Screening Your Leads: Letting the Web Do Your Work and Build Your Portfolioby Charrissa Cawley

When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone nobody envisioned that it would one day be as widely accepted as it has been. Although the telephone can dramatically cut down on the amount of work that goes into qualifying your prospects, the amount of time you spend on the phone qualifying leads is time you have to take away from other more lucrative activities. If you want to take your real estate investing career to the next level it’s time you step into the 21st century by investing pennies in a website – a solution that will free up time and help you bring in more pre-qualified leads than you’ll be able to handle.

The biggest benefit to you in having a website is that it can flood your inbox with pre-qualified leads – people who at a minimum already know something about you and are at least receptive to the idea of doing business with you. These are Grade ‘A’ prospects for you because you won’t have to explain as much to bring them up to speed and establish credibility with them because your website will have already done the heavy lifting for you.

A good website will have a questionnaire or information dialog box for your prospects to fill out. This information will be like digital gold to you because you’ll be able to further screen your prospects and weed out prospects unlikely to be good candidates for the type of investing in which you specialize or concentrate. In mere seconds you can find out everything you need to know to help you decide whether that particular prospect can be discarded or warrants a telephone response.

At this point you can send a canned message to prospects you can’t help and concentrate on prospects more likely to have properties worthy of a personalized telephone response. In addition, you can further screen the remaining prospects and call the hottest possibilities right away.

Every lead will land in one of four categories:

Strong prospect – warrants an immediate call

Possible prospect – call after the stronger possibilities have been called

Non-prospect – Based on the information they’ve provided, you’ve concluded that the lead doesn’t warrant a personalized response. These leads can receive a standard email thanking them for their interest, but unfortunately you don’t think there’s anything you can do to help them.

Good candidate – just not for you. These could be prospects with property that would lend themselves well to an investing strategy you don’t handle. For these candidates, you might work out an arrangement with another investor where you swap leads that fit the other’s investing strategy – in exchange for a small piece of the pie when they make the sale. By the same token you can slide a little something their way for any leads they provide you with that end up in your portfolio.

You only have 24 hours in a day to handle the myriad details involved in locating and purchasing property. Every second you spend on the phone is time you can’t spend on more lucrative activities. The beauty of a website is that it will work harder than you can. It’s available when your prospects are actively seeking answers – even if they’re thinking about it in the middle of the night or on the weekend.

Put the power of the web to work for you and reserve the telephone for strong candidates. Free up more of your time for other activities that will have greater potential to impact your net worth. If you find yourself itching to spend more time on the phone, give a friend or a loved one a call. You’ll have time to catch up on the latest gossip because your website will be working while you’re on the phone.

A good fisherman uses good bait. Decent bait will get you a lot of good nibbles, but a real estate website will cause the fish to jump into your boat. Unless you enjoy sitting in a boat all day hoping for an occasional nibble, invest pennies a day in a solution that will give you a full string of fish that will get you home more quickly. To learn more about how you can put the power of the web to work for you by loading your inbox with qualified prospects, point your browser towards www.myreiwebsites.com