a checklist and I have a checklist in my course on selling lease option houses and marketing the properties. It’s real simple I kind of broke it down. I listed all the things that have got to be done. Like, you know, you’ve got lead based paint that you got to remember to fill out, right? You’ve got a seller’s disclosure statements. You need to make sure the seller fills out and you know, you initial and give to the tenant buyer, have them initial it as well, all that good stuff. So anyway, when it comes to marketing the property, I list all the things that need to be done. And I have three columns on the left hand side of my checklist of who’s supposed to do it, like the responsibility, it could be you or it could be your virtual assistant or it could be your local real estate agent that’s helping you market the home.

So you need to make sure all that stuff is just getting done. And then the next column over to the right, you have the item that’s supposed to be done. And then the final column over to the right is the date completed. And if you have one of those for every property, just make sure you’re avoiding a lot of headaches and hassles well to market the property. There’s only really a few things that you got to do when you’re marketing a lease option property. And one of the things that’s really important to remember is if you haven’t found a good tenant buyer in three to four weeks, then something is wrong and it’s usually overpriced. So you might be asking too much in rent or it’s just a really obnoxious, weird house in the middle of, you know, I don’t know, real bad neighborhood, which you shouldn’t be doing lease options like that anyway, right?

But even then, if the price is right and if the rent is low enough, you’ll find a tenant buyer for it that wants that house. So usually 9 times out of 10, if a property is not if you’re not finding or traffic to that property, it’s because it’s overpriced or you’re just not advertising it in the right places. So I’m going to tell you the best things that you need to do. Number one signs. You need to have signs in the yard. And if you can put like 10 signs in the yard, then you need bandit signs in the neighborhood. That’s really important. Put some signs in the neighborhood. And then I’d also encourage you to, you know, like do bandit signs, the sign in the yard, do as many signs as you can. Signs have always worked best for me.

Now sometimes in some cities it’s a hassle and it’s a pain in the butt and you might get fines, but shoot, you know what, I don’t care because they work. Now maybe you put them out on a Friday night and pick them up on a Sunday night or something that might be good. But don’t forget your signs. And I like to do just ugly yellow signs, handwritten signs, sometimes white. I’ve used signs before or I have students that have used signs. One guy in particular, it just said rent to own 3% moves you in and then phone number. And got tons of calls with that and he was actually telling them 3% moves you in, like that’s it. So the people when they would call would expect that. By the way, if you use REI Simple, the CRM that we have, you can get phone numbers from them, right?

So you don’t need Vumber or Call Rail anymore, Google Voice. And the cool thing about that is you can put a phone number on there and with REI Simple, you can set it up where anybody that calls that phone number gets automatically added to your buyers list. And if they see a sign and they call that number, you can get a different phone number for each property. It’s only four bucks a month and you leave an outgoing message saying, hey, you know, thanks for calling about the house on 123 Main street. It’s a rent to own home. It’s a three bedroom, two bath, the rent is $1,300 a month and it’s in nice shape, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 3% moves you in if you want to see pictures and a video, go to this website, right? And you give them a domain and they can go there.

But the cool thing is you can set it up in REI Simple that when they call it, sends them an automated text message back right away. And it just says you could set it up where it sends them a text back that says, hey, thanks for calling about our house at 123 Main Street. Do you have any questions? And the cool thing about that is it starts a conversation. Because a lot of them won’t leave a voicemail once they hear your voicemail, right? But you can’t do it where it sends them a link to a website because that’s kind of spammy. But what you can do is you can just send them a plain text message back and if they respond back with questions, you can then send them a link and reply like, Hey, go check out the websites and the pictures and videos here on this page, right?

So you got to get those different phone numbers for different properties. And then when you get a property in the future, a new one in that neighborhood, you can text blast your entire buyers list about your new property. It’s pretty cool. Which leads me to something I forgot to say that like what you should do first, you got to get a bunch of pictures and get a video if you can. You don’t need professional video. Just walk through the House with your phone. Just walk through the entire house from front to back. Make sure all of the lights are on in all of the rooms in the house and just walk through the house with your phone and shoot a video. And then you can just upload it usually from your phone, right to YouTube or something like that. But put that on your website.

If you have REI Simple, you can get a lease option website. If you don’t, you know, you can get a Carrot website, you know, I have three or four different Carrot websites. Go to Joe LikesCarrots.com if you want to check out Investor Carrot, but they have really good sites, but get your property on a website, that’s really important because you want a place where people can go to look at pictures and look at a video to understand how the program works, to answer some common questions and things like that. And in my course, there’s stuff you can add to your website that explains the programs and answers frequently asked questions, etc, right? Okay, so you’ve got it on your website, you got a phone number for that specific property, you put that phone number on your bandit signs, on your ads for the property.

