How to Buy Multiple Properties From the Seller—At the Same Time

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When you find a Seller you can buy multiple properties from, you’ve hit a gold mine! And while you can buy multiple properties from them over time, there’s a special art and strategy to buying multiple properties from the same Seller, at the SAME time. In this episode, Jeff discusses tips and strategies for success identifying these opportunities, as well as negotiating them and getting the deals closed.

Episode Transcript

One of the most valuable types of leads of sellers that you will ever come across is the person from whom you can buy multiple properties. Now you can buy multiple properties over time, or you can buy them at once and in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about the magic of being able to buy multiple properties at once from the same seller. Without further ado, let’s cue up the theme song and then we’ll jump right into it.

Welcome to Racking Up Rentals, a show about how regular people those of us without huge war chest of capital or insider connections can build lasting wealth acquiring a portfolio of buy and hold real estate. But we don’t just go mainstream looking at what’s on the market and asking banks for loans nor are we posting We Buy Houses signs are just looking for quote, motivated sellers to make lowball offers to you see, we are people oriented dealmakers, we sit down directly with sellers to work out win-win deals without agents or any other obstacles, and buy properties nobody else even knows are for sale. I’m Jeff from the Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur. If you’re the kind of real estate investor who wants a long-term wealth, not get rich quick gimmicks or pictures of yourself holding fat checks on social media, this show is for you. Join me and quietly become the wealthiest person on your block. Now let’s go rack up a rental portfolio.

Hey, thanks again for joining me for another episode of the racking up rentals podcast show notes for today are at www.thoughtfulre.com/e40. Please do us a big favor by hitting the subscribe button, please, please please in your podcast app, it really does help other people like you and like me come together and help them find this show. All right, onward.

So, as you may recall, in a recent episode, we talked about the most valuable types of seller leads that you can possibly have. And those are people that you can buy multiple properties from. And in the first episode on this top topic, we spoke about buying multiple properties from the same people over time, and I told you a story about how I’ve done that many times myself. But today, we’re going to talk about how you can buy multiple properties from a single seller all at once, and how that’s excellent for you, and it’s excellent for them. So sequentially, the first thing we have to think about in terms of how this plays out is our marketing. And then ultimately the seller relations that our marketing leads us to. Now you might know when you do your marketing, that a seller has got multiple properties. And you might even approach them in a way that references both of those properties. But more likely than not, you probably don’t. And in my case, most of the time I just market to people about one property, even if I know that they have others or I suspect that they do. I want to start the conversation about one property. So how you go then from talking to them about one property to talking to them about multiple properties is that you have to have your antennas up, so to speak, so that you can detect and uncover more opportunity, you have to ask good questions, you have to think about the context of what they are telling you. You have to listen to their answers. And you might need to do some research as well. In fact, you absolutely should do some research.

So, let’s say that I’m going to go meet with Bob. And I’ve talked about about 1234 Main Street. But before I show up to talk to Bob in person, usually at his house, I’ve certainly done as much research as I can about Bob, I want to understand who I’m talking to who I’m working with here before I ever even show up. And one of the elements of that is to search the public records databases just to find out does Bob own any other properties now, it’s not a foolproof method for doing that because Bob could have you know, Elmo LLC that you would never know in a million years was him and you would never know to look for that. So it doesn’t always net you every single result. But a lot of times people have their properties listed in in various variations of their own name. So you’ve done some research, but then when you’re sitting down with Bob, you just need to ask Bob, good questions. You might at some point just say like “Now Bob, how did you get into this land lording business? Have you done a lot of this you have a lot of properties or did you live in this one house once and it turned into a rental?” You can ask Bob these questions in different ways to find out are there other properties because if land lording Bob is saying something to the effect of, “I am so tired of being a landlord, I just want to be done with this.” It’s natural for you to be able to ask like “Okay, Bob. So if I buy this property from you, does that take care of the whole problem are? Or are there other properties that you are looking to get out of managing as well?”

And once you know this, then you can, and must, of course, express your interest in those and begin to gather all the information that you can on So, all of those. And so, you might say, in order to express this interest, you might say something like, “Bob, I got to tell you, I’m actually interested in talking about both of those properties with you. Is that something that we could discuss?” And you’ll usually know, not just from their literal answer like yes, no, maybe, but maybe their body language and other kind of contextual clues as to how they feel about that. And if you see in them, you know, some kind of a sense of relief, then that’s, you know, you’re onto a really, really good kind of thing. It is possible that Bob might answer in a way that sounds ever so slightly reluctant. But that’s simply because he wasn’t expecting that in most cases, he was thinking you were there to talk about 1234 Main Street. And now you’re also talking about this second property as well. But it’s always good to as a Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur kind of convey, as well as sometimes just even directly say, “Bob, as far as I’m concerned, this is just a conversation. It’s food for thought for both of us. I’m excited to chat about it. If you feel good about one, you feel good about both. That’s great. We’ll move forward in that way. But I appreciate you just being open to the conversation at this point.”

