Seth: Hey folks, how's it going? This is Seth Williams. You're listening to the REtipster podcast, and this is episode 186. Show notes for today's episode can be found at retipster.com/186.

Today, I'm talking with Paul do Campo. Paul is a professional copywriter and real estate investor. He helps real estate investors with their follow-up marketing. Today, we're going to discuss using the right words in our communication, the importance of follow-up, how to implement follow-up, and how Paul has figured out how to use the right blend of communication to win repeatedly as a real estate investor.

I'll just say before we get started, the conversation you're about to hear was recorded on a day when my voice was pretty bad. So I apologize in advance for that.

Also, the audio quality was lacking just a little bit. I think you'll be able to hear everything we say, but just want to give you a warning ahead of time. Sorry about that. We'll try to do better next time.

With that all out of the way, Paul, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Paul: Thank you, man. I appreciate being on. We haven't spoken in a while. It was way back when I had you on my show. Things have changed quite a bit. Went from land to copywriting, and that was mainly of necessity to quit my W-2 and get into something that can support myself month for month.

Now, what do I do for investing? I actually sold off all my land notes. I'm actually working on selling one more off. We're hypothecating it out. I'm just kind of shifting gears here, pivoting my money into other sources.

And what I do today is just OmniDrip. I mentioned it. So that's a company I set up. We help investors with their actual follow-up, meaning like drip sequences, their automation, the copy, the content that goes into long-term follow-up because most investors we deal with, they're not really sure what to say besides, are you still interested in selling? They follow up infrequently.

A lot of my clients, they're winning over deals after three, four months. That's three to six months. It's kind of a typical range for these long-term sellers that just aren't ready yet. They're winning them over with 50, 60, 70 touches of follow-up.

So we have to be a little more creative about what we say. It's not just repeating the same direct question, “Are you still interested in selling?” It's being a little more creative and bringing more value upfront, building up credibility, driving them back to the website, driving them to articles, sending them follow-up mail, and sending emails of course.

Seth: You've got experience with houses, with land, and with notes, right? Of those three, how would you segment, this percentage of my experience is with houses and this percent is with land. How much time have you spent in each one of those different realms?

Paul: Yeah, I'd say more so in land. I probably spent a lot more in land. And my journey back in 2016, like everybody else, I jumped into wholesaling. A lot of land flippers, they start that way. and difficulty of it and sending lots of mail, cold calling, door knocking, all that, shifting over to mobile homes like Lonnie deals.

Seth: Lonnie deals? What is that?

Paul: Like the trailers or the mobile homes that you flip? You don't own the land and you sell them on owner, just like land, you sell them into notes.

Seth: Okay. Just out of curiosity. Did you say Lonnie deals? Am I hearing that right? What does that mean? I've never heard of that.

Paul: That's what I think the terminology for it. There's a guy named Lonnie Scruggs. He wrote a book on it back in the 70s called Deals on Wheels. It's just basically land, but with mobile homes. You don't own the land. It's in a mobile home park.

A really good return on those, but I just didn't like the rehabbing part of it. I didn't like chasing sellers, chasing buyers too, because there's chasing on both ends.

And then transitioning into land, which I love, because there was no chasing at all, except for the selling part of it. There's a little more intensity to actually get that property sold.

And then, from there, I had to make a decision because I needed to quit my W-2. I was doing copywriting gigs as well. And I made a decision to just go full-time in a copy because I already had clients, and it was exceeding the income I was making in my W-2. So I decided to quit my W-2 and just focus on copy for two years.

Seth: So when you say copywriting gigs, so were you doing copywriting for your W-2 job as well? And you had copywriting gigs for various companies on the side? Tell me more about that.

Paul: No, my W-2 job, I was actually a pipeline welder. I was a pipeline welder and foreman for the natural gas utility back in Southern California. It was actually a good job in terms of benefits and pay. I just wanted the freedom.

Seth: So how did the copywriting thing come into your life? Like, when did you even become aware that that was a profession? And it's like, okay, I love it; I want to do that.

Paul: I discovered marketing copy out of necessity back in 2016, because I really sucked at this whole sales and marketing thing to get houses. I came from blue collar. And when you make that shift from blue collar, and that's all you've done your whole life, and you come from a blue collar family, you don't know anything about sales and marketing. Making that shift if you don't have that personality is really a struggle.

So I, by accident, became Investor Carrot's copywriter for about a year.

Seth: How did that happen by accident?

Paul: Well, I knew about copy. I kind of knew, like, I heard about it. I read a couple books on it. And Carrot had sent out an email to all their members. And I was a member at the time. I had my own Carrot site.

And they said, hey, we're looking for a copywriter. And I said, why not? So sent it out, did their application. They chose me. I don't even, I was so surprised. Like, you know, what the heck happened here? I'm not even trained. I don't even know what I'm doing here.

Seth: Did you submit examples of your work or something? Is that how they chose you?

Paul: I don't exactly remember the application process. I didn't have any work to submit. So maybe there are some examples that I just put together on the fly there.

But the funny story is they actually then got rid of me the first two months because I kept submitting work that had a bunch of errors and because I was just really bad at proofreading. It was kind of depressing at the time because I was like, man, I actually enjoyed doing that. It was a very high hourly pay for what you do just right.

And so a couple months went by and I reached out to the person, like Trevor's right hand gal at the time. She's not there anymore. But I said, hy, if proofreading was my only reason why you guys got rid of me, how about you guys give me another try? I'll go out and hire out of my own pocket somebody to proofread all my material, make sure everything goes through.

They're ecstatic about it because they really enjoyed what I did. They were excited that I'm trying to solve the problem. So I got back in with them as a contractor and hired my own proofreader to do all that. Got better at proofreading, got better and better at what I do. From there, gigs kind of just started happening.

I started… one of my clients was a land developer, a big land developer who entitles, he buys his large lots that can fit a hotel, can fit a large multifamily. And they were doing something unique. He hired one of the best list guys in the country who works with Dan Kennedy, Craig Simpson. So that was fun working alongside him. The idea was they entitled these large lots, they own these large lots, they get the planning in place, they get the architects to create the hotel, blueprints.

And one of them happened to be in Vegas, like not on the strip, but just one block away from the strip. And they sell these, they put these together into a direct mail package, and they send it off to the top investors in the U.S. or maybe the world. I don't know what their list was, but I put together the package, the copy on it. And that was really fun.

Craig and I both parted ways with them because they were just taking too long in between projects. They would finish it and they wouldn't even send it. It would take months and months to even send. And now that thing is outdated. The letter's outdated and the list is outdated. So we'd end up just naturally parting ways and being too busy to fulfill for them.

Seth: I'm curious about going back to your story of how you got into copywriting.

So it sounds like you were sort of self-taught. It's not like you went to school for this. You just read a few books and it resonated with you and you figured out how to write in a way that was compelling and got people to take action. Is that right?

And if so, what books were you reading that were so influential to get you into this?

Paul: Yeah, it's just self-taught. Most copywriters are self-taught. There's not like a course in university on copywriting. There might be now if you get into like the whole CMO world and marketing world.

Some of the books… I would say Gary Halbert was influential on me. He's long gone. Bring that name up and even investors sometimes know who that is.

Ben Settle, who's alive today, he's an email copywriter. He was very influential on me.

Joe Sugarman, who's long gone, and I own his book. And probably a really good book for investors. Joe Sugarman, he only has like two books published. So that's a really good book.

So I'd say that the idea of copy is taking the problems that exist in the market, the deep-rooted problems, and then bringing the solution in a way that fits the market today.

So let me tie this into land, okay, because I started practicing this with land, because I was buying lots, I was selling lots, and I decided to do something a little differently. I decided to take my pages that display any lots I have for sale. I started to write it in a way where I'm displaying what exactly this lot's going to do.

We talked about it before. You can sell land in one of two ways. And I'm not saying the other way is bad; it's still going to work.

But you can sell it as, here's my half acre lot in the desert. Here's the coordinates. Basically selling it as a commodity, right? And when you boil it down to those roots, you're selling it as a commodity.

Now, I'm not saying that doesn't work. And a lot of investors became very successful doing it that way.

To optimize it a little bit more, I decided to sell it like, what am I actually solving here? And what's the actual use case of this land?

Most of the time, I was selling mountain lots. So after about a handful of sales, I already kind of understood my market. My market where people, city folks, because there was only one mountain range in that area, and the city folks were buying it because they dreamed of having this cabin in the woods.

Okay, so rest and relaxation, getting away from the city folks, making the city the enemy. All that I was really bringing into the front fold of the copy. And I did this with emails too.

Actually, I really liked what was happening with emails because most of the time people are doing, hey, here's our deal of the week. Instead, I decided to shift gears. And go more into being a brand that people enjoy reading, not for the sake of, oh, let's check out their deal, let's check out what he has to say today. I would be on the lookout for stories that really sell the lot that we have for sale.

So for example, I remember hearing about the story in the news that happened in the area where nurses and doctors were caught in this specific hospital having certain relations with the clients who were in comas. And it was a true story in the news. And there's other stories, like finding maggots underneath their bandages because they weren't cleaning them.

So I think my subject line was maggot-infested cities or something like that. I talked about that story. And then I pivoted into the call to action, which was our mountain lot, which was to get away from all these city people, to get fresh air, to be away from the millions, population, and et cetera.

So I just brought the problem up, brought up the solution with the real reason why they want to actually buy the land. And what I started seeing is that people on my buyers list, people I've never spoken to at all, would email me out of the blue and say, hey, I've been on your list for three months now, ready to buy. And it'd be one of the easiest sales I can make.

So it wasn't hardly any chasing. That's what I started seeing because I realized, and this is nothing new, by the way. You see this done in coaching. You see this done selling software. And in my OmniDrip brand, you see this. You develop a relationship with your actual buyers list.

Seth: How much work is it to be on the lookout for these stories to create this newsletter and all this stuff to entertain people with the end goal of, “I hope you'll buy something from me at some point”? How do you make the connection between, “I'm here to entertain you,” and connect the dots all the way to, “Okay, now buy this from me.”

Paul: Yeah. It's more of an art than a science. The more you do, the more writing begets writing or ideas beget ideas.

So, when somebody who has never done this before, it's like, I can never do this. Yeah, you haven't really done it before. And then, and when you start doing it, when you start looking out for stuff, in time, I mean, this is what you're supposed to kind of do as a salesperson is connect problems with solutions, right? And you're either doing it face-to-face, digging for information, really asking the situational, the problem questions of the salesperson. Whereas a marketer, you're doing it where you already know the market well enough. And you're choosing the biggest pain points.

And that could be through analogies. That could be the stories you've heard. It just comes from doing it enough to where, oh, this is a really cool analogy to show my audience.

So being entertaining is far more, and I've sent over at the time of this recording, I've probably had like 2,000 email blasts, not like 2,000 individual emails, but like 2,000 blasts, lists of 5,000 people to 60,000 people. My bread and butter today, I'd say, is like if anybody asks, hey, can And can you work one-on-one with me? My one-on-one package is email marketing. So every month we're talking to the list. We're creating relationships with that list. We're selling something to that list.

I would say after all that, the least valuable method of communication is education. It's just education. Just like, here's the three ways to do this. Here are the five ways to do that. It works to some degree. What I've realized is people tune out of that after so much. And people tune more into when there's even a subtle or slight entertainment factor to what you do, whether it be podcasts, whether it be articles, whatever it is, there's something in how you communicate that's actually somewhat entertaining.

If you don't believe me, look at the highest paid people in the world, they're all entertainers. Look at Donald Trump. He's kind of entertaining. So people do keep coming back because there is a slight entertainment factor to what you do.

Seth: Yeah, that's interesting. So like, what makes education entertaining? I don't know if you know who Ramit Sethi is, but he is a phenomenally good verbal communicator. Every time I hear him talk at all, I'm just kind of captivated by whatever he's saying. And I think what's going on there is he knows how to use the right words, but also vocal tonality and inflection and stuff just to make him not sound monotone. It's just very entertaining to listen to.

So is that what it is? It's just surprising people at what you do? Or what makes anything entertaining versus boring?

Paul: Yeah, that's a really good question. Ramit Sethi is hard to understand if he actually went out of his way to learn all that or if he actually does that already naturally.

So one aspect to that is bringing personality into the fold. Everybody has a personality, everybody has something that they can share. For emails, specifically, it's personality-driven. You look at Russell Brunson, he almost does the opposite of what is taught, which is slow down, be professional. The guy is a fast talker.

The key, and he mentions this, to what makes him wildly successful (in webinars specifically, because his pivotal moment is when you learn how to do webinars and sell via webinars) is he is an extremely good storyteller. And he ties it in and he brings up another story and ties it into what he's teaching. That is one aspect of doing it.

Telling stories, tying it into what you're teaching or selling that grows a relationship with something. People become friends because they like the other person. They like their personality. And that's kind of what you're doing with an email list as well.

I mean, back to what I do with OmniDrip with, you know, flippers, and we have some land guys that are clients as well with their acquisition side with their follow-up. If you come in with your follow, you know, everyone has drip sequences, but those are the dry, boring, direct questions of, hey, are you still looking to sell? Hey, are you still looking to buy? Those direct questions are 100% self-serving. They don't do anything for the other person. You’re an annoying pest at that point.

So what we bring in is we add a little more creativity. So what does that mean? That means that we're talking about what the cash offer actually brings the table. I'm bringing humor messages too. We have humor messages, like if somebody hasn't responded for a long time, I'm putting in humor messages into it. We're driving them back to an article. So for example, if the seller says, hey, I'm going to be fixing the house ourselves, we're driving them to an article that talks about the five top rehab items, the best bang for your buck.

And that has its own purpose for authority building, making us the experts in that field.

Seth: Can you give me an example? What is one of these humor messages? What are you talking about when you say that?

Paul: We'll send a text message out. We have different variations of all kinds of that. I'll say, hey, we haven't spoken in a while. “Press one if you've been swallowed by a gator. Press two if you actually did reach out to sell your property. Press three if you actually want me to be eaten by a gator. And this was all a mistake. You never wanted to sell your house.” That produces a lot of LOLs, but it's at least a response back, right?

So driving a response back to start that communication. Because that's the bottom line of follow-up is we want to move them. We want to start a conversation again, move them along the pipeline. If they haven't booked a call with us, that's the next step. We want to move them in our pipeline.

Seth: You brought up OmniDrip. What is OmniDrip?

Paul: Yeah, it's a brand I created by leveraging everything, all this copywriting experience I just talked about, and helping investors with it.

So what can a copywriter do with investors? People think it's writing your letter, your direct mail, which is all fine. But for me, the highest use and the best value I can bring for an investor, the ones actually doing lots of volume, is boosting their follow-up marketing.

So that all the leads that they're getting now, because they're only going to convert, you know, maybe 10% or less of those leads that come in (10% would actually be really good organization, if you can do that, I'm talking about single-family). And making sure that we are increasing that by having better follow-up long-term, better SMS, better email, better tasks, voicemail scripts, better articles, all following the seller or the lead, I should say. To either find out if it was all a mistake, that's always a good goal, right? If the lead was actually not selling one or moving out of our system.

Or two, when they're finally all ready, because this happens a lot, they ghost you, they're ignoring you. They actually are a lead. They actually are a really net quality lead. They're actually going to sell at one point. It's just that life gets in the way. There's more priorities.

Seth: Yeah. So when you say help with follow-up, so does that mean just writing the copy for them? Or is this like a CRM system that manages the follow-up? Or is it like the initial outreach? Is it that too? Like what specifically does OmniDrip do?

Paul: Yeah. So that's a good question. I don't sell a CRM and I purposely do that. I'm not planning on ever selling a CRM. We utilize whatever CRM the investor uses, you know, so they don't have to switch a CRM. That's a pain. Switching a CRM is a pain.

So we utilize whatever you have. Most CRMs have automations already, meaning like you can activate a sequence for a lead and then, and it sends out a sequence of emails, SMS, et cetera.

And so we plug, I have content already. We have hundreds and hundreds of variations of it for different types of investors. And we make it so it's semi-custom. We plug them into the CRM for a single family investor.

Right now, it's like 24 sequences for land flippers. It's cut in half or less.

Seth: Is this email? Because usually when I think of copywriting, that's kind of the default that I go to. But it sounds like this is like direct mail. This is texting. What communication mediums are being used here?

Paul: Everything. Because if you narrow down to one communication medium, you're really minimizing the pool of what you can do because people are going to unsubscribe. You're going to hit reply to stop. And then if you're only utilizing one way of communication, you've just eliminated any communication from that lead.

Seth: If somebody comes to you off the street, what would be the top three you would recommend?

Paul: Top three sequences?

Seth: The top three communication mediums. Is it like direct mail, texting, and something else? Or what would you need?

