Where to find the perfect candidate for lease option?

One of the exercise that I make my real estate coaching group students is to sit with a blank piece of paper and come up with (gulp!) 10 ways to find somebody who will buy their house.

It is always entertaining to note that given sufficient time to think (30 minutes) and you usually have 20 ways if not more to find the prefect candidate.

The same thing pretty much applies in the case of lease options also. The ones I have done in the last 12 months came from both traditional and nontraditional sources.

I will dissect one each here since a detailed discussion on where and how to capture a fat fish is literally a good four to five hour discussion. So many ways to get that $10,000 option fee and so little time!

But enough with the teasing and lets go to work.

Traditional way Numero Uno is running a classified ad - check out your Sundays metro area newspaper. In metro Detroit that would be Detroit News / Detroit Free Press Sundays Edition. They actually have a whole Rent To Own section which is a less fancy way of describing lease option.

(any way did any body figured out yet if it lease option or lease-option?)

For some pennies a pretty decent ad could be ran for 2-3 weeks, directed to an automated voice mail system (www.gotvmail.com) and 20-30 leads collected. My ads typically list the option fee in a range and here is the reason for that - one people who are really interested would want to know why is there a range and what they have to do to get the low option instead of the high one? (hint: it has something to do with their monthly lease payment).

Second you can feel the suburb out very quickly this way - you never know what you can get till you ask! Alternative is to run a high option upfront and see what they will pay and or at least call and try to pay!
A good number is $3000 is what you think is a fair number.

Nontraditional way is sit down with a piece of paper or in front of your computer and make a quick list of everybody that you know and who is working in some sort of public setting. For example, in Michigan a good example is somebody who is working in automotive plant for the big three auto makers. There are literally thousands of people who work in either directly their manufacturing facilities or work for a supplier who is supplying parts for them.

Most of these places have a public area - notice board in the cafeteria etc. - where notices to all employees are posted by other employees - buy , sell, pets for adoption etc. - a perfect place to create a catchy flyer (it is important to make something that causes action! I must have tested 20 of them till I figured 3 of them out that get kick butt response).

Ask the person you know very nicely if they can just pin the flyer on the common area for you. I can tell you my own numbers - two years ago when I went on a duplex selling binge - this strategy was the most effective out of all.