REAL ESTATE TRAINING ACADEMY
Real Estate Training Academy: Motivated Seller Marketing
www.RealEstateTrainingAcademy.com
REAL ESTATE TRAINING ACADEMY Phase II: Finding Deals Motivated Seller Marketing Campaign Management Mini-Module: Enhanced Transcripts Taught by: Heather Seitz
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Real Estate Training Academy: Motivated Seller Marketing
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REAL ESTATE TRAINING ACADEMY
Real Estate Training Academy Phase II: Finding Deals Motivated Seller Marketing
© Real Estate Training Academy, LLC 6170 Dodd Rd., Building B Greenacres, FL 33463 [email protected]
© 2006-07 Real Estate Training Academy, LLC
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Real Estate Training Academy, LLC Co-Founders: Heather Seitz Brandon Tankersley
Real Estate Training Academy, LLC Phase II: Finding Deals – Motivated Seller Marketing Campaign Management Mini-Module: Enhanced Transcripts
Copyright © 2005-07 Real Estate Training Academy, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.
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LEGAL NOTICE This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. The following information is given or sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering any legal, accounting or other professional services. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. From a Declaration of Principal Jointly Adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a committee of Publishers and Associations.
Published By: Real Estate Marketing Alliance, Inc. PO Box 144381 Coral Gables, FL 33114
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FOREWORD Congratulations on your investment in this course! The Real Estate Training Academy is committed to providing training and education through all the phases of your real estate business. The training system is designed in phases so that you can focus on your specific needs. Phase I: The Business of Real Estate Phase II: Finding Deals Phase III: Funding Deals Phase IV: Farming Deals Phase V: Real Estate Technology Phase VI: Advanced Topics in Real Estate You have chosen The Real Estate Training Academy’s Motivated Seller Marketing course which is comprised of transcripts from teleseminar trainings that were strategically conducted to train students to find motivated sellers; specifically foreclosures in this module. It has been purposefully written, edited and designed to be used as a learning tool in conjunction with our corresponding audio CD’s. This course complements are other courses in the Real Estate Training Academy System to give you a complete understanding in a step by step process of how to find, fund, and farm your real estate deals. Whether you are just starting out in this business or a seasoned real estate investor, this Real Estate Training system brings the latest information, strategies, and techniques that can either get you started in the real estate business or take your business to the next level. We wish you much success in building your real estate business. Real Estate Training Academy Co-Founders: Heather Seitz Brandon Tankersley
The road to success lies in two simple principles: find what it is that interests you and that you can do well, and when you find it, put your whole soul into it— every bit of energy and ambition and natural ability that you have. John D. Rockefeller III
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REAL ESTATE TRAINING ACADEMY Phase II: Finding Deals Motivated Seller Marketing
Managing your Real Estate Marketing Campaigns
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Campaign Management Strategies We’re going to be covering Campaign Management Strategies: "How to Manage Campaigns and Implement Systems." This is kind of where we’re going to pull all the nuts and bolts together. I want to recommend that you go out and pick up a copy of “The E-Myth”, by Michael Gerber. It is all about systems and managing your business through policies, procedures, and systems. Now… this may not be the most glamorous course, but I’ll tell you that this is one of, if not the most important aspects to being successful in real estate. You need the systems in order to be able to follow-up and follow through. It’s one thing to get campaigns started and it’s another to get campaigns completed. The more irons you get in the fire, the more critical it is that you stay organized and on top of your systems. For those of you that came on a bit late, I was saying that my mom is in town. I just had her and my boyfriend stamping envelopes because I need to get them out. My envelope "stuffer/label sticker-on-er" didn’t do such a great job this week. You’ve got to kind of use your resources and pull things together. The key thing is if you’re not going to stay on target and you’re not going to stay on task, then don’t even get started because it’s like throwing money out the door. We don’t want to do that. Even if you come to me and you say, “Heather, I just made $150,000 off of a single deal from this campaign. I don’t need to follow-up with the other campaigns” Or with the other mailers, with the follow-up email, whatever it is that you’re doing for that particular strategy. I want to encourage you to follow through because number one, we don’t know what’s going on in somebody’s situation. Number two, people’s circumstances change. During the summer months, people are planning… They’ve got to get set up for the school year for the kids and get things in order, so that in September everything’s good to go for the school year. By November (in our state), the tax bills will start to come out. Once tax bills start to come out, then the holidays are here. After the holidays, we’re into the New Year. We’re just about to start a big cycle for the neighborhood farming, the absentee owners. Foreclosures come and go all year round and probate kind of goes all year round. But we’ve got to take a look at the types of markets that may have a little bit of a different reaction seasonally. When you’re doing that, it’s really important to stay on target because you know at this point X, Y and B is likely to happen. So with that I want to start covering some of the critical components of what we need to do; of what our plan needs to look like of where we’ve got to go with this. A lot of
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this is going to be somewhat of a review for you because we’ve talked about plans a little bit in the past. We’ve talked about the target market. We’ve talked about the audience. We’ve talked about all that stuff but now it’s time to put the plan in place and get moving along with it. If we were going to look at, “What will I need to do to get my plan going? What do I need to do to get set up?” We’re going to go first and foremost and talk about our market. This is where we really define who it is that we want to talk to. We’re going to learn what it is that makes them tick. What is their personal situation? This is where all of the consumer profiles come into play. When you’re putting your plan together, you’ve got to say, “Okay, who’s my target? What’s my communication?” Is it going to be my direct mail strategy? Is it going to be my telemarketing strategy? Is it going to be door knocking? Is it going to be a combination? Is it going to be internet? What is it that I want to do to communicate to these individuals? This is where you start putting it on paper. You start structuring it out so that it’s concrete. I know that we have all heard in the past that you need to write it down and then it becomes reality. You know, we’ve heard all these things before but do we really do it? If we’re not doing it, then what we’ve heard in the past is nothing. We’ve absolutely got to write it down. We’ve got to get it going. We can put it in our heads. A lot of you have talked to me and you say, “Well how do you come up with all these things? How do you put these all into place?” It comes from a lot of practice and it comes from a lot of different planning sessions with a lot of different individuals. When I started, however, I had to actually write it down. I had to think it through because otherwise I wasn’t going to get it clear in my mind. You’ve also got to take a look at it. This is another overall component of your plan. It is the competition. The things that we’ve talked about are kind of designed to give you a better competitive edge. So what you’ve got to do is take a look at what your competitors are doing. You don’t want to necessarily do the exact same thing. You may want to do something very similar because if a lot of people are doing it, chances are, it works; however, it may not. A speaker came to the local real estate club and said, “This is what you’ve got to do.” Maybe the speaker sold hundreds and hundreds of courses and all the people are using the exact same materials. Chances are also that you’re not going to be the only one with a post card strategy. The key here is to evaluate what the competition is doing and just do it a step better or take it a step further. Be very wary of “cookie-cutter” programs on the market. Very seldom do they really work. And if they do… it’s only a small percentage of the time. Truly successful marketers are original and don’t depend on the marketing creativity of others. They take what others are doing successfully and model it to create their own unique spin.
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Constantly, constantly, constantly look at what the next level is. What the competition is and how you can do it a little bit better. The same exact thing holds true for us in our real estate business. The next thing is kind of going to sound a little bit weird and this is just from a conventional marketing background or advertising backgrounds. You want to really look at your products and service offering. What I mean by this is; what are you offering clients? This is where you start to look at your benefits. What are the benefits that you provide to your market? If you’re marketing to foreclosures, what benefit do you have over the competition? For instance, in a completely different arena what benefit is baking soda toothpaste over Colgate toothpaste? Well, in my opinion, it’s certainly not flavor but maybe it’s that it’s going to make my teeth whiter whereas the Colgate doesn’t. Then am I going for the whiter teeth or the flavor? Either way it depends what I perceive the benefit to be. On our real estate end are you offering a one size fits all solution because many, many investors are doing that. They’re saying, “This is what you do.” They get a book. They read the book. Then they try to fit that cookie cutter solution to every situation. Well those investors are either short lived or they don’t make very much money. The reason is there are so many different intricacies with every single deal. You guys have heard me talk about one deal that took forever to close. Well it finally funded a week ago. Last week I was supposed to close on another property and the title company had some hang ups and here we are now eight days overdue on that closing and I don’t even have a future closing date. I’ve got probate things on the table that we were ready to close a week ago. Things are going to hold it up. Every one of those situations, every one of those stories, every one of those dynamics is drastically different. Are you equipped with a lot of different options and solutions for your particular market? That’s why I really, really urge you as we go through all the different modules to focus on one very specific target and learn to be the problem solver. Some of you may say, “What is the product or service/benefit that I can provide over other investors?” Well they key is you’re the total real estate solution. No matter what their problem is, you’ve just got to take the attitude of "I can solve it. I’m a problem solver. I’m not a cookie cutter." Think of it in terms of, you walk into a kitchen and you want to make cookies. If you take the back of the chocolate chip package and you’re missing baking soda, you say, “I can’t make any cookies.” And you put the package away and you’re done. Verses saying okay, “What’s in the kitchen and what can I do.” Let’s put something together and get it as close as possible. Even if it’s slightly a little bit different or maybe I come and say, “You know what; chocolate chip cookies aren’t going to happen tonight. I need to make sugar cookies” or something along those lines.
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You need to start to think outside of the box and think really creatively in order to find the solution with what cards are dealt to you, with what ingredients you have. Unfortunately you’re never or 99% of the time you’re not going to have the ideal situation at hand. I wish that I could say that you would but you it’s just not the nature of it. If everything was clean, then there would be no need for real estate investors. The next component of your plan is the industry in general. I want you to really be paying attention to what’s going on in not only your local market but in the larger economy, in the state economy, in the national economy and the regional economy and the international economy. What is the 30-year mortgage rate doing? We hear all these things about adjustable rate mortgages and they’re great. I have them on all of my properties at the current time. But, the reason that I do that is because of my particular strategy. It’s very calculated, very predetermined and evaluated as to what kind of loan I put on my property. However, if you want to see what the true market is doing or what’s going on in the mortgage market, look at the 30-year note. The 30-year conventional mortgage, 30-year fixed. That fluctuates somewhat but what are the very low points with that note right now. Look at what’s going on. That’s going to be your indicator of where the mortgage market is going to go. Irregardless of whether or not home prices are going up and up and up and everybody thinks that home prices are topping out. Well, that’s why you need to start looking at other economies. What happened in Europe when prices got too big? What’s going on in China? China, I believe, has 100-year mortgages on their properties because of the cost of living and the price of the homes their economy. Yes, real estate is a cycle and it’s important to watch what that cycle is doing. But it’s also important that you need to be informed instead of listening to the spectators that are not playing. They’re just kind of watching from the side. It’s like the arm chair quarterback. They’re sitting there watching the Super bowl saying, “Gosh, come on. All you’ve got to do is run for the touchdown. I can’t believe he did it.” Well, are you out there playing or are you making comments from the sidelines? You’re the one playing so why would you ever listen to the people on the sidelines? You’ve got to have the information and you’ve got to make the informed decision. Now of course, don’t think that the appreciation is always, always going to be where it has been over the last several years. But don’t think that all of a sudden it’s going to drop off either. We are in a changing time. More likely than not, we’re on the verge or actually we are on the verge where things are starting to shift. The rental economy is going to strengthen again in the next month, years, and decade, what have you. But we’re starting to head towards that trend. Keep in mind what’s going on and pay attention to it. Because that’s what going to help you stay ahead of the game. So many times I see investors that have been doing the same things for five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. Well the market is changing. We’ve had a very stable market with respect to the fact that it’s been an appreciating market place
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generally speaking all over the country. Some places are higher than others but generally speaking we’ve had a pretty good upward trend. Investors that only know that kind of investing are starting to struggle. Because they’re not paying attention to what’s about to happen or what’s in the process of happening now. So it’s very, very important to pay attention to the industry. I also want to just talk about internet and technology. I know that for those of you that were at the next level training you got a big, big dose of this. You’ve got to start looking at the internet and technology in your business. It’s here. It’s very cost effective. It’s very inexpensive and you can you can just do so much with it. We’ll go into web sites and how we can get those developed for us in the next hour and a half or so. But it’s important to understand all of that. Technology a large part of this call tonight is the technological component of it. How are you utilizing technology, whether they’re voice mail systems, whether they’re internet, whether it’s outsourcing strategies available to us because of technology? All of those factors are very, very critical in your marketing plan. Then last and this is kind of like your communication method but slightly different and that’s the media. It’s not just what media are you going to use but more important or more specifically it’s what affects the various media have. Are you monitoring it? Are you watching it? Are you changing when you need to? Are you adapting when your business calls for it or when the market place calls for it? If you’re going door to door right now or if you’re driving for dollars or if you’re doing things like that right now, you’re media is basically one-on-one, face-to-face. Well that’s going to change as you start to do more deals and you start to get more time. Maybe you move to telemarketing to buy back a little bit more time and then eventually to direct marketing. Then eventually maybe you go to mass media on broadcast channels. All of those things are going to change either because you’re business is evolving or because your target market is evolving.
7 Critical Components of Your Plan 1. 2. 3. 4.
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5. 6. 7.
Now next I want to talk about in your business verses on your business. I know that I’ve mentioned just a little bit in the past and I’m going to just cover what the difference is again. See "in" your business stuff is what you need to do on a day to day basis to get things done. "On" your business is what you need to do in the grand scheme and the big picture to build your business as such. The "in" your business tasks I mentioned, some nights that I have my boyfriend and my mom stamping envelopes. Is that an "in" your business or an "on" your business? This is kind of a tricky one because the actual putting the stamps on the envelope is an "in" your business task. However, I wasn’t necessarily the one doing it. Tonight I wasn’t the one doing it. It was almost and this example of supervisory role. While they were doing that, I was preparing my notes for this call, let’s say. If that’s what I’m focusing on, I’m focusing on the big picture. Well, in the beginning I had to sign all my letters, hand write anything that needed to be hand written, put my own return labels on, put my own stamps on because I didn’t have an option. But when I was doing the "in" my business tasks I always had the end goal in mind. So let’s talk about just a couple of different "in" versus "on" tasks. I know it may feel like they’re one and the same but just start looking at if it’s something that you can outsource or get somebody else to do, then it’s basically busy work and it’s an "in" your business task. Things like answering regular day-to-day emails. I always hit my little F5 button on my keyboard. I feel like I’m being productive because I’ve got to communicate with clients and customers and sellers and buyers and title companies. I have to do all of that but is it something that can be outsourced and is it something that is directly going to put money in my pocket in the shortest amount of time possible? That’s the distinguishing factor here. "In" my business is what I’ve got to do temporarily. "On" my business is a long term putting money in my pocket. Now other "in" my business tasks I mentioned direct mail. I’m actually doing the direct mail pieces myself. I’m doing all the labels. I’m doing all the signing, the stamping, and all the little details that have to be done within this specific direct mail campaign.
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I’ve talk to you about www.DataQuick.com in the past. If you are using www.DataQuick.com and you’re the one that’s going to the web site that’s downloading all of the records, that’s mail merging all of the files together, printing them all out and then doing the whole sealing, signing, stamping, etc, that’s again, an "in" your business kind of tasks. It’s okay to do that and you have to do that in the beginning. You should do a lot of these tasks when you’re getting started simply because you’ve got to have a basic understanding of what goes into it, what the time line is, how long it takes to get them done and that way you can effectively manage it in the business. I want you to start to think about maybe five or ten things that you do on a daily basis that are not necessarily growing your business but feels like you are sometimes. I jokingly refer to this as productive procrastination. It’s when I feel like I’m doing something that’s productive but it’s not. Think about all the phone calls you take on a daily basis. You talk about real estate but are you making money? Are you creating relationships that could be future dollars? Well, that’s great. But, it’s a time leasing activity. It’s not productive and it’s not dollars in the bank account right now. Some of the "on" your business tasks might be let’s say you place an ad on www.CraigsList.org for somebody to do the busy work or to hire a virtual assistant, things of that nature. Reviewing your direct mail campaign, looking at the response rate verses the return rates, looking at your profit and loss statements from your bookkeeper. Not necessarily doing all the bookkeeping, not necessarily being involved in the day-to-day bookkeeping matter, but reviewing it, keeping an eye on it, watching the thing. Think in terms of I want to be a Donald Trump. I want to be a Bill Gates. That’s the big business picture. It’s important to keep the two straight because it’s going to keep you on target. When you’re doing your plans, when you’re figuring out your whole business plan, I want you all to refer to the bonus section. If I can give you some homework right now, it’s to go through that time management, goal setting session. You’ve really got to take a look at where do I want to be. I sometimes take people through an exercise and I say, “Let’s just suppose for a minute that time and money weren’t a factor. Tomorrow morning you could wake up anywhere in the world on the planet, maybe you want to be on another planet. I don’t know what your dreams are. You could wake up anywhere that you wanted to, do anything that you wanted to, and be anybody that you wanted to be. What would your day look like tomorrow?” As you’re going through that, be as crazy as you want. Maybe you wake up in Tahiti and go diving or I don’t know what you do in Tahiti but plan your day like that and just go wild and crazy. Now once you’ve done that, I want you to put a five year goal on that. That’s kind of your long term goal. Then I want you to build that back.
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In order to have that, where do you need to be in three years, a year? A year is a very realistic point. Then you work back a year, then to six months, then to three months, then monthly and then weekly. That’s going to give you your daily task list. You think that through all the time management and goal setting bonuses because it’s very important. But just keep in mind that you’ve got to look at the big picture and you’re "on" tasks is what’s going to bring you closer to that big picture.
“In Your Business” vs. “On Your Business”
In
On
Now I’ll reiterate the strategy and it’s one of your recommended resources and it’s www.ActionSecrets.com. This is my friend and business partner, Alex Mandossian’s site. He’s got a lot more to it but the biggest thing that I took away was the egg timer strategy. That’s where I set it for 60 minutes and in those 60 minutes I do nothing but "on" my business tasks that put cash in my pocket long term and I can see profits and build my business. So check that out. That’s going to absolutely help you as you start to grow and expand your vision.