Paul: Okay, I say manual tasks to call, right? We still need to make those calls. So that'd be one. Two would be SMS and three would be mail as well. So follow-up mail.

So follow-up mail is what we add in, which is very different from the typical mail.

If somebody comes into my world and they know who I am, they opted in, they want a cash offer, whatever it is. And they already know me somewhat that we've already kind of spoken, or they went through my portal or my website. So it makes no sense for me to send out a letter that says, Hey, I want to buy your house. Makes more sense for me to send out, for example, a greeting card that says, Hey, I appreciate you trusting us and taking the next step.

Or if they said no to my offer, it makes sense for me to send out a greeting card that says, Hey, we understand that our offer doesn't work for you, but we're here if anything changes.

So that type of mail that goes out, if we haven't heard from them and they fill out a form and it's been 30 days and no response, I send out like a pattern disruptive type of postcard, like a dog. And it says, Hey, what in the world just happened? Get them to read it and says, hey, you fill out a form from our website here. Just want to make sure that you actually have the intention to sell? Let's connect again. We have your cash offer waiting.

Seth: You're saying that you recommend people start with a cold call, right? Cold call first, have some kind of conversation.

Paul: The cadence, you're asking about like, what's the cadence of all this?

Seth: Like, what's the order?

Paul: It depends on the sequence. I mean, okay, this is for people who have already inquired, right? So this is the big opportunity. You know, everyone's focused on lead gen, which is hugely important. Everybody needs those leads. But a lot of people who've been doing this for a little while who already have that lead generation in place, they know how to do it.

The next opportunity to optimize their business is actually the leads that are already in their CRM. The leads who have already said yes to them at one point, but they sell with someone else.

Seth: When you say yes, does that just mean responding in some way?

Paul: You sent a mailer out, they called back, they said they'd like to get an offer, right? You sent out a mailer saying, you know, I'd like to buy your property. They called back about that. And then that lead disappears. It happens all the time. That lead falls through the cracks. Maybe you got them an offer and then that falls through the cracks.

So there's all kinds of breaking points in your pipeline after a lead comes in.

Seth: And correct me if I'm wrong, but... So it sounds like when people come to you, they already have a big list of people that have already responded in some way. You just help them squeeze more value out of those people, essentially?

Paul: Yeah, exactly. It's not so much about cold outreach. We focus on the leads that they already have, and we focus on their continuous stream of leads that are coming in. If they're going to continue doing business, they're going to continue having leads come in and optimizing those leads to make sure we're squeezing as much as we can from it.

Because most investors operate in a very low conversion rate. Their KPIs are really low because they're only focusing on the leads that you needed to sell yesterday. Their hair is on fire and they forget the ones that are still on the fence. They don't seem to have any intention right now, but they actually do have, they're going to sell. It's just a matter of time. It's a matter of fixing whatever things they have going on and they're just ignoring your text, which has nothing to do with you.

And then they end up selling with someone else just because they forgot who you are. They're going to forget who you are if you're not following up intentionally and building your credibility and your brand with them.

Seth: So what does a good follow-up sequence look like? How many times are we following up? What are we seeing? How are we communicating with them? What order? And at what point do you stop? At what point is like, okay, I've kicked this thing enough and it's not going to work.

Paul: Yeah, that's really a question. And so, we're always improving to see what works. And it's hard to say it in audio right now, instead of having a visual infographic. But whenever it's ours, I have this infographic of an actual pipeline. That's what I used to do as I weld. And so there's all these little gates. There's about three or four gates that you have to open that a lead flows through until you finally have a deal closed.

So when a lead comes into your system, you send out a mailer. They said, oh yeah, we're interested in selling our property. You gave them a cold call and they said, oh yeah, actually we're selling our property.

That lead is now in your pipeline. Now there's all these steps along the way.

So I would say that our first sequence that we have is when a lead is fresh, they enter into the top of funnel. They said yes right away means they have a hot inquiry to move along with you, but for some reason they're not responding. That happens a lot. Actually people who buy leads from other vendors or PPC leads, even SEO leads. Those are a little less often.

Seth: Just gonna stop you there. So you said they said yes, but they're not responding. So how did they say yes? Does it mean they did respond?

Paul: They did respond, but then the communication stops.

Seth: Okay. So they responded one time in some way. Maybe they didn't say, yes, I want to sell, but they said something, but then they are not continuing to respond after the second contact?

Paul: Yeah. It happens a lot with single-family businesses. So they see an ad about selling your house. They fill out the form. So that's the initial inquiry. That's the saying, yes, I'm interested.

And then communication stops. Like you're trying to call them back. They're not answering. You're sending them text, manual text, hey, let's get an appointment so we can talk about your property so we can get you an offer. Communication stops.

So going back to my pipeline, that is the first opportunity then. That's the first opportunity we can optimize those types of leads.

So with those, I'm highly aggressive, meaning I probably have like three or four auto text messages that go on the first day, a task to call, two emails that are sent on the first day alone and a mailer that's on the first day alone. Because the whole idea is to we need to get them back on the phone with us. We want to move them now into the next stage of our pipeline, which is the appointment.

Seth: Yeah. So in that situation, when somebody has said yes once, but then they're unresponsive, it sounds like the most effective way to break through that and actually start the conversation again is just to hammer them from every angle until something happens. And how often does that still not work?

Paul: So that particular sequence right there only lasts for about 30 days. So most of the time they get in contact probably midway or before that, actually,

Seth: Did you say three days or 30 days?

Paul: 30 days.

Let me clarify. It's not 30 days of every day we're sending them. Different steps. It tapers out. So it's hammer on first, then we start tapering like maybe three days, then five days, and 15 days. So it's about 30 days long with that sequence.

And then there's a task that gets sent out to whoever is, you know, the lead manager, whoever owns the lead to go ahead and put them in a different sequence. That's a lot less aggressive. And it's about a year long. Maybe it starts off a 15-day follow-up, and then tapers out to 30 days, maybe even 45 days towards the end of the year.

So that would be the cadence of it. Early on in the funnel, yeah, we're hammering hard. And you have to hammer with some intention of bringing value. It’s not just sending three messages in one day asking, “Are you still interested in selling?”

Again, I'm going back to that, because that's what I see often, that stuff gets ignored. If they're not in the moment right now, if they haven't prioritized selling their house, that stuff gets ignored. And then it also gets unsubscribed. And so you're creating a bigger chance of getting unsubscribed and stopping that communication from them.

So again, the intention is still hammering, but we still do it with value because we want to get them back on the phone. If we got an offer from them and they again ghost you, you put them in a different sequence that's maybe less aggressive like that because they moved down our pipeline.

Does that make sense?

Seth: I think so. But I guess a couple of things I'm wondering, And first thing is, do you have any kind of measurable, quantifiable way to tell when we do this stuff with OmniDrip, the result is this, we get this many deals. When we don't, when it's just that one and done, then we get this many deals.

Like how much of a difference does this make to go through all this stuff to keep trying to get ahold of these people?

Paul: Yeah. So I have anecdotal, not quantifiable, like stats. And if I told you, I'd probably be lying because nobody has enough stats to give you a true figure.

But when my clients do implement this, I mean, I have a review on my website. He's a single-family house flipper wholesaler. And he said it's added a hundred thousand to his bottom line. He's doing at least a deal, two deals per month.

I have other people that give actual measurements of, Hey, this is added X amount.

So I don't have like, if you do this, it's going to increase it by X percentage because the truth is that's really hard to measure with the CRM.

I've reached out to clients after we plugged everything in, ask them, Hey, how are things going? I want to make sure things are working. If it's not working, then I’ll try to fix it.

I've had clients say, you know, I haven't really noticed anything yet.

And I dive into their CRM and then say, we'll go into deals closed, see their inventory of deals closed. I'll dive into it and say, Hey, this was actually in a drip sequence. I see the activity here.

They responded after that. And it looks like you closed the deal two weeks later. And they're like, Oh yeah, that's right.

When you have a system like this, you tend to forget where the source came from. So that's another layer of complexity of measuring this stuff.

Seth: I will say, like you said, there's no way to really know what might've been because it's just, you just can't know that, but I'm pretty sure it makes a massive difference just by my own experience.

Something that I am pretty bad at is, uh, I don't like to annoy people. Like I don't like doing email campaigns to people saying basically the exact same thing seven times over again. I don't want to be a pain. I don't want people to unsubscribe, all this stuff.

But there have been a handful of experiences in my years of blogging where I've been pushed pretty hard by people to promote their thing. For example, you know, whenever I attend a conference, certain conferences, the person that runs that conference wants me to send out emails to my audience, tell them to show up there to meet me and hang out at the conference. And my default would be to send out one email and that's it. And if they don't come, they don't come.

But I'm being pushed to send out seven emails like once a month over the next five months or whatever it is. And I'll tell you, every single time, there is somebody who, not somebody, several people that respond, like the second email who didn't respond to the first one, and then the third one that didn't respond to the second one, and then fourth and fifth. Every single one gets results.

Whereas if I just did one, I would be losing a ton. So I'm sure this follow-up makes a big difference.

Paul: This is not theory. This goes across all industries where you're doing a lot of marketing on the front end and the back end.

And so going back to what I said, I've done about 2,000 email blasts. So that comes out to an email blast a day for five and a half years. For other companies, for myself, the more emails I send out for some kind of promotion, for example, the more money we make. That I know for a fact.And that's my peers who have sent out more emails than me, who are more involved with email copywriting than I am. They say the same exact thing. You still have to be a little more intentional about what you say. The stronger the relationship you have with that audience, the more money you're going to make and the more it's welcomed to send out more.

I haven't talked about this, but this is warm marketing. We have to think there's a lot of things that get mixed up when you're talking about cold lead generation versus warm conversion, warm communication with somebody you already know.

Very different rules, cold marketing and lead generation. Investors get this all mixed up and that's a whole different ballpark.

We're talking about converting people who already know you. There's this old ad guy named Leo Burnett, ad guy in the fifties. And he coined this term called “friendly familiarity.” And that's where that is the component element that really sells. It's not so much like, oh, this headline pulled you in, all of a sudden you wanted to buy. Most people are skeptical.

In direct response marketing, the guys that make a lot of money selling financial newsletters, they make a lot of money on the small percentage of the population who are called hyper buyers or hyper clickers, whatever you want. The people who are just like, oh my God, that sounds amazing when you buy it right now and they buy it and they don't ever use the product.

That only encompasses 5% of the population. The rest of the market, they're very much more skeptical and very much slower to make a decision. So the people who capitalize on that by creating a relationship in the long run come out a lot further.

Seth: So friendly familiarity. I mean, that sounds like a big deal to grasp what that means. Does that just mean like building rapport with them over time through your writing or something? Or what is that?

Paul: Yeah. Leo Burnett actually put this in analogy. You think about the insurance salesperson who sells insurance and this is in the fifties. So you see him on the bus every day. You know who he is. You know, he sells insurance. He's told you before. He's kind of pitched you before that, but every day you see him on the bus. Maybe he tells a story. Maybe you just shoot the hay with about different things going on in life.

Then when that person, something happens in that person's life that then says, you know, see somebody die in the family and the family doesn't have any way of ensuring that, decides I better call whatever his name is that I see every day.

That is an example of friendly familiarity, always showing up, and just showing up with value too. That is like the key to long-term email marketing with your warm list, not cold email lead generation, which I've done, different story. People show up to your show because they know who you are. You're the friendly familiarity. You're consistent in showing up.

People like consistency. So I've been on cash buyers lists that wholesalers reach out to. Hey, can I put you on my cash buyers? Sure. That's fine. Never hear from that person ever. Three months later, I get an email. I don't even know who the person is. Three months later, it's like, I have a deal here. I have no idea who this person is.

If I don't know the person who shows up in my email inbox, I tend to hit spam because I think it's a cold outreach. So I hit spam every single time. I'm not the only person that does that.

Anyone who's growing a buyer's list, don't only show up even days later. Show up immediately in their inbox because the meetup, the meeting is fresh in their mind. And so you want to continue that as time goes by. People buy things or end up selling things to people they trust and they like.

Like, trust is one of the biggest factors in actually moving a transaction down the line.

Seth: Do you know who James Clear is?

Paul: I've seen his content, but I don't know much about what he does.

Seth: Yeah, he wrote the book Atomic Habits, and it's been like a huge bestseller. I don't know how many millions of copies it's sold.

He's got this newsletter. It's kind of funny. Like, I get tons of different newsletters, some of which I've signed up for, some of which I haven't. There are certain ones that I just instinctively, I literally don't even see what they say. They just get deleted.

And James Clear is one that, I don't always read it, but I never delete them because when I see them, they're really clear and simple and to the point. It's not like a wall of text. There's actually not much text at all. It's just like a handful of valuable things and it's always really good stuff.

And it seems like that's kind of what we ought to be going for, right?

Paul: It depends on the market. I'm not going to say that the short form is better than long form.

The most successful email copywriter I know, he sells courses. He sells in the copywriting space and niche. There's different markets, different niches. Real estate investing is a whole other niche. And within it, you have land investing. And so you have all these hot people who are looking for more information.

Well, copywriting is one of them. It's a whole other world where you have people just diving into copywriting.

And so the most successful person I know in that niche who does very well, he uses very long form, very story-driven emails, and he sells really well doing it. Story-driven emails about him. “Hey, I was sitting at the bus stop one day…” I mean, they're, they're entertaining and it's not just a story for the sake of a story. Sometimes it is, but he's one of the most well-known. His name is Dan Kennedy. You could look him up is you'll see his email. There's long stories. Companies, copywriters eat it up because they want to learn how to do what he does.

So it depends on the market. And if I'm selling to CEOs who have very little time, I might be more brief, more to the point. Ben Settle is one of them. Ben Settle is one of these that sells to business owners. His stuff is very short to the point. They're not long drawn out and some of them are.

The point of it is, at the end of the day, what I'm looking for every email I send out is did I increase or decrease a relationship with my list? Most people are looking at what's my open rates and what's my clicks. That has seen absolutely no correlation with revenue, with more opens equals more clicks equals more revenue. I've never seen that. And my peers will say the same exact thing.

Seth: So if that stuff doesn't matter, then how do you know if you've deepened your relationship with your audience?

Paul: That's really a question. And that comes from revenue, right? Revenue is the number one metric, but also the engagement you're getting. You're still getting replies back. You're getting replies back from people. The metric that I watch, most people don't watch this, but I watch email revenue per contact.

So if I'm writing for a software company, for example, and they're trying, they have the same goals of mine, create a relationship with that list, be a personality-driven brand rather than just a box brand that nobody cares about. We're going to drive that principle in. And then we're going to look at what's our email list, how much revenue is attributed to that email list. We want to look at that every single month and see if it's sustaining, if it's growing, et cetera.

So that's probably the number one KPI I'll be looking at.

Seth: I guess in order to use that as a measurement stick, that means each email needs to have some kind of a revenue generating objective to it, right?

Paul: Yeah. That's a good question. I don't look at per email because, and here's why. The common idea is like, oh, let's take the best performing email and throw it into our drip sequence. Okay.

I've done that plenty of times, you know, recycle it back, we get the best one, I've done multiple metrics, open rates, clicks, and revenue, put it back into it and recycle it, send it months later.

I've seen it where it did okay, it did the same, and I've seen it a lot of times where it actually was the worst performing one.

So here's a really great way to see what your relationship is with your list is to start split-testing subject lines. Put a really bad subject line in, put a really good subject line that you think would do great, and then you experiment with all this.

If you see not much difference between the two when it comes to opens, that means people are opening your email because of who you are, because of the sender name, rather than the line. If you're getting a huge fluctuation of people opening because of the really sexy direct response type of subject line, it means you have more people opening because of the subject line rather than the sender name.

And that's the objective. I want people to open because they see that name come in. You know, here's a really good example that ties into SMS marketing.

I'm a subscriber to J. Peterman catalog. They sell clothing, high-end clothing. And I get a message every single day from them. A lot of times I'm not into buying clothing. I'm not even into it, but I'm still on their list and I still open it up just to check out what they have. And what they sell, it's usually a new offer about some type of new jacket, some kind of bomber jacket, whatever.

I'm still on their list, even though I get hammered every single day by them. And they're wildly successful in this industry of selling clothing. And so they know what they're doing. They're sending it every single day. Without skipping a beat.

Seth: What is it they're saying that's keeping you from saying stop?

Paul: Because the idea in the back of my head is like, you know, one day I want to buy something from them. One day I will. So I'm going to keep them on because they're always sending value in the form of an offer and a new jacket, whatever it is.

It's not like I go and open up each one. I'm not like, I see it, sometimes I don't open it. Most of the time I don't open it. I still allow it because they've built that trust. Again, going back to trust. They built that trust with me that I still want to keep there in the loop to make sure I don't miss out on anything.

