FSBO Junk Mail
Protection, Examples, and Advice

As many of you will discover, local real estate agents will start contacting you once you start advertising FSBO. You may be swamped with their phone calls. What you may not know is that you could be also swamped with emails. That is why we offer junk mail protection with our FSBO Property Information Web Page Packages.

While your FSBO website includes your email address (unless you specific otherwise), we never put your email in the ads we post.

Why?

Because that would expose you to a ton of junk mail and spam. Some ad sites have partnerships with real estate agents and so forth to provide them with the email addresses listed on their ad sites. Other sites are scanned regularly by enterprising agents who harvest email addresses themselves. Either way, your email address becomes fair game for all their many offers.

While we recommend that people create a free 'throw-away' email account for their website with a service such as Hotmail.com - called 'throw-away' because you delete the address once you sell your home - we also provide a free service for all the ads we place.

Instead of using your email address in the ads, we create a special email address for you that we monitor, and only forward serious inquiries to you.

While we always weed out the real spam (you know the mail we mean), we also weed out what *we* consider junk mail. In other words, we weed out all the many emails you would otherwise get from mortgage brokers, real estate agents wanting to list your home, and services who say they wish to buy your home but really wish to either pay only 60-70% of your asking price or who wish to set up a lease-purchase option whereby you do not receive full payment for your home up front, but only after several years.

Here are some examples of the mail we weed out.

Examples of discount purchasers:

1) Example of emails that mislead you into thinking they are from an interested buyer. Individual buyers will not ask you these questions. Asking how long you have had it on the market, why you are selling, and when you need to sell by are efforts to determine whether or not you are a 'desperate' seller.

What is the exact address of your home for sale?  How long have you had it on the market?   Why are you selling and when do you need to sell by?  What price are you asking?

Some are even trickier, and we know to weed them out simply because we see so many identical ones from the same people asking about properties all over the country.

GREAT PLACE,WOULD YOU CONSIDER A CONTRACT FOR DEED OR LEASE OPTION.PLEASE DON'T HESITATE TO CALL.THANK YOU AND GOOD LUCK.

2) As their own disclaimer reads, "please DO NOT SUBMIT INFORMATION about your property if you are NOT INTERESTED in receiving a DISCOUNT PRICE OFFER."

Example of mortgage brokers:

Let me introduce myself, my name is John Smith and I am with First National Home Loan and I am not a realtor so please hear me out. I have put together a free assistance program for FSBO sellers and I would like to share with you how it works and how it will get better prospective buyers through your front door by offering them 0 down and other financing options. Please give me a call and I will go over all of the many details. 952-123-4567 or 612-123-4567. Thank you for your time and consideration!

Example of 'helpful' emails from lease purchase 'specialists':

Would you be interested if we could show you how to get the top sales price in your market area whenever possible, to save you money in Realtor commissions and closing costs; to get you a tenant/buyer who not only gives you a percentage of the purchase price up front in non-refundable option money, but pays on time and takes care of the maintenance, and to do all this in possibly 30 days or less! How can we do all this? Simple, we are Lease Purchase specialists who are active not only in our local market, but nationwide, doing our own investing or in consultation with others. In our opinion, Lease Purchase is the only true Win/Win strategy for moving your property quickly. If you would like additional information, or would like to speak with us further about how the Lease Purchase Advantage can benefit you, please give us a call.

Example of combo offers from lease purchase/discount 'specialists':

My wife and I are Real Estate Investors and we buy property 1 of 2 ways. We buy all cash, and if we do, you have got to give me a great deal. Or we buy on terms, where we agree to cover your mortgage payment, cover all maintenance on the home via a lease-purchase contract. I have attached our Frequently Asked Questions to help you understand why a lease-purchase contract is a wonderful way to sell your home. Please take some time to read through the Frequently Asked Questions, it will only take a minute or two, and email me if either of these sound like something that you are interested in. We can close a deal within a matter of days!!

A few rules of thumb if you are interested in pursuing some of these offers:

1. A number of these offers come across our desktop that scream DELETE ME! even if they potentially could be legitimate. We're not saying they aren't legitimate, only that the same rules that apply to email scams and viruses need to apply here as well.
   
   
2. Among the things we warn against are emails that don't have anything but a name and, perhaps, a phone number in them as identifiers. A legitimate company should have all sorts of contact information in all their emails. (Check out ours to see what we mean.) The email in that last example only had a name. We would automatically delete emails with that little information. Again, this doesn't mean that these people are not legitimate, just that you need to be very skeptical of emails like that. It's better to be safe than sorry and, if you are truly interested in lease-purchase or discount purchasers, you can find these on your own rather than depending on potentially fraudulent emails from total strangers.
   
   
3. Another thing you should do is check out the return address. Our email addresses all end in @sell-your-home-fsbo.com or @acornwebworks.com because those are our business names. "Professional" emails from addresses like @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com should be viewed with great suspicion. While legitimate buyers may very well have an email address like that (heck, you may have one!), emails alleging to be from businesses need to be held to a higher standard. Free email addresses and professional businesses don't generally go together anymore.
   
   
4. Continuing about email addresses, even if the email isn't from one of the free email providers (e.g. yahoo, hotmail, msn) you should still check it out. The email in the example above was from something like BrownRealEstateInvesting@wmconnect.com. We would have expected the address to be something like Sales@BrownRealEstateInvesting.com if it were an established business getting its leads via email and wanting to be taken seriously, not from @wmconnect.com.
   
   So we checked out wmconnect.com on Google - and it is Wal-Mart's email domain name. What does this lead us to believe? That one of the "Real Estate Investors" works at Wal-Mart. And that they haven't invested enough in their business to purchase a domain name or create a website where people can check them out further. Again, they may be perfectly legitimate - we're not trying to imply they aren't - but selling your home is a major undertaking. If we were going to pursue the options they recommend, we'd find someone who understands the need to be totally professional with potential clients. These folks don't.
   
   
5. And don't forget one more important thing. This particular email had an attachment they wanted you to download. Remember...you are never supposed to open attachments from strangers. If you still want to, make very sure you have up-to-date antivirus software AND up-to-date virus signature files on your computer, and don't open the file until you have had your antivirus program scan it. (In this case, there was no virus, but the file never opened so we could never review their FAQ. Yet another way these folks were less than professional.)

Example of emails we check before considering them junk mail

Some of the time an email like this is from a non-buyer. They simply want to make contact with you so that they can start pushing their services. However, potential buyers will also send you a query like this. (Generally they want to know if the property is still for sale.) We always contact the writers of such emails to see if they are 'legit' or not. If they are, we would point them to your website and send you a copy of their email.

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So...if you want us to weed out spam email, we will do so as part of our services for you. If you do not want us to do this, simply check the box on our Request form that says you wish to receive all email without our weeding out junk mail. The choice is yours.

Equal Housing Opportunity