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If you’ve been following our episodes we’ve focused very heavily on seller lead generation working with ibuyers not against working with real invest real estate investors, embracing them, not necessarily trying to fight them as the real estate industry has done in the past. Because there’s a lot of interruption, people are trying to take your commission’s out, they’re trying to cut lenders out of the deal. There’s a lot of big tech money that is pouring billions of dollars into seller lead generation right now. So what I want to talk today about sort of how do we compete back? How do we fight back against that?
What we’re going to focus on today is how this dude is doing just that as a real estate investor. His expertise is in seller lead generation and motivated seller lead generation in certain different markets. He’s going to share with us today exactly what he’s doing and how he’s doing it. So what I want you guys to get out of today is very simple. Start thinking outside the box. Everyone wants to generate more sellers or more seller leads. We don’t do them by farming a bunch of strangers, you do it by putting your offer in front of the right person that needs that solution right now.
Three Things You’ll Learn in This Episode
- How investors grow their portfolio without having to look at the MLS and scour through a bunch of listings to find the right deal.
- Where to get a transparent view of what the property looks like
- A done for you real estate investing company for people that have money that don’t have the time capacity or wherewithal to actually get in the ground and get dirty
Resources
The Listing Advocate (Earn more listings!)
Transcript:
So how do you attract new business? You constantly don’t have to chase it. Hi, I’m Mike Cuevas to real estate marketing. And this podcast is all about building a strong personal brand people have come to know, like trust, most importantly, refer. But remember, it is not their job to remember what you do for a living. It’s your job to remind them. Let’s get started.
What’s up ladies and gentlemen, welcome another episode of the real estate marketing dude podcast. What we’re going to be chatting about today, folks, if you’ve been following the show, in the last few months, we’ve been very, very heavy on seller lead generation working with ibuyers not against working with real invest real estate investors, embracing them, not necessarily trying to fight them as the real estate industry has done in the past. Because there’s a lot of interruption. People are trying to take your take your Commission’s out, they’re trying to cut lenders out of the deal. And there’s a lot of big tech money that is pouring billions of dollars into seller lead generation right now. So what I want to talk today about sort of how do we compete back? How do we fight back against that? People always come to me and they say, Hey, Mike, well, there’s a lot of these alternatives to real estate agents today. And they all went out in the last crash, right? They went out in 2017, or 2002 1009. Well, real estate wasn’t an asset class back in 2000 789. Real Estate also didn’t have big tech, big capital involved in the industry, and with unlimited pockets. And that’s really what’s happening today. So today, what we’re stuck doing is forcing ourselves to sort of out brand out market, we have to get to the lead first. And what we’re going to focus on today is how this dude is doing just that he is a real estate investor. But his expertise is in seller, lead generation motivated seller lead generation in certain different markets. And he’s going to share with us today exactly what he’s doing and how he’s doing it. So what I want you guys to get out of today is very simple. Start thinking outside the box, and everyone wants to generate more sellers or more seller leads. We don’t do them by farming a bunch of strangers, you do it by putting your offer in front of the right fucking person that needs that solution right now. It’s very simple. No market average as a real estate investor, or this guy will introduce you to he doesn’t have he never has a lead generation problem, even if there’s no inventory, because he knows the right offer. And he has a solution for the people who need it. And that’s all marketing is guys, especially on lead generation. So he’s gonna dig us with his insight today. So without further ado, I’m gonna go ahead and introduce him. His name, I might butcher but his hi yocto Horry. I think I nailed it.
Yeah, you nailed it. Thank you for having me on your show, Mike, I appreciate that.
Dude, that’s the first time I nail a name like that. Thank you. Alright, anyways, once you go out and tell everyone who you are, where you do a little bit, give a brief and we’ll get into this.