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Now this leads us into the action plans. The action plan is a little bit different than "to do lists”. These are the "what are my bigger scope projects?" For argument’s sake, let’s say that our action plan may be getting a web campaign in place. Our "to do list" is going to be the individual steps that accomplish that. But the actual action plan is the bigger picture. What do we need to do to get the whole thing in place, up and running and working the right way? Action plans… you can research them, study them but basically it’s just a list of tasks to get to your objective. I’ll focus on a "to do list", but as I mentioned a "to do list" is just single goals. Now all these single goals will go ahead and create your action plan. But you want to use your action plan to help you concentrate on where you are in the various stages of achievement.
Setting Up Your Action Plan
You want to have time lines. So if it’s something that’s going to take you six months to do, the action plan is going to allow you to be able to evaluate at month one, at month three, at month five and then again at month six. Now the action plan is simply made up of all the individual tasks that you need to carry out your goal. The "to do list" is all those little tasks. This is where we get confused and this is where we get overwhelmed and this is where we run ourselves out of the business. We mistakenly think that a "to do list" or a "to do item" is an i.e. something that I do. So what we tend to do is give ourselves a dozen action plans compiled with 87 steps involved in obtaining each of our action plans. Understand that an action plan is a process. The tasks are deliverables, basically. In order to prepare your "to do list", quite simply, if you want to get as basic as possible, you can get this quad-ruled graph paper. I fold it in half vertical so it’s 4 ¼” X 11”
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and I’ll actually do four days right on that piece of paper. I just write all the tasks that I need to do for day one. I check myself to make sure they’re actually tasks and not big projects. If it’s a big project, I need to break it down to all the little tasks. You’ll start to see that you’re crossing off so many more things than you were before. You’re getting things done and you’re feeling a much greater sense of accomplishment. You’re being more productive and you’re working much faster. Another tactic when you’re doing you’re doing your "to do list" is to prioritize or organize. What are the most important things? Maybe you number them one through how ever many there are. Maybe you just put one for all the major priorities, two for secondary and three for not priority. There are all kinds of different ways that you can do that. But you want to prioritize and you want to make sure that you’re on target. If you’re working on your real estate business five days a week, you want to have a "to do list" for each day. The best thing to do is to set up your "to do list" at the beginning of your day. Not in the beginning of your productive hour, but at the beginning of your day. It may be over a cup of coffee. Evaluate where everything is at. Carry over anything from the day before that didn’t get finished, which means you can’t necessarily if you have obligations let’s say on a Wednesday, that’s fine. You need to pencil in your appointments and things that you’ve previously committed to. But you don’t want to overbook and give yourself 48 obligations on Wednesday because what if all your tasks from Monday carry over to Tuesday and then you’ve lost a day. Things happen so we have to be careful not to set ourselves up. For instance, yesterday I had a whole list of things to get done. In the midst of trying to get all these things done, the bathroom in my second home flooded. Well unfortunately that was a three hour chunk of time out of my day that I had to handle a situation. I had to take care of it. I can’t just say, “Hold on flood tomorrow because I have taxes to complete.” Upon that being cleared up I got in my car and said, "Okay, I’ll just work later." I just lost a couple of hours. Well I hopped in the car. About ten minutes into the drive I got a flat tire. You know there are just some things you can’t do anything about. So all those things that didn’t get done yesterday, even though I worked later at night, I still had to carry some of those through. So keep that in mind and just don’t discourage yourself with all of that. I talked about the daily "to do list". I don’t want to spend too, too much time on this daily plan of attack. But what we’re going to do here with this is actually figure out what do I have to focus on today. I break it down because I do a number of different things. I say today on the real estate front and I prioritize. What are my most pressing real estate deals or situations? It goes from properties that I have to deal with today whether it’s a closing that I have to address, whether it’s an issue I have to address, a contractor,
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what have you. Usually the ones that are closest to putting money in my pocket are at the top of that list. Then I go to the ones that I’ve got contracts to follow-up on. I’ve got contracts out on these. I have to follow-up with the potential seller. Those are the ones that I’m evaluating and researching and trying to make decisions on. Then fourth is the management of the campaigns and the management of the growth of the different things that need to happen. I have other things that I need to work on. So I say okay, real estate. That’s one component. Then I have maybe my other business, whatever that other business may be for you. This marketing course is another component of my business. There’s a certain amount of time that has to be dedicated to this. So what’s the most pressing issue that I have to handle here? When you’re doing multiple things there are a couple of strategies that you can do. You can say I’m willing to focus from eight to ten, Monday thru Friday on my real estate. On Tuesday I might say I’ve got to focus on this business and so on and so forth. So you’ve just got to figure out what’s going to work for you and do this each and every day. I think that it’s going to be important for you to understand what you can and can’t do. Focus on not trying to over do it because that’s when you start to get yourself into trouble. Now for the next probably half hour, forty-five minutes I want to talk about outsourcing strategies. You may be saying, “I’m not at that point yet. I don’t have the finances to do that. I don’t have the knowledge to do that. I don’t have the experience to do that.” I also want to caution you on the flip side of that. Don’t try to be all things to all people. If you have never created a web site, don’t think that you’re going to be this web master and you’re going to build a huge search engine and you’re going to be driving traffic and you’re going to be doing all these other buzz words that internet marketers talk about. That’s another whole string of business in and of itself. The whole internet mind sets is a different strategy. Yes, you need to have them but it’s not important for you to learn all of the intricacies of doing that. I want to talk about a few different places. Now designing. You know that you can get your free business cards at Vista Print. There’s a lot of researches fro the freebies. When I started, one of my web sites is and you have probably been to it but it’s www.Yamon.net and that site was actually based on the design of the free business cards. We actually paid to not have the Vista Print logo on the back. It was designed around the post cards that they had because I really liked the graphic and I said okay, "I’m going to have a photo connection to the business card so that it all flows together."
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You want everything to be seamless. You want everything to work together, but you may not necessarily be able to find the business cards, the web sites, the post cards, the letterhead, all of that to match on all these free services. So you might consider going to some of these outsourcing places to have those things designed. You can go online and find tons and tons of printing services. There’s so much competition that it’s getting so inexpensive and so reasonable to get these things done. The resource that use for design is www.DesignOutpost.com. You can also look at www.ELance.com.
They’re another resource. What you do, the way these work is they’re projects that are bid on. The way www.DesignOutpost.com works, let’s suppose you say I want to have a business set design; a business card, a basic web design, a letterhead and a post card. You would post this in just a basic real estate investor set and I’m going to tell you that I’m not a fan of these big yellow ugly things. I know we talked about this in the Guerilla Marketing section. A lot of investors swear by them and that’s okay. Everybody has a different opinion on what works and what doesn’t. My business model and my image is professionalism, is credibility, and is that level of service. I don’t think that you necessarily get with a big, bright yellow card that you leave all over the place. That’s just my personal opinion. You may have a different opinion and that’s fine. But what I would do is go to www.DesignOutpost.com and it’s a pretty simple process. You might have to register. I don’t remember. I believe you go into “start projects”. Then you outline what it is that you’re looking for and what you’re willing to pay. So let’s say you’re willing to pay for this basic job $150. You put your project up there and you put the price up there. What happens is all these designers that are either
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trying to build a portfolio, that are trying get practice, that are trying to make some extra money, what have you. They go and they bid on the jobs. But instead of bidding blindly, which is a concern with design services, especially coming from a past designer career. I want to see it before I’m going to commit to paying for it. So what they do is let’s say five designers bid on your job. They all produce the work for you. They all produce their version and you work with them. You say I like this banner but what if we tried it in blue instead of green. Let’s see what that would look like. You can be communicating with five or six different people at any given time. Then once you’re satisfied with one and you say this is the one I want to go with. Then they’re paid and the job is complete. But you’re actually having the opportunity to see several people work for you before you ever even have to pay for the finished piece. It’s a great, great resource to get you a professional image, a professional look and feel to your business. You can do as many as few components as you would like but you might want to just invest. I’ll give you a list here. You want to definitely have your business cards. I would say definitely have a web site. Letterhead is probably a good idea and post cards are probably a good idea as well. Again, all of these can be designed right here on www.DesignOutpost.com. Next we’ll go into a little bit more on the automation process and how to take yourself out of the detail stuff of taking 87 calls when people just want to say, “What is this about?” You know just asking a lot of questions that aren’t very pertinent to getting the job done. So you can go to a number of different voice mail services. You can do some call centers where they actually have a live person answering the phone all the way down to just automated voice mail services. There are all kinds of things in between. There’s a simple number. We’ve talked about using a local number verses an 800 number. Here’s an instant refresh. I prefer an 800 number if I’m doing a two step campaign offering them to call in for a special report or to get free information. I prefer local number if I’m giving the impression that they’re going to talk to a live person because people in most of the situations that lend from motivation. They want to talk to a live person. They want a body on the end of the line. Again, that choice is up to you. If you’re looking for an 800 number, there’s a resource here. It’s called www.Kall8.com. You can go there and their fees are very, very reasonable. For a few dollars a month you can have your own 800 number. Now this is the most basic. What I did is I got additional phones for my cell phone and they’re dedicated to different campaigns. One phone number will be for absentee owners. One will be for neighborhood blasts. One will be for probate. That way it helps me with my tracking. It keeps the tracking much more organized. I’m not trying to clash our friends and guess which database these individuals are coming from. Also it helps me just filter out a lot of noise I was getting initially.
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So what you can do is either set up a very, very basic just phone system like that or you could get an answering system where it says, “If you’re looking to buy a property, please press one. If you’re looking to sell a property, please press two.” Or let’s suppose you’re a realtor and you want to get one of these systems. There are multiple different systems that you can use. You can say, “Press one for the property located at 1347 Main Street. Press two for the property located at 1876 Washington Road. Press three for the property located on 18 South Coconut Street.” Then that way they are getting the specific information that they’re looking for. Then you can go all the way up to an actual live person, 24/7 that can answer any questions that you may have. You can take these as far as you want or as shallow as you want to go I guess. Another service that I was doing some research on last week trying to find different ways to outsource and different things that we can do in our businesses; you can hire complete customer service outsourcing companies that answer questions for people that take the calls. I think it was somewhere in the range of 40 hours a week they dedicate to you on your time line. It was $499. They’ll work for you 40 hours a week in your time line. You say who would do that? That comes out to like $3 an hour. Well the same people that the big guys, the airlines, the credit card companies, that the mortgage companies use. Those same people that they’re calling on or that they’re utilizing for their customer service and tech support, you can do that same thing. You can probably get it even cheaper. The company that I found at that price is www.SupportSave.com. You can read all the details about how affluent they are in English
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and their grammar and what they will and won’t do and how they get trained and all that good stuff. But the bottom line is there are a lot of resources. You may just say I want to have just a full time dedicated person that’s going to answer phones. I’m going to teach them what to say and how to say it. These are just different options as far as the voice stuff goes. Next we can talk about the assistants and envelope stuffing. Robin said to me the other day, “Heather I’m hooked on www.CraigsList.org.” I had talked about it a number of times. I’m thrilled with it. I just had my first experience with a not so great envelope person and that’s okay because at 10 cents a piece and at a per job commitment, it’s not a big deal. It’s just okay, I won’t use that envelope person again. No big deal. Well this is www.CraigsList.org. There are a lot of different things that you can find here. I go on their admin. and office a lot or I go under part time or etc. What you do is you simply put up there that you’re looking for somebody to do whatever it is that you need to do. I found my assistant there. She worked in my office for about six months. She graduated from school and now she’s working virtually for me from New Jersey.
Basically I just put in there that I needed somebody that could handle a lot of different tasks. That was action oriented, that didn’t need to be micromanaged that could show up on time, just all the ideal characteristics, all the things that fit me as a business owner. You may have different traits or different characteristics that you’re looking for in somebody that’s going to come and work for you. I found her for $9 an hour. She was the most loyal person that I could have ever found. She would stay late if I needed her to, come in on the weekends if I ever needed her to. She’d work from home. I mean a
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phenomenal person. If you look at that for $9 an hour, you get somebody that’s dedicated to you and your business and willing to learn. Now you might not always get top quality people right out of the gate. It may take some tweaking. It may take some firing. It may take some additional hiring. You never know. But it’s a great resource. It doesn’t cost you anything in most places to advertise. What I did for the envelope stuffing, depending on the campaign, is I pay 5 cents if all they have to do is sign, stuff, seal and put the return address label on. I pay 10 cents if they need to sign, handwrite the mailing address, put the return label on and seal the envelope. I have people crawling out of the woodwork to do the jobs for me. As you can see, 1500 pieces give or take a couple of dozen. So let’s say 1500 pieces, it costs me a $150 to have done. Every one of them was hand written with the return label put on, sealed and signed with my signature. Once you get to a point, isn’t that pretty good? Think about how much time that would take you to do all of that. People are happy to do it. They need the extra cash. While we’re on www.CraigsList.org, I also want to point out if you weren’t on the call that we did a few weeks ago with Armand. The real estate for sale. The housing wanted. Keep an eye on these. Check on these periodically because these are opportunities for you to find for sale by owners. People that may want your properties. People that may want to buy your properties. These are great resources for you. And also in this for sale section check frequently on furniture, garage sale and households. These are where you’re going to be able to get furniture if you need to have a furnished property. Even the rehabbed houses, if you do a little bit of dressing up, you’ll get higher dollars for all the houses that you sell. It’s just little things like curtains and little knick-knacks and maybe a side table. Just small little things; if you can get them cheap from a site like this or from www.eBay.com. You’re going to be able to save a lot of money. Shorten your holding time and just in general move your properties a little bit faster with higher prices. Under the garage sale and household, you’ll find a lot of appliances. Instead of having to go and spend $150, $250, $300, whatever it’s going to cost you for appliances; you can go ahead and save. Even if it’s a few hundred dollars, it’s worth saving the money. Poke around in there and see what you can find. There are a lot of great resources for us as investors. Now with copywriting services you say, “What do I need copywriting services for?” Well we’ve talked at great length about direct mail pieces. I’ve been very strategic in not saying, “Here are 101 samples for you” because I want you to take exactly this. It’s more along the lines of I want to teach you how to write the copy. You might say, “I’m not interested in that. Just give it to me.” If that’s the feeling that you have, I understand. I didn’t want to write copy for a long time either. Well, you can go to www.ELance.com and that’s on your cheat sheet. It’s E L A N C E dot com. It’s kind of like the www.DesignOutpost.com, except that they don’t do the actual job for you to review
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first. You can look at writing samples. You can see what they’ve done in the past and move from that point forward with somebody that you like and that you have a good feel for.
These individuals, same sort of thing, it’ll cost you $25, $50, $100, $300, depending on what it is that you’re looking for. But they can write your direct response mailers if you don’t want to follow formulas that I’m going to be giving you. They can write your post card campaigns. They can write your copy for your web sites. They can write your special report. They can write your articles. Let’s suppose you want to try to get published in different publications. They can write these things for you if you don’t want to be a writer. Now some of you may say, “I really enjoy the writing part of it.” Maybe even just work with somebody here for proofing or editing or tweaking it for you. Incidentally, you can also get some of these things also from www.CraigsList.org if you put the ads out. I’m just giving you a lot of different alternatives. I hope you’re starting to see "I can get an idea and I can get a design" to the most part over on www.DesignOutpost.com. I can get a copywriter to write the content of it over on www.ELance.com. I can get a person to go ahead and put the labels on or hand write or whatever I’m going to do over on www.CraigsList.org. Now all I am doing is facilitating five or six people all working together to create this piece. All I’ve got to do now is manage it. Of course it’s going to take you a little bit more money, but think about how much time it is that you’re saving. If you’re thinking I don’t have the money to do this right now. This is when you start finding partners. This is when you start joint venturing with other individuals. What if I bring this to the table? Would you be willing too? Okay, well let’s check it out and see what happens. You start to build relationships with other people so that they start maybe paying for some of this stuff or maybe say, "Hey. Let’s partner up on the first few deals that we do."
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There’s a million different ways to do it. I’m actually in the process of putting it together. So many people say all this is fine and well but how do you do this with no money or no products? As I said in the past, to this date, I have only purchased one property on my own credit. I still haven’t had to use my own cash on deals. So keep that in mind and start to just always, always think how can I do this for free? How can I do this with somebody else’s time, money, resources, etc? I mentioned a little while ago, a few pages back about www.Kall8.com. Here’s another kind of voice service. This is www.VoiceShot.com. This is a little bit different. There are a few things that you can do. When I talked about these call center services with somebody that’s going to answer phones, some of that sort of stuff, they can do over here. What I really like about them is the Voice Broadcast.
I talked about this at the Realtor Strategy. You can actually, if you’ve got a list of phone numbers, you can actually have www.VoiceShot.com you upload your database and they’ll tell you what format to put it in. They might even convert it for you. I don’t remember. All you’ve got to do is simply upload that, call into a message center, record your message and whatever that may be. Let’s suppose you have a foreclosure web site and people are coming to it. What you do is you have them leave their phone number. Well, they’ve left their address, they’ve left the property information, so what if you have say a dozen responses in one or two days. Couldn’t you turn around and send a voice broadcast? It’s like 10, 12 cents a voice broadcast. You know they have promotional things where you pay $100 into your account and they credit back. I believe it’s $25 with activation. I’m not sure if that’s periodic promotion or if it’s an ongoing promotion. You go ahead and set that up. You don’t have to send a minimum or a maximum at any given time. You can send three at a time if you want. All you do is say, “Hi, this is Heather with Yamon Investments. I saw that you stopped by the web site this afternoon or
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this week and I just wanted to follow-up with you on your request. Please call me at …… and you could put another phone number if you wanted to or you can pretty much give them any instruction that you like at that point. But you would just be following-up with the people who have properties that you are interested in. The reason that this is a good strategy is because a lot of times people will submit their information just to see what comes out, but not necessarily be real, real serious. This will help you distinguish the serious people from the tire kickers. This is something that I think you should get into the habit of generally speaking. Let’s suppose you put an ad on www.CraigsList.org and you get 500 responses or let’s be a little bit more realistic. When I put up an ad for a graphics person, I had over a hundred responses come in. So I just put their phone numbers all into a database and called them and said, “This is Heather. I got your resume. I’m interested in setting up a time to speak with you further. Please give me a call back. Or please shoot me over an email with three convenient times and dates that I could give you a call. Include your phone number, your complete name, and three times that are suitable to call. Again, that web site or that email address is [email protected]. Thanks so much and I look forward to speaking with you.” Well now let’s suppose that 30 people call you back. Well you’ve just eliminated 70 people that you don’t have to deal with sending follow-up emails back and forth, chasing down. It just really helps you systematize and streamline without having to do all these oneon-one calls to people back and forth. Now we are at the bottom of the hour and I want to go ahead and give everybody a 10 minute break and open up for any questions that we have so far before we go into individual systems and putting the final pieces together. What I want to talk about for the next 45 minutes or so is the individual systems. I kind of broke them down into the different markets that we had talked about over the last few modules. I brought a handful of them into the sheet just for time sake. Let’s suppose we’ve got our absentee owner list. Remember these are people that just don’t live at the property address. If they live down the street, chances are they’re just local investor’s like we are and may not be interested in selling. However, you can’t always be certain of that. I got a letter in the mail I think it was yesterday and it was an individual that I spoke with last week regarding a letter he had sent back in response to a letter that I had sent to him. He’s got about 20, 25 properties that he’s ready to liquidate. So investors do have circumstances that change and it’s not a bad idea but you don’t necessarily want to focus on them specifically. So we’re going to say that our absentee owners are out of state. What we want to first think about when we’re setting up our individual systems is what I kind of call the "Customer Continuum." What is our ideal? What is end in mind?
