The housing market meltdown created a severe change in the US lending market which will become even more evident as we move forward. Currently many of the loans are dedicated to first time home buyers who qualify for an FHA insured loan.

These type of loans give the buyer approximately 97% financing, with the remaining 3% covered often by government grants. Therefore they are in high demand because they allow any buyer to get into a property with practically no money down.

One caveat is that FHA requires the property title to have been “seasoned” for at least 90 days. That means that an investor who buys a home from a bank or a motivated seller, rehabs it and then puts it back on the market for a profit must wait 3 months before closing with a buyer who has an FHA insured loan.

This is not necessarily an issue considering that a typical rehab job will take between 2 and 4 weeks and that the marketing of the property will require at least another 2 o 4 weeks before a potential buyer is found.

Adding the time it takes to get the lean approved we easily get past the 90 days. The problem now is that banks, in order to lend to first time home owners, can only use FHA approved appraisers which introduces a bottle neck in the process because there are not so many of them.

Additionally. FHA approved appraisers are fairly expensive and can take a while before doing the appraisal since there is such an high demand. The bank also is likely to challenge the appraisal and ask for more data, adding time to the process. Then, when the bank runs out of government funds, they must wait for new funds to come in and this can easily add 15 more days. So it is common for a loan to take at least 45 days to actually be approved and delivered at closing, with some horrible delays that sometime bring the overall process at 6 months.

But there is more to it. The appraisers are now invited to take into account also bank owned properties while taking comparable sales for the area. Originally they used to only consider arm-length-sales while estimating the potential value of a property. That is they would consider only those properties sold by a private owner to a private buyer, both trying to do the best for themselves.

Therefore the average appraised value will go down and this trend will slow down sales and reduce average prices, as if they weren’t already low enough. It is funny because banks seem to be playing against themselves.

By tightening the lending process and by forcing appraisers to lower their appraisals, they will also reduce the average selling price of bank owned properties so accelerating the whole spiral on the foreclosure front.

Roberto Mazzoni

Why selling your products or services to just one person at a time while you could be talking to hundreds? Webinars and teleseminars are the most powerful tool any marketer can have today and they are particularly precious for the real estate investor.

You can deal with buyers, private money lenders or prospective partners that are anywhere in the US or the whole world for that matter and multiply your efficiency many, many times over.

Webinars are not only a selling tool, actually they are one of the most powerful promotional tools that exist. They prepare people for the sale and create the level of understanding and agreement that is paramount for a smooth relationship.

Setting up a webinar (on computer and telephone) or a teleseminar (on the phone only) is very easy: you just need an account with a company that provides a bridge line service or a site like GoToWebinar.

But there are the 17 steps you need to take to make it a success:

1. Select a JV partner that has a product of interest for an hot target market (this can be done through an evaluation of what he has already sold in other teleseminars or keyword Google evaluation on the subject if he has a new product).

2. Find out what your list or prospective new members want or what they are already buying (Google keyword evaluation, surveys on the members and other sources).

3. Evaluate the content of the product offered by the partner (info products are those who sell best).

4. Create a bonus package with the JV partner that is perceived to be far more valuable than the product being sold.

5. Create a time limit or quantity limit or both for the availability of the product promoted.

6. Together with the JV partner, define a script for the teleseminar. Create a system/script that can maximize returns.

7. Practice on the script by delivering the webinar or teleseminar to a friendly audience (for free) until you feel ready. If you have never done Webinars before you should practice at least 5 times before delivering your first “paid for” webinar.

8. Build a turn key system out of the offer so that people can simply pay and get going immediately with the specific product being introduced.

9. Make a payment system available to collect orders from the call (whether through the partner or directly). The best would be a Web page, but that could be complemented with an operator that could collect payments over the phone.

10. Setup an autoresponder for the project, to collect information from the registrants (name, e-mail address and sometimes phone number if we are going to do voice broadcasting to remind people about the call).

11. Setup an opt-in page and a confirmation page (date, time) and invite them to print it and keep it in view.

12. Write a series of e-mails to drive people to a landing page. Create value and the sense of a big event.

13. Get people registered collecting personal information. Possibly collect phone number to reminder them about the call shortly before it happens.

14. Remind people to attend several times (particularly in the morning of the day the call is due and just before the call starts). Give them the connection information again.

15. Do the live call with an operator/organizer who can assist people while they login and can collect questions while the speaker talks and who can contribute to the content by questioning and introducing the speaker (tha would be me). On big teleseminars more people might be needed: the organizer and one or more operators to individually help the people while they connect to solve potential audio issues or taking care of congestion.

16. Record the call with backups so to be sure not to fail and make it available as a replay over the next few days with several e-mails sent to people in the list.

17. If feasible, send a series of e-mails inviting people to participate to an encore presentation in case they missed the original live call or the web replay.

It seems a lot’s of action and it is to some degree, but you will get maximum results when you follow this sequence and you will work much less compared to telling the same things over and over to every single prospect, individually.

Roberto Mazzoni