When you’re prospecting and calling on distressed properties, and you already know that the owner is behind on their payments to their lender, you need to be careful about beginning your conversation with them.

Because there are plenty of brokers out there who will just call one of these owners and say, “I can see online that you’re behind in making your payments on your loan, so I’m calling to see if you might want to sell your property right now.”

With this in mind, when you’re talking to an entrepreneurial owner, whose own money is invested in the property, making a statement like that one is not going to help to get you into good rapport with them, because they’re probably already feeling sensitive about being behind on their payments, and the fact that you somehow already know that they’re behind, isn’t going to make them feel good.

So in these situations, consider calling them and treating this like a normal prospecting call, and then just ask them if they’re interested in selling their property. This way, you don’t need to deal with them feeling like you’ve just stuck a knife in their wound with you knowing that they’re behind on making their payments, and on their end, they might then look towards your inquiry as being a potential solution to get them out of this situation.

Plus, if they’re interested in selling, the discussion about them being behind on their payments will come onto the table soon enough, with you doing your due diligence, and asking them the right questions, at the right time. But don’t launch into this subject immediately, when you’re just opening-up your prospecting conversation with them.

Similarly, I get calls sometimes from credit card companies, and they begin the conversation with something like, “We can see online that you’re charging X amount of dollars on your credit card every month, we want your business, and we want to know if you’d like to switch over to using our credit card now instead.”

So in this world where I’m already not happy with how much people can know about our own personal information these days, similarly, that is not a good way for someone to open-up a conversation with me, especially when they’re trying to sell me something.

So then in moving forward, in knowing that there are services out there that are providing brokers with information on properties that have now gone into default on their loans, understand the position of an owner, and how they must be feeling about already being in this situation, and then begin your conversation in a manner that has a better chance of building good rapport with them.

 

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