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The end in mind is obviously the property. But we also know that that’s not always, always going to happen. So we’ve got to figure out what is this prospect look like when they come to us? This is where we have all these different things. We’re starting to build a profile. If we understand our target, all of this comes into play now. What is their mindset when they give me a call? We’ll do very specific examples. Let’s suppose I send out my absentee owner campaign I November when tax bills come out. Their mindset is probably tax relief or at the very least this property that’s been giving me a little bit of a headache suddenly became more of a burden. I just got the tax bill. So taxes are probably going to be a factor in their decision to sell. So you know in many cases their not just shopping around to see what’s happening there. They’re probably a little bit more serious about selling. This individual goes ahead and gives you a call. You’ve got to be ready for that. You need to sell because of this, this, this and this. I don’t live in the state. I had to transfer for work. The tax bill just came in and my taxes went up X amount of dollars, because it’s not homesteaded, because I don’t live in the state. Let them tell you their whole story. Now it’s time to find out just how motivated they are. We’ll go through the flow chart in just a minute. This is a great one for the absentee owners. But we want to just move them through different systems. If we start talking to them and find out that yeah they’re motivated but my neighbor just told me that the neighborhood property just down the street just sold for $400,000. “My house is a nicest on the block. I think I can get $450,000 but it’s been unoccupied for four years.” Well, then maybe we’ve got a little bit of a judgment issue here. This would be when you say, "Okay. I’m not sure if this might work in this particular situation right here and now. But, what if I offered to you” and you just go through from most desirable to you to obviously least desirable, which is nothing at all. You say, “What if I could lease option it from you?” Maybe that’s your second strategy. Or, what if, “have you heard Mr. Seller about the possibility of seller financing?” “Well, yeah but I just want to get my cash out and I have an underlying mortgage on the property. I’m just really not interested in that.” “What if I could show you a way that you could get a buyer at top dollar through seller financing and still cash some money out at closing? Would that be a little bit more appealing to you? You know we are a national investment team. We are able to often sell these types of situations for sellers and get you the cash that you are looking for to get out of the property.” Well now you’re making basically, for all intents and purposes, the equivalent of an assignment fee without necessarily having to put it under contract. You’re just helping them locate a buyer. You help the buyer and the ultimate person that’s going to purchase the mortgage note from the individual seller. It’s a little bit more complex than this. Basically, long story short, is you would get paid a structuring fee, which could be anywhere from 3 to 5% plus on the deal, depending on how you are able to put the whole thing together.
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Next might be if you’re a realtor to say the next option that we could do is possibly list it and see what we can do from that. “Well I don’t want to pay a realtor.” “What is it that you’re planning to do sir given that you’re living in Seattle Washington and your property is located in Miami Florida? What is your ideal situation here?” If they’re absolutely unwilling and their ideal and their only situation is top dollar with no commissions and they want to do this from Seattle and Miami, well. “If there’s anything thing that I can do in the future to help you out, by all means, I’ve got a lot of options and I’d be open to that to discussing some of those with you.” I’ll tell you. When I first got started I tried to avoid realtor commissions, avoid all these other commissions on a property that was three and half hours away. It was such a headache. It was such a massive problem that it wasn’t more than three weeks and I said you know what; this isn’t working. We’re going to have to turn it over to a local professional. And that’s precisely what we had to do. Very shortly thereafter the property was moved. With the absentee owners the entire strategy, we talked about the Customer Continuum sort of thing. If we wanted to outsource the entire thing and we wanted to use let’s say a direct mail campaign. We would go to an ELance type of web site, get somebody to write the letter for us. We would go to www.CraigsList.org, get somebody, an assistant or somebody that’s proficient in different desktop publishing applications. We would get that person to go into our database or download the database, whatever it is we’re looking to do. Get our records; merge them into the newly written letter that’s going out. Then from that point we could have another individual for ten cents a piece hand address the envelopes, put the return label on, stamp it, seal it, bring it back so that I make sure that it gets mailed out on time and we’re good to go. All that I have into that is the mind power to put all these people together and the management to just streamline this whole process. But I never had to do any of the physical work myself. We’ll go into the flow chart a bit in a second. To go back through those options that I just mentioned. But getting the actual marketing campaign out is very, very simple. That’s all we need to do is pull from those different outsourcing companies or resources that I went through a little while ago. We go through the neighborhoods farming. And let’s suppose we want to take the concept of the monthly newsletter that we talked about before. Well here’s a great example. We go to www.DesignOutpost.com and say I need a template for a monthly newsletter. I want it to be two colored. Let’s suppose you want it to be red and black. I need the colors to be red and black. I need a template where I can have three small articles from a
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mortgage broker, a realtor and a title company or something to that effect, a feature article, a place for classified ads and a place for postage. I need this template to be usable for the next twelve months or however long. So you have them working on the template. Once the template is designed, you turn it over to your person over at www.ELance.com and say this is the amount of space that you have to work with. I would like twelve articles on real estate investing that are going to be relevant to people in this particular area. I want in West Palm Beach, North of Belvedere Road, East of 95, up through the top of the county. I want content that’s going to relevant to them. I want information that’s going to entice them to come to me if they ever want to sell their house or list their house or anything of that nature. I’d like to have it all put together in advance. Then you contact your other people. You know your realtor, your broker, whoever’s going to write their feature article. Then you go to www.CraigsList.org and you get an assistant or somebody to do a part-time job. You say I want you to contact and locate. I want you to find out what I should charge for advertising. How somebody would do that, you would want them to turn around and research a dozen web sites for you. And get you the best pricing. Let’s suppose the pricing came out for your quantity a $1,000 a month. Well, in order for this whole newsletter concept to work the right way, you’re going to have to charge $1200 in advertising from their vendors. You want this individual to come up with say five or six different people for different categories. So five or six landscapers, five or six roofers, five or six maid services and offer them the services, basically a small scale advertising sales job. They put all this together. You could even send it back to somebody at www.ELance.com or any of these places to put the whole thing together for you. All the different components of it, you could upload it to a printing service online. You could probably upload all twelve monthly newsletters and say I want them to go out on the first of every month. There you have it. It’s all done. It’s timed. It’s ready to go and you know what this is going to cost you each and every month for then next twelve months. You’ve covered yourself in advertising. One word of caution, you want to make sure that if you’re doing something along those lines, you want to know how much lead time you have if you need to change. Why would I change it? Well, if you’re advertisers what to change an ad, if they want to cancel, if you need a new advertiser. You need to have a little bit of flexibility to change some of those things. All of that can be done using outsourcing strategies. Foreclosures. If we wanted to take the two step marketing campaign and its simple enough for us to turn around and say, “How to stop and avoid foreclosure and get the cash you need.” So that’s what our headline is for our classified ad in a newspaper. We can bring on an assistant to go and do some of the leg work for us. We can get the phone number set up
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at www.Kall8.com. We can get a web site design at www.DesignOutpost.com. We could go www.ELance.com or another one is www.RentACoder.com or to either www.CodeLance.com.com and they can put it all together into a functional little web site for you. Have it up and running and looking great. You just tell them. Look I want to be able to capture their name and their email address so that I can do some follow-up correspondence with them. They’ll know what you’re talking about and they’ll be able to get that all set up and programmed for you pretty simply. Once that’s done, all you’ve got to do is run your ads. You have to do a little bit of it. You’ll have to do the recording. You say, “I don’t have a special report.” You go back to the ELance type sites and get them to do your special report. Say these are the different options that a client of mine might have and I need you to help me put them into a special report. Once that’s put together, you ask for it in a PDF and a Word file if you want it so that you could edit it if need be. But now you’ve got something that you can print off and you’ve also got something that you can go ahead and send via the internet. All of that, again, with the exception of maybe some voice recordings and so forth, ready to go and all put together and finished. Realtors just might be one. If you were on the call when we talked about the Realtor® strategies, you use the call service, the www.VoiceShot.com. Say I want to start building relationships with realtors. Let me get some qualified people to call me back. You could go on to www.VoiceShot.com. Go to www.Realtor.com, get a list of 100 to 200 realtors and get their phone numbers. They’re all right there. Do a voice broadcast saying that you’re interested in working with them, that you’re trying to put a special realtor luncheon together or something to that effect. Put together a two hour luncheon. A meet and greet, maybe you have some cheese and crackers or some light or This would be when you say okay. “I’m not sure if this might work in this particular situation right here and now. Hor D'oeuvres. You could do a happy hour. You could do at lunch time. You could do a breakfast kind of thing. Then you just bring all these realtors in and you start networking. You start building the relationships with realtors. And all you’ve had to do is set it up. You could take it one step further where you could have them call back into either www.Kall8.com or back into live into www.VoiceShot.com where they have the number. The call center that they can turn around and register people and tally registrations and actually get people into the room for you. This is another way that you can start to utilize some of these strategies without investing a lot of time. And the last thing I want to discuss is the probate. This will be very, very similar to like the absentee owner. You’re going to want to do personal letters. Now these personal letters are going to be with a different stint. A lot of people will say don’t contact attorneys. This week alone I’ve had two probate attorneys contact me saying, “I liked your approach of my clients and I’ve got another potential property that you might be interested in. Would you mind going over this with me?”
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“Of course not.” Everybody says that attorneys aren’t going to call you. They don’t want to deal with investors. Well if you’ve got the right approach they really don’t mind. At any rate, you want to have a well written letter that is very, very kind, comes from the heart. You’re expressing compassion for their situation and that’s what’s going to get you the best result there. Now depending on where you are, you may or may not have an easy access to the probate. So perhaps you want to outsource somebody going down to the courthouse. You can often go to a local investor club or find people that are just trying to get started in investing. Say, “Look. I’ll pay you $1 a lead that comes in or 10 cents a lead or $5 a lead,” depending on what they’re actually doing for you. If they’re putting it into an easy to utilize database and just organizing it, updating it all for you, well hey. That’s worth a little bit more. If they’re just going and just photo copying all of the records for you, that might not be worth as much. But you could turn around and get a data entry person for a few hours a week to come in at $5, $6. $7, $10 an hour and do the data entry. Once you put it all together, you’ve got the letters written from your outsourcing vehicles. You’ve got somebody that’s actually found and/or done the data entry of the individuals, the personal representatives, the executors of the estate. Then all you’ve got to do is go back to your people and this time you’re only going to pay 5 cents. For probate I like to use a number ten window envelope. The reason I do that is because this is a business matter. So it’s okay to have a business looking letter come through. They expect it. That’s what they’re handling at this point. I still use a nice little return address label but the envelope saves me. You say well 5 cents, 10 cents it’s still pretty cheap. Well if you’re doing thousands of these, 5 cents starts to add up. Over the course of the year I’ll probably have 10 or 20,000 of these different things that go out. If you look at even the biggest companies, I remember when I worked at Cheesecake Factory. They took the olives off of the Greek Salad. They had four garnish olives. They took them off. I said, “Are you serious? How much could four olives cost?” It wasn’t how much four olives cost. It was what four olives cost times X number of salads from each store, times X number of stores, times every day that they were open. Just doing that little thing I want to say took somewhere in the range of $200,000 added to the overall gross income over the course of a year. Just think in terms of like the olive principle of just the little things that you can do. If you’re not going to have a lesser of a response, then go for the less expensive route, if it’s not going to affect your results and your campaign in and of itself. It just makes good business sense to do that.
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Now the remaining discussion that I want to have tonight is about just the specific worksheets and individual documents that you can be utilizing. We’ve got this flow chart here. I know I mentioned it briefly on one of our other calls. But this is just a general kind of overview that you can go through. You’ve got your marketing campaign, whatever that may be, whatever your strategy is that you’re going for. Now the seller response, this I want you to start thinking on each and every one of these little blocks and stuff in here. I want you to start looking at it as okay where can I bring other people in? When I work on putting a product together, doing an event, doing a marketing campaign, remember a little while ago we talked about action plans verses "to do lists" or task lists. The action plan is this whole thing. The "to do list" is all the little things that come into play. What I do is break down all my action plans into as many "to do lists" or tasks as it takes. And then I take it one step further. All these tasks, what do I either want to be involved in or need to be involved in, because let’s face it. There may be some things that you just say you know what. I enjoy that part of it. I want to do that. For instance I like negotiating the terms and determining how much I want to offer for properties. I like going in and looking at the deal and seeing what it is that I’m putting under contract, for the most part. I don’t necessarily want to outsource that part of it. So a lot of the other things, all of the follow-up, I hate following contracts to closing. Whether I’m buying or selling, but it’s something that has to be done. Is it something that I can put checklists in place and monitor somebody else? Absolutely it is. And that’s kind of a side note also. When I put together a rehab system, I said what do I need to do on a daily basis to keep track? Everything was a step by step. I did this and then I did this. As I was doing it and I encourage you to do the same. As you’re doing each and every thing in your business, start writing it down. Let’s go to your takings. As detailed as you can possibly be, if you’re going to www.DataClick.com and you’re downloading a file for the first time, you should be in a separate word processing document or in a separate notebook writing down as detailed as possible. Like file, open, file name. What’s your naming convention? Where do you save it? All of those little things. What happens when you bring somebody in is that you no longer have to be the trainer. You’ve got policies and procedures manuals. All they have to do is follow through. With regard to this, I want you to think of all the different things and all the different ways that you can outsource. Keep in mind that outsourcing does not have to mean an individual. It just means either technology or an individual or anything that’s not you. So on the seller response, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re picking up the phone and calling you. It could be an email. It could be a phone call. It could be a phone call to a voice mail and that voice mail could simply just be a regular phone number that there’s no indication that that’s not your normal line. But just simply says, “Hi you have
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reached the personal voice mail of Heather Seitz. Unfortunately I am unable to take your call at this time, but your call is important to me. Please leave me your name and your phone number and a brief message. If this is regarding a property, please leave me the address of the property and I will get back to you just as soon as possible. Thanks so much and make it a great day.” Something that simple. “Well I don’t want them to know that I do this property thing.” Well obviously, that’s what you do so why not streamline it for yourself. You could go a step further. When the seller responds and this green little dot here where it says gather the information, you could actually, if your voice mail is set up that way. You could have an assistant, like the one that I hired actually pick up the voice mails, jot down the phone numbers and then go through and do all the comparables for you. Then they can come back to you and you’ve got the complete picture. Now it’s time for you to just validate and verify, just real quickly. What I have them do and this is just kind of my system. If you’re online and you scroll a little bit further and if you’re on live paper then just go to the one that says it’s 17 of 18 and it’s the response date and the mailer. I have her fill out this complete document. The seller’s name, the phone number, if there’s other numbers, the property address, bedrooms, bathrooms, on the market, realtor, all this information that she can get. She may or may not have to call the individual back. She may just present this partially filled out to pending. Further down, this is where it has all the comparable information that you know. In this example I have three. These are just the three biggest. These are my closed sales. What I have in each presentation package that I have her present to me. What this is, is the property information sheet, number one. Number two is the tax roll and you can usually get these from any of the county web sites. It’s comparables and you can get them from a number of different sources. If you’re a realtor, you can get them from the MLS or if you know a realtor you can get them from the MLS. There’s Real Met, there’s Real Quest, there’s a lot of different comp services that you can get these from. So whatever your comp service is and I ask for a minimum of three active, three pending and three closed sales. Then in addition I want a map of where all of those individual properties are so that I can gage just how close and I can look. I can see she’s hit the nail on the head. All these comps are within two blocks of the subject property or whoa, none of these comps are on the same side of the highway. Well then those aren’t necessarily accurate comps, so the numbers aren’t going to work for me. Even if on paper the addresses look very close, in reality they may not be. It’s important to have all those components, at least for me and the way that I put things together. So back to our flow chart here, we’re just now at the response and the information gathering. There are already a lot of different tasks within this. The thing about it is we don’t even really have to be involved at this point. All of this can be outsourced to somebody else at this point.
