Make the Phone Ring

Property-selling wizardry from the Trump University faculty

The primary reason to advertise a property is to sell it. But there is another reason for advertising too. It is to generate a database of potential buyers for properties you will sell in the months and years to come.

This secondary advertising activity is especially important today. Properties are not selling as quickly as they were a year ago. If you have a database of prospective buyers and know what they are looking for, you can sell your properties more quickly. And moving properties faster saves you money in taxes, insurance and other costs.

The key is to advertise in ways that generate a lot of calls. Here are some of my well-tested strategies that work.

• Advertise a selling price that is lower than the norm. I am currently selling a three-family house in a city where similar properties rarely sell for less than $300,000. However, I am selling this property for $285,000 because it is not in the greatest neighborhood. If people call and want to see the property, I show it to them of course. But if they are not keen to look after I tell them the location, I ask what they are looking for and politely say, "May I have the opportunity to call you when something like that comes along?" So my advertising dollars are working for doubly hard for me.
• Advertise a benefit that sets you apart from the competition. I once ran an ad campaign in the New York subways that said, "Why rent when you can own your own house for $5,000 down?" Our phone rang off the hook and we built a huge list of potential buyers. "Zero percent down for qualified buyers," "motivated seller" and "seller to pay closing costs" are other phrases that generate calls.
• Craft ads that encourage people to call for full information. When I am advertising a property, for example, I never put its address in the ad. That would only encourage people to drive by and look at it without calling me. If they call, I will take them to the house, of course. But if they just drive buy, I cannot add them to my database or sell to them in the future.
• Analyze your advertising. How many calls do you get when you advertise a house at $250,000 in one town, for example? How many calls do you get when you advertise a house there for $300,000? You have to analyze the contact-generating abilities of different ads and invest your advertising dollars strategically.

Remember, it is never too early to start taking calls and developing your database. If you are building houses that will not be completed for a few months, for example, you can advertise now and start building your list of customers.

Never forget the power of advertising to make your phone ring, because calls represent dollars.

Jay D. Gottlieb, has taught the self-instructional course, Make Quick Profits in Any Real Estate Market at Trump University.Jay co-founded First Home Brokerage in 1994, a real estate investment company that acquired, renovated, and sold distressed single and multi-family homes to first-time homebuyers. The company quickly grew to be one of the largest re-developers of affordable 1-4 family homes in the nation, with sales of approximately $100 million annually and with over 3000 homes bought and sold. In 1997, Mr. Gottlieb was recognized by Crain's NY Business as one of the "40 under 40" top businesspeople of the year. In 1999, he won the Ernst & Young "NYC Entrepreneur of the Year" award in real estate. Currently, Mr. Gottlieb is president and CEO of Tri-State Home Sales LTD.

To master more powerful property-selling strategies, enroll in our comprehensive new course, The Real Estate Investor Training Program.