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Every Seller is Moving Toward Something, or Away from Something

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We know that before we can Solve the Deal—and ultimately get the Seller to say yes—we have to Solve the Person, so that we understand our audience and know their perspectives, opinions and motivations. But where do we start? In this episode, Jeff shares a simple way to begin Solving the Person: every Seller is either moving TOWARD something, or moving AWAY from something. Once you understand which of these your Seller is doing, you can make great progress Solving the Person.

Episode Transcript

As we discuss a lot on this show, it’s so important to solve the person before we try to solve the deal. And by solve the person, I mean, understand our seller. But sometimes you might ask yourself, gosh, where do I start? So in today’s episode, I’m going to give you a quick, simple guideline of exactly the first thing that you can try to understand about your seller. Because once you understand this, then you’ll be off to the races in terms of solving that person. Let’s cue up the theme song we’ll jump right into it.

Welcome to Racking Up Rentals, a show about how regular people, those of us without huge war chest of capital or insider connections, can build lasting wealth acquiring a portfolio of buy and hold real estate. But we don’t just go mainstream looking at what’s on the market and asking banks for loans, nor are we posting We Buy Houses signs are just looking for “motivated sellers” to make lowball offers to. You see, we are people-oriented deal makers, we sit down directly with sellers to work out win-win deals without agents or any other obstacles, and buy properties nobody else even knows are for sale. I’m Jeff from the Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur. If you’re the kind of real estate investor who wants long term wealth, not get rich quick gimmicks or pictures of yourself holding fat checks on social media, this show is for you. Join me and quietly become the wealthiest person on your block. Now let’s go rack up a rental portfolio.

Hey, thank you for joining me for another episode of Racking Up Rentals. Show Notes for this episode can be found at www.thoughtfulre.com/e104. Please do us a big favor by hitting the subscribe button in your podcast app; it really sends a message back to the podcast platforms that make them want to spread the message about our show. And you’re be helping other fellow thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs to find us. So thank you for doing that. Onward with today’s episode.

And in today’s episode, I want to give you as I mentioned an intro a simple idea that you can be focused on at the beginning of every new seller relationship you find yourself with. So let’s back up for just a quick second, we talk about something called the Y.E.S.S.E.S framework and the Y.E.S.S.E.S framework is the overall approach those six steps that lead us to getting our proposals accepted. That’s Y.E.S.S.E.S. The first step is You; the second step is Engage thoughtfully; the third step is Solve the person; the fourth step is Solve the deal; the fifth step is Empathetic proposal; and the sixth and final step is Sharpen and agree.

So right in the middle of the Y.E.S.S.E.S framework, we have two s’s, two s’s in the middle of Y.E.S.S.E.S. And the first one is solve the person. Now we have to solve the person before we can solve the deal. So let’s just do a quick recap of what does it mean to solve the person? Well, solving the person is basically about understanding your audience. It’s about understanding what they think. It’s about understanding what they feel, what their perspective is on everything on the world, on the marketplace, on their property, on taxes on rents on the real estate market, on everything. It’s about understanding what matters to them, what they think of themselves, what they think about their property, etc. It goes on and on. So the idea, though, simply put is, you need to understand your audience if you’re going to put a proposal in front of them, and expect them to say yes to it.

Now, this sort of segues into this topic that is so frequent in the world of real estate investing, which is, “motivated sellers.” And I would argue, as I’m sure I have on this very show, that if you have done some marketing, and a seller has called you back, I would argue that that seller is motivated. Now, their motivation might not be brutally obvious, right? They might not call you back with just one of the super predictable and cliche kind of situations like oh, well, my house is falling apart, and I don’t want to fix it. And I’m behind on my taxes. And it’s vacant right now, and so I want to sell. Those are the easy to determine motivations. But I would argue that every seller who calls you back is motivated, it’s not a question of their motivation. The question, however, is, do you have the savvy and sophistication to uncover that motivation to tune into the person to be able to solve the person enough to understand why it was that they called you. Because if they called you back, in their mind, you know that there must be at least some slight chance. If it’s no more than one in a million, maybe it’s no more than one in a million, but in their mind, there’s at least a chance that their life could be better if they return your call about inquiring about their property.

So we’re trying to ascertain the motivation of our sellers. So I want to give you the simple rule of thumb of cellar motivations. Generally speaking, everybody is either running toward something, or they’re running away from something. Okay, everybody is running either towards something new or away from something existing. Now, this is a broad idea, clearly, and it’s a generalized statement. But it is a really good place to start when you are solving the person, because if you can start with having a clear understanding of is this person moving away from something or they’re moving towards something else, then you can really dig in and fine tune your understanding of precisely what they’re running to or running from, what that means to them, why that’s important to them, etc. So the question for you is this seller you’re talking to, did they call you back because they’re moving towards something in life, or they’re moving away from something in life?