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Where I come in is at the end of the information gathering or if I need to actually call sellers back personally to get some of this information. I use that to make my final evaluation and figure out what I want to do with the property. Now it’s time to present offers. I encourage you; again, this is another hold up for people. This is another stumbling block where a lot of people get to the “I didn’t get to do it. Oops, I missed.” Or what have you. I’ve lost deals because I’ve gotten all the information. I’ve gotten ready and I just haven’t gotten the offer to the person in time. If it looks like a deal, move on it. Don’t continue to over analyze it. This is a practice. Just follow the process. Now ideally it’s just a straight shot down. If it’s an investor deal, flip it or keep it. If you’re flipping it, you want to go ahead and if you’re doing the rehab, you want to go and get your contractors out there. You want to do all the stuff that needs to be done. If you’re assigning it, you want to go ahead and get your numbers and get people into it as far as an assignment goes. If you’re keeping it, then you’re going to want to know is there a tenant that you need to get out. Is there anything you have to do on that note? And you want to start marketing for tenants or tenant/buyers right from the get go so that you don’t have vacancy issues. Now that’s the ideal situation. But let’s suppose they want market value and it’s listed with a real estate agent. If it’s listed with a real estate agent, what they’re willing to be flexible and negotiable, well it still may be an investor deal. But if it’s listed with an agent and they want full market value and they’re just not flexible, you should probably want to consider this a "tosser." Pitch it. Don’t waste your time on it. You’re going to be inclined to say, “No but they called me up.” You’re going to keep looking at it and going but I think it’s a good deal. Just throw it out. Or, you can put it into a tickler file that says follow-up in three months. What I would do I do all of this with manila envelopes. Every one of these sheets goes into a manila envelope. Every envelope has a time line. Everything that’s in an envelope or in a folder, rather, by noon on let’s say today. Wednesday. It needs to be out of that folder and into the next folder by five pm that day. So the beginning of the next day, everything in that folder needs to be out by five pm that day. So everything has a time line and every piece of paper in every folder has had to move at least one folder back. I know that sounds kind of silly but it’s a very simple task oriented management system. What you can also do is get the manila folders and label them, January, February, March, April, May, thru December. If it’s a case like a property at market value with an agent, you can turn around and say I’ll follow up with it next month. All you do is move that property, complete with all the comps, all the maps, everything that I just mentioned. You pop it into the folder for the next month and then you follow-up on it next month. Forget about it until that time. Now let’s suppose they go the other way and it’s not listed with an agent but they want market value anyway. Well there are a number of different things that you can do.
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You can try to negotiate price and/or terms. This may mean seller financing. It may mean a discount in price. It may be when we talk about our A, B and C different kinds of offers. It may be presenting different scenarios. You may just have to follow up later. Maybe they’re just not motivated enough. You could put them into your monthly files if you want to. The other thing that you can do if you’re a real estate agent or if you can get a flat referral fee, and again you want to check in your state what’s possible, what’s legal and what you’re able to do but let’s suppose you are a real estate agent. You have their address, obviously, send them a complimentary CMA, which is a Comparative Market Analysis. And just say, “Thank you so much for your time. Unfortunately as an investor I won’t be able to do anything with this particular property but I did want to present to you a CMA just so you know where you’re house is. Of course I haven’t been in the property so this is just a general guideline for you. I can’t specifically place your property here because I just don’t know what the condition is. But properties that are in the general area with the same square footage, bedrooms, bath, etc; this is what they’re going for.” Something to that affect. Then you follow-up with them until the property is listed. If at all possible, if they just say, “Absolutely. I don’t want to do that. It’s not my cup of tea.” Then you can turn around and offer them a letter for people that want to be for sale by owner. They don’t want to make it. They want top dollar. They can do it all themselves. “Okay, I understand that too. I’ve been in your position and if you can do it for yourself, why would you pay six for ten? I don’t blame you one bit. Let me go ahead and offer you another service that I provide. That is I can go ahead and pre-qualify people for you, so you’re not taking your property off the market for unqualified individuals.” So here’s step-by-step, here’s a process and you can get from title companies, from web sites, from contract to closing. What do I need to do? If you guys have gotten the A, B, C’s of real estate investing, if not, send a blank email to [email protected] or a daily(inaudible track 10 2:20) .com and I think it’s week seven you get some contract to closing table. Take out the excess of that and provide informative report to let them know what to expect. You can also provide a flyer, a financing type flyer. It just says, “We offer financing. You may qualify to get into this property for little to no money down.” You’ll need to check the guidelines of whatever company you’re working with as far as loan origination goes. But there’s one last ditch resource to try to get at least some money out of a deal that you’ve spent money to market to. You say, "Okay. That seems awfully far fetched. It’s just an awful lot of work to get a loan." Well, maybe, maybe not. Maybe you just serve as a lead source or maybe all of these components are outsourced. Maybe you are a real estate agent with a company that allows you to build a team under you. In which case, you feed the leads to your team members and you make an over-rider commission. Maybe you set up the same sort of thing for the loan programs so you’re not actually having to do all the work. You’re just feeding
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leads out and you’re taking a commission on the top when and if they close. It’s just a potential opportunity to generate income from deals that may have just died or likely would have just died. So you’ve got all these other opportunities just by saying what can I do. Let me be creative and let me monetize anything and everything that I possibly can. This is going to help you when you say there aren’t any deals. Well you’re making the most out of the deal that you do have. Because by using these strategies, I pretty much guarantee you that you can make at least 10% more of the responses into some kind of money making opportunity. Of course there are a lot of other off-shoots. Like if you’re in a probate situation and they have stuff to sell. Do you provide services to liquidate their belongings? What if it is that same situation and they need to clean out the property? Have you figured out a plan? “Okay. That’s not a problem. We do have services that we can basically clean out each and every room and we charge X amount of dollars per room to clean out the property for you. We’ll go ahead and send you any belongings that you let us know in advance that you would like. We’ll go ahead and do that for you.” Now let’s suppose you charge $300 a room. I would probably, if I were you, especially initially go get all the belongings that they’ve asked for out. But you can go ahead and hire out maybe for $200 or $250 a day hire a handful of people to come do the actual work for you. Now you’re basically taking a management fee but you’ve offered another service that people absolutely need. I had somebody call today and she wants to sell a car. I’m going to find a way to help her sell her car. It’s a 68 Corvette. I’m sure somebody would want it. It’s my only option for somebody. I need to be able to purchase your property at 60 cents on the dollar. You’re right. The deals are hard to come by but when you start to look at the big picture and say what can I do on this deal to make money? If the answer is nothing or nothing right now, either toss it or put it in a file to hold onto for later. I think that it’s critical that you start to look at all the different things that you can start to do to make money out of the deal that you have. When you’re starting $500, $1,000, $2,000 that’s all a good amount of money, it’s marketing expenses. You know if you think of it like that. You’ve just broke even on your marketing expenses. So when that deal comes in maybe next month, you don’t even have to take any marketing expenses off the top. It’s just pure profit because you were smart and figured out a way to monetize deals that most investors would have just simply walked away from. The next sheet is the marketing tracking sheet. On this sheet, this is where you just kind of post it on a bulletin board or hang it next to your computer. This is where you have all your campaigns. I’ve ranked my campaigns down. I don’t just have probate campaigns because probate in my office goes out once a week. So I would name the campaign, maybe probates say next Monday’s the eleventh, so Probate 7-11-05. That would be the campaign.
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Or you might say why does the campaign type probate and then you might say the description is that(track 10 7:22). It just depends on how many different things you’re doing. You want to have a campaign, whether this, a description of that campaign, one that went out. Then I just start actually using little tick marks. One, two, three, four, slash it with a line for five. Do the same thing over and over and over again. That let’s me actually just look right on a piece of paper with all my different campaigns. It gives me a one shot view. What’s going on? Probate is only getting a 2% response. Okay. Foreclosures is getting a 24% response. But wait a second, I’m not closing any foreclosure deals but I’m closing 50% of my probate deals. Or, foreclosure deals are giving me a lot of additional income streams that I’m not getting from other facets. Or, neighborhood farming strategies are affording me a lot of realtor opportunities and not a lot of investor opportunities. This is where you start to build that. It’s just to kind of keep track, hence the Marketing and Tracking Sheet name, of what’s going on. It’s a one shot deal for you. The next one is a lot more specific. This is "What’s your database name?" When I started, I started naming all my databases different. It got very confusing very quickly. Now I send out within my databases. So I have absentee owners. Basically for the neighborhood I separate by neighborhoods because there’s only a handful that I really want to focus on. Foreclosures; major database name. Realtors; major database name. Probate is a major database name. Then I have the description. And this is a new sheet for every single mailer that gets sent out. So it may be let’s say the database is Probate and the mailer description may be ‘letters to from 7-11-05 campaign.’ Now in number two, date 7-11-05 costs. Well how many pieces are going out. Let’s say it’s 500. What does that cost me? Does it cost me 37 cents times 500 and by having somebody else do it is it 48 cents? Is it 41 cents? You’ll have to account for the records that I downloaded. Do I have to account for the records that I’ve had to do the data entry on? Well if it’s mailer number one, then yes I do, because I paid for them. Or, maybe you break that up. This is where it all comes into how do you want to manage it on the front end? Whenever I send out my first letters, I take off the cost of that database on that first letter. But if you know that you’re going to be sending out five letters to the same person, then maybe you’d break that up over time. The reason that I don’t break it up over time and I take the number of pieces and figure out the cost for that acquisition on the first one is because as I go I start to lose people. I get returned mail. I have to delete people out of the database. So the number of pieces, I do how many pieces that I’ve downloaded or done the data entry for or what have you on my first run. Now I no longer have to count the cost of acquiring that name in the future. That’s been done. In this case, if it was mailer number two and I had 500 pieces, I might say well 37 cent stamp, 5 cents for the person to do it. That’s 42 cents. Let’s say it’s another 1 ½ cents
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for supplies. You could either keep it at 43 ½ or round up to 44 cents. 44 cents times 500 is $220. So now I know that the cost of that campaign for me to not have to do any of the work is $220. Now the response is strictly how many people are calling me. You might want to depending on how many you get, you might want to increase your response details at the bottom. I just did this as a quick reference when I was first starting and sometimes I don’t have five, six responses from a mailer. Sometimes I have 45 responses from a mailer. So, I put the little specifics there. I put how many pieces were returned because I need to keep track of that. If I send out 150 get returned then there’s a problem with the data source. Return on investment I simply calculate. This you might want to calculate it at the end of month one, maybe at three months and maybe again at six months or at the end of the year. But you don’t want to do this on a regular basis, meaning every week or something like that because it just gets to be too much. You may only want to do this once you have a deal come through because that’s when you actually get a return on your investments. So if you do a $500 finder’s fee for something or a loan originator commission or you sell a car on www.eBay.com or what have you. Then you come back and you say, "Well, what mailings/database did that come from?" Okay. Great. Now I can start calculating return on my investment. That simple scenario let’s suppose it was $500 and the total cost was $220. Well if it cost you $220 to make $280 for every $220 that you spend you make $280 profit. So $220 brings you in $500 gross less the $220 that you spent. $280 profit, well how many times would you do that? Well as many times as you possibly could. You’re making more than double what you spent. So you start to look at things that way and you get to really find out on the ROI, the return on your investment, is the biggest indicator of the success of the campaign. Then I turn around here and I put when the future mailings are. You know two thru ten depending on how many you do. You may do three or four or five per campaign. Or you may do twelve or fifteen or twenty or maybe it goes on forever. I don’t know what specifically it looks like for you. You just want to figure out. You can do that all right here. Put it in a three ring binder and then somebody’s just verifying and checking the dates. You may want to back it up or rather this would be your back up on the dates. You may want to do a digital copy so that you can just be reminded when it’s time. Then I fill out my mailing specifications. This is where I would put hand addressed envelope verses window envelopes. This is where I would put hand addressed return address or labels. This is where I would put American flag stamp verses blue egret. This is where I would do any specific changes that I put in my letters, specific text changes. Then if I don’t get a big response from a mailing and I made a couple of changes and then the
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next month I say what can I do different. Well let me change the stamp and see what happens. That’s where the recommended changes for future mailings come into play. I mentioned already a little bit the document that I fill out when I talk to the seller. Now, the response date is obviously when they call back. The mailer is where it came from. The seller’s name, phone, property address, bedrooms, bathrooms and all of that can come right from public records. The rest of this information unless you have access to a realtor or actually the only other thing if it’s listed with a realtor you can get all this other stuff you’re going to need at some point get on the phone with the seller. You’re going to have to open the communication lines with your sellers to get this information. You’re going to need to figure out their why and how motivated they are in order to put your plan together. So I’m not going to spend a lot of time on that. We’ve all seen these kinds of sheets. It’s basically "the who, what, when, where, why and how." Who’s the seller? What’s the deal with the house? When do they need to sell? Where are they located? Why are they selling? That’s the big, big, big one. And then how are you going to structure the deal. You can figure all that out however it makes sense for you. Then the last sheet on here is our monthly marketing plan. The way that it’s set up is for you to turn around and figure what is your tool. What is your strategy? If you’re doing direct mail for absentee owners, you need to know. I break it down, not so much as a tool, but into the actual campaign. So I would say for let’s say absentee owners starting 11-01. So absentee mailings that are going to go out on November 1st. Well I know that I want to mail to them five times in the course of the year or four if you count November to November. So I want to mail to them let’s just say for simplicity’s sake, we’ve only got a one year calendar, four times. Well now I start going and I start filling in how much that’s going to cost. So I want to mail to a 1,000. Let’s just say that it’s 50 cents a piece, for simple, simple math. Well we know that absentee owner campaign one, let’s call it that is starting in November. You know, you’ll break up your calendar however you need to. $500 for November and then you might say well I’m going to send another one in January right after the holidays, another one in March when taxes become due, then I’ll send one in the middle of the summer and then I’ll send one right before school. Those are very strategic times. Well now you’ve got that campaign slated for strategic times. You’re going to get some drop off so maybe you do a 10% drop off for the second mailer which brings it to $450. Then maybe a 2 to 5% for the remaining mailers that you’re going to do but now you say I’ve got some targets for how much money I’m spending. Just remember all along I’ve been telling you don’t set a monthly marketing budget. Set your campaign budget. So in that example our campaign’s probably going to be around $2,200 to $2,300. That’s over the course of thirteen months if we go November to November. So what you’ve done now is you’ve actually drawn it out. This is what the pros in the industry do. This is how they figure out how many times this ad is going to be played. Where am I going to strategically do this, that and the other thing?
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Well now, this is when you start building your campaign. You say well wait a minute. November is a really, really heavy month. I’ve got a foreclosure piece going out and that’s about 1,000 people. I’ve got my neighborhood newsletter that’s going out. My absentee owners, my realtor and my probate, they all hit in November, that’s going to cost me $3,100 in November. I don’t know if I can swing that. You know the following month is a holiday. Properties don’t sell. Then you start looking. You say I don’t know that I can do that. That’s when you start moving things around a little bit and you say is it possible that maybe I could forego my marketing to the realtors that month? Is it possible that maybe I change my strategy for the neighborhoods that month. Maybe I do something a little bit less expensive or maybe I do one at the beginning of December and one at the end of December instead to move your marketing dollars around. That’s how you determine what your monthly’s are. Not saying I want to spend $100, $500, $1,000, $2,000 a month in marketing. It’s okay. Here are my campaigns and now let me draw up the schedule for my campaigns so that they all fit together and they all fit within my marketing budget. The more money you’re making the more you’re going to want to spend in marketing and the more you’re going to want to outsource because it’s a cycle. But you’ve got to start slow and grow into it rather than just dive full speed ahead. Now having said that, that’s pretty much the nuts and bolts and the meat and potatoes of managing your campaigns and implementing the systems. These are all the critical components that we need to take into account to make everything work. This is how good deals actually become deals. We’ve got to be able to do the follow-up. We’ve got to be able to the follow through. You know we have to maintain it and we have to be able to keep up with it financially and time wise. By following these principles that we’ve discussed, this is what’s going to take you to that next level. As you have more money coming, you can afford to put more on autopilot while you’re learning new markets. Very quickly you’re going to be marketing to two, three, four, five plus types of “motivated markets”. It’s all going to change with experience. My next market that I’m focusing heavily on is the code violation market. Just because of what I know and the experience that I’ve had when I’ve been rehabbing homes, I know that it’s a very scary place to be for sellers but it’s also a very scary place for investors that aren’t seasoned. So it’s something that I’ve seen a lot of opportunity for and all the other things that I know can run themselves. I don’t have to be micromanaging.
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Marketing Flowchart Start Marketing Campaign
Seller Responds
Gather Information (Determine possible exit strategies and conduct 2-3 alternative offers)
Try and negotiate price and/or terms. Otherwise, follow up later. Keep in tickler file with follow up date.
Real Estate Agent
Loan Originator
CMA for Possible Listing
FSBO Letter for Loans
Market Value w/ out Real Estate Agent
Present Offers
Market Value w/ Real Estate Agent
Seller wants full market value and property is listed with an agent. Consider the property a dead deal. Follow up upon expiration of listing.
Flip or Keep
Follow up until the house is listed
Follow up until the house is sold
Flip
Keep
Market for retail buyers using advertisements, fax broadcast, email, etc.
Market for tenants or tenant-buyers, etc., if necessary.
FSBO Letter for Loans
Follow up until the house is sold © 2006-07 Real Estate Training Academy, LLC
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Marketing Tracking Sheet Campaign
Description
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Date
Response
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Marketing Tracking Sheet Database Name: Mailer Description: Mailing #:
Date:
Cost:
Response*:
Returned Pieces:
ROI:
Future Mailings: Mailing Mailing Mailing Mailing Mailing Mailing Mailing Mailing Mailing
Name
Mail Piece
# of pieces:
Date
#2: #3: #4: #5: #6: #7: #8: #9: 10:
Mailing Specifications: 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ Recommended Changes for Future Mailings 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ Response Details: Address Name
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Phone
Details
Resp. Date
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Seller Pre-Screening Sheet Response Date: Mailer: Seller Name: Phone:
Other:
Fax:
Property Address: Bedrooms: Baths: Is the property already on the market? Is the property listed w/ a Realtor? Is the property:
Yes
Vacant?
No
Tenant Occupied?
What are the taxes?
Owner Occupied?
Insurance:
HOA dues:
If rented, how much is/was the property rented for monthly?: What are you looking to get for the property?: How did you arrive at that price?: How long has the property been on the market?: Does the property need any repairs?: How soon do you need to close?: Why are you selling?: Additional Notes:
Personal Notes: Comps: Address Bed
Baths
Sq Ft
Condition
List Price
Sale Price
Closed Date
Possible Exit Strategies/Offers:
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Monthly Marketing Plan Tool
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
Totals
Marketing Budgetizer Tool
Cost/Lead
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct Nov Dec
Totals:
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REAL ESTATE TRAINING ACADEMY Phase II: Finding Deals Motivated Seller Marketing Campaign Management Mini-Module: Enhanced Transcripts Taught by: Heather Seitz
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REAL ESTATE TRAINING ACADEMY
Real Estate Training Academy Phase II: Finding Deals Motivated Seller Marketing
© Real Estate Training Academy, LLC 6170 Dodd Rd., Building B Greenacres, FL 33463 [email protected]
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Real Estate Training Academy, LLC Co-Founders: Heather Seitz Brandon Tankersley
Real Estate Training Academy, LLC Phase II: Finding Deals – Motivated Seller Marketing Campaign Management Mini-Module: Enhanced Transcripts
Copyright © 2005-07 Real Estate Training Academy, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.
