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In this series of episodes, Jeff dives deep into each step of the Y.E.S.S.E.S Framework for Getting Off-Market Sellers to Accept Your Offers. In this episode, Jeff does a deep dive into the third step of the framework, the letter with S, which stands for SOLVE THE PERSON. Listen in and learn why it is so uncommon for real estate investors to focus on solving the person, and why it’s so critical to do so. Learn what it means to understand the seller, how to gather insights over information, and how to determine a Seller’s One Big Thing, and much more.
Download the Y.E.S.S.E.S. Framework now!
Episode Transcript
The letter S stands for solve the person. Wait, what am I talking about? Hey, we’re continuing our discussion today of the YESSES framework for getting off market sellers to accept your offers. And in today’s episode, we’re going to dive deep into the letter S, which stands for solve the person. This is the most unique part of our entire process as thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs. So let’s cue up the theme song we’re gonna dive 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 we’re just looking for quote, motivated sellers to make lowball offers to. You see, we are people-oriented dealmakers, 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 a 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, thanks for joining me for another episode of Racking Up Rentals. Show Notes for today’s episode can be found at www.thoughtfulre.com/e47. Please do us a big favor by hitting that big subscribe button in your podcast app. It really does help us and helps other thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs who are looking for content just like this to find us by iTunes, knowing that you have subscribed to the show. Thank you so much for that. Alright, onward with today’s episode.
So today we’re going to talk about the letter S. And no, this isn’t Sesame Street, but we are going through a six-letter framework called the YESSES framework for getting off market sellers to accept your leads. Now, if you haven’t heard the last two or three episodes, I’d really recommend that you go back and you listen to those because these are cumulative as we go through first a big picture of the YESSES framework but then letter by letter. And today, we get to the third of six letters, the letter S which stands for solve the person. You know, what I’d recommend you do is go over to yes.thoughtfulre.com and you can download a PDF version of the whole YESSES framework.
So you’ve got a handy and you can refer to it anytime. So head over to yes.thoughtfulre.com, download your free copy just takes a second, and we’ll go from there. A super quick recap of the YESSES framework goes like this. Y stands for you; E stands for engaged thoughtfully, that was our last episode. S stands for solve the person, that’s what we’re going to talk about today. S stands for solve the deal. E stands for empathetic proposal. And the final S stands for sharpen and agree. And today we’re going to dive deep into the first S — solve the person.
So here’s where we are in the framework, we have decided what we really want to accomplish, and what our objectives and our investment philosophy are. And then we’ve as a result figured out who are the people who own the properties that we’d like to buy. And these are the people we need to reach out to. Then in the letter E we did exactly that we reached out to them. And we engaged with them thoughtfully we sent them our marketing, which we carefully thought about the right way to do that. And then they started calling and we did an intake of those leads. And we started to develop rapport and we went to their house and started to understand the situation who we’re working with, and what the opportunities are. And that leads us to S which is for solve the person. We’re now really trying to start putting a deal together. But this is the part where what we do as thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs is really so different. Everybody else really kind of in the mainstream in real estate investing, market and education. They just want to dive right in to trying to figure out the deal to structuring the deal to solving the deal was we solve the deal but we solve the person before we solve the deal. And that’s such a critical part of the yeses framework and how we operate as thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs. We need to slow down and we need to focus on the humans involved because we can’t buy properties unless we get a yes, from a human and we certainly can’t buy properties, you know in unique ways like with creative deal structures or with seller financing. Unless we get a yes, from an actual human being. There are always human beings on the other side of a real estate transaction. It’s just that when we’re buying properties that are on the market and things like that we never really get a chance to experience that other human. There’s so many intermediaries and things standing in our way. But in this case, we are talking directly to the actual person. And so we have the opportunity to understand the actual human being behind the deal. It’s really important to note too, that we need to just slow down there’s no hurry here at all. Another thing that’s so common in traditional real estate investing education is to quickly vet a deal an opportunity, ask questions, cut right to the chase, get right to the point, because if this thing’s going nowhere, you want to cut bait and run as fast as possible. And I kind of understand that you don’t want to spend a lot of time being wasted on leads that aren’t going anywhere. But the paradox of this, the exact flip side is that you will never really know if a deal can go somewhere until you’ve understood the human. And you can’t understand a human by just walking in and making a snap judgment, or trying to rush the process. We call this slow dancing or slow dancing with the seller. And that’s okay. It’ll take as long as it’s going to take. So let’s talk first about understanding people.
