Private Lending For Real Estate Investors: Credibility Kit Marketing Tips

One of the things about private lending and all marketing, if you've done a lot of marketing, you know half of marketing is waste. Half of the people that inquire or raise their hand are probably never going to lend with you. All they want is some free information. They're wasting your time and you need to cull through those and get rid of those individuals and get to the real serious players.

Identify the Serious Players

You might have to have those people call you back once or twice in terms of trying to make sure that you identified they're real serious players. The other thing you can do with your credibility kit and I've not done this - I have a little bit, I guess. I do have a very well defined file on my website but I've been thinking about this whole process of putting almost a full credibility kit on the website.

Post Your Credibility Kit

I don't know if somebody's done that or if somebody would think about doing it. At some point, I wouldn't mind working with somebody to try and develop that. It would be an interesting concept. You could send somebody to a page on your website and there would be maybe one or two or three pages that would have basically your credibility kit in a web-based format and that might be something, as time goes by, more and more that will be the format which you do.

Build a Trust Relationship

I think we talked about a number of these elements and that private lending is a trust relationship. That trust has got to be developed. With real estate investing there is a significant hurdle which you must overcome. If somebody walks into a bank, they walk into a lobby of a very expensive bank, there's all this fancy furniture and marble and all that stuff. You walk in and you just instantly have that sense of credibility of that organization.

As all of us know that doesn't mean much because the bank is probably broke anyway and we all know that half the banks are going out of business anyway. It doesn't mean very much, but the reality is the individual walking into that bank will get a sense of instant credibility because they've bought all this fancy furniture and a fancy office. Maybe it's downtown. They get credibility by that respect.

Say with even to a certain extent mortgage companies, if you go into a WAMU office, they're usually pretty nice in shopping centers things like that. They have credibility as part of that process. The average guy like you and me, we're real estate investors. I work out of my home office and maybe many of you do too. How do we develop credibility? Nobody knows my name or your name. We've got to overcome that basic mistrust type of thing between a potential lender and yourself.

Credibility Kit Builds a Trust Relationship

That is something that the credibility kit is designed to do. A well-done credibility kit will do a lot of that for you. It's not going to do it all. Believe me, you still have to sell yourself through a lot of other means, but it will help quite a bit and it will push the ball down the track a little bit. It's very important that you understand that the credibility kit's primary job is to overcome that lack of trust that is between the potential lender and you.

That is a natural process by which that person is going to not trust you, but the credibility kit's job is to try to start to overcome that process. I think I've already spoken about this. Nothing speaks louder than a well-done credibility kit, well-done, polished, well thought out. It brings out the real power in you and your background and experience.