Website: www.RealEstateTrainingAcademy.com
First printing Typesetting: Real Estate Training Academy, LLC Graphics: Real Estate Training Academy, LLC Printing: Printed and bound in the United States of America
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LEGAL NOTICE This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. The following information is given or sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering any legal, accounting or other professional services. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. From a Declaration of Principal Jointly Adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a committee of Publishers and Associations.
Published By: Real Estate Marketing Alliance, Inc. PO Box 144381 Coral Gables, FL 33114
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FOREWORD Congratulations on your investment in this course! The Real Estate Training Academy is committed to providing training and education through all the phases of your real estate business. The training system is designed in phases so that you can focus on your specific needs. Phase I: The Business of Real Estate Phase II: Finding Deals Phase III: Funding Deals Phase IV: Farming Deals Phase V: Real Estate Technology Phase VI: Advanced Topics in Real Estate You have chosen The Real Estate Training Academy’s Motivated Seller Marketing course which is comprised of transcripts from teleseminar trainings that were strategically conducted to train students to find motivated sellers; specifically foreclosures in this module. It has been purposefully written, edited and designed to be used as a learning tool in conjunction with our corresponding audio CD’s. This course complements are other courses in the Real Estate Training Academy System to give you a complete understanding in a step by step process of how to find, fund, and farm your real estate deals. Whether you are just starting out in this business or a seasoned real estate investor, this Real Estate Training system brings the latest information, strategies, and techniques that can either get you started in the real estate business or take your business to the next level. We wish you much success in building your real estate business. Real Estate Training Academy Co-Founders: Heather Seitz Brandon Tankersley
The road to success lies in two simple principles: find what it is that interests you and that you can do well, and when you find it, put your whole soul into it— every bit of energy and ambition and natural ability that you have. John D. Rockefeller III
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REAL ESTATE TRAINING ACADEMY Phase II: Finding Deals Motivated Seller Marketing
Managing your Real Estate Marketing Campaigns
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Campaign Management Strategies We’re going to be covering Campaign Management Strategies: "How to Manage Campaigns and Implement Systems." This is kind of where we’re going to pull all the nuts and bolts together. I want to recommend that you go out and pick up a copy of “The E-Myth”, by Michael Gerber. It is all about systems and managing your business through policies, procedures, and systems. Now… this may not be the most glamorous course, but I’ll tell you that this is one of, if not the most important aspects to being successful in real estate. You need the systems in order to be able to follow-up and follow through. It’s one thing to get campaigns started and it’s another to get campaigns completed. The more irons you get in the fire, the more critical it is that you stay organized and on top of your systems. For those of you that came on a bit late, I was saying that my mom is in town. I just had her and my boyfriend stamping envelopes because I need to get them out. My envelope "stuffer/label sticker-on-er" didn’t do such a great job this week. You’ve got to kind of use your resources and pull things together. The key thing is if you’re not going to stay on target and you’re not going to stay on task, then don’t even get started because it’s like throwing money out the door. We don’t want to do that. Even if you come to me and you say, “Heather, I just made $150,000 off of a single deal from this campaign. I don’t need to follow-up with the other campaigns” Or with the other mailers, with the follow-up email, whatever it is that you’re doing for that particular strategy. I want to encourage you to follow through because number one, we don’t know what’s going on in somebody’s situation. Number two, people’s circumstances change. During the summer months, people are planning… They’ve got to get set up for the school year for the kids and get things in order, so that in September everything’s good to go for the school year. By November (in our state), the tax bills will start to come out. Once tax bills start to come out, then the holidays are here. After the holidays, we’re into the New Year. We’re just about to start a big cycle for the neighborhood farming, the absentee owners. Foreclosures come and go all year round and probate kind of goes all year round. But we’ve got to take a look at the types of markets that may have a little bit of a different reaction seasonally. When you’re doing that, it’s really important to stay on target because you know at this point X, Y and B is likely to happen. So with that I want to start covering some of the critical components of what we need to do; of what our plan needs to look like of where we’ve got to go with this. A lot of
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this is going to be somewhat of a review for you because we’ve talked about plans a little bit in the past. We’ve talked about the target market. We’ve talked about the audience. We’ve talked about all that stuff but now it’s time to put the plan in place and get moving along with it. If we were going to look at, “What will I need to do to get my plan going? What do I need to do to get set up?” We’re going to go first and foremost and talk about our market. This is where we really define who it is that we want to talk to. We’re going to learn what it is that makes them tick. What is their personal situation? This is where all of the consumer profiles come into play. When you’re putting your plan together, you’ve got to say, “Okay, who’s my target? What’s my communication?” Is it going to be my direct mail strategy? Is it going to be my telemarketing strategy? Is it going to be door knocking? Is it going to be a combination? Is it going to be internet? What is it that I want to do to communicate to these individuals? This is where you start putting it on paper. You start structuring it out so that it’s concrete. I know that we have all heard in the past that you need to write it down and then it becomes reality. You know, we’ve heard all these things before but do we really do it? If we’re not doing it, then what we’ve heard in the past is nothing. We’ve absolutely got to write it down. We’ve got to get it going. We can put it in our heads. A lot of you have talked to me and you say, “Well how do you come up with all these things? How do you put these all into place?” It comes from a lot of practice and it comes from a lot of different planning sessions with a lot of different individuals. When I started, however, I had to actually write it down. I had to think it through because otherwise I wasn’t going to get it clear in my mind. You’ve also got to take a look at it. This is another overall component of your plan. It is the competition. The things that we’ve talked about are kind of designed to give you a better competitive edge. So what you’ve got to do is take a look at what your competitors are doing. You don’t want to necessarily do the exact same thing. You may want to do something very similar because if a lot of people are doing it, chances are, it works; however, it may not. A speaker came to the local real estate club and said, “This is what you’ve got to do.” Maybe the speaker sold hundreds and hundreds of courses and all the people are using the exact same materials. Chances are also that you’re not going to be the only one with a post card strategy. The key here is to evaluate what the competition is doing and just do it a step better or take it a step further. Be very wary of “cookie-cutter” programs on the market. Very seldom do they really work. And if they do… it’s only a small percentage of the time. Truly successful marketers are original and don’t depend on the marketing creativity of others. They take what others are doing successfully and model it to create their own unique spin.
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Constantly, constantly, constantly look at what the next level is. What the competition is and how you can do it a little bit better. The same exact thing holds true for us in our real estate business. The next thing is kind of going to sound a little bit weird and this is just from a conventional marketing background or advertising backgrounds. You want to really look at your products and service offering. What I mean by this is; what are you offering clients? This is where you start to look at your benefits. What are the benefits that you provide to your market? If you’re marketing to foreclosures, what benefit do you have over the competition? For instance, in a completely different arena what benefit is baking soda toothpaste over Colgate toothpaste? Well, in my opinion, it’s certainly not flavor but maybe it’s that it’s going to make my teeth whiter whereas the Colgate doesn’t. Then am I going for the whiter teeth or the flavor? Either way it depends what I perceive the benefit to be. On our real estate end are you offering a one size fits all solution because many, many investors are doing that. They’re saying, “This is what you do.” They get a book. They read the book. Then they try to fit that cookie cutter solution to every situation. Well those investors are either short lived or they don’t make very much money. The reason is there are so many different intricacies with every single deal. You guys have heard me talk about one deal that took forever to close. Well it finally funded a week ago. Last week I was supposed to close on another property and the title company had some hang ups and here we are now eight days overdue on that closing and I don’t even have a future closing date. I’ve got probate things on the table that we were ready to close a week ago. Things are going to hold it up. Every one of those situations, every one of those stories, every one of those dynamics is drastically different. Are you equipped with a lot of different options and solutions for your particular market? That’s why I really, really urge you as we go through all the different modules to focus on one very specific target and learn to be the problem solver. Some of you may say, “What is the product or service/benefit that I can provide over other investors?” Well they key is you’re the total real estate solution. No matter what their problem is, you’ve just got to take the attitude of "I can solve it. I’m a problem solver. I’m not a cookie cutter." Think of it in terms of, you walk into a kitchen and you want to make cookies. If you take the back of the chocolate chip package and you’re missing baking soda, you say, “I can’t make any cookies.” And you put the package away and you’re done. Verses saying okay, “What’s in the kitchen and what can I do.” Let’s put something together and get it as close as possible. Even if it’s slightly a little bit different or maybe I come and say, “You know what; chocolate chip cookies aren’t going to happen tonight. I need to make sugar cookies” or something along those lines.
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You need to start to think outside of the box and think really creatively in order to find the solution with what cards are dealt to you, with what ingredients you have. Unfortunately you’re never or 99% of the time you’re not going to have the ideal situation at hand. I wish that I could say that you would but you it’s just not the nature of it. If everything was clean, then there would be no need for real estate investors. The next component of your plan is the industry in general. I want you to really be paying attention to what’s going on in not only your local market but in the larger economy, in the state economy, in the national economy and the regional economy and the international economy. What is the 30-year mortgage rate doing? We hear all these things about adjustable rate mortgages and they’re great. I have them on all of my properties at the current time. But, the reason that I do that is because of my particular strategy. It’s very calculated, very predetermined and evaluated as to what kind of loan I put on my property. However, if you want to see what the true market is doing or what’s going on in the mortgage market, look at the 30-year note. The 30-year conventional mortgage, 30-year fixed. That fluctuates somewhat but what are the very low points with that note right now. Look at what’s going on. That’s going to be your indicator of where the mortgage market is going to go. Irregardless of whether or not home prices are going up and up and up and everybody thinks that home prices are topping out. Well, that’s why you need to start looking at other economies. What happened in Europe when prices got too big? What’s going on in China? China, I believe, has 100-year mortgages on their properties because of the cost of living and the price of the homes their economy. Yes, real estate is a cycle and it’s important to watch what that cycle is doing. But it’s also important that you need to be informed instead of listening to the spectators that are not playing. They’re just kind of watching from the side. It’s like the arm chair quarterback. They’re sitting there watching the Super bowl saying, “Gosh, come on. All you’ve got to do is run for the touchdown. I can’t believe he did it.” Well, are you out there playing or are you making comments from the sidelines? You’re the one playing so why would you ever listen to the people on the sidelines? You’ve got to have the information and you’ve got to make the informed decision. Now of course, don’t think that the appreciation is always, always going to be where it has been over the last several years. But don’t think that all of a sudden it’s going to drop off either. We are in a changing time. More likely than not, we’re on the verge or actually we are on the verge where things are starting to shift. The rental economy is going to strengthen again in the next month, years, and decade, what have you. But we’re starting to head towards that trend. Keep in mind what’s going on and pay attention to it. Because that’s what going to help you stay ahead of the game. So many times I see investors that have been doing the same things for five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. Well the market is changing. We’ve had a very stable market with respect to the fact that it’s been an appreciating market place
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generally speaking all over the country. Some places are higher than others but generally speaking we’ve had a pretty good upward trend. Investors that only know that kind of investing are starting to struggle. Because they’re not paying attention to what’s about to happen or what’s in the process of happening now. So it’s very, very important to pay attention to the industry. I also want to just talk about internet and technology. I know that for those of you that were at the next level training you got a big, big dose of this. You’ve got to start looking at the internet and technology in your business. It’s here. It’s very cost effective. It’s very inexpensive and you can you can just do so much with it. We’ll go into web sites and how we can get those developed for us in the next hour and a half or so. But it’s important to understand all of that. Technology a large part of this call tonight is the technological component of it. How are you utilizing technology, whether they’re voice mail systems, whether they’re internet, whether it’s outsourcing strategies available to us because of technology? All of those factors are very, very critical in your marketing plan. Then last and this is kind of like your communication method but slightly different and that’s the media. It’s not just what media are you going to use but more important or more specifically it’s what affects the various media have. Are you monitoring it? Are you watching it? Are you changing when you need to? Are you adapting when your business calls for it or when the market place calls for it? If you’re going door to door right now or if you’re driving for dollars or if you’re doing things like that right now, you’re media is basically one-on-one, face-to-face. Well that’s going to change as you start to do more deals and you start to get more time. Maybe you move to telemarketing to buy back a little bit more time and then eventually to direct marketing. Then eventually maybe you go to mass media on broadcast channels. All of those things are going to change either because you’re business is evolving or because your target market is evolving.
7 Critical Components of Your Plan 1. 2. 3. 4.
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5. 6. 7.
Now next I want to talk about in your business verses on your business. I know that I’ve mentioned just a little bit in the past and I’m going to just cover what the difference is again. See "in" your business stuff is what you need to do on a day to day basis to get things done. "On" your business is what you need to do in the grand scheme and the big picture to build your business as such. The "in" your business tasks I mentioned, some nights that I have my boyfriend and my mom stamping envelopes. Is that an "in" your business or an "on" your business? This is kind of a tricky one because the actual putting the stamps on the envelope is an "in" your business task. However, I wasn’t necessarily the one doing it. Tonight I wasn’t the one doing it. It was almost and this example of supervisory role. While they were doing that, I was preparing my notes for this call, let’s say. If that’s what I’m focusing on, I’m focusing on the big picture. Well, in the beginning I had to sign all my letters, hand write anything that needed to be hand written, put my own return labels on, put my own stamps on because I didn’t have an option. But when I was doing the "in" my business tasks I always had the end goal in mind. So let’s talk about just a couple of different "in" versus "on" tasks. I know it may feel like they’re one and the same but just start looking at if it’s something that you can outsource or get somebody else to do, then it’s basically busy work and it’s an "in" your business task. Things like answering regular day-to-day emails. I always hit my little F5 button on my keyboard. I feel like I’m being productive because I’ve got to communicate with clients and customers and sellers and buyers and title companies. I have to do all of that but is it something that can be outsourced and is it something that is directly going to put money in my pocket in the shortest amount of time possible? That’s the distinguishing factor here. "In" my business is what I’ve got to do temporarily. "On" my business is a long term putting money in my pocket. Now other "in" my business tasks I mentioned direct mail. I’m actually doing the direct mail pieces myself. I’m doing all the labels. I’m doing all the signing, the stamping, and all the little details that have to be done within this specific direct mail campaign.
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I’ve talk to you about www.DataQuick.com in the past. If you are using www.DataQuick.com and you’re the one that’s going to the web site that’s downloading all of the records, that’s mail merging all of the files together, printing them all out and then doing the whole sealing, signing, stamping, etc, that’s again, an "in" your business kind of tasks. It’s okay to do that and you have to do that in the beginning. You should do a lot of these tasks when you’re getting started simply because you’ve got to have a basic understanding of what goes into it, what the time line is, how long it takes to get them done and that way you can effectively manage it in the business. I want you to start to think about maybe five or ten things that you do on a daily basis that are not necessarily growing your business but feels like you are sometimes. I jokingly refer to this as productive procrastination. It’s when I feel like I’m doing something that’s productive but it’s not. Think about all the phone calls you take on a daily basis. You talk about real estate but are you making money? Are you creating relationships that could be future dollars? Well, that’s great. But, it’s a time leasing activity. It’s not productive and it’s not dollars in the bank account right now. Some of the "on" your business tasks might be let’s say you place an ad on www.CraigsList.org for somebody to do the busy work or to hire a virtual assistant, things of that nature. Reviewing your direct mail campaign, looking at the response rate verses the return rates, looking at your profit and loss statements from your bookkeeper. Not necessarily doing all the bookkeeping, not necessarily being involved in the day-to-day bookkeeping matter, but reviewing it, keeping an eye on it, watching the thing. Think in terms of I want to be a Donald Trump. I want to be a Bill Gates. That’s the big business picture. It’s important to keep the two straight because it’s going to keep you on target. When you’re doing your plans, when you’re figuring out your whole business plan, I want you all to refer to the bonus section. If I can give you some homework right now, it’s to go through that time management, goal setting session. You’ve really got to take a look at where do I want to be. I sometimes take people through an exercise and I say, “Let’s just suppose for a minute that time and money weren’t a factor. Tomorrow morning you could wake up anywhere in the world on the planet, maybe you want to be on another planet. I don’t know what your dreams are. You could wake up anywhere that you wanted to, do anything that you wanted to, and be anybody that you wanted to be. What would your day look like tomorrow?” As you’re going through that, be as crazy as you want. Maybe you wake up in Tahiti and go diving or I don’t know what you do in Tahiti but plan your day like that and just go wild and crazy. Now once you’ve done that, I want you to put a five year goal on that. That’s kind of your long term goal. Then I want you to build that back.
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In order to have that, where do you need to be in three years, a year? A year is a very realistic point. Then you work back a year, then to six months, then to three months, then monthly and then weekly. That’s going to give you your daily task list. You think that through all the time management and goal setting bonuses because it’s very important. But just keep in mind that you’ve got to look at the big picture and you’re "on" tasks is what’s going to bring you closer to that big picture.
“In Your Business” vs. “On Your Business”
In
On
Now I’ll reiterate the strategy and it’s one of your recommended resources and it’s www.ActionSecrets.com. This is my friend and business partner, Alex Mandossian’s site. He’s got a lot more to it but the biggest thing that I took away was the egg timer strategy. That’s where I set it for 60 minutes and in those 60 minutes I do nothing but "on" my business tasks that put cash in my pocket long term and I can see profits and build my business. So check that out. That’s going to absolutely help you as you start to grow and expand your vision.
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Now this leads us into the action plans. The action plan is a little bit different than "to do lists”. These are the "what are my bigger scope projects?" For argument’s sake, let’s say that our action plan may be getting a web campaign in place. Our "to do list" is going to be the individual steps that accomplish that. But the actual action plan is the bigger picture. What do we need to do to get the whole thing in place, up and running and working the right way? Action plans… you can research them, study them but basically it’s just a list of tasks to get to your objective. I’ll focus on a "to do list", but as I mentioned a "to do list" is just single goals. Now all these single goals will go ahead and create your action plan. But you want to use your action plan to help you concentrate on where you are in the various stages of achievement.
