There are a number of tricks to real estate advertising. Successful ad campaigns usually consist of ideas that lure people in and create a desire to learn more. You should, however, give some detail to make clear the type of tenant buyer you are looking for.

Keep reading; you will see why I don't always recommend numbers in real estate ads. But I recognize that often in real estate, ads have to have numbers.

For example, say I have a property that retails and I'm going to put it out on the market and have my man Brad or another realtor sell it. Let's say it would sell for $100,000. If I give someone soft terms, like a lease option or a land contract, I always push this a little bit too where the price is not going to be $100,000, which is a cash price, but $104,900.

I always take it $100 less than the next number up. Kind of like what you see in the stores where they make something $49 or $99 rather than $50 or $100.

So what we do is that same concept. Instead of making it $105,000, we make it $104,900. It's an eye trick, but it works. If it didn't work, gas stations and supermarkets wouldn't have been doing it for all of these years.

Then Kevin figures out a rough idea of the monthly payment we want. It isn't going to be locked in stone. But it's a rough idea. If $651.92 is the payment, we don't put that in the paper. That's not a clean, round number and it will only make eyes turn away.

Instead we'll put $650 or something close to that. Then we start getting some nibble and we sit down with the folks and we tell them that their monthly payment depends on how much money they put down.

I can imagine that a number of you who are reading this have tested the waters of advertising in the newspaper. I can also imagine that some of you have tried putting the monthly payment in the advertisement and then not putting the monthly payment in the ad.

What some of the people who have attended my boot camps have told me is that they have found that if you put the monthly payment in, people don't look beyond that. They care most about the bottom line.

Some participants in my boot camps have elected to go with a range for their monthly payment quote in the paper. I have also heard that some regions have rules that require you to put a number in the newspaper.

So since they have to put one number in, people decide to put a range of numbers in.

Some people have put a market number in the paper. This shows what the property would normally go for, and then they can give whatever number they want.

What we have found is that if we put what the rent is and they're marginal on it, they will never call us. If we don't put the number in the ad, they will call us. If it's not right for them, we have the opportunity to direct them to someone else.

Our intent is to get the phone to ring. We want to have the chance to speak with them. We have much more of a chance to move them towards something else if we can get them on the phone. We will never get to talk to them if we don't do something to make them call in.

We've played around with this for years and learned that we get more calls and more opportunities if we don't put the price in our newspaper ads.

Not to mention the fact that getting people on the phone or speaking with them in person gives us the chance to play with the price a little bit. We know what their financial situation is when we speak with them in person. We know what kind of money they can put down or we can always steer them toward something else that might be in their price range.

Here's another idea, if in your area you have local advertisers and maybe they'll charge you $25 for a whole month. Put something in there and keep it in for the whole month. It's not even close to the expense you'll pay for a daily circulation paper.

We run the lease options in the rent sections of the daily circulation paper. We advertise that it is a rent to own. When you do this you'll end up listening to a lot of different stories.

In our area of town right now, people will say they're really interested and then they say, "Will you accept Section 8?"

We just went through a spiel with them to be able to sell them the house and they're on Section 8. Well, if you're on Section 8 odds are you're not going to be able to buy.

The big thing when you are talking about a rent-to-own is that their mindset is rent or being able to lease it.

When you start your conversation with them, you're just trying to qualify them and see which direction you're looking to go.

We ask them if they're looking to rent or to buy. If they say they are looking to rent then we tell them flat out that we're looking for somebody that wants to buy. If they're just looking to rent this probably isn't the property for them.

The reason we focus on advertising in the rent section of the paper is because it's cheaper than the sale section. When you run your ads, you want to check the different pricing between the sale section and the rent section. Newspaper advertising is expensive, so you want to make sure you're getting the biggest bang for your buck. We can put it in the rent section because it's a land contract or rent-to-own. We get a cheaper price from the paper by doing it that way.

We've sold houses out of a rent-to-own advertisement. Somebody called and as we qualified them over the phone, we find out that they are a potential buyer, they just didn't know it.

They come into it thinking that because they don't have any credit, they probably couldn't buy. We have been able to educate and steer them into a direction when they can be a buyer.