We want to understand the seller, but what does that really mean? It means we need to really understand their opinions about things their worldview, about the world as a whole, but about real estate, about their market about their town about the political climate, the environment, the environment, the economic climate, etc. How do they perceive these things? And then we ultimately will get to what I call the one big thing. The one big thing is the single most important topic, factor criteria deciding element for the seller. It’s the one hill that they will die on, so to speak. It’s the one thing that even if there’s like 10 things on their mind, the one thing that if this doesn’t get met, nothing else will happen. One thing is always more important than everything else. And our job as excellent thoughtful real estate entrepreneur buyers, is to develop rapport with people to the point that we understand what their one big thing is, because the one big thing is the key to unlocking the deal. But I want to emphasize that their opinions, their perspectives are what matter. We’re not trying to compare ours to them, or ours to theirs. We’re not trying to debate theirs; we just want to uncover those things. And I want to really point out there’s a massive difference between information and insights. And actually, we have a whole episode on this. It’s episode number 27. If you want to go back and listen to that, again, information is data information would be things like, is the property rented? What’s what are the rents? What’s the square footage? How long has the roof been there, all that kind of stuff. And that stuff’s important for what we do. However, what’s more important than information at this point is insights, insights versus information, what are insights compared to information, you know, information, these is these data points, insights is little nuggets of our understanding about the other person, how they think how they feel, all of that, and insights are ultimately more valuable than information. I want to give you two quick examples of this. A couple years ago, I got a call and one of my letters, of course, from a seller. And her name was dusty, and I went to meet dusty after I’d spoken with her on the phone for a few minutes. One of the first things dusty said on the phone to me was she was kind of trying to brace me, she said, you know, I want to sell this property because I just had some renters in there. And they just did a terrible job. They did not meet my expectations. It’s just, I’ve just done being a landlord. I’m tired of being disappointed by people. And I said, Okay, she said, I’ll meet you, I’d like to meet you over there and show it to you because I’m kind of worried. But just brace yourself, you know, it’s not perfect. I’m like, Okay, all right, I understand. So I show up at the at the meeting with her. And I am kind of just naturally assuming that my idea of what she means is the same as her idea of what she means, like, tenants have taken bad care of a property. When she’s painting that picture. I have my idea of what that means. And I show up at the property and she kind of looks to me kind of embarrassed and she’s like, Okay, let’s go in. And we open the door, and I’m looking around going, what this place is fine. Like, we could make a few small improvements. Sure here and there. But this is nothing major at all. And what I realized at that moment is that I needed to gain this insight and I had to realize that I was making an assumption and assumption that her idea of what was terrible on record. was going to be the same thing as mine. And it turns out, it wasn’t at all. And that gave me a huge, huge insight into her. What her perspective on these things is, what her level of expectations is, what her standards are. And that gave me all the fodder I needed to make a great proposal to her, that played into her, you know, her belief system that this property was not in good shape, and that she shouldn’t be a landlord anymore. So I was able to kind of run with that and use these beliefs that she shared with me and I now understood about her to create a proposal that would work really well for her. I’ll give you another example. A seller I’ve had a while back. And I’ve actually I’ve had several sellers like this over the years too. But in our in our market landlord tenant law has evolved a lot and it’s become a lot more tenant friendly. And this person is seller, he made it very clear through his remarks that he felt like landlord tenant law meant that those changes meant that our market and the prospects of being a landlord were just going to heck in a handbasket, and that it was like a calamity and the worst thing ever. He then also kind of made some assumptive comments about how, you know, the current administration, obviously, we’re a bunch of idiots, and I, you know, he would not contribute to the funding of that administration by paying capital gains taxes. So I just standing there, I’m taking it all in. I’m not judging his comments. I’m not comparing his thoughts to my thoughts. I’m not telling him what my thoughts are at all. I’m just taking it in. And I’m understanding, this guy feels like the sky is falling when it comes to being a landlord. And he is sure as heck is not going to be paying capital gains. Those are his perspectives. And that’s all I need. I need to understand what his perspectives are. So that when I go back to him, and I make him a proposal, and I say, Look, sir, I know you’re right, it’s becoming extremely difficult being a landlord. Luckily, I’m young and got lots of energy. And I’m willing to put up with that brain damage. But I understand you aren’t. And so I’d like to make a proposal to buy your property with an installment sale. And this installment sale is going to allow you to get this property off your