What Comes First: Your Buyers List or A Deal?

If you plan to wholesale real estate, I hope you know by now that you absolutely MUST be building your buyers list. In fact, I am so adamant about this, that clients and investors who I work with often ask me which comes first: the buyers list or an actual deal.

I strongly recommend that you start building your buyers list immediately - even before you have your first deal. What?! How do you build a list of buyers even before you have a deal to market?

Well, without going into all of the details of how to build a buyers list, here are a few ideas:

First, you can market generically that you are looking for investors that are interested in deals. Put out some ads on some free classified sites seeking investors who want to be notified when you find a great deal. Ask them if you can add them to your buyers list. Most serious investors will want you to call them if you have a great deal.

Second, you can contact investors that have investment property and ask them if they are looking for more deals. If they say yes, then ask them if you can add them to your buyers list. How do you find these guys? Three very quick ways: people advertising that they want to buy houses, people with houses for rent (they're investors aren't they) and absentee owner mailing lists.

Third, you can borrow deals from other investors and offer to help them market their deals. While you are contacting investors using the first two methods, you can also ask them if they have any deals. The odds are that they will have a deal or two. Ask them if you can do some marketing for them to help them sell it. If they agree, you now have a deal that you can use to meet people interested in deals, which both helps you build up your own buyers list and helps your new investor friend get their deal sold.

Fourth, give away real estate courses and a list of distressed properties. I use this method with my wholesaling clients. I allow them to give away one real estate course on CD that I have, to attract people who are interested in investing, in order to build their list of potential investor buyers.

So, while some people believe that you need to have found a deal to start building a buyers list, I strongly disagree. You should be building your buyers list from your first day as a real estate wholesaler and keep building and replenishing it every single day that you are in business as a wholesaler. It is one-half of the life-blood of your business (the other half is finding deals) and it is critically important to do it everyday.

Until my next post,

James