Yeah, so I own a company called rocket offer. We source off market deals in the Midwest market. We are in Cleveland, Ohio, Memphis, Tennessee, St. Louis, Missouri, and Detroit, Michigan, those are four main markets currently. And we’re looking to go ahead and expand later on. And what our goal is to do is to help our investors grow their portfolio, and without having to look at the MLS and scour through a bunch of listings to find the right deal for you. And so if you are in expensive cities, like I am in California, and LA, or maybe Chicago and New York, and you just can’t find a good property below $750,000 or a million dollars, then the Midwest market is really, really great, because you can buy properties there for 50,000 $60,000, maybe 100,000, that cash flow great that can still appreciate and can be a great return on your money. And so a lot of people say, hey, whoa, a lot, you know, it’s out of state, how am I going to manage it? Well, we can introduce you to property management companies, insurance companies, lenders and contractors if needed. And another thing that we do is we do inspections on all the properties so that you can go ahead and get a transparent view of what the property looks like. There will be a walkthrough video as well and pictures involved. So you get a full transparent view without ever having to visit the property.
So you guys, basically it’s done for you real estate investing for people that have money that don’t have the time capacity or wherewithal to actually get in the ground and get dirty. That’s exactly
right. Yeah, we’re trying to be like a one stop shop for investors to come and say, Yep, I want that property. I know exactly what that property can bring in. I know exactly what condition it’s in. I’m ready to make an offer. Let’s go ahead and make this work.
And you guys are specifically looking for buy and hold type of investors.
We work with all kinds of investors buy and hold fix and flippers people who want to burn this burned the properties, which is by rehab rent refinance. And so there’s a bunch of different people, we even have institutional investors, we work with that buy up, you know, a 10 plus property package. So it really depends. We also work with retail investors who, who’s doing their very first deal so We try to cater to everyone.
Interesting. Um, you’re right. In a lot of the markets like I’m in San Diego, you’re in LA like the numbers just don’t make sense. And many times when I moved to San Diego, I was surprised that the spreads that the buy and the flippers are making. They’re, they’re averaging like 7% spreads, 8% spreads, I’m like, dude, you guys should just get your real estate license, I make the same amount without the risk. I never understood that quiet. But I get why people from other expensive areas go to the Midwest. So let’s talk about, first of all talk about your process, because I think there’s a lot to unpack there. You guys have a niche, okay. And everybody tries to cater to everybody, when we’re talking about marketing and whatnot, and they end up resonating with absolutely zero. Yeah, so I want you what I want you to get out of this is that is the niche and the process, because whether you’re a lender, you’re an investor, or your real estate agent, what you’re selling is your process. You’re not selling anything else, no one’s selling properties anymore. We’re selling the acquisition in the service of acquiring or disposing of those properties. So with that said, What is your guys’s process? Do you even have one and the reason why you’re getting your ass handed to you by everybody else is because you don’t have one your salesperson chasing your next check, not somebody who’s trying to create an experience. So when did you guys figure out this process piece? Because that’s really sexy, Don, for you real estate investing? I can bet you that I’m not psychic we just met. But I’m guessing you you you tried this model, you fell on your face and you created ancillary services around the questions you were getting.
That’s exactly right. And so we worked with, you know, I wanted to get into real estate investing in the very beginning, California super expensive, then I look. Okay, where’s another place that I can actually afford and buy properties that well, the Midwest was a great market for me to go ahead and invest in, then the next problem was okay, how am I going to go to source these deals, and for any investor, I think they would say finding that deal is always the toughest part. And if you buy the right deal, you can always make money, whether or not you fixed and flip it, whether you cash out refi, whether you just keep it as a cash flowing property, there’s always a way to make money if you buy the deal, right? So for me as an investor personally, as well, that’s the biggest thing I learned. And so like you said, the systems and processes need to be there for you to consistently get these deals and consistently sell them as well, which is what we do. So initially, when we started about a year and nine months ago, I was the one phone, you know, phone, like calling cold calling all these sellers, and say, Hey, are you interested in selling this home? Now we have a team of 15 people in our company, about nine of them are in our acquisitions team. And they’re all they calling, texting, sending out postcards, responding to maybe some of our feed Facebook ads are our digital advertisement so that we can go ahead and get in contact with the seller. So that’s what they’re doing day in and day out the other six employees that we have in the transaction side, they’re really working to close the deals, once we get them under contract, get some marketing on it, put some pictures, do the inspections, and really show it to our investors where it seems very real, very, very appealing and transparent. So that’s the current process that we have. And it’s been working for us. We started a year and nine months ago with zero Do you know we’re doing zero deals a month, and now we’re up to doing 15 to 20 a month. Great, dude,
let’s segment into the lead generation. So I know some people want to hear about awesome. So my point on that guys is you don’t have a process you’re not going to convert shit period. And even if you do convert that one, that bad Google review from your lack of process is going to cost you the next four deals, I promise you. Let’s get into your lead generation. What works if you caught what he said, he’s thrown a lot of shit at the wall through different channels, different mediums. And from everything I see right now that’s the only thing that works. There isn’t a soul channel it would you agree that it’s a combination of messaging and marketing that leads to the sellers? And what is your opinion on that?
