Marketing Strategies for Motivated Home Sellers in Foreclosure

According to ATTOM Data Solutions, a leading curator of real estate data, there were 164,581 U.S. properties with foreclosure filings — default notices, scheduled auctions or bank repossessions — in the first six months of 2022, up 153 percent from a year ago.

Two years after the COVID-19 pandemic, a massive government intervention, and mortgage industry efforts to prevent defaults, foreclosures returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2019. August foreclosures were at 86 percent of the number of foreclosures in August 2019. While these numbers are not historic compared to previous years, they are alarming.

Real Estate Opportunities for Local Home Buyers

Whether you are a seasoned real estate investor, wholesaler or home buyer, a foreclosure provides two opportunities:

1. For the Seller

Foreclosure causes more problems than it solves for a homeowner:

1. The seller loses their home to the mortgage lender.
2. The seller has difficulty selling their home in a bad real estate market.
3. The seller’s credit has been ruined for several years, making it difficult to buy another home.

As an investor or local buyer, you can help sellers unload their property and get out of their mortgage with their credit intact. You provide an opportunity for the homeowner to sell their house fast for cash without incurring selling expenses or going through the hassle of a traditional home sale.

2. For the Buyer

While foreclosure is never good, it does present an opportunity for you to land a lucrative real estate deal. You can buy a house as-is for cash at a discount and close the sale quickly. In most cases, the buyer or the lender who repossessed the house is willing to sell the property at a percentage of its market value to get it off their hands.

So, in effect, you create a win-win both for you and the home seller.

Marketing to Distressed Homeowners

As a seasoned investor, you can empathize with a homeowner’s hardship and help them through this difficult period. However, to find and reach distressed homeowners, you must develop marketing campaigns to target foreclosures. You must also understand the motivated seller mentality when crafting your marketing message.

A distressed borrower that is falling behind on their mortgage payment feels vulnerable. While they are eager for options and hope, they may be suspicious of a stranger and, potentially, a vulture looking to swoop down and profit from their misery. How do you overcome this distrust? The answer is to appeal to the homeowner’s emotion - not their intellect - in your marketing message.

Paid Advertising

A powerful way to reach distressed homeowners is paid advertising on either the Google or Facebook platforms.

Search engine and social media paid advertising allows you to display your ads to home sellers likely interested in a cash home offer while filtering out sellers who are not.

With Google search ads, you target keywords related to distressed sellers or sellers in financial hardship in your area. For example, search “How to avoid foreclosure” in Google. If you use that phrase as a keyword, you can create an ad that targets the seller’s situation. Make sure the landing page addresses foreclosure and financial hardship. It will improve your conversion rate.

Since Facebook is not a search engine, we lose the ability to target sellers searching for help with financial hardship. Instead, create specific ads that mention how you help sellers facing foreclosure. The more specific your message is, the more likely you will attract the right type of leads. Generalized ads are likely to deliver average or unrelated leads.

Website SEO

Foreclosure is always a hot topic with home buyers and home sellers. So, you need to highlight it throughout your website. Similar to Google paid ads, you’ll begin by identifying primary keywords such as ‘sell my house fast before foreclosure’ or ‘sell my house during foreclosure’. Position your keywords in the content in places such as your metadata, headlines, sub-headings, paragraphs, internal links, call to action, menus, and footers.

Once you establish and position your keywords, create pages focused on foreclosure.

• Foreclosure problem page
• Distressed House problem page
• Late mortgage payments problem page
• Foreclosure blog topics
• Internal links to foreclosure pages from other website pages

Optimize foreclosure pages or related pages for SEO and readability. Also, promote these pages on other marketing channels. It will help you create a high-converting website.

Online & Offline Retargeting

At Magnyfi, we combine both online and offline retargeting for best results. Online retargeting includes Google's display network of over two million partner sites plus we retarget on social media platforms, Facebook & Instagram.

With online retargeting, that is done by utilizing the Google analytics code and the Facebook pixel. You can create graphics that touch on multiple pain points, including foreclosure when doing this.

Our Intelligent Postcard Retargeting program reaches distressed homeowners who visit your website but do not take the desired action. Using a snippet of code on the back-end, we gather data on each visitor. We then send out credibility-based postcards to about 50-60% of your website visitors.

Our Retargeting strategy has everything you need to stay top of mind with motivated sellers in your market. The biggest thing to note here is that retargeting is only advertising to those who have previously visited your website.

Outbound Marketing Strategies

Outbound marketing strategies such as direct mail, cold calling, texting, and ringless voicemail (RVM) target and generate more motivated seller leads. Using these methods, you find distressed property owner’s information and manually reach out to them to see if they would be interested in a cash offer.

As a real estate investor, you can buy the data to help you accomplish this. Providers such as PropStream and Batchleads offer multiple tools for gathering property data, seller information, and lead generation. You can select sellers that are in pre-foreclosure and buy the data that includes their address & contact information.

From there, you can create an outbound marketing strategy that involves cold calling and texting, and RVM, as well as direct mail.

Start Generating 15-30+ Inbound Motivated Seller Leads Every Month

Magnyfi can help you develop your online credibility profile and leverage that to generate consistent, qualified motivated seller leads who are pre-sold on working with you. Learn more about how we can help you implement our Motivated Sellers Marketing Program in your area.

To check the availability of your market, fill out our application form or contact us at 877-540-4248, and we will walk you through the process. We only work with a limited number of investors per area, so claim your market today!