So tying it all back, it's all about the trust and relationship you have with your list.

Seth: It sounds like we're talking about newsletter-ish stuff, which I think is pretty relevant. Earlier in our conversation, you were talking about selling properties and getting people to be interested in the properties you're selling.

And again, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's kind of when this newsletter-type thing makes sense. And I guess you'd have to have a lot of properties in your inventory continually to justify all the work it takes to keep entertaining people and all this stuff.

But when we're talking about the acquisition side of things, where OmniDrip comes in, do you say, OK, Seth, we're going to take all your existing leads who have responded to you and we're going to start saying this specific message to this person on this day through this medium. The next day, we're going to say this thing through this medium.

Like, is that kind of what you do? Like, say exactly what to say and through what means we say it?

Paul: Yeah. After a client is done with us and on a drip.

So here's the before. Before, they might have maybe two or three drips. They kind of use it. The whole operation is, yeah, a lead comes in and I'll set a manual task to call. If they don't answer, I'll set another manual task. If they don't answer, I'll set another manual task.

So that is the “system” of follow-up. After we're done with them, they're going to have 20 different sequences.

So let's put this in a scenario. Now, after they're done with this, with us, a lead comes into their system. It's a landlord lead. They got done talking with them. He's interested in selling this property. He's got tenants in place. You give them an offer and then all of a sudden communication stops.

So what do you do with that? Before, they would just… most people would just call it dead after three or four or five manual tasks, or you can drop them into one of the sequences, which in this case would be the offer to low landlord sequence, drop them into that, let it work in the background for you. It's just going to send out the text messages automatically. If your CRM does that, it's going to send out the emails automatically. It's going to send out tasks for you to call back. It's not going to be every day.

This sequence right here I'm talking about is not an everyday sequence, far from it. It's going to send out emails that drive it to an article, SMS to drive you to an article. It might send a couple of direct mail pieces, not a whole lot, one or two. It's going to send you a task for a Loom video to send a personal Loom video to this person.

It's no different than a text message. You'll get a task notification that says, hey, follow up with this lead, send them a Loom video. Here's how to do it. Here's what you should say. It's a landlord lead. That lead now, whatever happened, we want to get them back on the phone to either text reply, Hey, I actually sold my house already.

That's a good thing. Get them off your list. You don't need them on your list anymore. If they sold it already.

Seth: When you talk about, “it's going to send all this stuff automatically,” and so that makes me think there's a CRM involved that's actually executing this stuff for you. But you said you don't work with a specific one, like you just work with whatever they have.

So are you like setting this up for them? Or are you saying, here, Seth, take this stuff, you set it up. This is what you're going to do.

Paul: No, we set it up in their CRM because a lot of investors don't quite understand how to set these things up. So I don't just give it to them.

And plus, they see more value in us doing it for them. If I just handed somebody, here's the templates. Well, for one, it's not made to their business because if a client comes in, I want to make sure if they do face-to-face appointments, we make sure that the messaging matches that. We don't want to send something that sounds like you're a 100% virtual investor. Hey, let's get on the phone to get details.

If you'd rather do face-to-face, we want to make sure everything matches to your business. So we put your URLs in place. We create articles for you, put it on your website.

Yeah, so if we hand out a template to people, they're never going to do it. And so I'm interested in getting people results at the end of the day. So we want to make sure that everything is in properly, that they're using it, they understand how to use it.

And because I've done the template thing and nobody ever really… Like you get back to them like, oh, you know, I don't know if it's working.

I don't know. Did you install it all? I installed about half of it.

I'll tell you the amount of content we input into their CRM, I've done it before. I have a team that does it. It's taken me like 8 to 10 hours to input into the CRM. So if I just hand them that template, they're going to be overwhelmed and they're just not going to do it.

Seth: Yeah. I think I heard you say somewhere that it's shown that it takes over 70 touches to convert those long-term leads.

When I hear this, it almost melts my brain because I don't want to follow up 70 times. That just sounds terrible. But the way that you do this is it happens automatically, right? And then does it stop after 80 times or something? Or when do you call it quits?

Paul: So to go back to that, to give some context to that, I know that from diving into clients, CRMs, and some CRMs, not a whole lot do this, but they'll tell you like, what's the average amount of touches it took before this person turned into a deal, right? They'll tell you that.

I keep seeing 70. I saw 180 there a day with a deal, 180 touches.

Now, that's total touches. That means they came into your CRM, they opted in, they filled out your form or they called in, and then you're just manual tasks, your call attempts, voicemails left. After they get in contact, transaction coordinators talking with them. So that takes into account too.

I'm seeing that number, these high numbers of 60, 70, 180 touches on average to see for these deals to convert. So what does that look like in the whole big picture? That's not like manual tasks. That's not you picking up the phone and making 180 calls. That is a combination. The manual, final calls are probably a small, probably a quarter of that or less. The rest of it are emails and SMS.

Okay, I'm going to tie this back. Going back, it's about friendly familiarity again, right? So I am trying to get touches in place. So I'm breaking these tactics down to the very minute detail, meaning if I send out a task for you, Seth, to call somebody to follow up with them, my task is going to tell you, call that lead. If the lead doesn't answer, leave this voicemail and I give you the whole framework on what to say.

And that task will then say, manually text them and paste this, then send this text their way after you leave the voicemail. And that text usually says, “Hey, I just called you about our offer. Do I have the wrong property?” So that's three touches.

So in reality, that's three touches, friendly familiarity. They're getting the missed call notification, the voicemail notification. If they have voicemail set up, they're getting the text, the manual text. And driving them also to an article on the website, that's a fourth touch. And if you want to get geeky about it, if you have a pixel set up now, you have ads being put in front of now, you're getting more touches.

So the point of this, again, is driving back home to this friendly familiarity, getting that and awareness up.

Seth: I don't know how much you track this, but when a lead is finally converted into a deal and closed, is there any common denominator you notice that's making that happen? Like, was it because the investor used a certain marketing medium, said a certain thing, offered a higher price or something else?

Like, what buttons should a person be pushing to increase their chances of closing?

Paul: That's a question I don't have an answer to because every investor I come across operates in a different way. They run a team of acquisition managers, or it's just the solo, like he's the owner and he might have a lead manager or an assistant, but he runs the appointments. And so he has a wildly better conversion rate than the other guys.

And they all use sequences differently. Not wildly differently, but I know an investor who loves how aggressive our form-filled sequences are. That's what I was describing to you, where it's like seven touches in the first day. He's using that even for leads that aren't even in that part of the stage yet. Maybe it's a lead that he gave an offer, but they dropped out of nowhere.He'll plug into that one. He loves doing it. He gets a response out of it.

And a lot of them have different lead sources. That plays a big role because your cold calling lead is far different from a guy who throws out a form. So that one calling the lead takes far longer to convert versus a PPC lead.

Seth: Yeah. So when it comes to something like texting or email, when somebody can say stop or unsubscribe and basically just kill that line of communication, what are some examples of things you say that actually get people to react and respond the right way without saying stop?

Or maybe another way to say that is, when people do say stop or unsubscribe, are there any common themes in terms of like, what was said in that email or text when they did that? What are the things that are making people opt out versus stay on the line with you?

Paul: In a 10,000-foot view of everything, because that's hard to measure. Again, because I don't really look at unsubscribes. I have a peer that looks more at this. And he actually says, he says this, the more opt-outs I get, the more money I make on a promo. So the more emails you send, yeah, the more opt-outs you're going to get.

Seth: Is that person in real estate or some other business?

Paul: Another business.

Seth: Okay. So that's one thing just to be aware of. I mean, it's could be a different type of recipient.

Paul: Yeah. Obviously different personality, different industry, different product.

But it's not like I, with real estate investors, we don't plug in daily emails in that way. Like a daily email might come in the first three days. And then after that, it tapers, there are emails like, you know, in a year span, that person's lead is probably getting 11 emails. So it's not a whole lot. So we're not sending a whole plethora of emails like that.

I don't have anything in real estate. I don't have anything to say as far as what is the good number. But I think a lot of people are scared of the unsubscribes. So that's why they tone down the frequency.

When I say everything I've seen outside of real estate, inside of real estate, everything I've seen is the more we send, the better outcome you have.

Seth: Yeah. So I guess your big discovery is like opt-outs and unsubscribes are not something we should be afraid of. Almost like lean into that. Say what you're going to say. If people want to leave, they'll leave. Don't worry about it. Is that your thought?

Paul: Yeah, absolutely. Because, again, we're plugging in multiple mediums, right? So if we do get unsubscribed, which is a natural part of all this marketing, it's not a bad thing to have unsubscribed. They come back later. We see they come back later anyway, right?

So they're not ready yet. They're still searching for a solution later down the road. And they fill out another form if you stop consistent marketing, right? And they come back later back into your SMS list.

But yeah, I'm not afraid of unsubscribes. Unless it's a huge, this is a caveat to that, understand what is an exorbitant amount, huge amount for unsubscribes rate. So in email, I'm looking at like half percent. So are we under half percent? Okay, we're at a healthy unsubscribe rate.

If you're getting 2%, 3% unsubscribe rate on email, don't remember what the SMS one is (SMS is higher than email; it's natural to get a higher unsubscribe rate in SMS than it is in email). But if I'm getting a huge amount, you're doing something wrong, either lead quality is completely off or (maybe this, I've seen this happen with people) merge fields are broken. So the dynamic fields, like you send out some emails, and it’s supposed to say, “Hey, John,” but instead it says, “Hey, first name.”

And so, all the merge fields are broken. And so people are like, yeah, this is garbage, and they unsubscribe.

So that's typically when you have a high unsubscribe rate, there's something technically wrong or wrong with your lead source.

Seth: Yep. Sometimes I like to ask questions like what I'm about to ask. It's kind of a ridiculous question. I know it's going to be hard for you to answer, but I just ask it anyway, just to get your thoughts on it.

So I know you said you recommend multiple different communication mediums like texting and email and calls and mail and all this stuff. So if a land investor could only use one marketing medium, they're not allowed anything else. What would you recommend?

Paul: I would say calls. Still continue to call because now you're eliminating automation. Now you're eliminating everything I do, which is fine.

I'm not going to say and hide behind, oh, email is the best way. I don't think so. Email works for real estate investors. Email works because it's an added layer with SMS. I recommend email last (this is for acquisitions, by the way), because you don't get a whole lot of replies back.

And that's a mistake I hear people say like, well, I don't get a whole lot of replies back from email, so I'm going to eliminate it. It's a terrible reason to eliminate a medium because marketing is not isolated from one another. It's not like they only see your SMS and your email is a completely different world.

No, everything connects with each other. They just read your email about some kind of scam going on in the market today. They relate that, again, friendly familiarity. They're relating that back to you and your brand. They see your text messages. They're going to respond to their most comfortable medium, which is usually text messages.

But it still adds to the story. It still leverages problems and pains. It still brings up your brand.

So going back, though, if you had no no other means of doing it, I'd say call.

Seth: And when you say that, are you thinking like hire a cold calling agency to reach out to people or just do this follow-up? Or are you thinking like, no, you Seth, you do the call.

Paul: So you're talking about cold lead generation. Again, so we want to mix the two.

Now cold lead generation is different. If I'm talking about warm follow-up, like actually following up with the person who came in already, who said yes to you already, calling would be the number one, I'd say. That's why I still keep calls in my automation.

Seth: With that in mind, again, is that me personally calling or is it like you can hire a cold calling or I'm sorry, just a calling agency to do it?

Paul: Yeah, either one. You, as a business owner, typically have a higher conversion rate than somebody who you hire. That's across the board; I've seen it in other organizations I've worked in.

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's you or somebody else, but calling is probably the better means. Because the SMS you have, again, going back to the unsubscribe, the SMS is going to have a chance of getting unsubscribed. Same with email. mail. Once that stops, it stops.

But calling is a little different. Until they call back, tell you to get me off your list. But then we want that call back. Then that creates a conversation point with them. We're getting face-to-face with them.

Seth: It's interesting how you're saying it doesn't matter. Because I know, I mean, maybe it depends on the quality of whatever agency you hire, whoever the person is doing it. Because I've heard some recorded calls that are just awful. I mean, it still works because there's not many other people doing it, but it's still not good as opposed to like, if I'm doing it and I care and I have better communication like that, that makes a huge difference.

Is it more about following the right script then in that case?

Paul: Yeah, I said that assuming that the other person doing it is doing a somewhat decent enough job, right? That's assuming that, right? And that rule goes into play for anything. If you have somebody who builds out drip sequences and emails, they don't know what they're doing. They're going to do a far less job if you're just going to do it yourself. So that goes to anything.

But assuming that calling, if you're going to use somebody else, obviously hire somebody. I mean, I hire somebody that knows what they're doing and you've vetted them, et cetera. So yeah, I think that goes without saying.

Seth: And if somebody could use two marketing mediums for follow-up specifically, would it be calling and what else?

Paul: Call and text message. If you're going to use auto text message just to use text message. Yeah.

That's the higher responsive medium that does get more responsive than any other medium. It doesn't mean you shouldn't use the others because it's cheap to send an email. It doesn't take any extra effort except building it up front to send that auto email.

But if you only had two, I'd say call and text message and do a cadence of either one. Calling, text message, calling, text message, a kind of repeated cadence like that.

Seth: So it sounds like texting gets more responses, but calling is more effective at actually closing deals?

Paul: Well, I mean, closing a deal means you're getting on the phone with them over the year. I mean, unless you're assuming closing it via 100% virtual, you're not even talking with them?

Seth: It happens less frequently, but it can happen. I've had that before.

Paul: Yeah, I've had that in land, especially. Funny enough, I had that happen more often with email than any other, like than text, for example.

But I mean, you get contracts in the mail too. So that's mail, I guess. That's the contactless medium. Mail can be one of them too, right? That was my mode of operation: just get the contracts in the mailbox. I've never talked to him at all. Then send him an email about the whole process, right? Send him a check.

And so it's kind of hard to say which one is best. Obviously, we just went through like each scenario is different, right? So some people might take that out of context where I just said, and then say, oh, that means for lead generation, cold calling is best. And then text messages.

Not necessarily. I mean, I didn't do that when I started in land, I was just sending mail out and I'd have a pretty high conversion rate on contracts.

Seth: Well, it's kind of interesting. Even when we started this conversation, I was kind of coming into this with certain assumptions, and I think you were too.

And it's important for people to recognize that because I think for land investors, this is definitely changing, but historically over the past 10-plus years, there used to be literally zero follow-up. People just didn't do it. You send one letter and that's it. You move on.

And we're in this world now where follow-up is way more important now and can be much more effective. And a lot of these things we're talking about are like my questions are framed in the context of almost like cold outreach. But that's not what you're talking about. You're talking about, no, these people have already responded in some way.

And that's just a different conversation when you already have some kind of connection with somebody versus not.

Paul: It's optimizing a different part of your business. All businesses, if you look at just the factory, you're putting them down a conveyor belt. I'm just talking about one part of that and optimizing that part. And there are other parts to optimize. One is lead generation. The other, selling the property. That's another part to optimize.

So yeah, it's just a different mode. I mean, depending on where you're at in your stage. Like you said, it's changed, right? From when I flipped land, I wasn't worried. And on the acquisition side of things, I wasn't worried about follow-up. Didn't really need to be. And if I was, I'd have too much property. I'd have a bottleneck in my conveyor belt, right? Which is a good problem to have, but it can be a really bad problem.

Seth: I did wonder about that whole conversation of following up more versus just doing more cold outreach to new people. I don't know if you have any cost comparisons on this, but like, what does it cost to implement this follow-up stuff versus, no, no, let's not do that.

Let's just keep reaching out to new people. Like what is more expensive, do you think?

Paul: That is a really good question. So, okay, I can relate this more to single-family because wholesalers and flippers have this problem more, right? It's land flipping.

Seth: The land is going that direction now. So it's a relevant thing to talk about.

Paul: So I'll say this. You're familiar with Dan Kennedy, right?

Seth: Oh, yeah, for sure.

Paul: Everybody knows Dan. He's not the only one that said this. He talks a lot about this in his newsletters, things like that.

And so in his books, people spend a huge amount of resources on the lead generation, and then they spend very little money on the follow-up, and that's the least expensive marketing avenue.

So this is a cost comparison. A lead, a call that comes in for a flipper, comes in, it's going to cost maybe $150, $180. Maybe on the high side, it's going to cost $300 per lead. So if you're buying leads from a vendor, those can cost $250, $300 a pop, okay? Very expensive lead.

So you can then, if you decide, I'm going to just do more lead generation, understand you are moving a lot of money into that front end to produce the same results or a slightly better result. While if you implement some sort of follow-up, especially if it's automated in a sense, let's take follow-up mail. The follow-up mail we implement, it'll probably cost you per lead an extra 10 bucks per month.

