Many times when the homeowner contacts you from your marketing, they’re looking for a way to actually stay in or keep their house. What you’ll find is that this happens 60 to 70% of the time. Don’t worry, just expect it. Your job at this point is to educate the homeowner and convert them from a keeper into a seller. This is done through education. What you need to do at this point is dig into the conversation and learn about the homeowner’s situation.
A perfect example of how the conversation might go: “hi I got your phone number from your website and I’m calling because I need to keep my house. I’m four months behind and the lender doesn’t seem to want to work with me” your response could be something like “okay will let’s talk about this, my name was David what was your name again?” The first thing we wanted to do is get control of the conversation by asking a question. When they answer with their name, continue on with more questions, you want to gently interrogate the homeowner to gather as much information as possible, which will then help you to educate them on their situation. “Mr. seller, tell me some more about your situation”. Let Mr. seller talk a little bit and during his conversation hopefully he will share some information that you can use. Then it’s time to ask some more questions. “Do you have a first mortgage or a first and a second?” “How much is owed on the first? How about the second? And how many payments are you behind again? How much are your typical monthly payments?” After you’ve asked a few key questions you can formulate a response that will go something like this: “well Mr. seller, after hearing what you told me, I can give you an idea of what you can expect from your lender. First of all I’m sure you can imagine there being only one or two payments behind makes it very difficult to get refinanced, especially in this marketplace, but being for months behind like you are, I would highly doubt that you ever find anybody that will refinance you. This leaves only a couple of options that I know of. The first option would be to pay off the back payments in full, can you afford the $9,000 to do that? No, okay well sometimes the lender is willing to work out a payment plan with you but many times they want about half of the back payments upfront so not only would you have to come up with $4500, they also take the balance of the other $4500 and add that to the loan and expect that to be paid back within four to six months, so your payment might actually go up 500, 800, even $1000 per month on top of what you’re already paying, are you in a position to be able to pay that?” Many times a seller will certainly say no. If they do say yes, by all means tell them either contact the loss mitigation Department and ask them for a workout plan or forbearance agreement or if you offer that service, offer it to them yourself. Otherwise this is where your conversion process happens. It should sound something like this: “Mr. seller as far as keeping your house, that seems to me the only options that I know of. There is another route that you could take should you decide to and that is selling your house. Iit seems to me that might be a good option at this point. Have you thought about selling your house?” You be surprised that many times a homeowner will actually say “yes I have thought about that and you may be right”. This is when you move in and let them know that your company actually buys properties. You explain that even though there is not much equity in their property which most likely there isn’t, you have a way that you can purchase the property by negotiating with the lender. There’s a very specific way to go into detail about this conversation and it means the difference of either turning that phone call into a deal are losing them for good. I’ll go into details in another post.
Sincerely,
