A short instructional video by Kevin Ray Ward advising real estate agents how to find, pre‑qualify, and serve real estate investors. Ward argues investors are highly valuable clients but require different processes — locating them via prospecting/meetups/listings, pre‑qualifying for funds and experience, understanding investor deal-focused thinking and buying patterns, streamlining offer workflows, and learning investing strategies from them.
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Real estate investors can be one of the best and most consistent sources of business for you in all of your business. Hi there, it's Kevin Ward, the founder of yes Masters Real Estate Success Training, helping you get more yeses and more successes in your business and in your life. And two of my favorite, favorite clients ever as a real estate agent were Rob Howey and Dana Malone. And over about a five year period, those two individuals were responsible for over 50 transactions for me combined. Now why? Because Rob and Dana were investors. They were real estate investors. And real estate investors can be one of the best and most consistent sources of business for you in, in all of your business. And when I found them, I had no idea what I had found, but they are and were a gold mine. The problem is most real estate agents have no clue how to work with real estate investors. Because real estate investors frankly are a different animal than regular buyers and sellers. They don't think the same, they don't work the same, they're just totally different. And in fact, I have had many brokers that basically have taught us real estate agents that working with investors is basically a waste of time because all they want to do is go out and put in low ball efforts, lowball offers and so don't waste your time and so forth. And yet I've made six figures off of individual investors. And I think it's one of the most powerful things to do if you're willing to learn how they work. So in this video I just want to talk real quickly about how to work with real estate investors as a real estate agent. So first, the first key to working with them is finding them. Now how do you find a real estate investor? Well, you can find them in a whole lot of ways. You can find them out by going to real estate investor meetup groups and network with a ton of them that way. The way that I found most of my real estate investors was by prospecting. And it came a couple of ways. One, both Rob and Dana interestingly came from for sale by owners. Dana would buy houses at the courthouse step. She would buy bank owned properties or properties at auction and then she would fix them up, rehab them and then flip them. She would sell them. And I found her because when she got ready to sell them, she would have them for sale by owner. And then if she didn't have them sold by the time that the rehab job was finished, then she would list them with an agent. But she would start by trying to do it for sale by owners. So I found her because I prospected for sale by owners and voila, I found Dana. I also found Rob as a real estate investor, not because he was selling his houses, although he did that too. But I found him because he had his house for sale by owner. Now it turned out he was really a sorry for sale by owner because he wasn't motivated. I've did business with him for six or seven years and he never did sell his own house, even though he tried several times. And I never could get him to list it with me because he wasn't motivated to sell it. However, I made a fortune over $100,000 in commissions just from working with this guy. He owned a house in South Lake, Texas, big house. But what I ended up selling for him were mostly houses that were 80, 90, 100, $120,000 properties. Because those were his rehab properties. I would help him buy them and then I would help him sell them. You can find them also when you have listings. So a lot of times you'll get buyer calls, especially when you take listings with like that are fixers, properties that need work, like probate properties, distressed properties, notice of defaults and so forth. When you have listings of lower end properties or fixers, you're going to get a lot of investor calls. So number one is just learning how and where to find them. And if you're doing business and you're prospecting consistently, you're going to find investors to work with. Now the second step is pre qualifying them. The reason this is important is because you're going to find out that most people that would call on a property that pose as investors aren't really investors. So before I spent any time with investors, I wanted to find out are they actually an investor or are they a wannabe investor who attended some conference or some training on how to become a real estate investor and they really aren't so pre qualify them. I want to know do you have money? Do you have experience? Do they have funds and do they have fruit on the tree? Do they actually know what they're doing or not? So I would always ask them. So how many deals have you done? How many homes? If they're a rehabber, how many homes have you flipped in the last 12 months? If they were an investor buying to hold and rent them out, how many properties do you have in your portfolio right now? It's a simple question, how much money do you have set aside for the right deal? Those two questions were really, really powerful. Just in terms of pre qualifying, whether or not I wanted to spend more time with A real estate investor. Now it always build a relationship with them, put them in my personal circle. But I wasn't going to go out and start spending a lot of time trying to find properties for somebody that wasn't actually ready and prepared to buy a house. Now the other thing is I always loved the listing side of the business better than the buyer side of the business because it gives you more control. And so Rob and Dana, the reason I love them so much and the reason I made so much money with them was because Dana would find her own property. She'd go buy them at the courthouse steps in Fort Worth at the foreclosure auction, she would buy them. So I didn't help her buy them. I didn't make any money on the buy. And then she would rehab them. She would have a sign in the yard and if they didn't have, she didn't have it sold by the time she started putting carpeting in. Then she would list it with me and I would list it and sell the property with Rob. He would buy HUD properties. So I would actually help him buy the properties. We'd make HUD bids and, and we'd bid on HUD properties and he'd buy them, he'd rehab them and I'd list them and sell all of those. And so I love that because I was dealing with getting the transactions on both sides of the deals. So you got to learn how they work. And this is the third thing is learn how investors think. And here's how they think. They're looking for a deal, they're not looking for a house. So if they're rehabbers, they're looking for a home they can get below market that has enough room, they can pay for repairs, fix it up and then sell it and make money. So they're not looking for a house and they're not going to pay full price. They're looking for a deal, they're looking for profit or they're looking for positive cash flow. If they're looking to buy or hold. Number four is understand how investors buy houses. And this is why I was taught investors were a waste of time is because they're going to make you want to put in all these low ball offers and so forth. Well, that's how they buy. They put in low ball offers and they know it's going to happen that way. So you'll take an investor and he may go through, he or she may go through 100 properties to pay offers on 10 of them to only be able to buy one or two. So you've got to streamline. If you're going to work with them, you've got to have a streamlined process for getting properties to them, letting them look through them, picking the ones they want to make offers on. And you just write out offers and it's just, it's a streamlined process. You're not and you learn what terms they're looking for and it's just like boom, boom, boom. And it's just like shoveling them out the door and knowing that half the time you're not even going to go get a response from the sellers. It's just, that's just the game. There's no, they're not emotionally attached. It's all about the deal. And then the fifth thing about working with those other investors that is so important and that is learn from them, learn how they make money. Because ultimately one of the best things about being in real estate is you can create financial freedom for yourself by learning how to buy and sell real estate. Not as an agent, but learning how to buy and acquire your own portfolio of rental property. Getting cash flow and stuff from the education that I received from working with them was probably as valuable to me as actually the commissions were themselves. Now at our Real Estate Vortex training camp, on our Real Estate Vortex online, we actually train a lot more on how to work with investors, how to find them, how to qualify them, what to do and exactly how to service them to help you make a fortune with them. So down in the link below is more information on the Real Estate Vortex and that training to help you learn more about that. If you're an investor or you're a real estate agent who's working with investors or wants to work with investors, put your questions down below. Your comments down below. What are the most important things you found in working with investors? Put them down in the comments below. Give the video a thumbs up if you like it. Make sure you subscribe to this channel. If you haven't, hope the video has been awesome for you and I look forward to talking to you on the next video. It.