Let’s just take a few examples of both toward and away from. Let’s talk about things that they might be moving toward, right. These are, these are good things, basically, they want more of these things in their life. So they might be moving toward buying a new property, right. So they’re selling this current property so that they can buy a new property, that’s one possibility. Maybe they’re moving towards something like travel, it’s certain experiences that they want to have in the next chapter of their life, maybe they are looking for forward to some toys, maybe they want to buy a boat, or a motorcycle, or a new car, or a vacation home or something along those lines, they might be moving towards something like that, they might be moving towards a new location, right, they might be moving towards moving. In other words, right, they want to go live with the grandkids live three states away. And so they’re moving towards what generally comes down to some type of a change in lifestyle, if you want to sort of put a broad bow on it, they’re moving towards something that’s changing their life in the way that they want it to be changed in. So these are the good things are moving towards these good things, you might call this pleasure. And call the away from things pain, that would be another kind of way of thinking about it. But if you think about it like this, the people who are moving towards something, what role does the sale of their property play in this moving towards that? It is an enabler, right. So the sale of this property enables their ability to move towards this thing that they want.

Let’s look at the other side. The other column here is the away from list, what are some things that they might be moving away from right, these might be things that you would consider pain; if the toward the list is pleasure, then this might be the pain list, these are the things that are bad versus the good towards list. So generally, of course, it’s going to be things like stress, maybe this property represents some particular type of stress, or hassle to them, maybe being in this town represents some type of stress or hassle to them. Maybe it’s just the general sense of responsibility of being responsible for tenants or another property to maintain, and things like that. It might be upcoming costs, right, they might be moving away from a $20,000 roofing bill that they know is coming up, or they might be moving away from things that they might consider to be true about the market locally, right? They might say, I’m moving away from this market, because I don’t like the politics in this town anymore. I don’t like the landlord tenant laws in this state anymore. Or this town is just really changed in the way it feels. It doesn’t resonate with me anymore. It’s too big. It used to be a nice small town. Now it’s too big. And I don’t want to be a part of that I’m moving. So though, they’re moving away from certain things, right.

So if our list of stuff that they could be moving towards is the good list, and a sale of this property enables their ability to move towards that, then the sale of their property, if they’re moving away from something, a sale is like a release, right, it releases them from their ties to something it’s like a little set of clippers that clip the tether that is chained to their leg. You know, mentally they’re thinking this property ties me to this one thing that I don’t want to be tied to anymore. So let’s get out the clippers and cut that tether.

So just to put a little bit of a bow on this. If we think back to our normal idea of motivated sellers and what the average investors focus on, and certainly what the lowbrow investors focus on their definition of motivation is pain. They’re looking for people who are in a very obvious manner moving away from something; they’re moving away from tenant problems ,are moving away from a vacant property. They’re moving away from maintenance issues and things like that. And that’s fine. And we as Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneurs absolutely come across those people. And we will help those people as well. But as TREES, we also see the other side, just as easily, we also see it with just as much excitement. And we actually have a better set of lenses on our eyes and ears that allow us to detect the times when they’re moving towards something. And for us to be able to interpret their desire to move towards that thing as motivation, right? A lot of the typical investors would say, oh, they’re not, they’re not a motivated seller unless they’re running from something. But we’re saying no, if you want to move three states away to be close to the grandkids, that itself can be a strong motivator, as well, even though you’re moving towards something from a perspective of abundance rather than the away is kind of a more of a perspective of scarcity.

So here’s my encouragement to you. When you jump in to try to solve the person, there’s a lot you need to know and I don’t want you to get overwhelmed by everything you need to know when you solve the person. So start simple. Start with focusing on trying to understand and assess from them, are they moving away from something, or are they moving towards something? And once you’ve got a sense for that, then you can dial in your understanding of exactly what that thing is, what it means to them and how you can help them get either away from it or towards the thing that they are trying to get to.

That is it for another episode of Racking Up Rentals. So again, Show Notes for this episode can be found a thoughtfulre.com/e104. Please do us a big favor by hitting that subscribe button in the podcast app and take just a second to rate and review the show. I so appreciate that. Did you know we have a Facebook group for Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneurs too? It’s called Rental Portfolio Wealth Builders and we would love to have you join us there; just go to group.thoughtfulre.com and you will be taken right to that page. If you liked this episode, and I sure hope you did, please take a screenshot of it, post that to Instagram and tag us; we are @thoughtfulrealestate. I’ll see you the next episode. Until then, this is Jeff from the Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur signing off.

Thanks for listening to Racking Up Rentals where we build long term wealth by being win-win dealmakers. Remember: solve the person to unlock the deal and solve the financing to unlock the profits.


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