So maybe per lead, it costs you 10 bucks. So you're adding 10 bucks into that $310. It's fractional to follow up, especially if you have some automation in place right now. If you don't have automation in place, you have to hire somebody to do the follow-up for you. That adds on to your costs.

It's still not as much as buying that lead because we're all buying leads. We're doing, we're buying leads through your time, with your money. And that is a huge amount of resources to get that lead.

Seth: Yeah. And I'm wondering, if somebody responds, under what conditions would you say we should not follow up with this person? Like, is it only if they say, I hate you, don't ever talk to me again and then you don't do it? Or like, if it sounds like they're 90% on no, but there's just a tiny little piece that's like, well, maybe. How do you know when to disqualify them versus continuing to follow up?

Paul: I would say for me personally, I would do it until they unsubscribe, right? I'm going to say every lead that comes in is a viable lead until they say no. That's my modus operandi.

Seth: So like on the phone call side of things, if you're emailing them, texting them and calling them, if they unsubscribe from the email and the text, does that mean you shouldn't call them anymore? Or do they have to cuss you out on the phone and that's the unsubscribe?

Paul: Yeah. Most investors operate this way, which is fine. An SMS unsubscribe. That's one channel they didn't subscribe from. There's still the email. So different channels.

I'm not a lawyer. So like if an attorney tells you no, that no means from all channels. I don't know if that answers your question, but everyone's going to feel it differently. For me, it's a no from each channel.

Seth: Well, Paul, I appreciate your time. If people want to work with you or talk to you more about how this stuff works and pick your brain more, what's the best way to get ahold of you?

Paul: Yeah. They can go to my site, reiomniadrip.com and easily contact me there. There's no salespeople behind it. They can just reach out to me. They can call me at my phone number on my site as well.

Seth: Sweet. Yeah. I will include a link to that, along with a lot of other stuff we talked about here at retipster.com/186. That's the show notes for this episode.

Paul, thanks again. It's great to talk to you and hopefully we'll talk again soon.

Paul: Likewise, man. Appreciate it.

Seth: Hey, everybody, how's it going? This is Seth Williams, and you're listening to the REtipster Podcast.

This is episode 178. And today I'm talking with my friend, Matt Theriault. So Matt is somebody I've followed for a long time since before I got into the blogging and YouTubing world myself.

And I remember back when YouTube was still a relatively new thing and I would look for real estate investing videos on YouTube and I would always see Matt's videos. And I appreciated them because they were really well thought through. They made me you think critically about real estate investing as a profession and how to deal with problems and think outside the box. And these things weren't surface level. They were pretty deep. And as a fairly deep guy myself, I appreciated his approach and his teaching style.

So today, I get to talk with Matt about his story and where his real estate investing and content creation journey has taken him and where he's trying to steer his ship in this ever-changing business environment we're all finding ourselves in.

So Matt, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Matt: Thanks, Seth. I appreciate it. I had no idea that the history went back that far, but it's good to know.

Seth: Yeah, man. I'm sure you've had an impact on a lot of people through Epic Real Estate and just, I mean, I don't know how many millions of views you probably have on your videos, but you've been doing this for longer than most, right?

Matt: Yeah. As far as I know, I think I'm the longest-running real estate investing podcast that's still going. So we started in 2009. I think the only person that was there before me, and he had like 10 different podcasts, was Jason Hartman, but a little bit more like higher level type.

But as far as the how-to and the nitty-gritty and strategy and technique and tactics and stuff like that, I think, yeah, the longest one.

Seth: Yeah. So I don't think I've ever even heard the actual origin story of how you got into real estate and what your journey looked like. like and even like the how and the why behind why you started Epic Real Estate Investing. Can you just like give me the backstory on how that all started?

Mat: Yeah. And thanks for asking. It's been a long time since I've been asked. When I got out of the Marine Corps, I spent the next 14 or 15 years of my life in the music business.

Seth: Oh, really?

Matt: And I did really well for myself.

Seth: What did you do in the music business?

Matt: I had a small hip-hop label, but we had major label distribution. It just happened. I was really blessed and fortunate that people liked what I did and they're willing to pay money for it. It’s very different than how real estate started because there were no goals. There was no discipline. There was just waking up and doing what I loved and I was just really fortunate.

And then, when the digital download came along, it just kind of killed the music. When you make all your money selling CDs and records, you know, it made it kind of tough. And I would say in about six quick months, I had no idea what was happening. I mean, in hindsight, it's crystal clear. But at the time, had no idea and went out of business in like six very fast months, like on the emergence of Napster.

You know, the whole underground music scene, whether it was underground hip-hop or underground rock or underground dance, they embraced that digital download, the technology, far before the mainstream population even knew what it was. So if you fell into one of those genres, then you got wiped out before anyone else even knew what a download was.

Seth: Are there any well-known artists that you signed that I could search for and find?

Matt: Right. Signed? Not really. I mean, Michael Myers was my only artist, but kind of what we did that was a claim to fame was two things.

We made records specifically for disc jockeys, like the battle hip-hop DJs. So we made those instrumental records with all the little scratchy sounds and stuff like that on them.

So we did that and then… As far as I know I'm the first one that did this, but at the time, dance music compilations were really big but then they would like center on a DJ who was like the actual artist or the star of the thing, and then they would mix their music and so they're mixed like legal mixtapes. If you remember what a mixtape was, I don't know how old you are, Seth. But I used to sell those in high school.

Seth: Okay, nice.

Matt: Did you ever have a cassette player? Are you that old?

Seth: Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Matt: Okay. I kind of lost track of where that technology started and stopped.

Seth: All my childhood, it was tapes.

Matt: Very good. And so I just took that same idea from the dance music industry and went over to hip-hop. And so I had the Beat Junkies, their compilation on my label. And they're still going as far as I know today. And they all went off to do other things. And then they all came back together. And they all kind of operate individually and as a group.

And then on our compilations you know I was able to work with you know Jurassic 5 and Eminem and Mos Def, and so all the kind of, not necessarily your mainstrea, I guess. Eminem is mainstream now but he wasn't at the time, no one knew who he was. But I got to work with a lot of artists but never really had anybody signed to me except the one, Michael Myers and another guy named Akbar. But anyway.

Seth: Wow, nice.

Matt: Once we decided that, I don't know how I'm gonna make my way in entertainment because I didn't necessarily have the talent myself. I was a little bit more of the executive type and you know, I produced a lot. But it turned into a, all of a sudden, only the people with the deepest of pockets were going to stick around.

And so I just had to find and do something else. And I went and bagged groceries. I was 34 years old and I was bagging groceries because I didn't know how to do anything else. I didn't have any certifications or degrees or anything. I didn't know what to do, but I had to eat.

Seth: Was that like a low point for you? Like, did you get depressed or anything? I mean, that's a huge fall, right?

Matt: For sure. I mean, when you're in your hometown and you're bagging groceries at the local grocery store and your high school girlfriend comes through the line, you're like a paper plastic man. You know what I mean?

Seth: Ouch.

Matt: That one hurt that day for sure. But yeah, you know, 34 years old and taking my lunch breaks with 16 year olds was kind of very humbling, for sure. And so did a lot of complaining, you know, blaming everybody and everything for my situation. Life was unfair and poor me for about six months and I finally realized, wow, if I don't do something, this might be my future and I don't want that.

And I became kind of close with the grocery store manager who was also 34 years old. Coincidentally, you know, he was managing the place and I was pushing the shopping carts. He was only two years away. This was the big eye opener. And this is like kind of really like the launching ground and the foundation of everything I'm about today.

And he'd been there for 18 years. He started there bagging groceries just like me, but he started when he was 16. He was two years away from being there 20 years. And he was going to be able to withdraw, I think, 70% of his pension. For indefinitely. I mean, he stayed there for 30, he could get a hundred percent, but he was going to go ahead and take that then.

But he pulled me aside and he showed me, and he used to have a photo album. Do you know what photo albums are?

Seth: Oh yeah.

Matt: Okay. All right. It's funny. I have assistants and interns. They have no idea what I'm talking about sometimes. And that makes me feel really old. I must be kind of out of touch with the young ones too.

I told one that I was the other day, I was like, yeah, I used to sell compact discs. And she was like, what's that? I said, you know, CDs. She goes, oh, I didn't know that's what that stood for.

Seth: You know, I actually had a moment like this last year. I was talking to somebody, I think he was like 23 or something. And I don't know how this came up, but we mentioned Ricky Martin. Like, I remember back in high school when Ricky Martin was a big deal?

This kid's like, who's Ricky Martin? What are you talking about? I was like, are you serious? No way. But I guess it kind of made sense. I mean, he hasn't been a big deal for a long time.

Matt: For a very long time. That's right. So he had showed me a photo album and he had like, I don't know, it was three or four multiple angles of it, but lots of pictures. But of three or four different apartment buildings he had been able to amass along the way while he worked at the grocery store.

And he shared with me how the passive income from his apartment buildings will surpass the pension that he's going to receive. And so he was retired at the age of 38.

And he told me these words. And these words, I've said them a million times. If you've listened to the show, you've heard them at least 10 times. But he shared these words with me. And it's just been the foundation of my whole existence ever since when he said, “You know, Matt. If you really want your money back, if you really miss your money,” and I really did because, you know, I made my million before I was 30 years old. And he said, “real estate is the final frontier where the average person has a legitimate shot at creating real wealth.”

And I was like, the final frontier? This is the last one? He says, “Yeah, unless you can know you've got an amazing three pointer and can jump three feet or, you know, swing a baseball bat better than anybody or whatever.”

But he basically just kind of broke it down. You've got to be super talented. Or you have to have an amazing business idea. You have to be an inventor. You got to be a writer. You got to be a composer. You got to have a gift for sports. But for the average person, real estate is where their best shot is at getting wealthy.

And I was like, wow, at this point in my life, I feel far below average. So who am I to aspire above average? So I took it on and I did what I thought the logical thing to do was I went out and got my my real estate license.

And I did okay. You know, I got rookie of the year in my office the first year and then it just kind of settled down. And I lived in an area where I was very blessed. It was the million-dollar homes. So I only had to sell one of those things every other month to make a really, really good living.

And, but there was one Saturday where I was meeting with a client and I had two good clients, really good clients. They just did repeat business. They gave me business over and over and over again. I didn't have to work for it. Once that relationship was established. They just gave it to me.

And there was a Saturday. I was all dressed up in a suit and tie. I remember it specifically as in Palos Verdes, California, at the top of the hill of Palos Verdes. And I was in a suit and tie at 10:30 in the morning. They were supposed to be there. They didn't show up until about 11. And they came in, they signed all the paperwork. I had all their papers out and everything, coffee and snacks and everything for them to sign the paper. They were closing a bunch of deals.

And they came in 20 minutes late in jeans and a T-shirt, signed all the documents and took off for the day. And then I was left there to finish up the paperwork. And then I had to go hold their properties open. And I was like, you know what? Real estate's been good to me. But if this is where the money's at, I'm sitting on the wrong side of the desk.

And so that was like my breaking point where I was like, okay, no longer am I going to represent other people in their sales and their transactions. I'm going to act on my own behalf. I'm going to buy and sell myself. But I had no idea how to do it.

So I went and made a huge investment, like so many people do in their investing education. I think I paid $22,000. And back then, my family thought I was absolutely insane. That was unheard of. I remember my grandma, she's like, well, you're going to get like a degree or something, right? A certificate? And I was like, no.

She goes, well, do they have a good job placement program? I remember her asking me all these questions. And I was like, no, I'm going to go be my own boss. I'm going to do this all by myself.

So that's how that transition started. That's how I got into real estate. It really was for the money, but then it really became that whole moment of this guy, the grocery store manager. He was able to recreate in parallel to his day job's pension an income that far exceeded it and did it inside of 18 years.

And most people strive for 40 years and can't do that through the traditional means. I was like, you know what? No one ever taught this to me. This is a brand new thing, idea to me. And gosh, if I didn't just luckily end up bagging groceries, I still might not ever know. So I was like, okay, this is what I'm going to do. And that kind of became my, I mean, sure, I got into real estate for the money, but then it became a little bit of a passion of mine to actually share what I had learned.

Seth: Yeah, it's interesting. You talk about what if you had never started bagging groceries and had that revelation and heard all that? It makes me wonder, I have a feeling a lot of people are in that situation and hear about it, but they just kind of blow it off or dismiss it. Or it's like, no, it's not real.

And man, I even think about myself, like how many business ideas have I heard about that maybe were real, but I just blew it off and dismissed it. And it's a good reminder. Like it comes down to action, but I guess also being able to tell, okay, this is a real legitimate thing versus now this is not worth my time.

Matt: Yeah. But this guy, I had evidence staring me right in the face.

Seth: Yeah. I'm sure that helped.

Matt: And he was my age and he was done and I was just starting over. And that was, it really hit me emotionally.

Seth: For sure. So did you start trying to get apartment buildings like he did? Or did you go after houses? You're like, what was your first step after you paid 22 grand?

Matt: As much money as I made in real estate, I spent it as fast as I made it. So I didn't have any capital and having, you know, left the music business, I had to file bankruptcy there. And, you know, my wife left me with all of her debt and, you know, she didn't like it that I didn't have a job anymore, basically. And I was no longer a celebrity, a music celebrity.

So I was really drawn. I got really lucky. The program I chose... It's not around anymore, but it was kind of like a buffet. You got to learn whatever you wanted to learn. It was a two-year program. You go out to Glendale, Arizona and, you just kind of walked up and down the halls and okay, they got wholesaling over here and they got short sales over there. And then there's legal strategies here. And I just kind of walked up and down.

And so I was really drawn to the creative acquisitions class. And because I had to go there because that's what my resources allowed me to do. And I just really embraced that and got really good at it. And went into single-family houses and buying stuff subject to and seller financing and built a portfolio, got it to over 350 units at one time.

I was completely unlendable from a bank standards the whole time. And that's what I was able to build just with that. And then when I started getting money, I was like, well, why would I go to a bank? I don't need their money. I know how to do this myself. So it was really a blessing to be able to start with really no money at all.

Seth: Wow. So you bought a lot of these properties or maybe all of them with owner financing where the person sold them to you on installments?

Matt: It was either owner financing, subject to, private money, a combination of the three. So those are my three main tools.

Seth: Okay. Gotcha. Like a hard money lender or you had a rich uncle who would partner with you or something?

Matt: Friends and family. Friends and family. Yep.

Seth: Cool.

And just people that I I would meet. I met a lot of people at my RIA clubs. What's funny about RIA clubs is that, when you're going in there as a newbie, you're like kind of in awe. I haven't been to one in a while, but there were like 100 people every time I went.

And I just look at all these people like, oh, my God, these people are all real estate experts. Look at all this stuff that they're doing and blah, blah, blah. And then once you do one deal and you tell somebody about it, all of a sudden the crowd starts to gather. And all of a sudden, you find yourself holding court explaining how you did this one deal. And then you realize nobody in there knows what they're doing.

Becoming an expert attracts money, buyers, sellers, partners, investors.And so once you do a few deals, you become the de facto expert because no one else has done just a couple of deals. And what that does is it attracts a lot of money. It attracts buyers, attracts sellers, it attracts partners, it attracts investors.

And, you know, a lot of those people have money and they want to put it to work, but they don't know how. So they cling onto the people that are actually doing it. So that's, that was a big launching ground too, as far as the private money goes.

Seth: Wow. So just out of curiosity, the owner owner financing piece, what percentage of your deals would you say you got that way versus subject to or private money?

Matt: They almost all started with seller financing. So I would say probably 70%, 75% of them were all seller financing.

Seth: Okay. What was a typical structure? How would you explain it to them or get people to go along with that versus just wanting cash? Like what was their motivation for saying, yeah, I'll do that?

Matt: Good question. Beause when I first started doing it and I see a lot of people do still do this today is when I first heard about how, in seller financing, the seller could step in and be the bank, I was like, that got me all revved up and raring to go. So I would just go to my sales appointments and present that right away. And lots of rejection when you do it that way.

And then over time, I started to learn that, okay, so there's this other guy down there a couple couple of years later, he said, you know, Matt, we buy, we're real estate investors. We buy properties in one of two ways. It's either our price in the seller's terms or the seller's price in our terms. You only need to get control of one of them. And, what you need to understand is, it's easier to go for the terms because the seller doesn't really understand anything but price.

So that was the big pivotal moment for me when he said, when you go in, you have to talk price because that's all they understand. They didn't go to some educational program and learn how to sell creatively.

So when you walk in and they're in some sort of distress and you start presenting all these creative things, you sound like a scammer. You sound like someone's trying to steal their property. You sound like they're trying to pull the wool over someone's eyes and doing something that's illegal.