Setting Up Your Action Plan
You want to have time lines. So if it’s something that’s going to take you six months to do, the action plan is going to allow you to be able to evaluate at month one, at month three, at month five and then again at month six. Now the action plan is simply made up of all the individual tasks that you need to carry out your goal. The "to do list" is all those little tasks. This is where we get confused and this is where we get overwhelmed and this is where we run ourselves out of the business. We mistakenly think that a "to do list" or a "to do item" is an i.e. something that I do. So what we tend to do is give ourselves a dozen action plans compiled with 87 steps involved in obtaining each of our action plans. Understand that an action plan is a process. The tasks are deliverables, basically. In order to prepare your "to do list", quite simply, if you want to get as basic as possible, you can get this quad-ruled graph paper. I fold it in half vertical so it’s 4 ¼” X 11”
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and I’ll actually do four days right on that piece of paper. I just write all the tasks that I need to do for day one. I check myself to make sure they’re actually tasks and not big projects. If it’s a big project, I need to break it down to all the little tasks. You’ll start to see that you’re crossing off so many more things than you were before. You’re getting things done and you’re feeling a much greater sense of accomplishment. You’re being more productive and you’re working much faster. Another tactic when you’re doing you’re doing your "to do list" is to prioritize or organize. What are the most important things? Maybe you number them one through how ever many there are. Maybe you just put one for all the major priorities, two for secondary and three for not priority. There are all kinds of different ways that you can do that. But you want to prioritize and you want to make sure that you’re on target. If you’re working on your real estate business five days a week, you want to have a "to do list" for each day. The best thing to do is to set up your "to do list" at the beginning of your day. Not in the beginning of your productive hour, but at the beginning of your day. It may be over a cup of coffee. Evaluate where everything is at. Carry over anything from the day before that didn’t get finished, which means you can’t necessarily if you have obligations let’s say on a Wednesday, that’s fine. You need to pencil in your appointments and things that you’ve previously committed to. But you don’t want to overbook and give yourself 48 obligations on Wednesday because what if all your tasks from Monday carry over to Tuesday and then you’ve lost a day. Things happen so we have to be careful not to set ourselves up. For instance, yesterday I had a whole list of things to get done. In the midst of trying to get all these things done, the bathroom in my second home flooded. Well unfortunately that was a three hour chunk of time out of my day that I had to handle a situation. I had to take care of it. I can’t just say, “Hold on flood tomorrow because I have taxes to complete.” Upon that being cleared up I got in my car and said, "Okay, I’ll just work later." I just lost a couple of hours. Well I hopped in the car. About ten minutes into the drive I got a flat tire. You know there are just some things you can’t do anything about. So all those things that didn’t get done yesterday, even though I worked later at night, I still had to carry some of those through. So keep that in mind and just don’t discourage yourself with all of that. I talked about the daily "to do list". I don’t want to spend too, too much time on this daily plan of attack. But what we’re going to do here with this is actually figure out what do I have to focus on today. I break it down because I do a number of different things. I say today on the real estate front and I prioritize. What are my most pressing real estate deals or situations? It goes from properties that I have to deal with today whether it’s a closing that I have to address, whether it’s an issue I have to address, a contractor,
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what have you. Usually the ones that are closest to putting money in my pocket are at the top of that list. Then I go to the ones that I’ve got contracts to follow-up on. I’ve got contracts out on these. I have to follow-up with the potential seller. Those are the ones that I’m evaluating and researching and trying to make decisions on. Then fourth is the management of the campaigns and the management of the growth of the different things that need to happen. I have other things that I need to work on. So I say okay, real estate. That’s one component. Then I have maybe my other business, whatever that other business may be for you. This marketing course is another component of my business. There’s a certain amount of time that has to be dedicated to this. So what’s the most pressing issue that I have to handle here? When you’re doing multiple things there are a couple of strategies that you can do. You can say I’m willing to focus from eight to ten, Monday thru Friday on my real estate. On Tuesday I might say I’ve got to focus on this business and so on and so forth. So you’ve just got to figure out what’s going to work for you and do this each and every day. I think that it’s going to be important for you to understand what you can and can’t do. Focus on not trying to over do it because that’s when you start to get yourself into trouble. Now for the next probably half hour, forty-five minutes I want to talk about outsourcing strategies. You may be saying, “I’m not at that point yet. I don’t have the finances to do that. I don’t have the knowledge to do that. I don’t have the experience to do that.” I also want to caution you on the flip side of that. Don’t try to be all things to all people. If you have never created a web site, don’t think that you’re going to be this web master and you’re going to build a huge search engine and you’re going to be driving traffic and you’re going to be doing all these other buzz words that internet marketers talk about. That’s another whole string of business in and of itself. The whole internet mind sets is a different strategy. Yes, you need to have them but it’s not important for you to learn all of the intricacies of doing that. I want to talk about a few different places. Now designing. You know that you can get your free business cards at Vista Print. There’s a lot of researches fro the freebies. When I started, one of my web sites is and you have probably been to it but it’s www.Yamon.net and that site was actually based on the design of the free business cards. We actually paid to not have the Vista Print logo on the back. It was designed around the post cards that they had because I really liked the graphic and I said okay, "I’m going to have a photo connection to the business card so that it all flows together."
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You want everything to be seamless. You want everything to work together, but you may not necessarily be able to find the business cards, the web sites, the post cards, the letterhead, all of that to match on all these free services. So you might consider going to some of these outsourcing places to have those things designed. You can go online and find tons and tons of printing services. There’s so much competition that it’s getting so inexpensive and so reasonable to get these things done. The resource that use for design is www.DesignOutpost.com. You can also look at www.ELance.com.
They’re another resource. What you do, the way these work is they’re projects that are bid on. The way www.DesignOutpost.com works, let’s suppose you say I want to have a business set design; a business card, a basic web design, a letterhead and a post card. You would post this in just a basic real estate investor set and I’m going to tell you that I’m not a fan of these big yellow ugly things. I know we talked about this in the Guerilla Marketing section. A lot of investors swear by them and that’s okay. Everybody has a different opinion on what works and what doesn’t. My business model and my image is professionalism, is credibility, and is that level of service. I don’t think that you necessarily get with a big, bright yellow card that you leave all over the place. That’s just my personal opinion. You may have a different opinion and that’s fine. But what I would do is go to www.DesignOutpost.com and it’s a pretty simple process. You might have to register. I don’t remember. I believe you go into “start projects”. Then you outline what it is that you’re looking for and what you’re willing to pay. So let’s say you’re willing to pay for this basic job $150. You put your project up there and you put the price up there. What happens is all these designers that are either
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trying to build a portfolio, that are trying get practice, that are trying to make some extra money, what have you. They go and they bid on the jobs. But instead of bidding blindly, which is a concern with design services, especially coming from a past designer career. I want to see it before I’m going to commit to paying for it. So what they do is let’s say five designers bid on your job. They all produce the work for you. They all produce their version and you work with them. You say I like this banner but what if we tried it in blue instead of green. Let’s see what that would look like. You can be communicating with five or six different people at any given time. Then once you’re satisfied with one and you say this is the one I want to go with. Then they’re paid and the job is complete. But you’re actually having the opportunity to see several people work for you before you ever even have to pay for the finished piece. It’s a great, great resource to get you a professional image, a professional look and feel to your business. You can do as many as few components as you would like but you might want to just invest. I’ll give you a list here. You want to definitely have your business cards. I would say definitely have a web site. Letterhead is probably a good idea and post cards are probably a good idea as well. Again, all of these can be designed right here on www.DesignOutpost.com. Next we’ll go into a little bit more on the automation process and how to take yourself out of the detail stuff of taking 87 calls when people just want to say, “What is this about?” You know just asking a lot of questions that aren’t very pertinent to getting the job done. So you can go to a number of different voice mail services. You can do some call centers where they actually have a live person answering the phone all the way down to just automated voice mail services. There are all kinds of things in between. There’s a simple number. We’ve talked about using a local number verses an 800 number. Here’s an instant refresh. I prefer an 800 number if I’m doing a two step campaign offering them to call in for a special report or to get free information. I prefer local number if I’m giving the impression that they’re going to talk to a live person because people in most of the situations that lend from motivation. They want to talk to a live person. They want a body on the end of the line. Again, that choice is up to you. If you’re looking for an 800 number, there’s a resource here. It’s called www.Kall8.com. You can go there and their fees are very, very reasonable. For a few dollars a month you can have your own 800 number. Now this is the most basic. What I did is I got additional phones for my cell phone and they’re dedicated to different campaigns. One phone number will be for absentee owners. One will be for neighborhood blasts. One will be for probate. That way it helps me with my tracking. It keeps the tracking much more organized. I’m not trying to clash our friends and guess which database these individuals are coming from. Also it helps me just filter out a lot of noise I was getting initially.
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So what you can do is either set up a very, very basic just phone system like that or you could get an answering system where it says, “If you’re looking to buy a property, please press one. If you’re looking to sell a property, please press two.” Or let’s suppose you’re a realtor and you want to get one of these systems. There are multiple different systems that you can use. You can say, “Press one for the property located at 1347 Main Street. Press two for the property located at 1876 Washington Road. Press three for the property located on 18 South Coconut Street.” Then that way they are getting the specific information that they’re looking for. Then you can go all the way up to an actual live person, 24/7 that can answer any questions that you may have. You can take these as far as you want or as shallow as you want to go I guess. Another service that I was doing some research on last week trying to find different ways to outsource and different things that we can do in our businesses; you can hire complete customer service outsourcing companies that answer questions for people that take the calls. I think it was somewhere in the range of 40 hours a week they dedicate to you on your time line. It was $499. They’ll work for you 40 hours a week in your time line. You say who would do that? That comes out to like $3 an hour. Well the same people that the big guys, the airlines, the credit card companies, that the mortgage companies use. Those same people that they’re calling on or that they’re utilizing for their customer service and tech support, you can do that same thing. You can probably get it even cheaper. The company that I found at that price is www.SupportSave.com. You can read all the details about how affluent they are in English
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and their grammar and what they will and won’t do and how they get trained and all that good stuff. But the bottom line is there are a lot of resources. You may just say I want to have just a full time dedicated person that’s going to answer phones. I’m going to teach them what to say and how to say it. These are just different options as far as the voice stuff goes. Next we can talk about the assistants and envelope stuffing. Robin said to me the other day, “Heather I’m hooked on www.CraigsList.org.” I had talked about it a number of times. I’m thrilled with it. I just had my first experience with a not so great envelope person and that’s okay because at 10 cents a piece and at a per job commitment, it’s not a big deal. It’s just okay, I won’t use that envelope person again. No big deal. Well this is www.CraigsList.org. There are a lot of different things that you can find here. I go on their admin. and office a lot or I go under part time or etc. What you do is you simply put up there that you’re looking for somebody to do whatever it is that you need to do. I found my assistant there. She worked in my office for about six months. She graduated from school and now she’s working virtually for me from New Jersey.
Basically I just put in there that I needed somebody that could handle a lot of different tasks. That was action oriented, that didn’t need to be micromanaged that could show up on time, just all the ideal characteristics, all the things that fit me as a business owner. You may have different traits or different characteristics that you’re looking for in somebody that’s going to come and work for you. I found her for $9 an hour. She was the most loyal person that I could have ever found. She would stay late if I needed her to, come in on the weekends if I ever needed her to. She’d work from home. I mean a
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phenomenal person. If you look at that for $9 an hour, you get somebody that’s dedicated to you and your business and willing to learn. Now you might not always get top quality people right out of the gate. It may take some tweaking. It may take some firing. It may take some additional hiring. You never know. But it’s a great resource. It doesn’t cost you anything in most places to advertise. What I did for the envelope stuffing, depending on the campaign, is I pay 5 cents if all they have to do is sign, stuff, seal and put the return address label on. I pay 10 cents if they need to sign, handwrite the mailing address, put the return label on and seal the envelope. I have people crawling out of the woodwork to do the jobs for me. As you can see, 1500 pieces give or take a couple of dozen. So let’s say 1500 pieces, it costs me a $150 to have done. Every one of them was hand written with the return label put on, sealed and signed with my signature. Once you get to a point, isn’t that pretty good? Think about how much time that would take you to do all of that. People are happy to do it. They need the extra cash. While we’re on www.CraigsList.org, I also want to point out if you weren’t on the call that we did a few weeks ago with Armand. The real estate for sale. The housing wanted. Keep an eye on these. Check on these periodically because these are opportunities for you to find for sale by owners. People that may want your properties. People that may want to buy your properties. These are great resources for you. And also in this for sale section check frequently on furniture, garage sale and households. These are where you’re going to be able to get furniture if you need to have a furnished property. Even the rehabbed houses, if you do a little bit of dressing up, you’ll get higher dollars for all the houses that you sell. It’s just little things like curtains and little knick-knacks and maybe a side table. Just small little things; if you can get them cheap from a site like this or from www.eBay.com. You’re going to be able to save a lot of money. Shorten your holding time and just in general move your properties a little bit faster with higher prices. Under the garage sale and household, you’ll find a lot of appliances. Instead of having to go and spend $150, $250, $300, whatever it’s going to cost you for appliances; you can go ahead and save. Even if it’s a few hundred dollars, it’s worth saving the money. Poke around in there and see what you can find. There are a lot of great resources for us as investors. Now with copywriting services you say, “What do I need copywriting services for?” Well we’ve talked at great length about direct mail pieces. I’ve been very strategic in not saying, “Here are 101 samples for you” because I want you to take exactly this. It’s more along the lines of I want to teach you how to write the copy. You might say, “I’m not interested in that. Just give it to me.” If that’s the feeling that you have, I understand. I didn’t want to write copy for a long time either. Well, you can go to www.ELance.com and that’s on your cheat sheet. It’s E L A N C E dot com. It’s kind of like the www.DesignOutpost.com, except that they don’t do the actual job for you to review
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first. You can look at writing samples. You can see what they’ve done in the past and move from that point forward with somebody that you like and that you have a good feel for.
These individuals, same sort of thing, it’ll cost you $25, $50, $100, $300, depending on what it is that you’re looking for. But they can write your direct response mailers if you don’t want to follow formulas that I’m going to be giving you. They can write your post card campaigns. They can write your copy for your web sites. They can write your special report. They can write your articles. Let’s suppose you want to try to get published in different publications. They can write these things for you if you don’t want to be a writer. Now some of you may say, “I really enjoy the writing part of it.” Maybe even just work with somebody here for proofing or editing or tweaking it for you. Incidentally, you can also get some of these things also from www.CraigsList.org if you put the ads out. I’m just giving you a lot of different alternatives. I hope you’re starting to see "I can get an idea and I can get a design" to the most part over on www.DesignOutpost.com. I can get a copywriter to write the content of it over on www.ELance.com. I can get a person to go ahead and put the labels on or hand write or whatever I’m going to do over on www.CraigsList.org. Now all I am doing is facilitating five or six people all working together to create this piece. All I’ve got to do now is manage it. Of course it’s going to take you a little bit more money, but think about how much time it is that you’re saving. If you’re thinking I don’t have the money to do this right now. This is when you start finding partners. This is when you start joint venturing with other individuals. What if I bring this to the table? Would you be willing too? Okay, well let’s check it out and see what happens. You start to build relationships with other people so that they start maybe paying for some of this stuff or maybe say, "Hey. Let’s partner up on the first few deals that we do."
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There’s a million different ways to do it. I’m actually in the process of putting it together. So many people say all this is fine and well but how do you do this with no money or no products? As I said in the past, to this date, I have only purchased one property on my own credit. I still haven’t had to use my own cash on deals. So keep that in mind and start to just always, always think how can I do this for free? How can I do this with somebody else’s time, money, resources, etc? I mentioned a little while ago, a few pages back about www.Kall8.com. Here’s another kind of voice service. This is www.VoiceShot.com. This is a little bit different. There are a few things that you can do. When I talked about these call center services with somebody that’s going to answer phones, some of that sort of stuff, they can do over here. What I really like about them is the Voice Broadcast.
I talked about this at the Realtor Strategy. You can actually, if you’ve got a list of phone numbers, you can actually have www.VoiceShot.com you upload your database and they’ll tell you what format to put it in. They might even convert it for you. I don’t remember. All you’ve got to do is simply upload that, call into a message center, record your message and whatever that may be. Let’s suppose you have a foreclosure web site and people are coming to it. What you do is you have them leave their phone number. Well, they’ve left their address, they’ve left the property information, so what if you have say a dozen responses in one or two days. Couldn’t you turn around and send a voice broadcast? It’s like 10, 12 cents a voice broadcast. You know they have promotional things where you pay $100 into your account and they credit back. I believe it’s $25 with activation. I’m not sure if that’s periodic promotion or if it’s an ongoing promotion. You go ahead and set that up. You don’t have to send a minimum or a maximum at any given time. You can send three at a time if you want. All you do is say, “Hi, this is Heather with Yamon Investments. I saw that you stopped by the web site this afternoon or
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this week and I just wanted to follow-up with you on your request. Please call me at …… and you could put another phone number if you wanted to or you can pretty much give them any instruction that you like at that point. But you would just be following-up with the people who have properties that you are interested in. The reason that this is a good strategy is because a lot of times people will submit their information just to see what comes out, but not necessarily be real, real serious. This will help you distinguish the serious people from the tire kickers. This is something that I think you should get into the habit of generally speaking. Let’s suppose you put an ad on www.CraigsList.org and you get 500 responses or let’s be a little bit more realistic. When I put up an ad for a graphics person, I had over a hundred responses come in. So I just put their phone numbers all into a database and called them and said, “This is Heather. I got your resume. I’m interested in setting up a time to speak with you further. Please give me a call back. Or please shoot me over an email with three convenient times and dates that I could give you a call. Include your phone number, your complete name, and three times that are suitable to call. Again, that web site or that email address is [email protected]. Thanks so much and I look forward to speaking with you.” Well now let’s suppose that 30 people call you back. Well you’ve just eliminated 70 people that you don’t have to deal with sending follow-up emails back and forth, chasing down. It just really helps you systematize and streamline without having to do all these oneon-one calls to people back and forth. Now we are at the bottom of the hour and I want to go ahead and give everybody a 10 minute break and open up for any questions that we have so far before we go into individual systems and putting the final pieces together. What I want to talk about for the next 45 minutes or so is the individual systems. I kind of broke them down into the different markets that we had talked about over the last few modules. I brought a handful of them into the sheet just for time sake. Let’s suppose we’ve got our absentee owner list. Remember these are people that just don’t live at the property address. If they live down the street, chances are they’re just local investor’s like we are and may not be interested in selling. However, you can’t always be certain of that. I got a letter in the mail I think it was yesterday and it was an individual that I spoke with last week regarding a letter he had sent back in response to a letter that I had sent to him. He’s got about 20, 25 properties that he’s ready to liquidate. So investors do have circumstances that change and it’s not a bad idea but you don’t necessarily want to focus on them specifically. So we’re going to say that our absentee owners are out of state. What we want to first think about when we’re setting up our individual systems is what I kind of call the "Customer Continuum." What is our ideal? What is end in mind?
