How do you know if you have a truly motivated Seller?

How do you know if you are dealing with a Seller who is truly motivated, and not just an unmotivated person who will waste your time? After all, you can only do deals with Sellers who are motivated…right?

OK, we can agree on that. So that means the key to being more successful must be finding more of these motivated Sellers, right?

Not so fast.

It’s important that you reframe this idea. If a property owner is engaging you in a dialogue—let’s say they responded to some of your marketing—they ARE a motivated seller.

The problem though, is that we tend to think of motivated Sellers as people in distress—people in a bind in some way. Maybe the property is physically distressed, maybe they’re in a tough situation, maybe they have a need for a speedy solution; that person is what we think of when we think of “motivated Sellers.”

But consider this: what if every Seller you talk to is actually a motivated Seller, but they don’t just have their motivation spray painted nicely on their forehead, for you to be able to see?

That means the real problem is not that you don’t have enough motivated Sellers; the real problem is that you don’t have yet the experience and the tools that you need to be able to uncover what their real motivation actually is.

So if you want more deals, you don’t need more motivated Sellers; rather, you need to be continually sharpening your ability to interact with these people in a way that allows you to extract and extricate insights from them about what their motivations really are.

And once you understand what those motivations are—because they absolutely exist, and these people would not be talking to you otherwise—you can begin crafting a proposal that’s going to hit the target for them in terms of addressing those motivations. And that’s how deals start coming together.

To recap: How do you know if you have a motivated Seller? If they’re talking to you, you have a motivated Seller.

What you need to do is improve your ability to understand what those motivations are, with sophisticated interactions with those Sellers.