As a real estate wholesaler, you already know that finding motivated seller leads is the lifeblood of your business. Having an absentee owner list is the fastest way to market to thousands of highly motivated property owners.

In this post I’ll walk through why absentee owners are one of the best lead types, and how to find them.

I’ll also give you some insight into their motivation factors when communicating with them.

Finally, I’ll tell you one of the best ways to market to them, and increase your deal flow through marketing automation.

Read on to find out:

• What are absentee owners
• Advantages of marketing to them
• Where to get lists of absentee owners
• Buying a list of absentee owners
• Motivation factors of absentee owners
• How to market to absentee owners
• Automating your marketing

Let’s get started with a simple definition of absentee owners.

 

What Is and Who Are Absentee Owners?

Absentee owners are people who own real estate but do not live on the property. There is a good reason why they are one of the best lead types to market to. Since they are not actively living in the property, they have less of an emotional attachment. As a result, they are more likely to be motivated to sell.

Many absentee owners are investors who buy real estate to rent for income. They usually hire property managers to manage their investment and are not hands-on property owners.

Absentee owners can also be people who have abandoned their property for personal reasons. In this case, they do not house tenants, the house does not appear in rental listings, and the house sits vacant.

Examples of personal reasons why people have more than one property include:

• Second home/vacation home owners
• People who had to relocate and are paying the mortgage on two properties
• Military personnel who needed to deploy quickly
• Heirs

No matter the reason for the owner’s absence from the property, the bottom line is, they do not live on the property they own and are absentee homeowners.

There are many advantages to marketing to absent landlords or homeowners, which I explore next.

 

The Main Advantage of Marketing to Absentee Owners

There is one huge advantage when marketing to absentee owners: lack of attachment.

Because they don’t live in the house, most of the owners don’t form an emotional bond to their additional property.  So if the property becomes a problem, they are much more open to finding solutions to those problems.

In cases like that, any irritation because of the property, for example from vacancy or the need for repairs, will make that seller more likely to want to part with it.

Real estate investing is all about finding opportunities, at the right time, and capitalizing on them.

When it comes to marketing to absentee owners, you will find that the right timing is much more frequent with this type of lead.

When you present them with an offer they can’t resist, they might be ready to jump at the chance to cash in.

You just have to find enough of them, who are at the right point in their ownership, where they are fed up with that second property.

Now you know who absentee owners are, and what makes them highly motivated sellers. In the next section I’ll give you some pointers on how to find them on a large scale: through a list provider.

 

Where to Get Absentee-Owned Property and Owners

There are a ton of list providers out there, so which ones do you choose?

In general, most list providers get the data from the same place: tax rolls.  So the basic data is the same.  But is it?

Does the data that you get come with phone numbers and email addresses?  In many cases it doesn’t and you have to then go out and pay for skip tracing to find that information.

This is time and money that you could be using to find more deals.

Then, what are you going to do with the data?

Does the data provider come with an integrated email marketing system and CRM to help you market to those leads at scale?

This is where REI/kit comes in.

REI/kit is a completely integrated wholesaling system that already comes with skip traced leads. This is ideal for outbound lead marketing with automated email, text, ringless voicemail, and direct mail campaigns.

Not only that, but it also has inbound lead marketing components including a lead generation website, as well as lead generation phone numbers for your offline marketing.

All of this is included as part of your subscription, and scales as your business grows.

 

How to Find Absentee Owners Quickly Using REI/kit

REI/kit’s Motivated Seller Lead Lists tool, integrated with the REI/kit CRM, is an easy-to-use, but powerful, leads list generator that automatically skip-traces your leads.

It takes just a few clicks to create an Absentee Owner list:

 

 

Once created, set your geographic radius, and layer on any other filters to fine-tune your results.

Your REI/kit absentee owned leads are then automatically skip-traced as they are being processed into the CRM for:

• Owner name
• Property address
• Owner’s mailing address
• Phone number(s)
• In many cases email address

 

Watch this short video for more details on the Leads List tool:

 

 

Once processed into your CRM, your absentee owner list is ready to be marketed to within REI/kit immediately.

Now, as with any marketing method, there are best practices for how to get the most out of the lists you receive.

 

Getting the Most Out of Absentee Owner Lead Lists

Seasoned investors love the efficiency and ease of using lead lists to market to motivated sellers.

If you are just starting out, however, you might wonder how to make sure that you are getting the full benefit of a lead list.

The main concept to keep in mind when finding motivated sellers through a list provider, is that the more leads you contact, the higher the likelihood of finding a truly motivated seller.

This is what the most successful wholesalers do: They contact hundreds of owners, also splitting up their marketing campaigns by geographic farm area in order to track the locations with the most positive response.

It’s important to get in front of as many leads as possible to find deals, but contacting those leads only once will result in a smaller response.

