About My First Caller

OK - after talking with this woman who called my toll free number and went through the questionnaire, she seemed borderline motivated...but I figured I needed th practice in meeting with sellers (and she lived only a few blocks away!) so I agreed to come over and take a look at the house. I was really nervous about making an offer. I prepared some legal forms before I left which consisted of: Option to Purchase, Offer Sheet, Lease Option Form. I also ran some numbers to see what kind of seller financing offer I could give her and still have positive cash flow. Since it was an expensive area with high-taxes the numbers looked like this: $70,000 upfront, $600/month for 10 years, and about $127,000 balloon later. Then I dashed off to the meeting --

So, her daughter had moved out of the house and she wanted to buy a real nice place she found in PA with her daughter...but she hadn't sold a house in 15 years. After looking at the home, I realized it was a great house for a starting family and had a big (1 acre) back yard. Everything was well taken care of...If I had to pick something potentially bad, it was the underground oil tank.

Anyway - we talked for a while and I presented a few different offers to her: First I tried to do a seller finance where I told her I can get her that right away (about 7 days); she said even though she didnt have much of a mortgage left (about $50K) she needed a lot more money upfront to get the new house, but we couldn't seem to get a combo that worked for me and her; so I tried an 80% offer using an option. I figured that she loses nothing if I can get her souse sold fast, plus she could still list with a realtor (whom she was about to contact) and just exclude me. She didnt like that either.

So the moral of the story is like they said; make sure the caller is really motivated before you meet with them. Granted, I dont feel that I wasted my time here because it got me infront of a seller for 'practice', but I certainly wouldn't want to continue to do this if I had a lot of calls.

I left her my name and number and told her about the lease/option idea and said that if she got in a position of double payments to give me a call.