In my career as a successful real estate investor, I have wasted a lot of time and a lot of energy talking to real estate agents.

Among other people, (like friends and family)… if you told a realtor about my strategies for buying real estate… they will tell you my strategies don’t work and you cannot buy real estate that way.

All my real estate buying strategies are one hundred percent legal and ethical, by the way.

Don’t get me wrong… I have used real estate agents before. I have often used them to sell my properties. I simply never talk to them when I’m on the buying side.

Some of them can be really great assets — again… if you use them correctly.

But most of them will rob you of your dreams. They may not know it. They may think they have your best interests at heart… some of them may even believe they are absolutely, 100% correct when they tell you what I teach you is “not possible”…

But at the end of the day, you must ask yourself one question. How do they put food on their dinner table?

They do so with the one way they know of selling houses. The one way they know will guarantee them a commission when the property changes hands… cleanly from one owner to another.

You, on the other hand… you’re going into a deal talking about seller financing, 2nd mortgages, wholesaling, lease options and all these weird ways of buying real estate… and suddenly… the lines are not so clear anymore. The realtor doesn’t see where he gets paid. A lot of them even think that, maybe… you’re scamming them out of their commission altogether.

Well, hell. If I were a realtor and I had no idea what you were trying to pull here, I’d be wary of you too.

So let’s say you stop talking to realtors when you’re hunting for properties. Just stop talking to them altogether.

Where does that leave you?

I asked this question to one of my classes recently. Lots of great answers came back…

• Newspapers
• Craigslist
• FSBO
• Drive-bys (I talked about this strategy in an older post)
• Friends & Family
• Old Listings while jogging

All excellent ways of finding sellers, and every single one is “outside of the system”… so I’m quite proud of my students. This was, after all, only week four of thirty-eight in my course when I asked them this question.

But at the end of the day…

What do you noticed about all six ways my students rattled off above? Do you see a pattern? Take a closer look, if you haven’t.

It’s this. You’re still working your butt off to contact these sellers. Scanning the classifieds, Craigslist… randomly picking up a deal here or there while driving or jogging.

These are all under the category of “You contact them”. The SECOND of three ways you can find sellers.

What’s the third way?

You ready?


Get them to contact you.

Now you’re the person in charge. You’re driving the bus. You’re negotiating from a place of power. They can’t get mad at you or hang up on you… and if they do… hey, they called you in the first place!

How do you get motivated sellers calling you, then? Well, that’s at least three weeks of training materials… but I’ll say this much:

Marketing Systems.

To your Real Estate Success,

Dario Lorenzo