Creatinga Marketing Plan to Buy Houses

By Richard Roop

How many houses do you want to buy this month? How many seller appointments do you need to reach your house buying goal? How many leads do you need to sort through in order to get the appointments required? How much money can you investon marketing to get those deals coming to you?

Do you have a plan each month? Do you then work your plan? Are you committed to certain goals? Do you track your progress and then make adjustments if you’re off track?

Without a plan, your ability to collect cash and build equity as a real estate entrepreneur will be inconsistent at best. At worse your results can be, well… non-existent.

A Simple Plan for Creating Consistent Results

I’m going to share with you some great tips for turning your income and wealth accumulation goals into reality. First you need a vehicle. You got that. Buying and selling single family houses. What a great opportunity. What a great business.

Next you need a few goals. How many houses do you want to buy this year? How much profit do you want on each house, on average? How much cash will you collect now (income) and how much later (equity)? How much time will you dedicate each week to move you to your goals?

Now you need a strategy for success. You got that! Ron’s 5 Steps to Success (for any business) as you recall are:

1. Locate prospects

2. Prescreen leads

3. Construct and Present Offers

4. Close

5. Sell Quickly

You need to gather technical knowledge and skill in each of these areas. You probably have enough training and techniques to get started… or enough experience to take your business to the next level. That means you have enough “how to.” And you’ll always want to continue your education. That goes without being said. Attention on ongoing improvement and personal development is a habit of nearly every super successful entrepreneur I’ve met. But be careful…

What’s the real key to creating results and enjoying the successful achievement of your goals? It’s really all about taking action. Implementation. Applying what you’ve learned.

I do a lot of consulting with investors. Much of it relates to answering questions and giving out “how to” details, mostly around marketing and business strategies. I also do a lot of coaching. Coaching is different. I first give my coaching clients as much “how to” information as possible before I bring them into coaching. That’s so we can now focus in on simply applying all their real estate investing tools and strategies specifically toward achieving predetermined goals… and handling other “stuff” that only comes up when you get out there and start taking consistent committed action.

Developing a Plan of Action for Next Month

Let’s take the “5 Steps to Success” and work backward.

Step 5: Sell Quickly

I call it selling or occupying quickly. Usually the only reason to sell a house is to get cash. You need more cash, sell more houses. Occupying a house in our business usually means filling your vacancy with a tenant buyer or contract buyer. In either case, you will be collecting cash when you get the house occupied.

Therefore, set a goal for monthly cash. Or set a goal on how many houses you want to sell or occupy next month. This includes selling or occupying any houses you bought this month, houses you get back this month, houses you buy and then flip next month, and buyers who are finally cashing you out after living in property for a spell.

Step 4: Close

Get the deed. Get ownership. Do double closings. Flip contracts. Buy houses. How many houses are you going to buy next month?

Step 3: Constructing and Presenting Offers

You make offers on the phone or in the home. Make offers on the phone if you do not want them accepted. That means if you want to buy the house, meet with the seller.

If you are trying to prescreen a seller out, I call that “blowing them out of the water.” Tell a seller what you may do over the phone if you don’t expect them to accept it. Otherwise, go see them, do a presentation and attempt to get a contract.

If the seller is unavailable (out of town) then setup an appointment on the phone but fax them paperwork for the appointment and let them know you’re looking to get an agreement if you can work out all the details.

Set a goal on how many seller appointments you want next month? Working backward, that will depend on how many houses you want to buy. How many sellers do you need to see to buy a house? Three? Five? Ten? Remember, these are meetings setup after you’ve prescreened the seller. If should take too many. Be sure you goal for meeting with sellers supports you goal for buying houses.

Step 2: Prescreening Leads

How sellers do you need calling you, asking you to buy their house, in order to get an appointment? First you want to quickly eliminate non-deals. These are properties out of you area, or a type of property you’re not interested in. Next, look for motivation and equity. If they have some motivation or flexibility, and equity to work with, they are active leads. Work these leads. Go see these sellers. These are your active leads.

The rest of your leads can go into follow up. These sellers have equity but lack motivation or flexibility. If they have time or other options they’d like to pursue, fine. Let the market beat on them for awhile but stay in touch. They need to cook.

Read the article at for more on “How to Quickly Eliminate Non-Deals.”

How many calls and website submission forms do you need to book enough appointments to you reach your house buying goals?

Step 1: Locating Prospects

Generating leads is only one way to locate prospects. You can search the MLS, get referrals, hunt down the owners of ugly houses, etc. However, my number one method for locating prospects is direct response marketing. Get sellers calling you. Get sellers submitting their property information to your website.