100% Yeah, I think you just need to do everything in anything to get consistent leads because you are going to be limited to how many people you can cold call or that you’re going to be limited how many people you can text the day. So really, you want to spread out those avenues also, because maybe one day, you know, the texting market doesn’t work or texting doesn’t work really well because the carriers are cracking down on them right now. So that’s something that might go away right and then so now you need other channels to still get you to consistent deals if you’re relying on one lead source, whether it be cold calling, whether it be texting, and you lose that lead source, then you’re really screwed because you have nowhere else to get your leads or get properties from and so that would be a huge, huge, you know, hit for us. So we always like to diversify and try all these different things. And really, it depends on the month to some months. The postcards work the best someone’s texting works the best someone’s cold calling works the best. So you really don’t No. And that’s why I really, really encourage everyone to have a systemized process for each and every single one of them. But do all them consistently so that you can get consistent leads coming into your inbox.
Let’s uh, let’s unpack a couple of the texting. So my partner is really good at texting, but you’re right, all the carriers are cracking down and from the looks of it, the texting isn’t gonna be around in two to three years, if that long or even a year from now, but doesn’t mean doesn’t work now. So a lot of people are just throwing a lot of shit at the wall to see what happens. How many people tell you to eff off on a text messaging campaign?
I would say anywhere from like 60 70% they’ll just tell you straight up like never contact you again. It’s simple as that. And you just have to go in with a mindset like that’s that’s just the name of the game in real estate, you’re gonna get told no 7080 90% of the time, but the 10% that says yes, that’s where the money’s at. And that’s where you have
so lead generation guys is what we’re saying is you have to have a stone art lead generation prepare for rejection. Most people can’t deal with rejection and therefore they stopped doing it. Alright, tax semester, you totally agree. But overlayer in text message, you know, you’re also calling the same people you’re texting. Yeah, exactly. sort of the same messaging, right? Hey, I’ve been trying to reach you to buy your house. You might have got my tax apologize. That’d be the intrusive but I’m serious.
Yeah, exactly. Yes. And also because you can also call landlines, but you can’t text landlines. So a lot of people still have like landlines. I don’t personally but a lot of people still do, especially the older fold. So and those older folks are actually the people who might want to sell the property because they’re like, you know, I’m moving out to my kids plays out in Georgia, I want to go see them, and I want to live with them now. Or they’re willing to just sell the property. And so it might even be better to just call out those landlines instead of texting.
And how often are you hitting direct mail to these individuals as well,
we we cycled the road every single month. We tested a lot in the beginning, but it is something that takes a lot of time. So with postcards, I would say it really takes them anywhere between like six to nine months to really even see results from it. So it’s a long process. I think cold calling texting, you’ll get quicker, faster results. But eventually those postcards can add up and get you the leads that you want. Because they’re going to be the ones that are hitting you up instead of you saying hey, do you want to sell their home? They’re coming to us saying, I want to sell my home. And that’s what everyone wants?
And Facebook ads, what’s the messaging on those?
Yeah, Facebook ads. It’s it’s, it’s no different, really. And I don’t think you can make it too much different from anyone else. It’s really saying, hey, sell your home, quick cash. That’s all you can say. And it’s who you show it to. And what you do once they actually put their information in that really matters. Because initially, everyone says the same thing. They say, Hey, I can buy your home for cash as is. And that message really doesn’t change. But it’s once they actually put their information. What are you gonna do with that lead? And how are you going to convince them to actually get them under contract? Yep.
Let’s get into that. So offers are simple like that. This is the thing that always drives me nuts is like, we’ll get real estate agents. They’ll be like, I can’t get a listing. It’s like, well, you’re trying to sell people who are interested in selling so put your offer in front of the right people. We’ll get back to the data on who you target in a minute. But I’m curious on Facebook, in particular, I’ve been seeing video ads not work as well even urban say do video on Facebook. Well, I’m not getting as results on video. I’ve seen better on text images or moving images. What are you seen on that?