So you just always have to go through the price. And then, if you reach an impasse when discussing price, then you go, well, I might be able to give you a little bit more. If I could give you some money now and the rest later, how much do you actually need right now?

And that was always the transition. And I still use that exact line today. And once they give you an answer, now you've dialed in, you've closed for the down payment, so to speak. Now you just have to decide how you're going to pay the balance. And that's typically in payments.

Seth: Yeah. So is there some kind of, you know, once you get to that point where you wrote the subject of payments, that kind of thing. Is there a standard set of terms that you default to? Like five years, this percent interest, this down payment, or is it like there is no standard? You just figure out what they want and tailor it to that?

Matt: So my default, my go-to, like I always want them to tell me what they want, right? But if you ask them what they want, they don't have an answer. So you have to kind of feed it to them and let them and help them figure it out.

But it'll always be, once they give me the down payment, I'll say, okay, well, you know, most people that everyone else I work with, but they allow me to pay the balance in 300 equal monthly payments. Are you okay with that? And they almost never are. Oh, no, that's too long. It's 27 years. I'll be dead by then. I've heard that a million times.

And I was like, okay, well, how many payments would be acceptable? And now I can go from there. But I planted the anchor with 300, which I wouldn't get, I think it's 27-something years. And I also didn't, if I say 300 equal monthly payments, I'm also starting at zero interest too.

Seth: Do you say that or is that just kind of the underlying assumption?

Matt: No, just 300 equal monthly payments until the balance is paid off. So I didn't introduce interest at all.

Seth: As far as the down payment, is that just whatever they say they need now or do you have a standard down payment that you try to shoot for?

Matt: As little as possible always, right? You always want as long a time as possible and as little down money as possible. And if they say they need a half, then it's like, okay, well, what are the payments going to be? And what is that ROI going to calculate to? And now that gives me a number of what, how much I can go pay a private money person for. You know what I mean?

So that's how I do it. If they wanted a big, giant chunk of money down, then my payments are going to be really small and drawn out.

Seth: Sure.

Matt: And it's like, well, if that's too small, well, I'd be happy to raise them up for you, but what can you do for me on the down payment? And so it would just be like this little seesaw balancing act until we met someplace where it was a good deal for both of us.

Seth: Of all of these people that you've talked to with seller financing, I mean, obviously it sounds like it's worked out plenty of times, but what percentage of the time is it just like, no, we're not doing seller financing versus, yeah, we'll consider that.

Matt: I wish I was tracking that. I've gotten to the point where I just don't pay attention to the no's. I'm just looking for the yes-es. Most people don't like the payments idea. I just don't have a number. I mean, it's obviously just buying properties at a discount, period. Or it’s going to be a low number, right? I mean, one out of 10, you are knocking it out of the park.

Seth: The reason I asked that percentage of people to say yes to that is because I've heard people say that when they're trying to go down this self-financing path, it's usually like 20% to 25% of people will say yes, and the rest are just no. But that probably has a lot to do with other factors too. Like how well they're explaining it and how flexible they're willing to be on the terms and all this stuff. So I was just curious if you had any wild guess.

Matt: I would imagine my conversion rate is better than most just because I break it down. Like I don't say, well, how about you carry back the financing for me? Or I want you to do a seller carryback, or why don't I take over your payment subject too?

But I'll just say, hey, how much money do you need right now? Great, then I'll give you the rest later. Is that okay? So I remove all the jargon from it. So it is easy to understand.

So I think my conversion rate is probably better than most.

Seth: Yeah, that's actually huge. Being able to speak it in ways that are easy for an eighth grader to understand. There's a lot of people that can't do that. I feel like the smarter you get, the harder it is for people to be relatable like that.

I was just talking to somebody yesterday who was going on and on about all this stuff. I just didn't understand what he was talking about and it really hurt our communication. I feel very disconnected from what he was trying to explain to me. So yeah, it's a good, good point.

Matt: It's so true. I mean, and I've gone through where I didn't know anything and I was successful. And then I started to know a little bit of something and started to feel like I might have been a little too big for my britches and would get in my own way. And then I had to just dumb myself down again.

And, you know, when I have clients come through now with our program, they're all nervous and scared. And I said, good, don't let that go. Hold on to that for as long as you possibly can, because it's when you're the least threatening when you're the most dangerous. And so I've learned to actually play that role now.

Seth: Interesting. So of those three, seller financing, subject to, and private money, is your preference to go with seller financing?

Matt: Seller financing is always the preferred option for deals.

Seth: Like if you could always have your pick, is that what you would go with?

Matt: Always, always. As long as it cash flows and it produces an ROI, I'd rather do that every single time. I mean, I wish I would have gotten a few more loans when the rates were down at 2.5%, 3%. I wouldn't mind some more of those. But yeah, the seller financing is always the way to go for me

Seth: Yeah. So did you always stick to residential units or did you ever do anything else or how'd that go?

Matt: I dabbled in three different apartment buildings in Memphis and I screwed all three of those up.

Seth: What went wrong?

Matt: I got them really, really cheap. They needed a lot of rehab and managing a big rehab from Los Angeles and going halfway across the country to Memphis. I just couldn't keep my eye on the prize, you know what I mean? So I delegated too much. Didn't even delegate. I abdicated.

I said, here's the money, go fix it. And then I just trusted that it would get done. And it didn't. And so I would never do that again. But I did it three times, like all within the same year. And I said, okay, let's stop doing that.

Seth: Of those houses that you bought with seller financing, you're subject to private money. Were these ever requiring like full rehabs where you had to get a general contractor and fix the whole thing up because it was a piece of junk? Or were they just kind of ready to go where they didn't take a lot of work?

Matt: Both, but mostly needed rehab.

Seth: Okay.

Matt: Most of the time, if it needed too much rehab, it turned into a wholesale flip for me. So my intent was always to hold the property until I decided that I didn't want to. And usually one of the deciding factors is if it needed too much rehab.

Seth: And one more question about that seller financing. So under what conditions, if you got down that track of the seller seriously considering this, under what conditions would you say, no, like this isn't going to work? Is it just if it didn't cashflow, or was there like a minimum amount of cashflow you needed? Or like, if they wanted a balloon in three years, was that a deal killer? What did the box have to look like for it to work?

Matt: First and foremost, it had to cash flow. That was a must. If I'm not making a giant equity position or if I'm not making a stream of income, it's not a deal for me. So that's the first thing.

Second thing, if I'm going to hold on to it, then I have to have property management in the area that can get the property to perform. That's going to be more vital to your success than anything else, in my opinion, is having good property management that can screen tenants and can collect money and keep the maintenance down low and all that.

So that was always those two things—you know, those were the deal breakers.

Now, when it goes from there, it's a give and take on what the equity position is and what the cash flow position is.

Here's a good example. I mean, I'm always looking for the cash flow, right? But when I moved here to Vegas, I got a couple properties here that don't really cash flow at all. But they are the nicest properties in my portfolio.

And from what I've learned over the years in managing property managers that are managing my properties is that sometimes the nicer houses with the lower ROI are a better experience than when you go into a lower income area that has an amazing ROI. At the end of the day, what actually performs in real life is typically the nicer properties.

So I made that shift about four or five years ago and started really just focusing on much nicer properties and okay, like I don't need the cashflow to live. So cashflow hasn't been that much of a focus, although it's important. I don't want to carry a bunch of negative stuff, but that's just kind of an example of that.

There's so many variables and there's kind of a wide spectrum and it kind of depends on what does the deal present. And then second thing is what do you actually need at that time? Do I need cash to replenish my marketing budget or make payroll or am I cool there? And I can just keep adding to my portfolio and adding cash flow.

Seth: Another question I had was on the cash flow piece. Was there any kind of ratio either back then or now with the nicer properties you have where it's like, if I've got this much equity tied up in it, it needs to make this much per month in cash flow?

Like if you've got a million dollar property making you 25 bucks a month, I'm assuming that's probably the juice isn't worth the squeeze. So like, is there a minimum threshold?

Matt: I didn't have a strict box, no. But kind of what I would go for if I could get somewhere between a 10% and 15% cash-on-cash return, then I knew I could borrow the down payment and pay somewhere between six and eight and create an infinite return. So that was kind of like my minimum income.

Even though it wasn't written down anywhere that in my mindset, I was like, gosh, if I can get between 10% and 15% cash-on-cash, then I know I can pay somewhere between 6% and 8% for the private money and my private money pool would be more than happy with that. Because I only need 10 grand here and 50 grand there for those down payments.

Seth: Yeah. It sounds like you're clearly not afraid of hard work. Trying to think of, why do you think you were able to do so well and continue to do so well and all the different things?

I mean, you've succeeded in multiple domains, you know, the music business, real estate, education. Like, why is that? Why doesn't everybody succeed like this, like you do? Is it because you're not afraid to get on the phone and just talk to people and wheel and deal and negotiate, whereas other people might be scared or timid or shy? What do you think your unfair advantage is?

Matt: I think I'm very clear. I don't want to struggle, right? I don't want to just get by. I don't want to be mediocre. So that's inside of me. So I want more than average, first.

And I think second is if I don't go get it, who else will? I think those are probably the two things. Like no one's going to do it for me. And apparently today that does make me a little bit of an anomaly.

It seems like you pay attention to social media and you start reading the comments underneath. It's just like, wow. You know, one of the big comments that I heard, things I see all the time and hear all the time is when I talk about rental property and people say, yeah, but then you got to deal with tenants.

I was like, okay, so here's the trade off. I can spend four hours a month managing my property managers and deal with a bad tenant every once in a while. Or I can report to a boss for the next 40 years. You're telling me that sounds better? Because I feel that mindset a lot out there. Like that's the trade-off. Like you're going to say, no, real estate sucks. You're a loser and you're a con man and blah, blah, blah. And you're an idiot and you're irresponsible. And how dare you teach this to people? Because everyone's going to lose.

I'm just like, wow, is that really, that's really what people's mindset is when it comes to income property. They think they're going to mess up with every single tenant's going to be terrible for them.

And then they think, oh, there's the other one. If the water heater goes out, there goes your whole years of cash flow. Like I hear that all the time. And that's a reason not to do it. I was like, yeah, but I got the appreciation. I got the depreciation. And the tenant is still buying the property for me. And then whatever improvements go on, I just adjust my cost basis.

And it's beautiful. There's no other investment class that allows you to do all this stuff. And people hear just one thing and they're like, oh, no. And they walk away with the wrong lesson. And that's a shame.

Seth: Yeah, that is a shame. Well, I'm actually curious. So when you rewind the clock from when you're 34 and you're bagging groceries, to then you make this decision, you get your education, you start going down the real estate track as an investor, not just an agent. So how long did it take you from the day you started doing that to the point where you had more than enough properties to give you the cash flow to give you a much better life? I get that's kind of an open-ended question.

Matt: No, it's fine. Just under four years, about three and a half years.

Seth: Okay. So I guess you were working as an agent as you were buying these properties and building up that cash flow?

Matt: No, those two things did not run parallel for more than six months. So I was exclusively an agent, did not own anything. And then I made the transition. I started owning and I stopped being an agent altogether.

Seth: Okay. So during that runway up to that four-year period, were you still bagging groceries to live off of that? Or how were you supporting yourself?

Matt: Kind of what I said. I did the marketing. I did almost all networking, though. I mean, it was almost all face-to-face. And I mean, I didn't know people would respond to postcards back then. I thought that was ridiculous. Who would send that trash?

God, if I only knew then what I know now, I would have sent twice. I would have gone overboard on postcards back then. I had no idea they were working so well. But my intent was always to hold the property. But I ended up flipping a lot.

Seth: Oh, I see.

Matt: Did you know Matt Owens over at Owens Capital Group?

Seth: I don't think I do.

Matt: He's in Redondo Beach. And he had a big turnkey operation before I even knew what turnkey was. And I would go out to all the REIA groups. I would go to the Chamber of Commerce and all the little networking parties and I would sell his properties for him.

I got by doing that and he paid me 3,500 bucks for every turnkey property. And so I just went out and looked for busy professionals and brought them to his doorstep and I got commissions for that. So that paid a lot of bills for a long time.

Seth: So you got up to 300 units at some point, and then did you you decide to like start selling those off? And at what point did you decide, Hey, I should get into the education part of this business and do that. What made you realize early on that you'd be good at that?

Matt: All right. So that's a good question. I had no intention of ever becoming an educator in the beginning. I went to a rah-rah seminar. I was in one of those little pyramid multi-level marketing things for men.

And they were just like, well, loaded you up with all the personal development stuff. And they'd always have speakers. And there was one guy there. And this is right when I was just getting started in real estate.

And he said, you know, the wealthiest people in the world, they have one thing in common. How they make all their money is they get really good at something and then create multiple streams of income from that one thing that they're really good at.

And he says, most of the time, it ends up as being a consultant, a teacher, a tutor, or something like that. And so I heard that. Oh, okay. Well, maybe I'll teach one day. Let me get some more transactions under my belt. Maybe that's a possibility.

And I've always been the perennial opportunity seeker. And I got invited to this one thing. And this was when I was brand new. The internet was brand new. And someone went to this little workshop on membership websites. I was so blown away because I was receiving passive income from real estate. And now I want to diversify and get passive income from another source.

And so now I kind of put those two things together and went, well, maybe I could put some little videos together, put them inside this membership website, have another stream of passive income. So that's how it really started; it was the desire for another stream of passive income.

So we did that. And, you know, I sold it for, I think a hundred bucks a month or something like that. And we had probably a hundred people in there. And so that was kind of like, okay, well, hey, that's money. I don't really have to work on it. It's all automated, they can watch the videos.

And one day I walked into the house and Mercedes said, hey, I got you a coaching client. I was like, what's a coaching client? What do I have to do? And I said, I don't want to do that. I just want this passive income thing. I don't want to talk to people. I just want this to be this passive thing.

She said, well, he's already wired the money, so you've got to do it.

And so that was kind of where it started and he turned out to be wildly successful, that very first client. And I think I got kind of hooked on living vicariously through him and recognizing something I knew had value to other people besides myself.

And then we put out and sent out a little email, hey, who else wants to do this? And gosh, that was when you could send out an email and he had 30 new clients by noon. And that's kind of how it started.

Seth: I'm actually curious, how do you split your time between this education side and then the actual transacting of real estate deals yourself? I know this is something everybody who's a real estate investor and teaches about that has to figure out how to balance.

Is there some kind of organized structure where it's like, okay, I'm going to spend this day doing this and these other days doing this, or does it just kind of change from week to week? How do you make that happen?

Matt: Yeah, that was a big, big problem in the beginning because I would sell this thing that was like for 12 weeks, an hour of a phone call a week for 12 weeks. And then guess what happens when you get to 40 clients. Like that's all you do all day long and there is no time for anything else. I was like, okay, this is insanity.

I remember the year, it was 2014 or 2015. I would give all that money back to have that year back because all I did was stay on the phone for these little consultations. But what I did is I moved everything to a group structure. And so on Thursdays, there's a group call.

So it originally started off, I just work an hour a week now and service the same people and get the same results. And then I gave them access to me via the free app on your phone, Voxer. If they had deals to look at and they needed explaining of complex things, then they would come to the group call and I would do it then.

But if they had a quick question or two that I could just answer really quickly and get them going again, then that's what they would use Voxer for.

And that changed everything. All of a sudden, it became almost a lifestyle business. And now I had six and a half days a week now open to continue my real estate investing.

Seth: That's a great idea. Yeah, it makes sense to batch things like that. Is that still how it works today, that kind of group format?

Matt: Yeah. I mean, Thursdays are dedicated to my coaching. So there's like a few calls now that I do on Thursdays, depending on what experience level that the student is in. And then, yeah, the other six days are freed open for me to take the real estate calls.

Seth: Do people ever give you crap about being an educator at all? Like if you can really do this…

Matt: I’m just gonna say yes, I don't know what people give me crap all the time.

Seth: I mean, is that like a thing that you ever encounter?

Matt: The new word I keep hearing is grifter. Go ahead.

Seth: I mean, is that a thing you ever encounter where people like almost looked at you with a skeptical eye? Like, OK, how are you trying to scam me or something? You're not real because you're teaching stuff instead of doing it. Or is that a you ever deal with that or not really?

Matt: Yeah, it comes up particularly in the comments. Right. I do remember the day where someone said just another stinking guru. And I was like, guru? Is that what I am? Like, all of a sudden, it was like the first time anyone ever called me a guru.

And I was like, oh, wow, that's weird. I didn't know I was a guru. I thought I was just kind of, you know, helping people and being a facilitator of this online education. I didn't realize I was a guru.

