I focus on selling properties on rent to own or owner financing.  There are lots of reasons to do this over stricktly offering your houses on a rental basis.  Recently, we had several properties available - we had eight vacancies. 

Usually, we only have 2 or 3 available at any one time.  That was starting to concern me, so I mapped out the highest leverage steps in the sales process.  In other words, the steps in which we could make the biggest difference in getting these houses sold. 

The better you can leverage (i.e., getting more with less) ALL the assets you have, the more profitable you will be as a real estate investor.  Improved leverage means you can make just a small, incremental improvement that translates into a huge improvement in your results. 

One of the highest leverage points was follow up.  So I sat down with some scratch paper, and wrote down on that piece of paper, "how can I use follow up to make the biggest difference in making sales?" Here is what I came up with:

1) First of all, we log in the name and phone number of everyone who takes a look at one of our properties.  On average, that amounts to about 15 showings a week.  We can call everyone who called to looked at a house in the last 30 days once each week to find out if they are still looking for a house.

2) Call back everyone who has left a message at least 3 times if you don’t get them on the telephone. 

3) Call back everyone who has looked at a house the very next day to answer any questions. Using these three simple steps, I had all but two properties sold within 2 weeks.