So for me, I actually have a lot of content personally, too. So I have a tic Tock and tic tocs pretty crazy. Honestly, I posted like a job position two days ago. It kind of blew up a little bit. And then I got over 100 150 resumes and the course of 24 hours. Yeah, it’s crazy. I mean, social media is insane. I couldn’t get that result if I wanted to if I posted my job on indeed. So I think building that personal brand and also building a company brand is really really powerful. Getting people to come over to you and say hey, I want to list with you. I want to sell my property through you. I want to buy properties from you.
How many people are going to your site before they’re reaching out to you? And are you able to track that? Yeah, check the check you out up front.
So on average, we have about 100 people visiting our site every single day, about 30 to 40% of them are returning people so they will go ahead and come back and check in to see if we have new properties or if you know, maybe they can. Maybe they did some due diligence and they want to come back out of those It’s really tough to say because they do come from all different channels. And then one day, they might just hit me up on the phone, even though they have gone on the website, they don’t maybe necessarily make an offer there, although we encourage people to, but they go on a free consultation that we have. And then our, you know, salesperson actually is able to close a deal with them on the spot there. So it’s a little bit tough to say, but we do have about 100 people visiting our site every day. And a bunch of them are returning visitors as well, which we love.
Yeah, cuz people are checking you out first. So like I trust this guy for actually get this cash offer, and is your what’s the offer the offers, I’ll buy your house in cash.
So yeah, offers, I’ll buy your home in cash. And then we can close quickly, we have a bunch of investors that we work with that we know that we can close on those properties, especially if we get them at a good deal, we know that we can mark them up a little bit. So that everyone is kind of in a win win situation, the investor gets a property, they don’t have to shop anywhere else. And they get a good deal, we make a little bit of money and the seller gets what they want in terms of price, too. So everyone wins in a transaction. I think that’s how every real estate deal should be done. There’s so many components that go into real estate investing in a property deal. Everyone can win. It depends on how you structure and how what kind of relationships you want to build with people as well.
Make sense? How many people are taking the cash offer? If I get 100 people to opt in on a cash offer? They raise their hand? How many people actually take it and transact?
So for us, even even on the seller side? Yeah. And it’s really tough. It depends on the numbers, I would say. So we would send let’s say, a message to 5000 people, right? And out of those 5000 people, we might get 100 people saying, you know, I’m interested, and out of the 100 people that say yes, I’m interested, we can go ahead and you know, we’ll go ahead and ask them questions, we’ll get the answers to them, we’ll calculate what the best offer is that we can give. And then once we get the best offer to those sellers, then, you know, I would say maybe out of those 120 of them would say yes, I want to take those offer, and then out of the 20, maybe 10 will actually sign off on those contracts. So that’s kind of the numbers that we’re looking at. It can vary time to time, obviously. But that’s about the average that we’re looking at.
How about the follow up from the inquiry, hey, I want a cash offer what happens immediately after that, oh,
then we go ahead and immediately give him a call if they’re available. If not, then we’ll ask the questions on text messaging, or whatever else, you know if it was through a Facebook ad that we might have to send a messenger if that’s the contact that they gave us, and we’ll just ask them the questions that we need to get in our CRM. And once we get all those questions answered and put into our CRM, that’s when we have a maximum offer that we spit out from there and then we’ll say Hey, Mr. Mrs. seller, this is what we can go ahead and do this is the price that we can work with let me know if that works for you. And we can go ahead and get you situated and move your property as quick as possible I
love it and this is where a lot of people would think that you need all this technology but when people are opting in for a cash offer they want a phone call right like they want you don’t want I don’t want to be on a frickin auto responder for two months and then having them call me like they’re opting in for cash offer and this is where services and that person calling you back is the key to the whole damn deal. Oh yeah it’s the tone right here one thing I if like someone calls you back I remember we’re doing a lot of we see a lot of direct mail back in the day and I was in Chicago no stone agent and I was creating direct mail campaigns right? And I would have my agents following up on them. This is where I learned that not everyone converts the same way if I had one dude I I won’t say his names he probably listened to the show. But he gets on the phone and I recorded every call I would record call we had that technology and then I would listen to him and be like trying to coach them through it but the very first time he’d be like, Hello this is first name Hold on a second why grab a pen? Don’t ever say that first. I don’t grab a pen. So what are they doing right now my social security number like and the tone set it off so that people were freaked out you could tell by their tone. Like you have to be Oh hey, I just got your message. Just want to reach back to is now a good time. You just responded back in a cash offer on your property. I’m just calling you back. Is it okay to chat now?