hands and off your mind and get out of the business of trying to keep up with a daily change in landlord tenant law. But it’s going to defer your capital gains to be through this structure. And let me explain that to you. And I was able to position what I wanted, in terms of what he wanted, because I understood the person, I solved the person before I tried to solve the deal. So as we’re at this step of solving the person, of course, we’re really focused on building a relationship with them. We’ve already established rapport really, in the E step, engaging thoughtfully, but now we’re working on truly building a relationship with them. And it’s really important that you sense and feel their level of eagerness, their level of energy, and then mirror that, you know, nothing would be more likely to raise red flags than if they were pretty calm and slow and wanting to ease into this relationship and you just showed up, you’re like, great, I need to make you an offer right now. They would sense that. And that would be a major disconnect, on the other hand, that the exact opposite could be true, right? If they are expressing that they’re ready to take care of this now. But you’re kind of dragging your feet trying to slow it down artificially, just so you can have more time to build a relationship, they might pick up on that too. So we call it slow dancing, but you really kind of want to dance with the seller at the speed and the tempo that they set. Secondly, you really want to ask good questions, you know, so you might ask me, Well, what is what defines a good question? Well, a good question I would say is one that is likely to uncover those insights, you know, not so much information is good to you’re going to want to take note of that, but it questions that uncover insights, you know, qualitative questions. How do you feel about this topic? What was your experience when this happened, and those types of things, and is really important, really, really important than that? This is gonna sound obvious, but I will tell you it is not as common as it seems like it should be. You need to be listening very, very closely to what they say. I don’t mean taking notes and writing down everything they say, or Trent recording it, transcribing it, you just need to be listening. Because if you’re listening, you will pick up on the information of course, you’re going to need to remember that they said the rent was 1600 and 50 bucks. But if you’re going to listen, you’re going to be able to pick up things that you were you’re reading between the lines, right? They say they feel XYZ about this topic, they feel ABC about this topic. And you can pick up on the vibe of what they’re really saying and read between the lines of that and that’s where your insights come from. As you’re asking them these questions and having this conversation, it’s also very important that it feels conversational, you know, it should feel natural, it should not feel like an interrogation. Don’t show up with a clipboard with 30 questions in a particular order, and you say, Okay, question number seven. All right, answer is this great. Number eight, blah, blah, blah, don’t do that. Have a conversation. conduct yourself like, again, a regular person having a conversation with a regular person, and listen, and focus and remember what they said, so that you can understand the person as best as you possibly can. And lastly, but certainly not least, is we need to simply find out, and what would be a win for the seller? What would be the thing that just would make them as happy as possible? And this is actually a question you can ask a little bit more directly ask a blue-sky question like, hey, if this all worked out, exactly. As you have been dreaming about, what does that look like? Tell me, I’d like to understand what we’re shooting for, ideally. So if you can do those things, you can build that relationship conversationally. ask good questions. And for crying out loud, listen to what they’re saying and understand what they’re really getting at. And know when you leave that meeting, or this series of meetings, as it might be solving, the person might take several steps, several meetings, progressively understanding what would be a win for them, you’re going to set yourself up great for the next step, which is the second s solving deal. And that’s what we’re going to dive into in the next episode. So that is the first s in the YESSES framework.
And that wraps up today’s episode of Racking Up Rentals. So again, show notes for today’s episode are at https://www.thoughtfulre.com/e47 for Episode 47. Please do us a massive favor by hitting that subscribe button in the podcast app. The second please, if you would also be so kind just rate and review the show, iTunes and the other podcast platforms, just like to know that people are listening and ratings and reviews. Let the platforms know that that’s exactly what’s happening. If you don’t know already, you should head over to join our Facebook group, it’s free for thoughtful real estate entrepreneurs. It’s called Rental Portfolio Wealth Builders. We’d love to have you joined us there so it’s just go to group.thoughtfulre.com. And it’ll take you right there. Last but not least, if you liked this episode, and you’re listening on your phone, take a screenshot of it real quick and then post that screenshot to Instagram and be sure to tag us. We are @thoughtfulrealestate, it’s all spelled out. And that too will help spread the word for the great content that you are enjoying here as well. I will see you in the next episode we’ll keep diving into the YESSES framework. 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 deal makers. Remember solve the person to unlock the deal and solve the financing to unlock the profits.
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