That’s why, hand-in-hand with reaching out to your absentee owner list, you also need to follow up with those leads to maximize the impact of your outbound campaigns.

 

Follow-up is key with lead lists

In most industries, the average sales representative follows up once with a prospect (if they follow up at all), and then doesn’t contact them again.

There can be many reasons why owners don’t respond the first time you contact them. Following up with them gives them the opportunity to see the solution you provide.

Following up with many leads manually is tedious, so you should automate the process as much as possible.

Automated systems send multiple communications over time. As a result, you have a very good chance of being top of mind when the owner is finally ready to do business.

Getting the most out of your absentee owner list through outreach, and following up with automation, will exponentially increase your likelihood of closing deals. I’ll talk about how to scale your business with automation further down this post.

But before we can get to the how, let’s briefly talk about an absentee owner’s motivation factors, and how you can use those motivation factors in your marketing.

 

What are the Motivation Factors for Absentee Owners

Getting to the heart of a seller’s motivation

Marketing to absentee owners effectively can be a challenge for real estate investors.

The reason why is because it seems like these owners all face the same problem. That problem is that they have a second property that they may want to get rid of.

As a result, it’s easy to think that a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy will get results.

In actuality, each one of the absentee owners I listed at the beginning of this post, has a particular, and unique, psychological pain point that you should be aware of in your dealings with them.

These pain points could be that they are paying two mortgages — on a new house, and on a house they used to love. They could be landlords who started out with a dream of cash flow, but are now tired of constant vacancy and upkeep.

Whatever their motivation factors, getting the attention of these sellers lies in communicating that you solve their very specific issue.

Every conversation, email, and phone call should strike at the heart of their situation, and you should constantly reinforce the idea that you are the solution to their problems.

I’ve covered why it’s so important to include motivation factors in your marketing. Now let’s talk about how to market to these absentee leads.

 

How to Market to Absentee Owner Lists

When considering what kinds of marketing methods are ideal for any lists that you purchase, it’s important to consider the scale of your campaigns.

You may be reaching out manually, but that will not move your business forward in any meaningful way. You’re wholesaling to help people and make money, and the more the better – right?

 

Automation of your marketing and follow-up tasks is the straightest path to scaling your business.

I have already covered the importance of using automated systems to reach out and follow up with your leads.

What is the marketing method that you can automate and scale to thousands of sends for practically nothing?

Email, my friend.

Believe it or not, most absentee owners are upper middle class, have other jobs, and live in their email.

 

What should you include in your marketing to Absentee Owners?

Let’s talk about what you should include in your emails to your absentee owner list.

I already outlined the types of motivation factors to take into consideration when communicating with your absentee leads.

It’s those specific pain points that you need to include in your emails, again with your company as the answer to their problems.

There should ideally be an email for each of the types of leads that you will be targeting.

This is so that if a particular email received does not resonate with that potential seller, one of the others will.

Now, you may not have the time to carefully craft a series of emails that address those pain points from scratch.

If that is the case, let me introduce you to another tool within REI/kit that you can use with your lead lists right away: the Email Campaigns tool.

 

Automated Absentee Owner Email Campaign Done For You

The Email Campaigns tool makes it easy to set up and send automated email campaigns to all of your absentee leads, in just a few minutes.

We have already done the hard work for you by creating the Absentee Owner email campaign sequence.

This email drip sequence is made up of four pre-written emails that can be sent as-is, or customized to your brand, and already addresses those psychological pain points I outlined above.

The best part is that you don’t even need to have spreadsheets to keep track of which leads you have already emailed, to manually send them additional emails.

The tool will send the emails automatically, one after another every few days – completely hands-off.

Email marketing is one of the smartest ways to introduce yourself to your leads exactly where they already spend hours every day. Having the ability to automate the process easily means having more time to close deals.

 

Try the REI/kit absentee lead lists tool, robust CRM, and text, ringless voicemail, email and direct mail marketing automation campaigns. PLUS lead capture websites, virtual phone numbers, analysis tools, and pro property reports!

Sign up for a full-featured trial for your plan, and start ramping up your deal flow today — click this link to see the list of features and benefits: https://www.reikit.com/pricing

Summary

There are few leads more motivated to sell than people who have a second property that they do not want, known as absentee owners. Use absentee-owned properties as a lead source in your wholesale real estate marketing campaigns, and you will reap the benefits!

In this post I talked about the advantages of marketing to absentee owners. I also pointed out the best way to find these leads if you want to scale your real estate wholesaling business – by using an absentee owner list, and how to get the most out of your lists.

I broke down the motivation factors of absentee owners that you should use in your communication with them to drive a response. Finally, I showed you how to get your business in front of your leads easily with email campaigns and email marketing automation.