So you’ve expressed your interest, and you’re now gathering information on both properties. So you might be asking Bob, for more information about the tenancy of those properties and the rents and, you know, hey, so how long have you owned this one over on Oak Street, and you want to have a full dossier, then on both, or all the properties that you are now speaking with Bob about.

Now, if you can negotiate to put multiple properties in contract at once with this seller, it’s a really, really great thing. And I’d say there’s three real reasons why it’s such a great thing. Number one, if you’re doing two deals, for instance, two deals are going to net you more money, right. And you might be buying this for a long-term cash flow, you might be buying it to flip or to wholesale. But whatever it is, now you’ve got two instead of one. And that is, is awesome. Now it’s going to go further. So you’re going to make more money in the manner that you want to with two deals instead of one. And the second reason is, now you’re single sourcing, to deal. So you’re going to make not only more money, but you’re going to make more money without necessarily too much more effort. So if there are two properties, sure, there’s going to be some more effort, because you’re going to be doing due diligence twice, you’re going to be doing your evaluation twice and your analysis. But you don’t have to go find another Bob, you can simply dive right in and have two conversations with one person. And so now you’re kind of, as they might say in the business world, your cost of customer acquisition, so to speak, your cost of seller acquisition is now going way down, because you’re getting a second deal for the same person without any incremental marketing costs.

So, reason number one, you get more deals, that means more money. Reason number two is you get more money with the same amount of effort. But reason number three is the one that I want to focus on a little bit here. And that is that when you are the buyer of multiple properties from the same person, you actually have more leverage in the negotiation because you are creating more value at the same time. Okay now, as Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneurs, we love to have a lot of leverage. We don’t love to necessarily exert a lot of leverage over other people, especially in a very obvious kind of way. But we like to know that we have more leverage. And if Bob, in this case, was really wanting to get out of both properties, and he thought you only wanted to buy one and now you actually want to buy two, he might be ecstatic. And when he’s ecstatic, he feels like you’re creating a ton of value for him. And that actually means you have more leverage in the conversation because you are solving. You are the stone killing multiple birds at once, so to speak, for Bob. So I want to give you a simple example of a time I’ve done this. I’ve done this a few times, never more than two properties at the same time. But with this case, I want to tell you a little story about Linda.

This was about two years ago when I met Linda. I sent Linda a letter about one of her properties. I did not know that Linda had other properties, but I would learn that later. And when Linda and I met up, I came to learn that she was in a difficult spot of life. Her husband was in hospice, in home hospice and his time was running out very, very quickly. Now I learned, I learned very fast that Linda is a very strong and savvy woman and she and her husband have been involved in real estate quite a bit. And even though he was probably more of the driver in that, she was very involved in so she was very confident in herself and whatnot. But she’s in a very tough chapter of life as a result of her husband’s failing health. And I had sent her this letter about her first property, which was a lower end type of a home. It wasn’t as it wasn’t in the perfect location; it was an okay location. It wasn’t in great condition as I would come to learn. It wasn’t the most marketable house. But in my conversation with Linda, because we were talking about how she just needed, you know, fewer things to worry about, because she really wanted to focus on her husband and their affairs, that that needed to kind of be wrapped up.

I learned that she had this other property, that was also a rental, that she was open to the idea of selling to now. This wasn’t the one that I had sent her the letter about, but she was open to having that conversation. And when I learned about that property, I looked at it. And I thought, actually, I like this one a lot better. And I realized I would like to buy both of these properties, or I’d like to do deals with both of these properties. Let’s put it that way.

As I always do, I conversationally, and you know, relationally and sensitively broach the subject of seller financing, just to poke around a little bit and see what some of the possibilities were. And she told me that she actually would be open to that; that they actually had sold properties on contracts, so to speak before themselves, so something she was familiar with, and was comfortable with. However, she did need some cash out of these two sales because she wanted it, she was trying to wrap up some of the financial affairs and whatnot with her husband, while he was still around. And they wanted to take care of some things like that. So ultimately, what we ended up agreeing to was that I was going to buy the first house, the lower end house for cash or a private loan, but there was no financing contingency. And it was just one, you know, affordable cash price for me. And I was going to buy the other property, which I actually liked better and was much more interested in keeping with seller financing that had a low down payment. And because she was getting a lot of cash out of the sale of the first property, the lower end home, she didn’t need quite as much down for this one to meet her cash needs. So I gave her a low down payment. And what ended up happening is, as I progressed in my analysis of the two properties, I really decided that that first home, the lower end home, I just didn’t want to buy it myself, I didn’t want my name on title of that property. It’s not a flip that I wanted to do, the numbers worked for a flip. But it just wasn’t the quality of property, and location and whatnot that I personally wanted to take on myself. So I decided to wholesale that property. And so I found a wholesale buyer, who was the perfect kind of fit for this type of property. And I signed it to them. And as I recall, my assignment fee was around $20,000. And then my down payment on the other house that I was going to be buying with seller financing was right about $20,000. So effectively, the wholesale fee from the first deal, made my down payment for me on the second deal, and allowed me to buy the second house with seller financing with effectively no cash out of pocket.