But you get that. But weirdly, I've had people come through here. And after we've had some time together, I said, you know, Matt, I'm glad I came here and I'm glad I chose you. But, you know, I was actually more skeptical that I couldn't find anything negative about you on the iternet. I would rather have found something, maybe one or two people that kind of had an issue.

And so I've had it both ways, you know, to where people, they have negative things to say and there's nothing negative about me that has been said. Who knows?

Seth: Yeah.

Matt: If that's who they are, then they're just not the right fit to work together.

Seth: Sure. Yeah, I was listening to this interview between Jordan Peterson and Oliver Anthony. You know who he is, Oliver Anthony?

Matt: Oh, he's the singer guy, the country guy, right?

Seth: Yeah, he kind of just came out of nowhere. Yeah, so he put a video on YouTube and it blew up. Now he's got all these opportunities coming his way.

And as Jordan Peterson was interviewing Oliver Anthony, Oliver was saying like, yeah, I don't really want to sell out or I don't want to just sign this huge record deal. Almost like it was a questionably immoral judgment to do that, to just take a bunch of money and do that.

But Jordan Peterson had some kind of interesting thoughts on that. He was saying, you know, a lot of people who criticize others for selling out are people who have never really had the opportunity to sell out because they don't really have the opportunity. So they kind of look down on other people who do.

And also like, if you do take those opportunities to get more exposure, spread your message, and seen by more people, inevitably, you're going to get a lot more feedback, which is going to give you more information on how you can be doing things different and better as opposed to just working in a silo and just putting your head down and doing your own thing.

So there's actually a lot of upside to getting bigger, so to speak. And I know it's not necessarily this evil move or selfish move to do that, even though there might be obviously self-interest in that. There's a lot of good things that can come from leveraging the internet and getting your message out there.

So i thought that was interesting.

Matt: That's a pretty common viewpoint, I'm not surprised Oliver Anthony had that position. That's a pretty common viewpoint inside the music industry, because it's such an artsy thing that people feel once you do it for money you lose your your edge, you lose the artistic aspect of it. So I had that, I experienced that all the time in the music business. It was tough to work with people that weren't motivated by money. It's like you're a brilliant artist, I want you to be on my label. What do I got to do to to lure you over here so I can work with you?

And I think there's a lot of me that way as well early on. But I think the older you get, you realize how society works, you know, and the way that money serves our society. There's nothing that replaces it the way that it serves us. It puts food in our stomach. It puts the roof over our head, the clothes on our back. It pays the hospital bills. And it allows us to do all of those things for the people that we love. And if you don't have money, you can't do that.

So I think the older I get, the more I think you have an obligation to make as much money as you possibly can. If you want to really live a fulfilling life in a society that we live on this planet, because that's just how society works and you don't need money to be happy for sure. Like I've never wanted to debate people on that because that's kind of silly debate in my opinion, but boy, life is a whole lot better when you got it. I'd rather be sad with money than sad without it.

Seth: Yeah. No, I hear you. I'm with you. So you were talking earlier about, you wish you knew that like postcards worked as well as they did and that kind of thing. Maybe, I wonder, when you think of all the stuff you've learned in all the businesses you've taken part in, is there a most important lesson you've learned that you wish you knew when you started that you know now?

Matt: Gosh, there's a few of them, but the one thing that comes to mind right away, and I was just at a Christmas party. And they asked like if you could go back and tell your younger self—one of the questions, the table topics, that they surrounded on the table was—if you go back and give one piece of advice to your younger self what would it be?

And immediately it came to me was don't be afraid of the zeros. Meaning, it takes no more work to flip a hundred-thousand dollar house than it does a million-dollar house.

And in the beginning, being from Los Angeles and, you know, I think the median price in Los Angeles at that time was $350,000, $400,000, something like that. But when I made my first trip to Memphis and saw that houses were 50 grand, I got so excited and my confidence just went through the roof. And that's when I really started to succeed.

But looking back, I could have done the exact same thing in Los Angeles with the exact same work, the exact same processes, the exact same steps, the exact same conversations, everything, and made 10 times the money.

So I would go back in and that would be one thing. One lesson was like, just don't be afraid of the zeros. That's because as a big thing, a big number attached to it doesn't make it more difficult or scarier.

Seth: Why do you think we are more afraid of the zeros? Like, I think I am to some extent. And you're right. I mean, I don't know why. It doesn't make a logical sense. I don't know if I'm thinking somehow there's a bigger consequence if I screw this up versus a small deal when, either way, I'd be kind of screwed. So I don't know. But what do you think is going on with people's heads?

Matt: There's one paradigm shift that I had that really kind of changed everything for me. And it just removed that fear altogether. In fact, it almost reversed it. It’s when you don't have any money, you think that's the hard part, right? You think, like, I got to want to put an offer on a million-dollar house, where would I possibly get that money?

Even if they said, here's a 5% down payment and I still need 50 grand to make that happen, right? So that will hold a lot of people back from even writing an offer, let alone getting into the deal.

But the operative word being “deal,” if that 50 grand down is going to produce 100 grand profit, then you must put it under contract or else that 100 grand profit won't be yours.

And it's not difficult. Like an example I always use when I'm speaking to a group live is that “I have a dollar in my hand. Give me 50 cents and I'll give you the dollar.” That would be no problem for everyone to do. People do that trade all day long. Right? And so that kind of connects. So that's how you kind of look at a deal is that I have 50 cents that's worth a dollar to somebody.

And if you have that, then you want to get as much control as many of those as possible. And the same thing will go is like I have a hundred dollar bill, do you have 50 bucks, so that you'll trade me for it. Now we just added some more zeros to that and the answer is still a resounding hell yeah. And if it was a million bucks and do you have 500,000 for it, it'll be like, no, but I’m gonna go find it because that's a quick half a million dollars I could make right now. So that was a huge paradigm shift that has me no longer afraid of the zeros.

Then also, when you start playing that way, you start to recognize, wow, it's actually a lot easier to raise a couple million bucks than it is 50,000. If the exchange is there, right, if the dynamic of the deal is still there, it's much easier to find that money because for $50,000, someone's going to get 10% on that in return. And they're like, eh, that's like no money. It's probably even worth writing up the paperwork and signing the docs.

But hey, if I could put a million bucks out there and I can get 10% on it, then now you capture actually not necessarily more people's attention, but you get more serious attention and consideration from the people you do share it with.

Seth: Oh, that's a great illustration. I love that.

It sounds like things have gone resoundingly well for you as a real estate investor. Have things ever not gone well? Like have you had any horror stories or deals that fell apart or things gone really, really bad or anything like that?

Matt: Well, all of my multifamily ventures have really gone bad and I tried to do them from afar and they were major. I just bit off more than I could chew. They were big projects.

Seth: Does that mean like you lost money on them or something, or it was just a waste of time or how'd they go bad?

Matt: The one I got out by the skin of my teeth and broke even and was able to get all of my investors their money back. And I actually had to sell that with seller financing just to, so I could at least get my price. So that was okay.

Another one, yeah, I probably lost about 50 grand of my own money. But then there's another at the same time, and these three all happened relatively in the same time in relatively the same area.

Then there was another thing. I just bought this building. It's 50 doors and it's just a brick building and they were all gutted. Like every single unit had to be redone. And I got that for $1,000 a door. And I was like, well, hell yeah, just take it. We'll figure out what to do with it later. And I held onto that for a year and just paid the property tax.

And I'm finally just like, you know what? I'm never going to get to this. And now I've got these open wounds from these last two multifamilies. And I sold that one for $2,000 a door.

So that was actually a great day. But I haven't ventured back into multifamily since. But those were my disasters. And I'll do it again. But now that I'm local here in Vegas, I just told Mercedes last night, I was like, I want to get a multiunit here. We've got to start looking for multiunits here.

Seth: Cool.I mean, you got into buying houses. It was pre-2008, right?

Matt: It was right at 2008, 2007. I got the bug in 2006 when prices and the market were really flourishing. And then that's kind of when I was getting trained and educated.

Matt: Okay. And fortunately, I didn't lose a whole bunch of money like everybody else did around me. And so when the prices came down, now I was armed and ready to go.

Seth: I mean, if you were trying to do that exact same thing, buying those first 300 units or however many you got in those four years, do you think that'd be a lot harder to do right now in this environment in terms of getting people to do seller financing or getting lower prices and that kind of thing? How much of that success do you think was tied to just the time of which you were doing it?

Matt: Well, there was a lot more desperation. So if there's a lot more distress in the market, that makes it a little easier. And the other big difference from then between now is there are just a lot more houses than there were people. So that made it easier.

But, you know, life comes along and kicks everybody in the teeth every once in a while. And it doesn't matter where they're from or what demographic or how much they make a year. So us as real estate investors that exchange equity for peace of mind, there's people every single day that need peace of mind. And they're going to turn to their property for that financial relief and they need it fast and a real estate agent can't handle it. And so I don't think it's remarkably different or more difficult.

Seth: We talked a little bit about some of the harder deals you've done where you didn't come out ahead necessarily. Are there any astoundingly amazing deals that were just grand slams? What do those look like?

Matt: I think my grand slams came at the beginning of COVID, when everyone was kind of like, I mean, the very, very beginning when everyone was kind of panicking, they thought the economy was going to collapse and everyone was predicting the real estate market was going to crash.

And I was able to scoop up quite a bit of properties from people who had just bought turnkeys. I've got all of those with just seller financing. People just want to be out of it. And then we know what happened over the next two or three years as they all doubled and tripled in price in some places.

So that was a whole slew of grand slams just at the time where I was, I just want more cash flow. And if I'm going to get it with seller financing, I don't have to put a bunch of money down and I don't have to get a bank finance. I was like, I'll take them all. Yeah, let's go. This ain't going to last forever.

And so those were my, those were my really, really big wins. Otherwise everything has just been, you know, nice little single-family purchases.

Seth: Yeah. It's interesting. I kind of see with high interest rates, certain sectors of the real estate market slowing down a lot. And I just get excited when I see that stuff.

Are you kind of like that too? Like if people are freaked out, like it was three months after the pandemic hit, when it was like a huge depression for a really short period of time. I mean, that was a cause to get excited. There were tons of of opportunity there.

But it just makes me wonder, is there ever a time when it's appropriate to be scared? Like, oh, things are getting a little too crazy. Watch out.

Matt: Well, I think to justify it, to be really scared, we need a crystal ball because we don't really know what's going to happen next. If you look at right now and I get a lot of disagreement with this, but here's my theory about right now.

There's several dynamics at play that were different from 2008. And everyone says, oh, it's going to be 2008. It's a cycle. It's going to happen all over again.

I was like, well, if it does happen, it's not going to be for the same reason. And it's not going to be for a reason that we've ever experienced before, because the supply and demand has gone to such an imbalance that there's more people at home buying age. Like the millennials are now intersecting with the first time home buyer age. We have more demand for housing than any time in the history of this country. And we're also coming off of a 10-year deficit in building, so right there prices can only go one direction.

The second thing would be the interest rates obviously affect affordability and how available money is, but the prices keep going up. So although a lot of people are hurting, there's a lot of people that are still doing just fine and buying what's left because the inventory is so low.

I think now after the Fed's last little signal and they did not raise rates and then they suggested that they're going to lower them two times in 2024. And just based off of that news, we've seen the biggest decline in mortgage rates in a four-week period than we've seen since 2000, whatever. It's like the fastest drop in 20 years.

And so rates have already come down almost a full point than they were just five weeks ago. And if that's just before they even brought the rates back, so the Fed brings those rates down again, we hit 6.5%, 6%, I think a new bottom has been established and you'll see a bunch more people just because there are that many people to to dive right back in.

And I think that's going to happen in the spring. It's an election year. And the current administration doesn't want to sit there and debate and have to defend their position on the economy if the economy is going good. So I think they're going to do whatever they can to boost the economy.

And I think at that time, because of the supply and demand imbalance, right now, houses are probably as cheap as they're going to be for a very, very long time.

Seth: Well, given that and the whole crystal ball thing, are there any particular pockets of opportunity you think exists right now, just given where things are at?

Matt: I think the pocket of opportunity exists with single-family homes. If you look at Blackrock, it’s on track to own 60% of all single-family homes by 2030. Blackstone just raised, I think it's $40 billion, might be $30 billion, whichever. It doesn't really matter. I guess every billion is just another billion. But they just raised that to compete with Blackrock.

Weirdly that there are ones named Blackrock and ones named Blackstone, but they just did that. And then just two weeks ago, there's a giant press release from Jeff Bezos. Just came out of retirement and started a single-family fund.

Seth: Oh, really? I didn't hear about that.

Matt: So the race is on for single families right now. And I think, you know, as the expression goes, a rising tide lifts all boats.

The opportunity is to own or control as many single families as you possibly can right now. Because over the next few years, if all of those are institutionally owned, those that are privately owned are going to be at a premium.

That's kind of where I think the opportunity is right now.

Seth: Interesting. No, I hadn't even heard about that. I don't really follow the single-family home space that much, which is weird for a real estate investing person, but that's just not my area of focus.

So it's a good lesson in how to stay ahead of things, depending on whatever your strategy or your niche is. Information is powerful. Just being aware of that stuff and what's going on, that can educate your moves in a lot of ways.

Matt: Yep. I mean, do you remember the name Lee? Lee Iacocca?

Seth: Oh, yeah. Was he with Chrysler or something?

Matt: Yeah, he's the one who went in and saved Chrysler. And all he did was look at this type of information and look at demographics and look at where the population is aging. And he just based it off the Baby Boomers.

And when he did that, the Baby Boomers were starting their families. And he's like, okay, so what does this massive portion of our population, what do they need? Well, they need something to transport their families. And he essentially invented the minivan. And so he made that whole decision and it turned out to be a genius move and it brought Chrysler back to life just based off of looking at demographics.

And if you go back and the baby boomers had the same impact on when they were teenagers on Levi Strauss and on the Mustang, and then they had the same impact on Gerber baby food when they were born.

And so we've already seen that happen. And now we have this other bigger bubble, bigger population in a shorter timeframe that were born, being the millennials. They're going to go through and have all the same impact on all the same industries that the Baby Boomers did.

And one of those industries is housing. And right now they've just reached home buying age.

And there was just an article, I think it was in Business Insider last week, because the conception was millennials don't really want to be owners. They just want to rent. They want to be mobile. They want to be loose. And so they've kind of hit the home buying age a little later later because they have totally flipped.

Bank of America just did a whole new poll, new survey on it. And I was like, 70% of all millennials think that's their only chance to ever be wealthy is by buying real estate, but they're scared to death that they're not going to be able to. So I think when these rates come down, there's going to be a frenzy for them to try and get theirs.

Seth: Now that whole thing about Lee Iacocca and just like understanding the general populace and what they may or may not need. Like, how do you do that with confidence? Like what if you made the minivan and it just didn't work? What if that was just a miss, a misunderstanding?

I mean, I feel like we all look at him like a genius because it worked out, but I don't know. What if you made some other kind of weird car that people didn't buy? It's obvious in hindsight, you know?

Matt: Yep. But I mean, it's kind of like when you look at a human's basic needs, if you invest in a human's basic needs, a human's desire for water and food is not going to go away. So that could be a good investment. And the same thing with shelter, unless, you know, just kind of sleeping under the stars actually comes into fashion. And that's never been a thing. We've always had a roof over our heads.

If you're going to make a prediction, I think that's probably the safest prediction you could make. And if you look at Baby Boomers now, they're having a big impact on health care and retirement homes and vacations. And because now they're at an age where that's what they need. And they're having that big an impact on that whole industry. And this is going to happen all over again.

Seth: Have you seen the stuff about how birth rates are plummeting in most first world countries?

Matt: Yep.

Seth: So do you think that plays any role in this? Like, I've even thought about this with self-storage. Like, so it's going great today. But what if the population drops and a bunch of people just don't need storage anymore or whatever it is? I think the U S is in a better position because a lot of people want to emigrate here, which can make up for that loss.

But do you think that has anything, or worth looking at that in any way for the future?

Matt: I mean, I'm going to say absolutely yes. But there is a caveat that I have for it is there is enough people that have already been born to support the housing industry for at least the next 10 years, right? For at least that, probably well into the 20 years. And that's if we didn't add any more people.

But the Census Bureau came out with their report showing that we're having a million new immigrants a year, as you just mentioned. So there's a million new people. And that brings our birth rate slightly above the replenishment value. Forget what the number, I think it's like 1.8 babies average per family to maintain. But with the immigration, integration, it puts us at 1.9 and a half or something, just slightly over.

So as long as that policy remains in place, then I think real estate in any capacity is probably job security for quite a while.

Seth: how do you know all this stuff? Is it like a website you're going to, where it's like, hey tell me stuff I didn't know as a real estate investor? Is it like a ChatGPT thing or how do you stay on top of all these stats?