That’s exactly right. Yep. It’s it’s how you set the tone in the very beginning. Exactly. That it really is so important because you don’t want someone coming in. They’re like, hey, I want to buy your art. You know, I want to buy
some stoner and they’re being like, Hey, bro, what’s up, man? I’m calling you back or you also can’t be too aggressive.
Oh, you really can’t. It’s a happy medium for sure. And it takes time to get better at it’s just repetition. It’s like going to the gym, right? The more you go, the better you become, the stronger you become. It’s really the same for anything. I Think. Same with sales, it’s really important to just continue doing it, refining the process, making sure that you get better each and every time. And eventually you will get better to get more deals and close more.
Makes a lot of sense. One more thing, and I’m curious, my partner’s telling me this. And you mentioned it earlier, I forgot to ask you a follow up on it. You saying you get different responses from different mediums throughout the country. So like, and this is he was trying to explain to me He’s like, Alright, so he tried cold calling in New Jersey, for example. Yeah. And they’re like, Fuck off. Yeah, everybody, you know, but then when he did it in Indianapolis, everybody wants to talk. So you’ll see, like, through different demographics and geographics at some people are nicer. And it seems to be in the smaller towns, they’re nicer as a fair statement than in the bigger cities. So something to think about you guys when you’re thinking about what you’re going to target and who you’re going to target. Because if you target not saying that those areas are full of assholes, but in a sense, people are router, or more irritated in different parts of the country. I don’t know why it is. But it’s actually
true. It’s absolutely true. It’s absolutely true. Even if it’s in the same state, or even if it’s in the same city, there’s little locations where you’re like, man, every seller that we talk to there, they just don’t they just don’t want to talk to us at all. They’re hungry, right? Yeah, they’re just angry, they’re like, no, like, you can just go home do just stop dog me, and those hang up the phone, like it kind of, it’s hard to talk to those people. I mean, there are obviously nice people in any area. But there are a location, that’s a lot tougher. And I think like you said, if for anyone listening to this podcast, it’s really, really important to make sure that you are taking that into consideration. And it might be easier in other locations, where if you are looking to cold call, you might be able to get more leads than like you said, maybe New Jersey where a lot of people don’t want to talk with anyone necessarily
true. That makes sense. Awesome. Did I have my last few questions I have here are just gonna be alright, Who the hell are we targeting? Right? So we went through a couple things. Just to give you guys a quick reminder, if you’re watching this, at the end, you can rewind back to the beginning. But where we started was different channels, multiple channels of marketing, different various messages all towards the same people, the same audience, but we’re not buying a list of Every Door Direct Mail here and sending neighborhood route. Because if you do that you’re going to go broke. Or probably my guess is you’re targeting people who need to sell. So let’s unpack that a little bit. And define who is likely to sell so that people stop trying to put their content in front of people that don’t want to speak to him?
Yeah, that’s so true. When we initially first started, we were looking at like absentee owners, there’s like divorce list, there’s a little like probate list. There’s pre foreclosures, there’s a bunch of different lists that you can go ahead and target so that your money goes as far as you can possibly make it go far. Because when you’re initially starting these lists, and these leads that you purchase, obviously cost money. And if you bought the entire city of let’s say Cleveland for $10,000, and you don’t, you know, you’re calling every day and you call 1000 people every day, most of those people might say no, because you’re not really filtering those leads. And it might not be something that you know, you can be working with. But if you filter them out and you narrow down that list in the very beginning, when you’re just starting out, you have a higher chance of hitting someone that says yeah, I am interested in staying home. So I think it’s really important to maybe filter it out. Again, absentee owners is something that we looked into divorce lists, a pro you know, probate pre foreclosures, there’s others that you can definitely look into. And you can always look them up on Google to they always show you like, Oh, this is a good list that you can go and target to look into for best results. And obviously not every single one of them are going to be like I want to sell the home but a good amount of them at least will be compared to if you’re able to if you’re buying a broader list.
