You're about to discover 3 hilarious pranks to pull on your best real estate investor or agent friend on this April Fools Day. WARNING: Don't watch the following video if you do not have a sense of humor. I've seen a tremendous amount in all my years in this business and these gag ideas have come from the school of hard knocks. As you've already experienced in your own life, the lies you are most likely to believe are the ones you want to believe. So these pranks prey on that unfortunate piece of human psychology. All real estate deals have two key ingredients; a buyer and a seller. So the first two pranks deal with that. Then, you'll learn about how to utilize overbearing homeowner and condo associations to create a great prank. Lastly, I'll top it off with a bonus 4th prank that will have you rolling. Without further ado, here's 3 pranks to pull on a real estate investor:
Three Pranks to Pull on a Real Estate Investor
Two Key Components in Real Estate Deals
1. Motivated seller that really wants to get rid of their home
2. The type of buyer that can move quickly
They have a big down payment, and perhaps if you're offering maybe rent to own, or owner financing terms they are more than willing to do those, and pay top dollar for the property, and give a big down payment because they normally can't get a loan through a bank. Those are where our first two pranks come into play.
Prank 1
Fake Motivated Seller
Disclaimer: This information is purely for informative purposes. Whether you use this information to prank someone is entirely up to you. Do not blame me for potential outcomes.
In order to create a fake motivated seller you must be experienced in real estate. The more you know, the easier it is to pull this prank off.
There is an app called Slydial that allows you to call someone with any callback number you choose and even alter your voice so that it is not as recognizable. The concept is for you to call them up using Slydlia, and pretend to be someone that would like to get rid of their home. If you want to take it a step further, you can even give them a fake property address, so that if your investor friend looks it up, everything comes back legit.
You could even go so far as to actually setting up an appointment at the house, so that your friend knocks on a strangers door, thinking that they want to sell their home. And the stranger answers with no idea who your real estate investor friend is.
Prank 2
Fake Buyer
Once again, you can use Slydial, but this time set up an appointment to go and look at one of the houses your investor friend has for sale or rent. This means that this prank will only work if your investor has a deal in the works.
This actually happened to me personally. I had a property listed as a rent to own and a person called claiming they needed to find a place within the next two weeks and had $7,000 to put down on it. He said he needed to look at the property asap, so I agreed to meet him at the house that afternoon. When I got to the house I received a phone-call from him claiming that he was running a little late. I waited a while longer and then received a second phonecall where he informed me that he was having trouble finding the place, so I asked him where he was and he started naming some landmarks that were in fact close by. After about an hour of this man claiming he was lost and trying to find the place, he just stopped answering the phone. I actually never heard from him again. Now I am not sure if this was a prank or not, but if you want to completely mess with a friend of yours, this is what you do. You'd have to always dial back out because if you are using Slydial, he won't be able to call you back. So you pretend to be close by and call back every ten minutes claiming you are close or lost. You can do this for about an hour until your friend gets super madder and madder, but I would not suggest pulling this prank on someone that will not find it funny. Do not blame me if you end up totally pissing someone off.
Prank 3
HOA Prank
This prank could apply to any homeowner that's in an HOA Home Owners Association, or if it's a condo, it's a Condo Association. A lot of these associations have a lot of bylaws with all kinds of rules that dictate what their homeowners can and cannot do. Some of them are over the top ridiculous.
I actually pulled this trick on a friend of mine and it did not work out very well. You see, HOAs often send out letter that say things like, "Your trash was left out in front of your house for two days, which is against ordinance 73B section 5. You need to remove your trash barrel from the rode each night after trash is collected.
So I created a letter with the address of the HOA management firm as the return address. I filled it out with his address as the receiver and made the letter look like it was coming from the HOA. I then wrote a letter that said that my friend's flower pots were positioned the wrong way which is a fine of $50.
Now because this rule was so ridiculous, I figured my friend would pick up on the joke but he didn't and ended up calling the HOA and finding out they had not sent the letter. They thought it was some sort of scam and actually called the police to try to figure out how many other homeowners had received this scam letter.
When he was telling me about this later, I started laughing because I couldn't believe someone would actually think it was a scam since I had put to make the checks out to the actual HOA. When he found out it was a prank he felt so stupid that he did not laugh; in fact, he didn't talk to me for almost 6 months.
If you decide to pull this prank, please let your friend know it was a prank. I didn't tell my friend for weeks, and had no idea that there was an actual detective looking into it.
Bonus Prank
Free Signs
One of the techniques I use to find rent-to-own tenants is to put up handwritten signs. One time, I received a voicemail from someone that threatened to take every sign I had posted and write "free pitbull puppies" on them and then put them in areas where people would be interested in free pitbull puppies. I thought this was a joke because he was so detailed on what he was going to do, so I did not think much about it. Well I was wrong. The person found fifteen or twenty of my rent-to-own signs, turned them around, wrote, "free pitbull puppies with my phone number, and put them up in all sorts of neighborhoods. I received literally hundreds and hundreds of phonecalls. The signs did not get ripped down because they were in bad parts of towns and I did not know where to find them in order to take them down myself. I ended up having to buy a new phone number for my rent-to-own advertising because of all of the free puppy phonecalls I received.
If you decided to do a prank like this, make sure you know the sign ordinances for the municipality that you are putting them in. Some areas do not allow them.
Catherine T says
Free puppies that’s really really funny you had me howling thanks
Gwen says
Oh my goodness!! You are too smart for your own good!
David says
You’re one funny guy Phil, fun video thanks
Sherman says
Phil’ you’re one crazy guy, !!!
Gary says
That’s why people love you Phil not only your vast wisdom that you freely share but your sense of humor is just as priceless excellent stuff I look forward to hopefully being mentored by you .
chris ryker says
Fun video…I am definitely doing the free signs prank on someone.