Buying What's Not for Sale

I was out with clients yesterday who are looking for just the right piece of land to build their next home. They've had no luck looking at what's currently listed on the market.  So they asked me yesterday if I ever contacted owners and asked them if they were interested in selling. I thought that was a great topic for a blog post here!

The answer is that I have definitely contacted owners to ask if they were willing to sell. It doesn't happen often, only a few times over my years in real estate. And it's not been wildly successful. But I have uncovered people who wanted to sell who had not yet put their homes on the market and so it is worth a shot.

I will generally send letters to the owners involved. Sometimes it's a subdivision where someone really wants to live and either nothing is currently for sale, or the right house isn't for sale. Sometimes, as with this couple, it's absentee owners of parcels of land. It's important in the letter to be as specific as I can since there's a fair amount of skepticism in the world these days when a letter arrives out of the blue asking about selling your property!

The other thing to keep in mind is that in these instances the potential buyer gives up some leverage. If someone comes to you to buy your specific property and there's already tons of property actually available for sale, odds are you can be pretty firm about price. The buyers want it very badly and the sellers clearly aren't at all pressured to sell. While it may get you the perfect property, it will almost never get you a great deal on it!

Have any of you used this strategy to buy? Have any of you sold a property when approached by a buyer or their agent? I'd love to hear your stories!