It has been my experience that marketing is the most important function in business, but especially so in real estate and real estate investing. Marketing is many things acting concurrently to bring a product, service, or message to the market.
What Marketing Can Accomplish
One year ago my partnership bought a home in a depressed market. We paid $27,100 in cash for the home. It was a 3 bedroom, 2 bath home with a garage. We immediately turned around and put out a marketing campaign to sell it for $65,000 without doing anything materially to the property. We did do two things though. We assessed the market and determined that there was a shortage of owner financed / contract for deed deals. The second thing we did is we replaced the sign in the yard of the seller with our own sign in the yard, in the window (in case the one in the yard blows down) and we placed oodles of ads on the internet.
The marketing brought us leads. The leads competing for the one home created our win. Within a couple of weeks, we had our deal done and on to the next one.
Happy Investing Folks,
Tommy Ray