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The end in mind is obviously the property. But we also know that that’s not always, always going to happen. So we’ve got to figure out what is this prospect look like when they come to us? This is where we have all these different things. We’re starting to build a profile. If we understand our target, all of this comes into play now. What is their mindset when they give me a call? We’ll do very specific examples. Let’s suppose I send out my absentee owner campaign I November when tax bills come out. Their mindset is probably tax relief or at the very least this property that’s been giving me a little bit of a headache suddenly became more of a burden. I just got the tax bill. So taxes are probably going to be a factor in their decision to sell. So you know in many cases their not just shopping around to see what’s happening there. They’re probably a little bit more serious about selling. This individual goes ahead and gives you a call. You’ve got to be ready for that. You need to sell because of this, this, this and this. I don’t live in the state. I had to transfer for work. The tax bill just came in and my taxes went up X amount of dollars, because it’s not homesteaded, because I don’t live in the state. Let them tell you their whole story. Now it’s time to find out just how motivated they are. We’ll go through the flow chart in just a minute. This is a great one for the absentee owners. But we want to just move them through different systems. If we start talking to them and find out that yeah they’re motivated but my neighbor just told me that the neighborhood property just down the street just sold for $400,000. “My house is a nicest on the block. I think I can get $450,000 but it’s been unoccupied for four years.” Well, then maybe we’ve got a little bit of a judgment issue here. This would be when you say, "Okay. I’m not sure if this might work in this particular situation right here and now. But, what if I offered to you” and you just go through from most desirable to you to obviously least desirable, which is nothing at all. You say, “What if I could lease option it from you?” Maybe that’s your second strategy. Or, what if, “have you heard Mr. Seller about the possibility of seller financing?” “Well, yeah but I just want to get my cash out and I have an underlying mortgage on the property. I’m just really not interested in that.” “What if I could show you a way that you could get a buyer at top dollar through seller financing and still cash some money out at closing? Would that be a little bit more appealing to you? You know we are a national investment team. We are able to often sell these types of situations for sellers and get you the cash that you are looking for to get out of the property.” Well now you’re making basically, for all intents and purposes, the equivalent of an assignment fee without necessarily having to put it under contract. You’re just helping them locate a buyer. You help the buyer and the ultimate person that’s going to purchase the mortgage note from the individual seller. It’s a little bit more complex than this. Basically, long story short, is you would get paid a structuring fee, which could be anywhere from 3 to 5% plus on the deal, depending on how you are able to put the whole thing together.
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Next might be if you’re a realtor to say the next option that we could do is possibly list it and see what we can do from that. “Well I don’t want to pay a realtor.” “What is it that you’re planning to do sir given that you’re living in Seattle Washington and your property is located in Miami Florida? What is your ideal situation here?” If they’re absolutely unwilling and their ideal and their only situation is top dollar with no commissions and they want to do this from Seattle and Miami, well. “If there’s anything thing that I can do in the future to help you out, by all means, I’ve got a lot of options and I’d be open to that to discussing some of those with you.” I’ll tell you. When I first got started I tried to avoid realtor commissions, avoid all these other commissions on a property that was three and half hours away. It was such a headache. It was such a massive problem that it wasn’t more than three weeks and I said you know what; this isn’t working. We’re going to have to turn it over to a local professional. And that’s precisely what we had to do. Very shortly thereafter the property was moved. With the absentee owners the entire strategy, we talked about the Customer Continuum sort of thing. If we wanted to outsource the entire thing and we wanted to use let’s say a direct mail campaign. We would go to an ELance type of web site, get somebody to write the letter for us. We would go to www.CraigsList.org, get somebody, an assistant or somebody that’s proficient in different desktop publishing applications. We would get that person to go into our database or download the database, whatever it is we’re looking to do. Get our records; merge them into the newly written letter that’s going out. Then from that point we could have another individual for ten cents a piece hand address the envelopes, put the return label on, stamp it, seal it, bring it back so that I make sure that it gets mailed out on time and we’re good to go. All that I have into that is the mind power to put all these people together and the management to just streamline this whole process. But I never had to do any of the physical work myself. We’ll go into the flow chart a bit in a second. To go back through those options that I just mentioned. But getting the actual marketing campaign out is very, very simple. That’s all we need to do is pull from those different outsourcing companies or resources that I went through a little while ago. We go through the neighborhoods farming. And let’s suppose we want to take the concept of the monthly newsletter that we talked about before. Well here’s a great example. We go to www.DesignOutpost.com and say I need a template for a monthly newsletter. I want it to be two colored. Let’s suppose you want it to be red and black. I need the colors to be red and black. I need a template where I can have three small articles from a
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mortgage broker, a realtor and a title company or something to that effect, a feature article, a place for classified ads and a place for postage. I need this template to be usable for the next twelve months or however long. So you have them working on the template. Once the template is designed, you turn it over to your person over at www.ELance.com and say this is the amount of space that you have to work with. I would like twelve articles on real estate investing that are going to be relevant to people in this particular area. I want in West Palm Beach, North of Belvedere Road, East of 95, up through the top of the county. I want content that’s going to relevant to them. I want information that’s going to entice them to come to me if they ever want to sell their house or list their house or anything of that nature. I’d like to have it all put together in advance. Then you contact your other people. You know your realtor, your broker, whoever’s going to write their feature article. Then you go to www.CraigsList.org and you get an assistant or somebody to do a part-time job. You say I want you to contact and locate. I want you to find out what I should charge for advertising. How somebody would do that, you would want them to turn around and research a dozen web sites for you. And get you the best pricing. Let’s suppose the pricing came out for your quantity a $1,000 a month. Well, in order for this whole newsletter concept to work the right way, you’re going to have to charge $1200 in advertising from their vendors. You want this individual to come up with say five or six different people for different categories. So five or six landscapers, five or six roofers, five or six maid services and offer them the services, basically a small scale advertising sales job. They put all this together. You could even send it back to somebody at www.ELance.com or any of these places to put the whole thing together for you. All the different components of it, you could upload it to a printing service online. You could probably upload all twelve monthly newsletters and say I want them to go out on the first of every month. There you have it. It’s all done. It’s timed. It’s ready to go and you know what this is going to cost you each and every month for then next twelve months. You’ve covered yourself in advertising. One word of caution, you want to make sure that if you’re doing something along those lines, you want to know how much lead time you have if you need to change. Why would I change it? Well, if you’re advertisers what to change an ad, if they want to cancel, if you need a new advertiser. You need to have a little bit of flexibility to change some of those things. All of that can be done using outsourcing strategies. Foreclosures. If we wanted to take the two step marketing campaign and its simple enough for us to turn around and say, “How to stop and avoid foreclosure and get the cash you need.” So that’s what our headline is for our classified ad in a newspaper. We can bring on an assistant to go and do some of the leg work for us. We can get the phone number set up
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at www.Kall8.com. We can get a web site design at www.DesignOutpost.com. We could go www.ELance.com or another one is www.RentACoder.com or to either www.CodeLance.com.com and they can put it all together into a functional little web site for you. Have it up and running and looking great. You just tell them. Look I want to be able to capture their name and their email address so that I can do some follow-up correspondence with them. They’ll know what you’re talking about and they’ll be able to get that all set up and programmed for you pretty simply. Once that’s done, all you’ve got to do is run your ads. You have to do a little bit of it. You’ll have to do the recording. You say, “I don’t have a special report.” You go back to the ELance type sites and get them to do your special report. Say these are the different options that a client of mine might have and I need you to help me put them into a special report. Once that’s put together, you ask for it in a PDF and a Word file if you want it so that you could edit it if need be. But now you’ve got something that you can print off and you’ve also got something that you can go ahead and send via the internet. All of that, again, with the exception of maybe some voice recordings and so forth, ready to go and all put together and finished. Realtors just might be one. If you were on the call when we talked about the Realtor® strategies, you use the call service, the www.VoiceShot.com. Say I want to start building relationships with realtors. Let me get some qualified people to call me back. You could go on to www.VoiceShot.com. Go to www.Realtor.com, get a list of 100 to 200 realtors and get their phone numbers. They’re all right there. Do a voice broadcast saying that you’re interested in working with them, that you’re trying to put a special realtor luncheon together or something to that effect. Put together a two hour luncheon. A meet and greet, maybe you have some cheese and crackers or some light or This would be when you say okay. “I’m not sure if this might work in this particular situation right here and now. Hor D'oeuvres. You could do a happy hour. You could do at lunch time. You could do a breakfast kind of thing. Then you just bring all these realtors in and you start networking. You start building the relationships with realtors. And all you’ve had to do is set it up. You could take it one step further where you could have them call back into either www.Kall8.com or back into live into www.VoiceShot.com where they have the number. The call center that they can turn around and register people and tally registrations and actually get people into the room for you. This is another way that you can start to utilize some of these strategies without investing a lot of time. And the last thing I want to discuss is the probate. This will be very, very similar to like the absentee owner. You’re going to want to do personal letters. Now these personal letters are going to be with a different stint. A lot of people will say don’t contact attorneys. This week alone I’ve had two probate attorneys contact me saying, “I liked your approach of my clients and I’ve got another potential property that you might be interested in. Would you mind going over this with me?”
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“Of course not.” Everybody says that attorneys aren’t going to call you. They don’t want to deal with investors. Well if you’ve got the right approach they really don’t mind. At any rate, you want to have a well written letter that is very, very kind, comes from the heart. You’re expressing compassion for their situation and that’s what’s going to get you the best result there. Now depending on where you are, you may or may not have an easy access to the probate. So perhaps you want to outsource somebody going down to the courthouse. You can often go to a local investor club or find people that are just trying to get started in investing. Say, “Look. I’ll pay you $1 a lead that comes in or 10 cents a lead or $5 a lead,” depending on what they’re actually doing for you. If they’re putting it into an easy to utilize database and just organizing it, updating it all for you, well hey. That’s worth a little bit more. If they’re just going and just photo copying all of the records for you, that might not be worth as much. But you could turn around and get a data entry person for a few hours a week to come in at $5, $6. $7, $10 an hour and do the data entry. Once you put it all together, you’ve got the letters written from your outsourcing vehicles. You’ve got somebody that’s actually found and/or done the data entry of the individuals, the personal representatives, the executors of the estate. Then all you’ve got to do is go back to your people and this time you’re only going to pay 5 cents. For probate I like to use a number ten window envelope. The reason I do that is because this is a business matter. So it’s okay to have a business looking letter come through. They expect it. That’s what they’re handling at this point. I still use a nice little return address label but the envelope saves me. You say well 5 cents, 10 cents it’s still pretty cheap. Well if you’re doing thousands of these, 5 cents starts to add up. Over the course of the year I’ll probably have 10 or 20,000 of these different things that go out. If you look at even the biggest companies, I remember when I worked at Cheesecake Factory. They took the olives off of the Greek Salad. They had four garnish olives. They took them off. I said, “Are you serious? How much could four olives cost?” It wasn’t how much four olives cost. It was what four olives cost times X number of salads from each store, times X number of stores, times every day that they were open. Just doing that little thing I want to say took somewhere in the range of $200,000 added to the overall gross income over the course of a year. Just think in terms of like the olive principle of just the little things that you can do. If you’re not going to have a lesser of a response, then go for the less expensive route, if it’s not going to affect your results and your campaign in and of itself. It just makes good business sense to do that.
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Now the remaining discussion that I want to have tonight is about just the specific worksheets and individual documents that you can be utilizing. We’ve got this flow chart here. I know I mentioned it briefly on one of our other calls. But this is just a general kind of overview that you can go through. You’ve got your marketing campaign, whatever that may be, whatever your strategy is that you’re going for. Now the seller response, this I want you to start thinking on each and every one of these little blocks and stuff in here. I want you to start looking at it as okay where can I bring other people in? When I work on putting a product together, doing an event, doing a marketing campaign, remember a little while ago we talked about action plans verses "to do lists" or task lists. The action plan is this whole thing. The "to do list" is all the little things that come into play. What I do is break down all my action plans into as many "to do lists" or tasks as it takes. And then I take it one step further. All these tasks, what do I either want to be involved in or need to be involved in, because let’s face it. There may be some things that you just say you know what. I enjoy that part of it. I want to do that. For instance I like negotiating the terms and determining how much I want to offer for properties. I like going in and looking at the deal and seeing what it is that I’m putting under contract, for the most part. I don’t necessarily want to outsource that part of it. So a lot of the other things, all of the follow-up, I hate following contracts to closing. Whether I’m buying or selling, but it’s something that has to be done. Is it something that I can put checklists in place and monitor somebody else? Absolutely it is. And that’s kind of a side note also. When I put together a rehab system, I said what do I need to do on a daily basis to keep track? Everything was a step by step. I did this and then I did this. As I was doing it and I encourage you to do the same. As you’re doing each and every thing in your business, start writing it down. Let’s go to your takings. As detailed as you can possibly be, if you’re going to www.DataClick.com and you’re downloading a file for the first time, you should be in a separate word processing document or in a separate notebook writing down as detailed as possible. Like file, open, file name. What’s your naming convention? Where do you save it? All of those little things. What happens when you bring somebody in is that you no longer have to be the trainer. You’ve got policies and procedures manuals. All they have to do is follow through. With regard to this, I want you to think of all the different things and all the different ways that you can outsource. Keep in mind that outsourcing does not have to mean an individual. It just means either technology or an individual or anything that’s not you. So on the seller response, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re picking up the phone and calling you. It could be an email. It could be a phone call. It could be a phone call to a voice mail and that voice mail could simply just be a regular phone number that there’s no indication that that’s not your normal line. But just simply says, “Hi you have
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reached the personal voice mail of Heather Seitz. Unfortunately I am unable to take your call at this time, but your call is important to me. Please leave me your name and your phone number and a brief message. If this is regarding a property, please leave me the address of the property and I will get back to you just as soon as possible. Thanks so much and make it a great day.” Something that simple. “Well I don’t want them to know that I do this property thing.” Well obviously, that’s what you do so why not streamline it for yourself. You could go a step further. When the seller responds and this green little dot here where it says gather the information, you could actually, if your voice mail is set up that way. You could have an assistant, like the one that I hired actually pick up the voice mails, jot down the phone numbers and then go through and do all the comparables for you. Then they can come back to you and you’ve got the complete picture. Now it’s time for you to just validate and verify, just real quickly. What I have them do and this is just kind of my system. If you’re online and you scroll a little bit further and if you’re on live paper then just go to the one that says it’s 17 of 18 and it’s the response date and the mailer. I have her fill out this complete document. The seller’s name, the phone number, if there’s other numbers, the property address, bedrooms, bathrooms, on the market, realtor, all this information that she can get. She may or may not have to call the individual back. She may just present this partially filled out to pending. Further down, this is where it has all the comparable information that you know. In this example I have three. These are just the three biggest. These are my closed sales. What I have in each presentation package that I have her present to me. What this is, is the property information sheet, number one. Number two is the tax roll and you can usually get these from any of the county web sites. It’s comparables and you can get them from a number of different sources. If you’re a realtor, you can get them from the MLS or if you know a realtor you can get them from the MLS. There’s Real Met, there’s Real Quest, there’s a lot of different comp services that you can get these from. So whatever your comp service is and I ask for a minimum of three active, three pending and three closed sales. Then in addition I want a map of where all of those individual properties are so that I can gage just how close and I can look. I can see she’s hit the nail on the head. All these comps are within two blocks of the subject property or whoa, none of these comps are on the same side of the highway. Well then those aren’t necessarily accurate comps, so the numbers aren’t going to work for me. Even if on paper the addresses look very close, in reality they may not be. It’s important to have all those components, at least for me and the way that I put things together. So back to our flow chart here, we’re just now at the response and the information gathering. There are already a lot of different tasks within this. The thing about it is we don’t even really have to be involved at this point. All of this can be outsourced to somebody else at this point.
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Where I come in is at the end of the information gathering or if I need to actually call sellers back personally to get some of this information. I use that to make my final evaluation and figure out what I want to do with the property. Now it’s time to present offers. I encourage you; again, this is another hold up for people. This is another stumbling block where a lot of people get to the “I didn’t get to do it. Oops, I missed.” Or what have you. I’ve lost deals because I’ve gotten all the information. I’ve gotten ready and I just haven’t gotten the offer to the person in time. If it looks like a deal, move on it. Don’t continue to over analyze it. This is a practice. Just follow the process. Now ideally it’s just a straight shot down. If it’s an investor deal, flip it or keep it. If you’re flipping it, you want to go ahead and if you’re doing the rehab, you want to go and get your contractors out there. You want to do all the stuff that needs to be done. If you’re assigning it, you want to go ahead and get your numbers and get people into it as far as an assignment goes. If you’re keeping it, then you’re going to want to know is there a tenant that you need to get out. Is there anything you have to do on that note? And you want to start marketing for tenants or tenant/buyers right from the get go so that you don’t have vacancy issues. Now that’s the ideal situation. But let’s suppose they want market value and it’s listed with a real estate agent. If it’s listed with a real estate agent, what they’re willing to be flexible and negotiable, well it still may be an investor deal. But if it’s listed with an agent and they want full market value and they’re just not flexible, you should probably want to consider this a "tosser." Pitch it. Don’t waste your time on it. You’re going to be inclined to say, “No but they called me up.” You’re going to keep looking at it and going but I think it’s a good deal. Just throw it out. Or, you can put it into a tickler file that says follow-up in three months. What I would do I do all of this with manila envelopes. Every one of these sheets goes into a manila envelope. Every envelope has a time line. Everything that’s in an envelope or in a folder, rather, by noon on let’s say today. Wednesday. It needs to be out of that folder and into the next folder by five pm that day. So the beginning of the next day, everything in that folder needs to be out by five pm that day. So everything has a time line and every piece of paper in every folder has had to move at least one folder back. I know that sounds kind of silly but it’s a very simple task oriented management system. What you can also do is get the manila folders and label them, January, February, March, April, May, thru December. If it’s a case like a property at market value with an agent, you can turn around and say I’ll follow up with it next month. All you do is move that property, complete with all the comps, all the maps, everything that I just mentioned. You pop it into the folder for the next month and then you follow-up on it next month. Forget about it until that time. Now let’s suppose they go the other way and it’s not listed with an agent but they want market value anyway. Well there are a number of different things that you can do.