How much can you afford to spend on marketing? We are talking about ads, signs, letters, postcards, flyers, etc. Who are you going to target and how will you get your message out? These are marketing campaigns. It may take several campaigns working simultaneously to reach your goals.

Definition of a Marketing Campaign

There are five “M”s to every marketing campaign.

1. Market:Who are you going to target? What geographic area or which targeted list?

2. Message:What are you going to communicate to your market?

3. Media:How can you cost effectively deliver you message to the market?

4. Multiple hits:How many times will you hit the same market during the campaign?

5. Months:How many months in a year will you hit your market?

Budgeting Your Marketing for Success

The cost of different marketing campaigns will vary. Low cost campaigns might require more labor on your part but less money. Higher cost campaigns may save lots of time and effort, and sometime are spread out over several months.

An important key is determining how much you spend to TEST a campaign before you end it, taking care not to commit long term until you have know you have a winner.

An average profit $27,000 per deal?

Some deals you do will make you a quick $3,000 to $15,000 on a flip. Rehabs as well as properties held many years can each bring $40,000 or more. Others deals you hold for a year or two only earn you $25,000 to $35,000 each. Profits of course vary from investor to investor… and from market to market. However, an average profit of $27,000 is a safe figure I use for the planning and coaching I do with investors nationwide.

How much to spend?

How much are you willing to spend on marketing to get one deal if your average profit is $27,000? I know from experience that you can do a deal spending $50 to $300. I also know that it’s more likely that you’ll want to plan investing $500 to $1,000 for each deal. In hot markets, fast moving markets… basically markets that lack motivated sellers, you can plan spend more. If you double or triple that budget per deal you are looking at $1,000 to $3,000 per house bought. However, I see higher average profits per deal in those markets as well.

Budgeting Planning Tips

Tip #1: Invest enough to test a marketing campaign to buy one house. In normal markets that’s $500 to $1,000. Hot markets $1000 to $3,000.

Tip #2: If you invest half your budget and you don’t get close to half the calls needed for success, you can drop it early. If you need 10-15 calls to buy a house and you only have 4 calls midway through, you might want to redirect you marketing to a different campaign

Tip #3: Budget enough to reach your goals. Or adjust your goals to meet your budget.

Tip #4: Some campaigns (like cheap weekly classified ads) can take several months before you get halfway through the campaign.

Tip #5: You want more than one campaign running at any given time. The number will depend on your month house buying goals.

Tip #6: The best campaigns will be the ones you have already tested and then can put on autopilot.

Marketing Campaign Example:

Mail small postcards to 1,000 homeowners of “non-owner occupied” houses within one zip code. Mail once every 3 months for 12 months for a total of 4 hits each. 4,000 postcards mailed thru USPS.com are about 30 cents each. Total campaign cost is $1,200 which is $100 a month of a monthly marketing budget. Goal: Buy 2 or more houses with a minimum profit of $25,000 each, closing at least one deal within 6 months.

Marketing Campaign Checklist

Here’s a new little tool to help you plan out your campaigns. I gave it out for the first time last month out our live marketing boot camp. Read through it and see how it will help you. You can download a copy of it at

Free Marketing Plan Review

Here’s one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned since I began coaching real estate investors one-on-one. If we help our clients set a monthly goal and then determine how many calls they need to achieve it, they can then simply focus on getting the leads coming in. We plan out a few of the best campaigns each month, trackthe results each week, and adjust along the way as needed. It’s very powerful process and it helps to create consistent results. For example, if you want to make $50,000 in cash and equity buying 2 houses next month, you don’t have to focus on the money or the buying, but first focus on getting the 30 or so calls you need coming in.

About the author:

Richard Roop has fast become known as “The Marketing Consultant for Real Estate Entrepreneurs.” He has been a full-time creative real estate investor since 1996 and continues to buy and sell 3 to 4 houses each month near his home in Woodland Park, Colorado.

Besides running his own real estate investment business, Richard shares his marketing expertise to help individual investors build their businesses nationwide. Each month he speaks to hundreds of real estate investors from experienced pros to budding entrepreneurs. He specializes in sharing proven, low cost direct response marketing strategies for getting a steady flow of motivated sellers calling you to buy their house, as well as systems for getting your properties occupied fast. Richard also likes to teach systematic approaches to growing your business, leveraging your time and increasing the profitability on each deal.

Richard’s marketing approach to investing is an excellent model if you like the idea of achieving your financial goals WITHOUT the need to hunt for deals, rely on agents, use your credit, offer large down payments, struggle with tenants, borrow from banks or call sellers.

FREE real estate investor “how to” articles, steaming audio presentations and eLetters can be accessed instantly online at