Clever Ways To Market On A Small Budget

When you are first starting out as a real estate investor, there’s no shame in having a small marketing budget. The good news is you can still achieve great results, you’re just going to have to be a little creative.  If you don’t have much money to invest in marketing, it means you are going to have to invest your time doing some “manual labor” instead. 

Phone Calls 

One of the best low-cost, yet highly effective, marketing strategies you can implement right away is simply picking up the phone and making phone calls to potentially motivated sellers. How do you find these people to call? Here are a few ways: 

• Find ads on Craigslist to call 
• Call “for sale by owner” sellers on Zillow
• Google search in your county area for different types of “for sale by owner” websites 
• Pick up a local newspaper and call “for sale by owner” ads
• Call rental ads as well, because a lot of times you will find “unintentional landlords” – individuals who were originally trying to sell their house, but they couldn’t, so now they’re trying to rent it as a last resort 

These phone calls cost you nothing out of pocket, merely your time. 

Bandit Signs 

Another effective, low-cost marketing strategy for those on a small budget is putting up bandit signs. I’m sure you’ve seen them. They are usually located near busy intersections or at highway exits. They are those neon-colored signs that typically say, “I Buy Houses. Any Price, Any Condition. Call me at 555-555-5555.” Many investors successfully use bandit signs to generate high-quality leads, and those leads can often result in some of the best deals.

As effective as this strategy is, at the same time beware that some cities or municipalities around the country are much stricter than others when it comes to displaying bandit signs. A lot of cities don’t really police it or enforce it very strictly at all. But for the ones that do, punishments for using bandit signs range from one end of the spectrum – receiving a warning letter and requiring that you remove your bandit signs from a certain area, to being fined a couple hundred dollars per recurrence – all the way to being threatened with jail time. So you need to do your homework and weigh the risk and reward of using them in your area. 

Other Effective Low-Cost Marketing Strategies

Here are few other low cost marketing ideas you can implement right away. Get some business cards made up and pass them around to everyone you know (and everyone you meet) and tell them that you’re in the real estate business and that you buy houses. Inside my Foreclosure Investing Mastery course you’ll have access to a ready-to-go, professionally designed business card that are proven to work and you can simply model your business card after that. 

Next, you can also put a magnetic sign on your car that says you buy houses. You can also go door knocking and pass out flyers in the area you want to buy houses in. They call this “farming”. Basically, just start walking up and down the streets and knocking on the door and say, “Hello, this might sound like a silly question, but I’m actually interested in buying a house in this neighborhood. Do you know anybody that might be thinking about selling their house?” Don’t ask them if they are selling, ask them if they know of any neighbors that might be thinking about selling their house. 

In conclusion, if you’re tight on funds and you have a small budget, don’t let that stop you. You now have more than enough low-cost ways to go out there and find deals, now just get started.