Real Estate Investors – Using Newspaper Ads to Get Motivated Sellers to Call You

Obviously you’re aware that in terms of the private lending process, I do not recommend newspaper ads for a number of reasons. To get sellers, newspaper ads work. They don’t work great and they have to be done right to get a good response, but what’s nice about newspaper ads is if they’re done right, they don’t cost a lot of money.
They’re completely evergreen, meaning once you set it up, they just crank week after week after week. They will produce a steady stream, not overwhelming, but you will get calls over time.
 
Use Small Newspapers
The important thing about a newspaper ad is you do not want to be placing it in a big newspaper like the Philadelphia Inquirer. In fact, the Philadelphia Inquirer may not be here in the next few months. If you live in a big town, the big newspapers are absolutely out of the picture. They’re very cost-prohibitive.
 
Target Your Area
 
Again, going back to our business plan: Hopefully you’ve all earmarked a particular township or borough or little town with 10,000 to 20,000 homes. Hopefully that town has a small little newspaper. Typically it may be a weekly paper. It may not even be daily in many cases. You could advertise in most of these newspapers for $15-20 a month or week. Not an exorbitant amount of money.
 
You work with the newspaper, you draft your ad, and that ad will just be there week after week after week. If you do it the right way, you set it up with voicemail system or the website, you can track the results to you know how many people are calling from that newspaper ad to your voicemail box by tracking it through that voicemail or extension number.
 
Set Your Budget
 
You can then make some estimates. I’m spending $20 a week. Maybe in a month’s time, maybe you got six phone calls. That’s not overwhelming certainly, but six phone calls, if they’re good quality phone calls, could be very profitable.
 
Maybe you’re not going to get a deal each and every month out of those six calls, but maybe the third or fourth month, every once in awhile you’re going to hit a really good quality property with a truly motivated seller who’s ready to do a deal.
 
Write Attention-Grabbing Headlines
I think newspaper ads should be part of your process. It is absolutely an effective way to get sellers to call you. It’s simple and easy. Some of the things you’ve got to watch out for obviously is space. You’re paying for space. Generally they’re not going to give you a lot.
 
You’re going to get a small headline. You need to put something in there that will catch attention. You could have maybe a sentence or two. Typically, not even a sentence or two; it’s a bullet point or two.
 
Part of what I’m going to give you on the download page is about probably 30 or 40 different newspaper ads that I’ve tried over the years. I’m going to give you all of these ads. You guys can look at them. You can change them or modify them but I’ll give you some examples.