Matt: It's probably mostly because of the YouTube channel. I got to keep making stuff that's relevant. So I got a bunch of Google news alerts on and I'm always reading and like, what's the interesting thing to talk about today? And so I learned a lot, just kind of de facto being a content creator.

Seth: Well, when you and I were talking earlier this week, we were talking a little bit about AI. What role do you think AI is going to play in the lives of real estate investors in the years to come? Like, do you think it's going to cause a cataclysmic shift in anything or is it just kind of a fun little thing that's going to be around?

Matt: Well, fortunately… Each little AI bot out there doesn't need a house to own, right? So it's this intelligence that doesn't need shelter.

Gosh, you know what? I don't even know if I can make a prediction because it looks like all the experts that were creating AI predicted incorrectly. Have you heard that?

Seth: What were they predicting that wasn't right?

Matt: Well, they were predicting that AI was going to gobble up all the low-paying, menial jobs first. And they thought when it gets to more creative stuff and the stuff where you really need critical thinking and like that, that's probably going to be last in the food chain for AI to go ahead and take over.

But it actually started the exact opposite. It started taking over art. It started taking over music. It started taking over all the critical thing in writing and stuff like that. And, you know, the assembly job, assembly line jobs that we thought was going to take over, those seem to be all be pretty safe right now.

I use AI, like I use the ChatGPT thing almost every single day, probably for 40% of my day. I'm on it because it's so helpful and I'm so much more productive. But where their ideas of that advancement is going, I don't know.

I just saw this reel on the hologram. So they've had these holograms that they could actually literally, you would mistake them for people and they could cast them out anywhere. They've had that for years. The CIA has had this for years. And I don't know if this is true because it was on a reel, but they're pretty good at faking that stuff. But I was just blown away on that technology. And like TVs are just going to go away. Everything's just going to be a hologram show that sits on your desk. And if you don't like it there, you can pick it up and put it over here. And so wait until we have this little hologram sitting on our desk and there's AI attached to it.

Like, I guess, that could be the future, but I don't know what their capabilities are.

Seth: Have you used the ChatGPT Plus app, like the voice thing where you can have a verbal conversation with it?

Matt: I have not. No.

Seth: Dude, you have got to try it. It's nuts.

Matt: Is that on the App Store?

Seth: Yeah. So if you got ChatGPT Plus, do you have that?

Matt: I do, yeah.

Seth: So if you get the app from the App Store and just download the thing and sign in. So right down where you would normally type out your prompt, there's a little set of headphones. And you tap that and you can just start talking to it.

And, um, the voice that comes back to you is stunningly real. It's crazy. It's like, it has like breaths and it says like, um, and like, and he says things that a person would say. And it's like the most realistic thing I've ever heard. And I've heard from people who are using this to practice their calls with motivated sellers. Like they tell ChatGPT to pretend to be a motivated seller and ask challenging questions back.

And I tried this the other day and it was weird. I almost was like getting nervous talking to this chat bot. It's like, you know, starting to sweat a little bit. I was like, wait a minute. This is just a machine. It's okay. Relax, Seth.

But if you're somebody who is a verbal auditory processor and you like to just talk your thoughts instead of writing them out, it's gold. It's an amazing resource.

Matt: I have the app down on my phone. I don't even play though with the voice commands on my phone either though.

Seth: So I don't usually do it either. Like I actually prefer to type stuff out cause I can say what I actually mean. I just think better that way. But yeah, there's a lot of times, especially if you're like driving or something and you just, you just want to be able to talk it out with somebody and it's really good at that.

Matt: No. Interesting. I'm going to check that out.

Seth: Yeah. Well, it's made me think, I mean, if it can talk that real to me and make me feel like I'm talking to a real person, imagine what that means for phone calls and call centers. And I mean, any kind of customer service where people need human contact. I mean, it's not that big of a stretch for this to replace that now, or even like texting and chat bots and all this stuff. Like, I know that stuff exists already, but I feel like that's going to take huge leaps forward.

Matt: Well, I mean, just at the Google conference four years ago, there's a YouTube video. I remember AI calling up and making an appointment for a hairdresser, right? And it had the little breaths. It had a little chuckle. Ha ha, that was a good one or something like that. And so that was four years ago.

So yeah, I mean, I'm sure it's already here. We just don't know which app it exists in at the moment.

Seth: So is there anything you still want to do in your real estate investing career that you haven't done yet? Like do you have any big audacious goals where it's like, yeah, I got to do that, but you haven't been there yet?

Matt: I want more houses. The pandemic wasn't great for my education business. And when you're a live event business and they shut down live events, it kind of kills the business model. And so I sold a lot of my real estate, a lot of units to keep that whole education platform running.

I guess the biggest thing is for me to replenish everything that I sold. And it's focus number one at the moment over the next three or four months, because I think as soon as the rates go down, the prices are going to go up and it's going to be even more difficult to find.

Seth: When you're out finding new houses to buy these days, I don't know how much you're actually buying houses right now, but are you using direct mail? What's your way to find those deals?

Matt: I just released a video on exactly how I'm doing this.

Seth: Oh, cool.

Matt: So it’s on YouTube on the channel.

Seth: I'll find that and I'll link to it and I'll put it in the show notes.

Matt: Okay, cool. First, you have to know, yeah it is direct mail, but it's a very different type of direct mail. And a lot of people don't think direct mail is working and the reason it's not working is because you have thousands, hundreds of thousands of people sending the same direct mail pieces to the same people. And I've been in the appointments and I've seen stacks of postcards on people's desks, like all the letters and correspondence they've received from investors that are trying to get a deal.

And so what's required is first, you got to know who you're looking at or looking to. The second thing is how you got to personalize that communication. You have to get noticed and recognized in that person's mailbox above and beyond what everyone else is selling.

So rather than sending the same thing everybody's sending, you have to send something that nobody is sending.

And so I've gone to a few different direct mail houses that aren't real estate mail houses. And, you know, they send things in bulk that look like birthday cards and special packages and stuff like this and other direct mail stuff, but not necessarily real estate-related. Sure, it costs more, but I don't have to send out as much because it gets recognized, it gets noticed.

And then the message within, this is where I've been using ChatGPT to death because I've got this long, lengthy prompt of what's the ideal thing to say. And this is, in a nutshell, the ideal thing to say to an out-of-state owner of a vacant house that has a tax lien on it, to create a letter or a sequence of correspondence through different mediums. Creating a campaign, so to speak, that's speaking directly to that person's issue. Like that was the only letter I sent out this month was to this person. And that's the experience that they get.

And so that's working really, really well. And I put the step-by-step process on how how to do that.

Doing that and then also the other part where the stats are, and you've probably seen these stats before, the sales stats. But most sales or deals don't happen until after your fifth contact, right? And then most people will quit after their fourth, which is really remarkable because they're three feet from gold and most people quit.

And so I think with the direct mail, how I generate the interest, that works. But how I actually close the deals is with my follow-up sequence that you have to follow up and you have to leverage as many different types of communication and correspondence as you can for that follow-up. And that's what that whole video entails.

But between those two things is, uh, it's working really well. That's still working for me.

Seth: This is the best real estate lead generation strategy for 2024? Is that the one?

Matt: Yeah, that one. Yes.

Seth: Anybody listening to this, go to retipster.com/178. It's in the show notes and I'll have a link to that video here. Or you can just go to Matt's channel, Epic Real Estate on YouTube, and you'll find it there too. But that sounds awesome.

So it makes me wonder if you're able to send out a lot less mail, let's say I've got a list of, I don't know, 5,000 people and I've established, okay, I only have to send out a thousand now because this is going to work a lot better.

Do you have some logic you go through to figure out, okay, these are the 20% that are the lowest hanging fruit, and these are going to be the easiest ones to get. So I should go to these ones, not those other 4,000. Or is it just pick a random thousand from that 5,000 list and go with that?

Matt: Good question. So there's kind of two ways I go about it.

The first way is I try to stack as many of these distressed factors on top of each other as possible. So as I was just saying, if I'm going to send a letter to an absentee owner of a vacant house that has a tax lien on it, that's like three factors of distress.

They're an absentee owner, which means they might be a frustrated landlord. They have a vacant house that's not producing income. And they have a tax lien on it, which is a symptom of potential financial distress.

So I can do that. And so that would produce a certain size list. And then if I added one more thing, I was like, and also it was showing foreclosure activity. If I add that one more factor, then the list gets dramatically smaller, right? And so by adding those factors, that kind of reduces the size of your mailing list just by doing that.

But once you add too many, I mean, you're starting to get these small little micro lists of 20 houses here and 15 houses there and 30 houses with that one. So that's one way. If you can find the right combination that gives you what your number is according to whatever your monthly budget is going to be.

The second one is I use DealEngineer. It's kind of like PropStream, I guess. It has all the data and everything, but it has the predictive analytics. So it has all the same property data that every other software basically has. They pull in their data feeds and there are these aggregators, right?

So it has all the property data, but with the AI, they've been able to add people's data to it as well. And it does these predictive analytics by researching, you know, 40 years of properties sold off the market. What did the people have in common? Not just what did the properties have in common?

So it'll go deep. It's very intrusive. What magazine were they reading? What were their neighbors doing? And who was their neighbor? What was the school system experiencing at the time? What was the crime rate at the time? So it takes all of these different things. And I think it has their credit reports and everything.

And so it takes all of these information points and it creates a predictive score or a sellability score. And then I use that to sort as well. So I kind of go back and forth and create these different lists.

Seth: You go back and forth between PropStream and DealEngineer. Are those the two websites you're using to do this?

Matt: I use primarily DealEngineer and I use this other thing called Seller Sniper. DealEngineer gives me all the data that PropStream has. So I can reduce my list in one of two ways: by either just the factors and see how many that gives me or I can just use the AI and reduce it that way.

Seth: Does DealEngineer actually generate the lists for you as well or does it just tell you this is what these people look like, these things in common?

Matt: Yeah it'll it can generate the list for you because it has a score between between zero and 1000. So anything above 500 is, is at least two times more likely to sell than the stuff below 500. So there, that'll fix and clear up a whole bunch and clear out all the people that aren't going to sell to you at discount right away, just by doing that single one.

Seth: And how long have you been using DealEngineer? Have you used it long enough to know like, yeah, this works, this gets consistent results?

Matt: I'm going on almost two years now.

Seth: Oh, that sounds pretty sweet. I got to check that out.

Matt: I think they have a land thing thing too. I didn't pay for the land plugin, but they have a land upgrade.

Seth: I'm sure I and many others will check that out.

Matt: I think what really makes the marketing work is not necessarily the list and not necessarily what you're sending, but it's like a combination of all of them. So if you can find somebody that has a problem that would be open to sell in their house to solve that problem. That's first of all.

Second of all is standing out in a sea of marketing messages out there. So you got to stand out. If you make it personal and then if you're consistent and then you follow up, I think they all work if you have those elements in your marketing.

Seth: Yeah, I think I have some trust issues with some of these data services because I know kind of, not entirely, but kind of what goes on under the hood. Like there are some counties out there that are just super rural and remote where like the data just doesn't get updated for years on end or at least every quarter. Like, it's just not current.

Whereas in California, it's about as good as it ever gets. I mean it's like almost perfect data they just do such a good job there. I think that's where it all started. ut you know if you go to some place in Timbuktu or North Minnesota, it's like the the data either isn't there or it's going to be really old and these data services aren't going to tell you that.

So, I don't know, it just bugs me because I see them advertised like, yeah we'll show you delinquent tax data and this and that. But I know they don't actually have that data in a lot of counties. And they're not going to tell me when they don't.

But you work in like Las Vegas and more populated markets, right? So you probably don't run into that too much.

Matt: Yeah. So yeah, you're 100% right. I mean, totally.

And then even the data, even if it is updated, and I learned this as a real estate agent, is that that data is entered by someone that's working at minimum wage and who’s just sitting there watching the clock and can't wait to go home. So mistakes get made and they get made frequently, right? So there's that aspect as well.

But, you know, is it is it better than no data at all? That's kind of the question you can ask yourself.

Seth: Well, especially if you've used it and seen it work repeatedly in a certain market. I think that's all I need to know. I mean, you're golden right there.

Matt: Yeah, it's I mean, it's a better starting point than just, you know, sending a letter to every single house in your city.

Seth: Yeah, absolutely.

Matt: And if you did that, you'd need a pretty large budget. If you had the budget, it probably wouldn't be a bad strategy anyway. But if you don't have an unlimited budget, you've got to reduce it and get your list smaller in some way.

And so we just use the tools that give that to us. I subscribe to probably five different of those services. So they have their little strengths and weaknesses on each one of them.

Seth: Yeah, it's nice to have access to a few of them, especially when you know where certain ones shine because you can kind of pick and choose.

Awesome. Well, Matt, I totally appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. It's been great having you on to close this out.

I've got a few final questions that don't have so much to do with real estate. It's more just to understand you as a person.

So first question, curious to hear your answer to this, because I don't get the sense that you have a lot of fears, but what is your biggest fear?

Matt: It's so interesting that you just asked me that question because I was asked that question when I was teaching a class, I was representing somebody else at the time.

I wasn't selling anything of my own in 2009 and they had asked me what do I fear, just what you asked me. And it was that it came out so spontaneously, that I won't be able to buy enough.

Seth: Like buy enough houses?

Matt: Yeah I wouldn't be able to buy enough. And I fear that right now.

Seth: What's enough? I mean, it's interesting to hear you say that. I mean, you strike me as somebody who you're not going to go starving anytime soon. I mean, are you afraid you're going to lose the roof over your head? Why is that fear even there?

Matt: Well, I know that the more that I control, the more that'll be there. I mean, the more that I'll gain from it. And I'm concerned a little bit about the value of the dollar and inflation. And if something were to happen to that, you want income-producing assets that represent a human being's essential need, like housing.

So if the dollar collapses, my house is not worth nothing. It might be worth zero dollars, but it'll be worth chickens and eggs and pelts. You know what I mean? Like whatever we're going to use it for currency next.

And if it goes to a digital currency, or if it goes just to a different currency altogether, or if the yuan comes in and all of a sudden that's our currency, whatever it could happen, the real estate is going to maintain value. You are just going to be paid in a different currency.

And so I guess that's maybe a little bit of a doomsday prepping type thing as well.

Seth: Yeah, that's what a lot of fears are, is doomsday stuff. It's not really rational, but we have those fears anyway. I got plenty of myself.

But that makes me wonder, what if you weren't allowed to buy real estate anymore? Like you can invest in anything else, but you can't do real estate. What do you think you would default to?

Matt: I've become pretty good at marketing. So rather than build something new or invest in something new, I think I would become, I don't know, I guess the simplest term is an affiliate marketer.

So that way, I could be very flexible and mobile and could point my marketing machine at whatever the trend was.

Seth: Yeah, you'd be great at that. Totally.

Matt: Yeah, I think I would do that.

Seth: So what are you most proud of?

Matt: I'm most proud of that I've built this platform that my 12-year-old won't have to take the long route to learn everything that I've learned. And I like that. And I've been able to help a lot of people who have been able to piggyback with their kids off of what I've built as well. And, uh, that's pretty awesome.

Seth: Cool, man. Last question here. So suppose you just had a hundred million dollars wired to your bank account. You don't have to worry about money anymore. You're also not allowed to continue on your current career path. So no more real estate, no more education, none of that.

What would you do for the rest of your life?

Matt: You know, I just have to say the first thing that came to mind, because that's what I've always wanted to be since I was a kid, is I always wanted to be a dolphin trainer at SeaWorld. So I think, I know that's a little bit like, a lot more information has come out about the humanity of, or the inhumanity, according to the animals we hold captive at our amusement parks.

But I think it would be some sort of like a marine biologist or researcher or something like that. One of my favorite shows is with Jeremy Wade on the Animal Channel. And just for him to be able to travel the world to these amazing places and go fishing. Something equivalent to that. I don't like to fish too much, but something equivalent to that is probably what I would do.

Seth: It's great, man. So if people want to find out more about you, what's the best place to go? What website or YouTube channel or what should they do?

Matt: Yeah. Epicrealestate.com will lead to everything that we do. So if you can find your way there, then pick your pleasure from there.

Seth: Cool. And I'll include links to that and Matt's YouTube channel and podcast in the show notes. Again, retipster.com/178.

Thanks everybody for listening. And if you're still here, go ahead and text the word FREE, F-R-E-E, to the number 33777. You can stay up to date on all the stuff going on in the REtipster world.

Thanks again for listening. Thanks, Matt. I'll talk to you next time.

Matt: Thanks, Seth.

Introduction:

“So I offered her 7000, and she was happy about that. I sold it for 45,000. That was an email. And right away I realized it was an opportunity in email, because emails is free. Like, you don't have to pay anybody, just an email.”