Yep, stacked data, folks so you want to buy a list of somebody who is a landlord or an absentee owner that might also be having financial constraints that the house is also vacant. That person is a lot more likely to sell than the house the homeowner just bought Yep. So just make sense. Awesome. I think we unpacked I mean, most of it any other things that I didn’t capture here that you want to start out on.
No, I think you caught on everything. I think the most important part I think for everyone is if you’re just getting started a real estate investing is just do your own homework, just do the basic due diligence, understand how to run numbers, understand how to give a maximum offer, understand what you want to do with the property out Do you purchase and what your exit strategy is? And then just take action. And once you start taking action, you’ll start to figure things out when I started a year and nine months ago, I didn’t have any clue. I don’t even know what a mortgage was, like two years ago. Yeah, I had no clue.
young guy, man. He’s got 23 years old. This guy’s doing 20 deals a year.
a month. Yeah, I’m 25 right? 25. Good for you, dude. Thank you appreciate it. Yeah, and um, you know, I didn’t know all these things until I actually started taking action because you really don’t know what you don’t know. And you start learning as you go. So when I was on a phone call with some of the sellers, there’ll be like, yeah, I have a lien on this property. Is that okay? And I’ll be like, What the hell’s a lien to lien? Yeah. And then I’ll quickly look it up on Google and be like, Oh, that’s a lien. And then, you know, I’ll learn as I go there. And no matter how many times you read what a lien is, on a book, it’s just not going to stick in your head because you’ve never experienced it. experienced it, that’s when you really like Okay, I gotta watch out for this. Yeah,
good advice. Good advice. Why don’t you go ahead and tell our listeners who where they can find you. If they want to learn more about your, where they can follow you on social and all that go ahead and foragers?
Yeah, you guys can always reach out to me on Instagram at HAYANTO Oh, and it’s kind of like a it’s a nickname that I had in college and all for some reason I thought my name was unique so I would easily be able to get Instagram and Tiktok handles but apparently I’m not that unique. I had to be I had to make it a little bit different. I have the same ad for my tech doc and I create a bunch of content there are two on how you can go ahead and start you know investing real estate and give you a little bit of tips and tricks there too. So if you guys ever want to reach out you can always go there if you are looking for prop properties off market properties you might want to invest in in the Midwest you can always go to rocket offer.com slash invest rocket offers spelled R OCKETOF R and we have all our properties there otherwise you can always reach out to me on Instagram and Tiktok and I can go ahead and introduce you or show you what our website is getting get on a phone call with you and maybe see what the best strategy is because maybe it’s not the Midwest maybe you’re better off investing somewhere else you know I’m not going to push the best thing I just have rentals there and I love that market that’s why I’m super passionate about it. But you know, it’s not for everyone so for me, I just think that everyone should do what works best for them.
I agree with that. And like you said earlier if you don’t take action nothing ever happens and yes you fall on your face but we call it failing forward so anytime you learn a lesson is by making a mistake but as long as the lessons learned it was a really mistake no it’s not because that lesson learned will save you and make you money in the long run if you learn something from it so that is actually no differently than video guys a lot of you guys obscure to get that video scary on video well guess what I was scared to my first video too but I did it now I don’t even look at them again because I’ve been doing it for the last 10 years. So if you’re interested in learning more about what we do over at real estate marketing dude we script edit and distribute your video content for you whatever it may be wherever you’re at in the country. That is our expertise we build your personal brand and if you’re interested in some of the stuff you saw here today check out our other product listing advocate calm listing advocate calm which is a multiple seller solution to convert more of the seller leads so appreciate you guys listen other episode. Thanks for leaving us some reviews. Leave us a couple more. Follow us on social, the G the Facebook and the YouTube. We’ll see you guys next week’s episode. Hey, thank you for watching another episode of the real estate marketing dude podcast. If you need help with video or finding out what your brand is, visit our website at www dot real estate marketing dude calm. We make branding and video content creation simple and do everything for you. So if you have any additional questions, visit the site, download the training, and then schedule a time to speak with a dude and get you rolling in your local marketplace. Thanks for watching another episode of the podcast. We’ll see you next time.