How to filter out Real Estate advertising scams?

Yes, a lot of property owners here who has an apartment/house for rent don;t have the physical time and some are not pc savvy to create ads themselves so they seek advertising companies or realty companies to do it for them.

Odds are, if they come to you with a specific offer, i.e. posting their ads on CL for $x, it's a scam. Since you're the one advertising a service, simply ignore any offer that makes you uncomfortable.

Because most of the people, at least in the groups I mentioned, don't know what they're doing, are wasting money doing it and probably getting frustrated with lack of results. This is really common among FSBOs and small time property investors. Odds are, they are not looking for help on CL - if they were, they'd post their own gigs.

Like any other sales proposition, some will be open to exploring what you can do for them and others won't.

I marketed for FSBO's on CL and several other online sources for almost 2 yrs b4 the market crash in 2008.

I just contacted them via phone mostly. Prior to doing that though I had built a small 'example' website for them to view about the service I was offering them in case they questioned 'what exactly is it you can do for me?'

I'd take tons of photos of the homeowners house inside and out, at least 2 dozen photos, and/or I'd shoot some video.

I'd measure all the rooms inside, look up the sq ft from the county website and other necessary stats about the property.

Once back home I'd throw the photos into a video format like Animoto or Movie Maker and build them a marketing site using their property address as the URL. All the stats I gathered on my visit and from the county website I'd throw on the site as well. I put a email form on there as well forwarding all emails to the homeowner. The phone # on the site was a 'rented' # like a Google Voice ( I don't recall the exact company I used) forwarding to their residence as well. That way any calls that came into that number they'd know the potential buyer had already been to the website, saw the photos/video, stats, etc and liked what he saw and was calling for more info to the homeowner or to set up a showing. So the homeowner knew that kind of pre-qualifed them to a degree.

I also included 3/mo of marketing online using various formats and sources in my fee. I wanted nothing to do with the screening, negotiating with buyers etc. That was all for the FSBO to handle. I just built them a site to help them market their home and gave them 3/mo of marketing which consisted of maybe 1-2 hrs a week at most marketing the website I built for them for their home.

The site took me maybe 2 hours to put together. The 1st one took probably twice that long til I got better at it.

I started finding clients initially driving around and seeing ForSaleByOwner signs in people's yards and writing down their ph # from the sign and calling them up inquiring about their property. How many calls they've had, how much interest, what are they doing for marketing etc. 95% of the homeowners have no clue like 80% of the realtors do about how to market. Stick a sign in the yard and wait for the phone to ring ya know. Realtors use the MLS and stick a sign in the yard and wait for the phone to ring and charge you 6% commission.

Then I started calling FSBO's online. Houses under $100k the homeowners are reluctant to pay anything extra to help sell their house either because they're broke, have no equity, no job or whatever reason. That was my experience although there were a couple of exceptions. Properties over the $100k price were a better target.

Of course you'd hear "oh, that's a good idea but my kid or cousin can do that for probably nothing" when I'd mention my marketing method to them. Ok, good luck with that, see ya, here's my number if you ever get your head out of the sand.. Next. I started out charging $399 flat fee for the site + 3/mo marketing. I did some for $299 and 2/mo marketing. Most I ended up doing $350 flat fee & 3/mo marketing. If they wanted me to continue the marketing after the initial 2 or 3/mo I told them 3/mo for $88. Nothing was written in stone so I'd rather have something instead of nothing if a homeowner balked or wasn't sold on the opportunity. I always started high at $399 and went down so I had some wiggle room. I also gave discounts for referrals. Ya have a friend trying to sell their house you know of and if they sign up for my service I'll give you a $25+ discount. A couple times I had already built a clients site and got a referral from them so just got them a $25 gift card to a steakhouse or Applebee's or something like that. One client actually got me 4 referrals.

I had 24 clients at one time in various price ranges and wanted to scale up somehow but right around that time things in the market started to slide south and more foreclosures started popping up, credit lines came to a halt, disposable income dried up and so did my 'business'. It was more like a hobby, I never really registered it legally or anything. I initially just wanted to test the waters when I started to see if there was a viable business idea with what I was doing and it kind of took on a life of it's own after awhile.

I initially didn't know what to charge and kind of played around with the price a bit. A homeowner is usually selling their home themselves for a reason and don't want to pay 6% to some realtor to list it for them. But once you show them and can convince them how much more beneficial it would be to have a website with all the property photos, details, etc it saves them a ton of time taking calls from tire-kickers, answering the phone and 100 questions. If an interested party is calling or emailing them they've found the website and have expressed an interest. It's up to the homeowner to sell the house, I just provided the vehicle to help them market it.

All in all I enjoyed messing around with it. Could I have made a full time income off of it? Hard to say. Like anything else it's a numbers game. I think if you did a mailing and sent out several 100 postcards to local FSBO's I know you'd get some results. I just sent out 1717 postcards to absentee homeowners in the past 2 weeks and I'm still getting calls today. So far I've had just shy of a 9% call back which is off the hook and have 3 possible deals from it so far (I'm a RE investor).

Anyways, it's been awhile since I've stopped by here and I happened to log in and see they have re-designed the forum and have this trending topics feed now and this post was at the top when I jumped on and ....woolaa.. Sorry about going so long but I figured this was what the OP was asking about and since I had some experience doing it many moons ago I thought I'd drop my 2 cents in.

Hope I didn't lull anyone who reads this to sleep.

Good luck!
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