Maybe if you do any fliers, stuff like that. But anytime anybody ever, ever, ever calls that number, the cool thing is that adds them to your buyer’s list, which is super important and cool. And by the way, once you start doing a bunch of this, you can have a VA, a virtual assistant, manage your text messages, right? Because it can be overwhelming. You probably won’t be able to yourself, but you know how people are these days, they just don’t leave voicemails, right. They just communicate by text and so they’ll listen to your outgoing message but they won’t leave a voicemail. It’s funny, my friend the other day he left, he was calling his daughter and he got her voicemail and she texted him back. She said, you left me a voicemail. What is this 1990?

Anyways, so like voicemail is old school these days with kids. So yeah, do you understand? Does that make sense? I wish I could see you guys so I could just see some heads nodding to make sure that what I’m saying makes sense. Okay so where else can you advertise the property number after number one? Signs. Number two is Facebook Marketplace. Facebook Marketplace is probably replaced Craigslist in terms of where people go. It’s way better than Craigslist. But the only problem I don’t like the Facebook Marketplace is it doesn’t give you, you can’t put at least, I haven’t found a way to put phone numbers in there yet. I guess she could, maybe if you put it in the description, but anyway, put your house on Facebook Marketplace, put it in the for rent section. If they’ll let you put it in the for sale by owner section as well after Facebook Marketplace, as many pictures as you can by the way in all of these.

Make sure your pictures, they don’t have to be professional professionally done, but make sure they’re taken with a lot of light, a lot of light. Okay in your rooms try to get a lot of light in the rooms. Then after Facebook Marketplace tried to get it on Craigslist, I put them usually in the for rent and the for sale by owner section. When it comes to Craigslist, I like creating about two or three completely different ads and post them on different days so you can rotate through those and recycle them. You know, I might have two or three rental ads and one for sale by owner ad I get more traction from, for rent than I do for sale by owner, okay. Then Zillow, now Zillow is tricky because it just is if it’s already been listed before, you know, you might have to go through and try to claim that you’re the owner.

You don’t want to lie and claim that you’re the realtor, okay. Sometimes it’s a little tricky to do that. By the way, if you are licensed, if you are a licensed agent, Zillow for some reason I’ve heard this from several people, if you become a premier agent with Zillow, which just means that you get the rights to a certain zip code. So what this one guy did is he found this obscure zip code out in the country and he became the premier agent of that zip code with Zillow. So he does a little bit of advertising in that zip code. It makes it a lot easier for him to advertise his for sale by owner properties on Zillow. Like does that make sense? Like he’s got rental properties and for sale by owner properties that he puts on Zillow.

And because he’s a premier agent in another small remote zip code, it’s a lot easier for him to put his for sale by owner and his rental properties on Zillow. Make sense? So go get that done if you’re an agent. All right, so you got banded signs, Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist and Zillow. If you’ve done those four things, you’ve not sold it yet, then something’s wrong again. It’s overpriced or you’re not advertising it enough or it’s a butt ugly house and you don’t want to do lease on butt ugly houses, right, right. The final thing I’ll say is Facebook ads. Facebook ads worked really well. Facebook ads though, work better for maybe building your tenant buyers list. If you want to give away a list of rent to own homes, you can do that in my course. I show you how to do it.

We’ve tested images on Facebook ads, of nicer homes and smaller homes, cheaper homes, and the cheaper ones work best. I’m talking about like, you know, the homes built in the nineties or the early two thousands, a little three bedroom ranches. We even tested one with nice, perfect green grass and one with like green and brown grass and the one with the more unprofessional grass with brown patches actually pulled better. So we tested real nice houses and the one that worked best was a three bedroom ranch in a suburban area with brown, partly brown grass and that worked the best and we just drove them to an Investor Carrot squeeze page and got really, really cheap optins. So that’s something you might want to consider doing. We have information on how to do that in the course, but it’s pretty simple straight forward all right.

So that’s it. You start marketing the property, then you start taking phone calls, start taking applications. You’re definitely going to want to get somebody eventually to do all of this for you. And you know, you’ve got to outsource it anyway. So I just recommend why not outsource it to a realtor, find a leasing agent and have the realtor or leasing agent do that. How do you find a leasing agent? You put an ad in Craigslist? Say, Hey, I’m looking for a leasing agent, I’m an investor I’m looking for a leasing agent to help me, at least my properties have them call you. I usually pay them to one full month’s rent depending on how many that you’ve got going on. If that doesn’t work, posting an ad in Craigslist, you can just start calling all of the rental properties look for the ones that are even the ones that are done by property managers.

Sometimes those leasing agents that are advertising those properties will work for other clients as well just for finding tenants. And you just ask around enough at your local REIA group. Different companies that are advertising properties for rent. You’ll find people that can do it for you. I’ve done it before. I found realtors that for $500 bucks would just advertise the property for me so I can be done. All right, so I’m long winded.

This has been a longer one than I expected it to be. If you want more information about lease options and how to do them I got a book, I wrote a book on it that teaches you all of the steps that I’m talking about here. Go to WLBook.com WLOBook.com. It’s free. You just pay a few bucks in shipping and handling. We’ll send it out to you and it’s pretty cool. All right, go get my book WLBOook.com that stands for Wholesaling Lease Options. WLBook.com we’ll see you guys. I’m out of here. Bye.