So that’s a very simple example of how something like that can work. But I want to talk through two tips really quick, two tips about the best practices, in my opinion when you find yourself in this situation. Tip number one is that I really encourage you to evaluate each of these two properties individually, as if they’re completely unrelated, evaluate them as if they are not coming from the same seller. And look at each one fairly on its own merits. As you develop your opportunity vision around a property. don’t edit yourself don’t feel like well, you know, this is a package deal and a half to this has to be a flip because the other ones a flip, evaluate each of the properties and analyze them individually. As I told you about my case with Linda, as I did that, I realized I could make money on a flip with the lower end home. But I just didn’t feel comfortable with the property itself. And it wasn’t the type of property I really wanted to be associated with. And I realized that I was more comfortable and also financially happy with the idea of just getting a kind of a quick easy say 20 grand instead of a 50 or $60,000 profit on the flip, if it all went well. So I evaluated that one independently for its own, you know, on its own merits. And that’s the conclusion I came to. And as a result, that I structured each of those two deals separately based on what made sense to me, separately and individually on the two properties.

Now, of course, it had to make great sense to Linda as well. But my point here is that I want you to evaluate each of the two properties independently of each other, and then structure a deal that meets the seller’s needs, but make sense for that property without feeling like, you have to tie the two together in your mind. And that brings us to the second tip, which is, I want you to talk about this transaction or these transactions as if they were a package. Because really, you are providing a single solution to this seller. And you want them to think of it as all of their problems are going away in one fell swoop because of the seller’s thing that you are providing to them. But I encourage you to not write it up as one transaction now, you could write it up as one single transaction with two properties. But that will greatly limit the flexibility that you have in your deal. So I would encourage you strongly to write it up as two separate transactions, two separate purchase agreements, with two separate negotiations, even though you are you seller’s know, the sellers thinking of it as one and you like the fact that they’re thinking of it as one and maybe even you’re kind of thinking of it as one, it’s much more flexible for you to have the ability then, as you proceed into your due diligence and learn more about the properties to negotiate any agenda with repairs, or with price adjustments or terms, adjustments separately with each of the two. And also, as kind of a pro tip, you have more leverage in this case, because while I hope that you’ll never get to the point where you will have to say this out loud, there is silently, the possibility that you could back out of one of the deals with within your contingencies, of course, you could back out fair and square with seller’s one of the deals and only close on the other one. And that provides you some extra leverage because the seller then has kind of been downgraded from, they feel like all their problems are being solved to only one of two of their problems are being solved. And you wouldn’t have that power if you had written these up as one single transaction. Because you’ve written them as to, you actually have that kind of little silent bit of power. But I hope you never have to really exact that power and say, Well, you know, fine, if you don’t drop the price on this one, I’m just gonna bow out of this one and only close on the other one that’s not a seller relations oriented way to go about things or a thoughtful way to do it. But silently there is that dynamic there.

So in summary, and thinking about our previous episode on multiple properties from the same seller, there is so much value in finding sellers that have multiple properties that you can buy, and you can try to find them intentionally. But I would say just keep your eyes and ears open, learn to ask great questions. And find out if there is more opportunity with that one seller either right now, or in the future. And if there is right now, then that’s fantastic for you because you can get two deals done perhaps maybe even more, but at least say two deals done, which will give you twice the financial results you’re looking for, you’ll get two deals done without any or too much more effort than just one deal. And you will actually have more leverage in your negotiations with the seller, because you’re creating more value for them. But keep looking at both of those properties separately, and evaluating them independently and write the deals up separately.

That’s it for today’s episode of racking up rentals. Again, there’s show notes at www.thoughtfulre.com/e40. Please do us a favor and do yourself a favor as well hit that subscribe button right now in your podcast app. And please take just a quick moment to rate and review the show. You don’t have to write a novel in there but we love to hear your thoughts and that creation of more reviews and ratings really does help iTunes want to share this show with other people.

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Thanks for listening to Racking Up Rentals where we build long term wealth by being a win-win deal makers. Remember solve the person to unlock the deal and solve the financing to unlock the profits.