How to Control the Emotions of Home Buying

Buying a home is almost always an emotion-based process. Once you find a home you like, you become emotionally attached to it. Emotional attachment can cause you to make unwise decisions when making an offer, handling negotiations, and so forth. Once you’ve fallen in love with a house and visualized it being your home, you’ll start to do WHATEVER it takes to make sure it becomes your home.

This is about the worst possible way to buy a home, but also may be the best possible home for you.  You do want to fall in love with your new home, but you also want to be careful.

You can literally cost yourself thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands of dollars, by being too emotionally attached. Instead of letting emotions rule the game, try to include some common sense in the buying process. Real estate investors have a saying that goes, “Don’t fall in love with the house, fall in love with the deal.” This is easier for an investor as he won’t live there, but you should be aware of this, and use your head.

Having said that, I realize that you will always have some emotional attachment to your house. You need to like it. Your goal is to strike a balance between liking the house and using common sense to tell you whether you are sacrificing too much to try to get the house. If you find you have to make lots and lots of compromises to get a house, stop yourself and ask, “Is this really worth it?”

Remember to strike a balance between emotions and common sense in your home buying process. It will help you enjoy your home that much more once you actually move in.

When I first started doing lease options it was about two years before I realized that I needed to work with Realtors because of their control over the sellers. Realtors pre-screen everything for you and in general their sellers aren’t in financial trouble. The Realtors control the relationship with the sellers and the sellers tell the Realtors everything, including personal information. That’s one of the key reasons I like to work with Realtors – they control the knowledge base about the seller.
I look for Realtors who can understand lease options and can help their sellers also understand the benefits of lease option, but this understanding can take time. My job is to assist them and help them understand when to call me. Here is how I generate leads for lease options through realtors.
1. Making cold calls to generate leads
If you look in any real estate section of any newspaper, you can find the top listing agents you need regarding potential properties. Many times the agent is unavailable, but that’s not a problem. Just leave a descriptive message about the property that interests you and let the agent know how to contact you. You might want to make yourself a short script with the highlights of the things you need to discuss so that you don’t fumble for words when on the phone. Also don’t be afraid to ask for information from the assistants. They often know as much or more about the status of the home and the seller.

2. Structuring the Deals through Realtors
Tell the agent how you found out about them – butters them up a bit – and let them know that you are willing to give a presentation. Suggest that the Realtor fax you a potential listing. If you have already developed a relationship with the Realtor, you can always “dig” a little during the phone conversation to see if they have a property that is a good candidate for a lease option that they might have overlooked.
A. Proposal – used to put together a mock-up offer to a Realtor that they can then present to the home owner or seller. It will put down the overall terms in writing without the specifics. This saves a lot of paperwork because you only fill out the other paperwork when you have an agreement on the proposal.
B. Letter to get into the brokerage office – I tell the broker what I do and don’t be anxious on the proposals – make it low pressure. When you’re first starting out, you‘ll want more deals to go through because there’s a great excitement in the newness of the game. Don’t get too wrapped up in a deal happening, because a lot of them don’t happen. I probably get about 40% of the proposals I put out- which means that 60% come up empty.

3. Unwanted Buyers
A Realtor will get a pre-approval letter from a mortgage company before they show a home to a prospective buyer. Otherwise they’d be wasting valuable time and energy with a lot of people who are looky-loos and not serious buyers. The Realtors don’t want to waste their time with those buyers, but those are the buyers I want and I need the names from the Realtors. So I send the Realtors a “Garbage letter” which basically says, “Don’t throw those names and numbers in the garbage! I can help the buyers get into a home with lease options. I offer a $1000 finders fee for every name that ends up in a deal.” This is another incentive to Realtors to work with me. I’m not out to steal their business – I’m here to help them and to offer a unique service to buyers with financial history difficulties. I want to help them move their inventory, so I am interested in the buyers they can’t help in traditional methods.

Working with Realtors is key in any lease option deal.  For more information about Generating Leads through Realtors check out my book Investing in Real Estate with Lease Options and Subject-to Deals.

Motivated sellers are out there in every city, every town, and every state.  Finding them isn’t as difficult as it might seem – if you know which techniques work for attracting the attention of a seller who wants to work with you on a lease option or subject to.

There are different circumstances and situations in the lives of people that motivate them to need to sell their home.  These reasons can include a job transfer, bankruptcy, foreclosure, divorce or upgrading to a bigger home.  The final factor likely to affect sellers’ level of motivation is the state of the real estate economy itself. You have to know what’s happening in the real estate market in your area or in the area where you are interested in finding your investments, and the best place to begin is at the official website for the National Association of Realtors.

The kind of motivation you are looking for is not someone just wanting to sell their house but someone who either is motivated to get rid of their good debt or their bad debt. Here are 3 out of 16 techniques listed in my book Investing in Real Estate with Lease Options and Subject-to Deals that have worked for my students and me over the years:

1. Tear-off flyers in local drug stores, convenience stores, party stores – wherever you can get them posted.   These tear off flyers can say the same things as the signs and ads.  The tear off parts should have your phone number, website if you have one, and a short statement – We Buy Houses.
2. Out of state owners – There are services in many cities that allow you to find all out of state owners, or owners where tax bills are sent to addresses not at the property (non-owner occupied).    Out of state owners are far away from their property and many times want to get rid of the far away headache and move on with their life.  Also, they may not really know what the current market is anymore and many may not even care.  They may simply want to get rid of that unwanted home in a far away place.
3. Real estate investor clubs always have other investors with homes that they haven’t sold or want to sell.   Network and let others know what you do.  I have bought several very good deals from other investors, either because they had their hands full at the time with their own deals, or they were out of their area.  Some investors only wholesale their properties.   Wholesalers buy low and then resale low.  You should be a member of a local real estate investor club and be regularly attending meetings.  It is one of the best places to network.   Check out  The National REIA website for a group of local real estate groups in your area.

You can learn all 16 techniques to finding motivated sellers in my book Investing in Real Estate with Lease Options and Subject-to-Deals.

November 19-22 I will be holding the “Soft Market Investing” Boot Camp. This is four days of intense Real Estate Investing training during which you’ll learn:

• What strategies work best right now in today’s market
• How to maximize your profit potential when using these investing strategies.
• Strategies you’ll be able to implement the very next day!

The training offered at this event will be, without question, some of the best you have ever been a part of at any real estate event. You’ll walk away with the ideas and concepts that can put tens of thousands of dollars in your pocket! This Boot Camp will also be saturated with strategies and concepts that work in today’s market. As most of you know, I specialize in Lease Options and Subject To’s. Both of these strategies will be covered in detail during the Boot Camp!

And, given the current real estate market’s condition, this couldn’t be a more perfect time to attend the “Soft Market Investing” Boot Camp.

The first Boot Camp was held June 26-29 and was sold out! Hurry up and Register….Seats are filling up fast!!

Click Here to Register

I have started adding some Lease Option, Rent-to-Own, training videos on YouTube.  This one is on working with real estate agents.  The video shows you how to find listings that can do a Lease Option or Rent-to-Own, but are NOT listed that way. 

Real Estate Agents:  You will also want to know how to do this to find leads for your Rent-to-Own or Lease Option buyers.