The first step in any pre-foreclosure, short sale or workout business is to build your list. This is true of all direct response businesses. And pre-foreclosure is certainly a direct response business.

No matter what method you use to build your list, you will eventually need to contact your leads. There are a variety of methods, but one of the best is direct mail. You have the homeowners full mail address. Now you want to use it.

And whether you use post cards, flyers, multi-page sales letters, lumpy mail or any of a hundred other media, your job is to convince the prospect to take whatever action your sales piece is designed to elicit.

It is outside the realm of this article to go into detail about which of these methods you might use to choose. They will all do the job. Each has strengths and weaknesses. But each of them has to deal with the simple fact that your prospects in this field of Real Estate are different than in other markets because of one essential fact.

Most of the people you are dealing with are in various levels of shock or denial. They have a huge emotional, and usually financial, stake in their home. Out of embarrassment, many of them will lose their homes without ever asking family or friends for help.

So how do you motivate them to call you, dial into a recorded info line or visit your website? And these days, it is very likely that your prospect will check you out on the web to determine if you are who you say you are.

The first step is to begin building a relationship from the first word of your sales piece. A firm tone, tempered with empathy for the position they are in goes a long way towards breaking downs the barriers that are accentuated by reality of a pending foreclosure.

Now, I'm not going to tell you what to write in your sales piece. That would take an article much longer than this one.

But I am going to make a suggestion that will enhance the relationship building process as well as instill confidence in the prospect that you are the one to help them solve their problem.

Organizations such as the Association of Real Estate Investment Professionals (AREIP.org), the Online Better Business Bureau (BBBOnline.com) and many local Chambers of Commerce offer "consumer confidence" programs.

These programs go a long way to adding credibility to your business and can ease the decision making process for your prospect. That was recently brought home to me by a prospect who called in to our testimonial lines (you DO have a testimonial line, don't you?) to describe her experience making the decision to agree to a short sale by a client's company. You can here the complete audio file at AREIP.org.

But when you are choosing a Consumer Confidence program for your business be sure that your membership in the organization is verifiable online. That means that when the membership logo on your site is clicked on, it takes you to a page on the organization's website that is personalized to your business. That way you get maximum credibility for your business and maximum impact from your membership.

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