What is a motivated seller lead?
The phrase gets used for any homeowner on a distress list, which is not what it means. Motivation is a situation, not a data field.
Motivation is about constraints, not price
A motivated seller is somebody for whom something matters more than squeezing out the last few percent — usually time, certainty, or simply being finished with the property. That is why he or she will consider an offer below retail: you are being paid to remove a problem, and the discount is the price of that.
It follows that "motivated" cannot be read off a list. Being tax delinquent does not make someone motivated; it makes him or her findable. Plenty of delinquent owners have no intention of selling and plenty of motivated sellers are perfectly current on everything.
What actually produces motivation
In practice it is almost always one of a short list of life events: a death and an inherited house nobody wants, a divorce, a job relocation, a landlord who has had one tenant too many, a property that needs more work than the owner can face, or somebody carrying two mortgages after moving.
Financial distress is on that list but it is not the whole list, and treating it as the whole list is why a lot of investors only ever call people who are angry about being called.
How you tell, before you spend time
You ask, and you listen for a constraint. "What would you do with the place if you could snap your fingers?" gets further than any qualifying script, because it surfaces the constraint in the seller’s own words.
The shortcut is a seller who has already said something. A person who replied to a message about his or her property has told you, at minimum, that the subject is live — which is more than any list field can tell you.
Questions people ask
Is a motivated seller the same as a distressed seller?
No, though the terms get mixed. Distress describes the owner’s financial position; motivation describes willingness to sell on terms other than top dollar. There are plenty of motivated sellers with no distress at all — an out-of-state landlord who is simply tired of the property is one of the most common.
How do I know a lead is really motivated and not just on a list?
You do not, until someone has spoken to him or her. That is the entire difference between a list and a lead: a list is a hypothesis about motivation, a reply is evidence of it.
Related
Every lead on Freedom Leads is a seller who already replied to a text. $5 each, sold once, to one buyer.