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You can try to negotiate price and/or terms. This may mean seller financing. It may mean a discount in price. It may be when we talk about our A, B and C different kinds of offers. It may be presenting different scenarios. You may just have to follow up later. Maybe they’re just not motivated enough. You could put them into your monthly files if you want to. The other thing that you can do if you’re a real estate agent or if you can get a flat referral fee, and again you want to check in your state what’s possible, what’s legal and what you’re able to do but let’s suppose you are a real estate agent. You have their address, obviously, send them a complimentary CMA, which is a Comparative Market Analysis. And just say, “Thank you so much for your time. Unfortunately as an investor I won’t be able to do anything with this particular property but I did want to present to you a CMA just so you know where you’re house is. Of course I haven’t been in the property so this is just a general guideline for you. I can’t specifically place your property here because I just don’t know what the condition is. But properties that are in the general area with the same square footage, bedrooms, bath, etc; this is what they’re going for.” Something to that affect. Then you follow-up with them until the property is listed. If at all possible, if they just say, “Absolutely. I don’t want to do that. It’s not my cup of tea.” Then you can turn around and offer them a letter for people that want to be for sale by owner. They don’t want to make it. They want top dollar. They can do it all themselves. “Okay, I understand that too. I’ve been in your position and if you can do it for yourself, why would you pay six for ten? I don’t blame you one bit. Let me go ahead and offer you another service that I provide. That is I can go ahead and pre-qualify people for you, so you’re not taking your property off the market for unqualified individuals.” So here’s step-by-step, here’s a process and you can get from title companies, from web sites, from contract to closing. What do I need to do? If you guys have gotten the A, B, C’s of real estate investing, if not, send a blank email to [email protected] or a daily(inaudible track 10 2:20) .com and I think it’s week seven you get some contract to closing table. Take out the excess of that and provide informative report to let them know what to expect. You can also provide a flyer, a financing type flyer. It just says, “We offer financing. You may qualify to get into this property for little to no money down.” You’ll need to check the guidelines of whatever company you’re working with as far as loan origination goes. But there’s one last ditch resource to try to get at least some money out of a deal that you’ve spent money to market to. You say, "Okay. That seems awfully far fetched. It’s just an awful lot of work to get a loan." Well, maybe, maybe not. Maybe you just serve as a lead source or maybe all of these components are outsourced. Maybe you are a real estate agent with a company that allows you to build a team under you. In which case, you feed the leads to your team members and you make an over-rider commission. Maybe you set up the same sort of thing for the loan programs so you’re not actually having to do all the work. You’re just feeding
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leads out and you’re taking a commission on the top when and if they close. It’s just a potential opportunity to generate income from deals that may have just died or likely would have just died. So you’ve got all these other opportunities just by saying what can I do. Let me be creative and let me monetize anything and everything that I possibly can. This is going to help you when you say there aren’t any deals. Well you’re making the most out of the deal that you do have. Because by using these strategies, I pretty much guarantee you that you can make at least 10% more of the responses into some kind of money making opportunity. Of course there are a lot of other off-shoots. Like if you’re in a probate situation and they have stuff to sell. Do you provide services to liquidate their belongings? What if it is that same situation and they need to clean out the property? Have you figured out a plan? “Okay. That’s not a problem. We do have services that we can basically clean out each and every room and we charge X amount of dollars per room to clean out the property for you. We’ll go ahead and send you any belongings that you let us know in advance that you would like. We’ll go ahead and do that for you.” Now let’s suppose you charge $300 a room. I would probably, if I were you, especially initially go get all the belongings that they’ve asked for out. But you can go ahead and hire out maybe for $200 or $250 a day hire a handful of people to come do the actual work for you. Now you’re basically taking a management fee but you’ve offered another service that people absolutely need. I had somebody call today and she wants to sell a car. I’m going to find a way to help her sell her car. It’s a 68 Corvette. I’m sure somebody would want it. It’s my only option for somebody. I need to be able to purchase your property at 60 cents on the dollar. You’re right. The deals are hard to come by but when you start to look at the big picture and say what can I do on this deal to make money? If the answer is nothing or nothing right now, either toss it or put it in a file to hold onto for later. I think that it’s critical that you start to look at all the different things that you can start to do to make money out of the deal that you have. When you’re starting $500, $1,000, $2,000 that’s all a good amount of money, it’s marketing expenses. You know if you think of it like that. You’ve just broke even on your marketing expenses. So when that deal comes in maybe next month, you don’t even have to take any marketing expenses off the top. It’s just pure profit because you were smart and figured out a way to monetize deals that most investors would have just simply walked away from. The next sheet is the marketing tracking sheet. On this sheet, this is where you just kind of post it on a bulletin board or hang it next to your computer. This is where you have all your campaigns. I’ve ranked my campaigns down. I don’t just have probate campaigns because probate in my office goes out once a week. So I would name the campaign, maybe probates say next Monday’s the eleventh, so Probate 7-11-05. That would be the campaign.
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Or you might say why does the campaign type probate and then you might say the description is that(track 10 7:22). It just depends on how many different things you’re doing. You want to have a campaign, whether this, a description of that campaign, one that went out. Then I just start actually using little tick marks. One, two, three, four, slash it with a line for five. Do the same thing over and over and over again. That let’s me actually just look right on a piece of paper with all my different campaigns. It gives me a one shot view. What’s going on? Probate is only getting a 2% response. Okay. Foreclosures is getting a 24% response. But wait a second, I’m not closing any foreclosure deals but I’m closing 50% of my probate deals. Or, foreclosure deals are giving me a lot of additional income streams that I’m not getting from other facets. Or, neighborhood farming strategies are affording me a lot of realtor opportunities and not a lot of investor opportunities. This is where you start to build that. It’s just to kind of keep track, hence the Marketing and Tracking Sheet name, of what’s going on. It’s a one shot deal for you. The next one is a lot more specific. This is "What’s your database name?" When I started, I started naming all my databases different. It got very confusing very quickly. Now I send out within my databases. So I have absentee owners. Basically for the neighborhood I separate by neighborhoods because there’s only a handful that I really want to focus on. Foreclosures; major database name. Realtors; major database name. Probate is a major database name. Then I have the description. And this is a new sheet for every single mailer that gets sent out. So it may be let’s say the database is Probate and the mailer description may be ‘letters to from 7-11-05 campaign.’ Now in number two, date 7-11-05 costs. Well how many pieces are going out. Let’s say it’s 500. What does that cost me? Does it cost me 37 cents times 500 and by having somebody else do it is it 48 cents? Is it 41 cents? You’ll have to account for the records that I downloaded. Do I have to account for the records that I’ve had to do the data entry on? Well if it’s mailer number one, then yes I do, because I paid for them. Or, maybe you break that up. This is where it all comes into how do you want to manage it on the front end? Whenever I send out my first letters, I take off the cost of that database on that first letter. But if you know that you’re going to be sending out five letters to the same person, then maybe you’d break that up over time. The reason that I don’t break it up over time and I take the number of pieces and figure out the cost for that acquisition on the first one is because as I go I start to lose people. I get returned mail. I have to delete people out of the database. So the number of pieces, I do how many pieces that I’ve downloaded or done the data entry for or what have you on my first run. Now I no longer have to count the cost of acquiring that name in the future. That’s been done. In this case, if it was mailer number two and I had 500 pieces, I might say well 37 cent stamp, 5 cents for the person to do it. That’s 42 cents. Let’s say it’s another 1 ½ cents
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for supplies. You could either keep it at 43 ½ or round up to 44 cents. 44 cents times 500 is $220. So now I know that the cost of that campaign for me to not have to do any of the work is $220. Now the response is strictly how many people are calling me. You might want to depending on how many you get, you might want to increase your response details at the bottom. I just did this as a quick reference when I was first starting and sometimes I don’t have five, six responses from a mailer. Sometimes I have 45 responses from a mailer. So, I put the little specifics there. I put how many pieces were returned because I need to keep track of that. If I send out 150 get returned then there’s a problem with the data source. Return on investment I simply calculate. This you might want to calculate it at the end of month one, maybe at three months and maybe again at six months or at the end of the year. But you don’t want to do this on a regular basis, meaning every week or something like that because it just gets to be too much. You may only want to do this once you have a deal come through because that’s when you actually get a return on your investments. So if you do a $500 finder’s fee for something or a loan originator commission or you sell a car on www.eBay.com or what have you. Then you come back and you say, "Well, what mailings/database did that come from?" Okay. Great. Now I can start calculating return on my investment. That simple scenario let’s suppose it was $500 and the total cost was $220. Well if it cost you $220 to make $280 for every $220 that you spend you make $280 profit. So $220 brings you in $500 gross less the $220 that you spent. $280 profit, well how many times would you do that? Well as many times as you possibly could. You’re making more than double what you spent. So you start to look at things that way and you get to really find out on the ROI, the return on your investment, is the biggest indicator of the success of the campaign. Then I turn around here and I put when the future mailings are. You know two thru ten depending on how many you do. You may do three or four or five per campaign. Or you may do twelve or fifteen or twenty or maybe it goes on forever. I don’t know what specifically it looks like for you. You just want to figure out. You can do that all right here. Put it in a three ring binder and then somebody’s just verifying and checking the dates. You may want to back it up or rather this would be your back up on the dates. You may want to do a digital copy so that you can just be reminded when it’s time. Then I fill out my mailing specifications. This is where I would put hand addressed envelope verses window envelopes. This is where I would put hand addressed return address or labels. This is where I would put American flag stamp verses blue egret. This is where I would do any specific changes that I put in my letters, specific text changes. Then if I don’t get a big response from a mailing and I made a couple of changes and then the
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next month I say what can I do different. Well let me change the stamp and see what happens. That’s where the recommended changes for future mailings come into play. I mentioned already a little bit the document that I fill out when I talk to the seller. Now, the response date is obviously when they call back. The mailer is where it came from. The seller’s name, phone, property address, bedrooms, bathrooms and all of that can come right from public records. The rest of this information unless you have access to a realtor or actually the only other thing if it’s listed with a realtor you can get all this other stuff you’re going to need at some point get on the phone with the seller. You’re going to have to open the communication lines with your sellers to get this information. You’re going to need to figure out their why and how motivated they are in order to put your plan together. So I’m not going to spend a lot of time on that. We’ve all seen these kinds of sheets. It’s basically "the who, what, when, where, why and how." Who’s the seller? What’s the deal with the house? When do they need to sell? Where are they located? Why are they selling? That’s the big, big, big one. And then how are you going to structure the deal. You can figure all that out however it makes sense for you. Then the last sheet on here is our monthly marketing plan. The way that it’s set up is for you to turn around and figure what is your tool. What is your strategy? If you’re doing direct mail for absentee owners, you need to know. I break it down, not so much as a tool, but into the actual campaign. So I would say for let’s say absentee owners starting 11-01. So absentee mailings that are going to go out on November 1st. Well I know that I want to mail to them five times in the course of the year or four if you count November to November. So I want to mail to them let’s just say for simplicity’s sake, we’ve only got a one year calendar, four times. Well now I start going and I start filling in how much that’s going to cost. So I want to mail to a 1,000. Let’s just say that it’s 50 cents a piece, for simple, simple math. Well we know that absentee owner campaign one, let’s call it that is starting in November. You know, you’ll break up your calendar however you need to. $500 for November and then you might say well I’m going to send another one in January right after the holidays, another one in March when taxes become due, then I’ll send one in the middle of the summer and then I’ll send one right before school. Those are very strategic times. Well now you’ve got that campaign slated for strategic times. You’re going to get some drop off so maybe you do a 10% drop off for the second mailer which brings it to $450. Then maybe a 2 to 5% for the remaining mailers that you’re going to do but now you say I’ve got some targets for how much money I’m spending. Just remember all along I’ve been telling you don’t set a monthly marketing budget. Set your campaign budget. So in that example our campaign’s probably going to be around $2,200 to $2,300. That’s over the course of thirteen months if we go November to November. So what you’ve done now is you’ve actually drawn it out. This is what the pros in the industry do. This is how they figure out how many times this ad is going to be played. Where am I going to strategically do this, that and the other thing?
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Well now, this is when you start building your campaign. You say well wait a minute. November is a really, really heavy month. I’ve got a foreclosure piece going out and that’s about 1,000 people. I’ve got my neighborhood newsletter that’s going out. My absentee owners, my realtor and my probate, they all hit in November, that’s going to cost me $3,100 in November. I don’t know if I can swing that. You know the following month is a holiday. Properties don’t sell. Then you start looking. You say I don’t know that I can do that. That’s when you start moving things around a little bit and you say is it possible that maybe I could forego my marketing to the realtors that month? Is it possible that maybe I change my strategy for the neighborhoods that month. Maybe I do something a little bit less expensive or maybe I do one at the beginning of December and one at the end of December instead to move your marketing dollars around. That’s how you determine what your monthly’s are. Not saying I want to spend $100, $500, $1,000, $2,000 a month in marketing. It’s okay. Here are my campaigns and now let me draw up the schedule for my campaigns so that they all fit together and they all fit within my marketing budget. The more money you’re making the more you’re going to want to spend in marketing and the more you’re going to want to outsource because it’s a cycle. But you’ve got to start slow and grow into it rather than just dive full speed ahead. Now having said that, that’s pretty much the nuts and bolts and the meat and potatoes of managing your campaigns and implementing the systems. These are all the critical components that we need to take into account to make everything work. This is how good deals actually become deals. We’ve got to be able to do the follow-up. We’ve got to be able to the follow through. You know we have to maintain it and we have to be able to keep up with it financially and time wise. By following these principles that we’ve discussed, this is what’s going to take you to that next level. As you have more money coming, you can afford to put more on autopilot while you’re learning new markets. Very quickly you’re going to be marketing to two, three, four, five plus types of “motivated markets”. It’s all going to change with experience. My next market that I’m focusing heavily on is the code violation market. Just because of what I know and the experience that I’ve had when I’ve been rehabbing homes, I know that it’s a very scary place to be for sellers but it’s also a very scary place for investors that aren’t seasoned. So it’s something that I’ve seen a lot of opportunity for and all the other things that I know can run themselves. I don’t have to be micromanaging.
© 2006-07 Real Estate Training Academy, LLC
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Real Estate Training Academy: Motivated Seller Marketing
www.RealEstateTrainingAcademy.com
Marketing Flowchart Start Marketing Campaign
Seller Responds
Gather Information (Determine possible exit strategies and conduct 2-3 alternative offers)
Try and negotiate price and/or terms. Otherwise, follow up later. Keep in tickler file with follow up date.
Real Estate Agent
Loan Originator
CMA for Possible Listing
FSBO Letter for Loans
Market Value w/ out Real Estate Agent
Present Offers
Market Value w/ Real Estate Agent
Seller wants full market value and property is listed with an agent. Consider the property a dead deal. Follow up upon expiration of listing.
Flip or Keep
Follow up until the house is listed
Follow up until the house is sold
Flip
Keep
Market for retail buyers using advertisements, fax broadcast, email, etc.
Market for tenants or tenant-buyers, etc., if necessary.
FSBO Letter for Loans
Follow up until the house is sold © 2006-07 Real Estate Training Academy, LLC
Page 40
Real Estate Training Academy: Motivated Seller Marketing
www.RealEstateTrainingAcademy.com
Marketing Tracking Sheet Campaign
Description
© 2006-07 Real Estate Training Academy, LLC
Date
Response
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Real Estate Training Academy: Motivated Seller Marketing
www.RealEstateTrainingAcademy.com
Marketing Tracking Sheet Database Name: Mailer Description: Mailing #:
Date:
Cost:
Response*:
Returned Pieces:
ROI:
Future Mailings: Mailing Mailing Mailing Mailing Mailing Mailing Mailing Mailing Mailing
Name
Mail Piece
# of pieces:
Date
#2: #3: #4: #5: #6: #7: #8: #9: 10:
Mailing Specifications: 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ Recommended Changes for Future Mailings 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ 9 _ Response Details: Address Name
© 2006-07 Real Estate Training Academy, LLC
Phone
Details
Resp. Date
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Real Estate Training Academy: Motivated Seller Marketing
www.RealEstateTrainingAcademy.com
Seller Pre-Screening Sheet Response Date: Mailer: Seller Name: Phone:
Other:
Fax:
Property Address: Bedrooms: Baths: Is the property already on the market? Is the property listed w/ a Realtor? Is the property:
Yes
Vacant?
No
Tenant Occupied?
What are the taxes?
Owner Occupied?
Insurance:
HOA dues:
If rented, how much is/was the property rented for monthly?: What are you looking to get for the property?: How did you arrive at that price?: How long has the property been on the market?: Does the property need any repairs?: How soon do you need to close?: Why are you selling?: Additional Notes:
Personal Notes: Comps: Address Bed
Baths
Sq Ft
Condition
List Price
Sale Price
Closed Date
Possible Exit Strategies/Offers:
© 2006-07 Real Estate Training Academy, LLC
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Real Estate Training Academy: Motivated Seller Marketing
www.RealEstateTrainingAcademy.com
Monthly Marketing Plan Tool
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
Totals
Marketing Budgetizer Tool
Cost/Lead
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct Nov Dec
Totals:
© 2006-07 Real Estate Training Academy, LLC
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