That's Meir Shemtov, a land investor who is absolutely crushing it in the land business right now. He has a team of 14 people and he does 10 to 15 deals per month. How does he do it?

“I have this radical idea that bills are paid with dollars and not with percentages. We make money when there's like 20 to 30 grand on the deal.”

In this episode, you'll learn Meir's framework for when and why he can make higher offers than anyone else.

“Why I think we get a lot of the deals that other investors don't is because [beep].”

You'll also learn how Meir uses email to find land deals all over the country, including his four tricks of email marketing.

“You want to have a domain that isn't your actual domain, and you also want to use multiple. Instead of putting an unsubscribe button at the end of your email, you should write [beep].”

You'll also learn how you can take the same $20,000 and instead of doubling your money, you can 10x your money without any additional risk.

“Buy a property for 20 grand and flip it for 40. Sound advice, but how about buy a property for a million, put 20 down, the same 20 grand that you have, and then flip that for 1.5. Now instead of making 20,000 now, you just made $500,000 with your 20 grand!”

And an unexpected twist that you probably won't expect.

How effective is this? Like, is it worthwhile to do this? The answer to that is we're about to dive into all of that and much more right now.

Seth: Hey, everybody, how's it going? This is Seth Williams and Ajay Sharma. You're listening to the REtipster podcast. This is episode 170. And today, we're talking with Meir Shemtov. So, born and raised in Uruguay, Meir moved to the U.S. at 13 years old.

He started his first ecommerce business at 23 and became a partner in a creative retail company and then sold it to WeWork at 25 years old. And then, he launched a co-living startup and then exited that in 2020. And then he launched LotofLand Inc. shortly after that and got into the land business. And Meir has about nine people on his team and he does a lot of double closings and assignments, about ten contracts per month.

And he is passionate about charity and mindfulness. And he turns off all devices for 25 hours per week with no TV or social media at home. And he lives on a farm. And there's a lot of unique things about Meir that we're going to talk about. The way his business works, the volume that he's doing, the sizes of the assignments in, the double closings that he's doing. It's pretty cool stuff. So I think this is going to be a great one.

Meir, welcome to the show. How you doing?

Meir: Thank you, Seth, so much. Thanks for having me, really. This podcast and this community are probably responsible for a lot of my growth, personal growth also, but mainly in the business. I definitely wouldn't have been here without you, without the content that you put out. And I just wanted to say thank you.

And when I started out, it was more about taking as much information as I possibly can. And I think I'm at a point now where I would like to share some of the different tips and tricks with everybody else. So, so excited to be here. I'm so grateful to be in this position and to be here with you guys.

Seth: That's awesome, man. I appreciate the kind words. And, yeah, I'm really glad you decided to do this with us. Looking forward to it.

Meir: Yeah. And shout out to Ajay. Ajay's been good friend, also on the land space, and thanks for the intro as well, and always connecting me with the right people. So thanks, Ajay.

Ajay: I appreciate it, man. I do my best, but you're an easy person to connect with.

Meir: Thanks, man.

Seth: How did you guys get connected, the two of you?

Meir: So I think we first met... So there are some episodes from the REtipster podcast that I've listened to multiple times. Doug Smith's episode was amazing. The episode with Callan Faulkner was really good.

And through Callan, we kind of met with Ajay, and then we flew to Texas. We had a little meetup there, and then Ajay introduced me to a few other, you know, the land community is so amazing. You get to know everyone. Everyone's so giving. Everyone's always sharing resources, and it's not that big. So it's just so much fun to have this community to be a part of, and that's really special.

Seth: Yeah. That is a striking thing about the small size of the land community is that everybody does kind of know each other. Like, if you're at all vocal anywhere about anything, there's a good chance that you're connected to somebody else through at least one or two degrees of separation. So it's kind of cool.

Meir: Yeah.

Seth: So let's start from the very beginning. So when did you first hear about land investing, and what made you decide to give it a shot?

Meir: It's a pretty unique story. A little unconventional, like everything else about me.

So we started, like you mentioned, co-living. That was kind of my foray into real estate. Margins were very thin. The concept was super cool, but it was very much a city, New York, kind of thing. And the time came that we just didn't like living in New York, in the city.

So we moved to the West Coast, and I'm very passionate about hospitality. I love real estate also. Real estate has really good hospitality. Real estate, like short-term rentals, they have really good margins. It's also fun. It's not the typical landlord tenant kind of thing.

So in California, I started looking for land to build a lot of short-term rentals and create, like, an experience. And very quickly, I realized that California is not the place to get permits to do things. It's just a little bit difficult to get anything done, especially in 2020. Things were just closed, and it was just so hard.

And incidentally, I had a brother, my brother Levi, he was buying and selling land. He was just getting started. I think he saw it from his friend was doing it or something. And I'm like, hey, you know how to send mailers, right? He's like, yeah. I’m like, why don't you show me how to send mailers? Because I want to just start buying land to do this thing. So he's like, sure, let's get on the zoom. And he showed me how to do it. And then he's like, I got one request for you. I'm like, yeah, what? He's like, just drop your Airbnb thing and start flipping.

I was like, why? He's like, what do you mean? Because it's so much easier. It's so much fun. The margins are there. You don't need permits. It's just like, why don't you just, let's do one together. And really, credit goes to him. He guided me through it. He was super instrumental at the beginning.

And then I started doing a little bit more reading, more watching, more listening to everything. And I actually remember because he didn't know about the REtipster community. He just kind of started through his friend. And then one day he sends me a link to your website or to your podcast, and he's like, oh, my God, I think I found the OG. His brain was like, oh, my God, I found the guy.

And ever since then, I obviously started listening to every episode, and it was uphill from there. And then slowly, gradually, we started building up the team, and then, thank God, where we are today.

Seth: So when was that, like, what year did this all start for you?

Meir: That was, I think, 2021.

Seth: What did your first year look like? Did you just start sending out mail like everybody else does, or, I guess, what was your volume that first year? Your typical deal size? And when did things start changing for you? Because I know you do things a bit differently than the average course teaches how to do this stuff.

Meir: I would say most courses say to send mail, and I think it's for a good reason. If you're new and you don't have a team, texting is very difficult, and mail is just kind of especially blind offers. They kind of qualify the sellers for you, so there's a lot less work.

So I started with mailers. I started in Joshua Tree, which is kind of where I wanted to do these hospitality retreats. And I was living in LA, so it wasn't so far. And I speak Spanish, my first language, actually. So a lot of the phone calls that were coming in were Spanish-speaking people, and a lot of them lived in LA, so it was just answering the phones I sent out. I don't remember how much mail, but I would go to people's houses to meet with them.

So this one guy was like, I don't know who you are. And it was a good deal. There was like $20,000 profit. So I was like, okay, I know where you live. Why don't we just meet? All this is in Spanish. And he's like, I'm not signing any purchase agreement. I'll just sign the deed. This is when I was at his house, and I didn't know the difference between a purchase agreement and a deed. I'm like, okay, I just need to FaceTime my partner real quick. I just called my brother and, hey, Levi, what should we do here?

So it was very much like that, the first few deals. And then right away, I realized it was an opportunity in email, because I guess I'm a millennial. And this whole concept of sending letters was weird. So I started sending emails from the skip trace that I would get. And they got also in California, and they got this woman whose grandparents left them a parcel. She knew it was worth a lot, but she said, every land investor calls me, they know that it has to go through probate, which means that my grandparents died without a will or without putting it in my name. And they all just leave. And I really want to monetize this property.

So I offered her $7,000 and she was happy about that. And I paid for all the legal fees. I sold it for $45,000. And that was an email. It was straight-up email. This is before I got fancy with emails. This is literally mail merge emails. I was jeopardizing my personal email. This is stupid rookie mistakes. But it worked.

And I started doing a lot of these very time-intensive, personalized deals with people and I really learned the ins-and-out of the business that way. And that's how slowly I started scaling. First brought someone to help me in general, then brought in a texter, then another one, then a comp person, then a data person.

We could talk about the team later, but that was kind of my early beginnings was very deal by deal. I still miss that. Talking to sellers and negotiating, but deal by deal, paying attention to what their needs are, bringing value to them, and then learning the process and scaling from there.

Seth: We got to get into this email stuff because you're right, this is not something that I hear often. I mean, I've heard it a handful of times, but this is definitely not the norm.

Of the dozens of questions I can think of, the first one would be like, what software are you using? What are you saying in your email? What kind of response rate do you get? Just tell us how that works.

Meir: Yeah. Okay, so if I were to break down my whole business into four pillars, the first pillar will be marketing channels. The second one would be markets. Which markets do I go to? The third one would be employees, and then the fourth one would be inventory.

Okay, now each one of those pillars have metrics tied to them. So how well is this particular channel performing? How well is this market? How well is this employee performing? And then the inventory that we have, how many views, how many saves, how many offers.

So everything has a number and everything is trackable. So right now let's talk about acquisition channels. Well, let's say we skip trace 130,000 people per month. Okay, so we start with texting and we text everybody. Then we take the people who never replied and we send them emails, we send them ringless voicemails, we send them mailers, and we also cold call.

Now, cold calling is still not fully our strength because the other four that we do, it's always range offers. So when we're texting somebody and they're like, oh, well, how much you want to pay for my property? Everybody wants to know how much you're going to pay. We throw them a range offer and if they say yes, then we take the time to comp it and we take the time to qualify them further.

Ajay: And how big is your range?

Meir: The range? We usually tell them like let's say $2,500 to $3,500 an acre because we think it's worth around from 45 to 65. So it's kind of just to keep the conversation going because everybody wants to know the number and we don't have time to give everybody a number. So we give them like a low ball range. And if they say, sorry, I want whatever, then it's not a good deal. And if they're cool with it, then we look into it further.

We do the same thing with email. We do the same thing with mailers. And with mailers, we do more of a blind offer. And if the property is too expensive, like if we're dealing with like a million-dollar property, we'll just give them a range. So also it's very hard to comp and to send blind offers for properties that are 100 acres plus at volume. So for those we just do a range. We just want to get on the phone with people. But anything smaller than 100 acres, we'll send a blind offer.

And RVMs is very similar where we don't give a range at the voicemail, but it's a voicemail.

The problem with cold call is that you're calling a guy, and he's at Whole Foods, and he's getting a phone call from you. He's not down to start discussing numbers with you. A text or voicemail, an email or letter, you send the piece and then they have time to think for a second and then they get back to you. But a phone call is very instant and very intruding, so we haven't been able to do range offers on a cold call. The problem with that is that it has generated tremendous amount of leads that aren't very qualified. They're just people who said, yes, I want to sell my property. So then we have to still perfect that.

So in this business, my role as a CEO is optimize scale. Optimize the process, optimize the four pillars of the business the way I see them, and then scale. More texting, more channels, more markets, more employees. But to your point, before I tend to scale and to do things before optimizing. And that's kind of my blind spot where I'm very eager to hire more people and scale and do TV ads or whatever without first optimizing everything else that we do have going on.

And to answer your question specifically about email, since I know that was something that was interesting to you, I started doing simple mail merge. Mail merge is, for those that don't know is you have a spreadsheet, let's say Google Sheet of let's say a thousand emails and then there's a Google Chrome add-on called mail merge. There's thousands of them and you create an email, simple email, say “Hey, your name came up because we're buying property in your county and let me know if you're interested in selling your land.” Very simple. And then it kind of sends like 50 a day or something, I think. I didn't have money then to pay for the pro account or something, so I was literally going out of my personal inbox and that's like highly risky.

Let's just say what's right about that was that I took action. And what was wrong about that is that I almost jeopardized my entire email and server and website because obviously too many people report spam and then everything just goes into spam. And then buyers are trying to get a hold of you, title, selling you, sending you like closing documents. Everything's just going, it's just a terrible idea.

So what you should do is a few things. So there's a lot of email platforms out there. We use Mailshake but there's a bunch. And what you do is you first want to qualify all the email addresses. So there's a lot of tools out there. There's one called DeBounce, DeBounce.io. There's so many of them that basically you pay like very little. But you upload your laundry list of thousands of emails that you got back from skip tracing.

Because a lot of investors don't realize. But when you skip trace list you get emails that nobody does anything with them and you get them for free. So a lot of them are garbage. Most of them are garbage. But still there is enough, especially if you're doing the kind of volume that we're doing. You can be sending 1,000 emails a day, verified, qualified emails per day. And email is free. You don't have to pay anybody to send emails, right? And emails as opposed to texting, you don't have to sit there sending email by email. You can actually just send a bulk email.

Now there's a few tricks of the trade. First of all, the whole objective with email marketing is deliverability, because everybody can send thousands of emails a day, but if they all land in spam or promotions, no one's going to see them.

Now, if you check your promotions tab, you'll see there are some billion-dollar companies that are still landing in promotions and they couldn't figure it out how to land in your inbox. So if they couldn't figure out, chances are I cannot figure it out either. So I don't pretend to know better than these humongous companies that are still landing in my promotions and spam. That being said, they don't have the luxury to do smaller batch testing or to do the little tricks that we do.

So first of all, you want to avoid bad emails, so you want to clean those lists.

Second, you want to avoid spam words. You can Google what are some spam words.

Third, instead of putting an unsubscribe button at the end of your email, you should write “Reply ‘unsubscribe’ if you'd like to opt out.” What that does is people reply “unsubscribe,” but that tricks the system into thinking that you're having engagement. That's actually good for you. When somebody replies unsubscribe, we obviously delete them, right, because we do what they say we should do. But that's good engagement.

The problem with that is on the flip side, if you're trying to track engagement, every unsubscribe is considered an engagement as far as the platform is concerned because you had all these people that replied to you, but it still works. There's some backend stuff that you could do, like emails going back and forth. You can schedule emails between two accounts just to show that there's some sort of activity.

And another tip is that you want to have a domain that isn't your actual domain.

So our domain is LotofLand.com. We have “MyLotofLand,” “TheLotofland,” LotofLand with hyphens. Use a bunch of stuff that look like your company but aren't actually your domain because you want to keep your domain safe and clean. So if anything happens, your domain doesn't go down.

And you also want to use multiple aliases. So let's say “sethwilliams at lotofland,” “seth.williams at lotofland,”, or “swilliams,” “williamsseth,” so multiple variations. So if one of them gets also, there's a recovery period till you come back.

We actually have a deliverability team outsourced, but they're in our Slack and they're basically in our payroll at this point. And their whole job is to ensure that our emails are landing in inboxes.

Seth: Yeah, I will say that whole unsubscribe button thing. So I've got like a filter set up in my Gmail where if you even say the word “unsubscribe” anywhere in the email, it sends you to a separate folder where I will most likely just delete your email and block.

I kind of hate those people who don't put the word unsubscribe in there because they're doing exactly what you say and it kind of gets past that filter I set up. And it's annoying to have to reply to them, but I guess it works.

Meir: What if someone sends you like a love letter? “Hey, Seth, I love your content and I'm never going to unsubscribe.”

Seth: Oh, man. That would be very unfortunate for them..

So with email, there's obviously a huge benefit in that it doesn't really cost hardly anything other than whatever you're paying to insure deliverability. But what kind of response rate or close rate or how effective is this? Is it worthwhile to do this? Is it like one in 1,000 or one in 100 or how well does it work?

Meir: That is a very good question. And it's something that I've been thinking about a lot. Let's talk about the other marketing channels, like mailers. Mailers are expensive but super effective. Texting, they work. So sometimes I ask myself, like, why reinvent the wheel? Why not just scale my texting team? Or why not scale the mailer team? So the answer to that is, you never know what will change with the texting regulations, the minute they change something or they stop something. I'm an expert in email marketing. I can just ramp that up. I already have the team for it. There's no wasted time. The same with mailers. Some states are banning or not. It's always good to have that.

I would say it's a different kind of person. So if I identify a market that really works for me, that there's super high demand, anything we get works. And you mail that place already. You've texted it and you still didn't get a hold of the owners. Like this woman in California. The mail was going to her grandparents’ house. No one's checking that her phone number wasn't associated with anything. But somehow her email was because maybe she was paying the taxes or somehow her email was associated with that property and she got the email.

The kind of leads that we get with email are actually very good leads. There are people who have email. You could imagine there are people who are doing business with you as if you're a businessman, it's a different conversation than a spam text.

So I don't know the exact number. I know we've closed a bunch of email deals. The ratio, I don't know how good it is compared to the other ones. But here's the thing. The margins are so good in this business that one deal pays for the time of the people, the deliverability team. It pays for the software. Like, just one deal. So you do one deal, and then everything else is paid.

And obviously the goal is to automate all of this as much as possible, so it doesn't take up much of my time. And then it's kind of just extra funnel, if you will, of cash flow.

To answer your question, not great, but still profitable, and I still keep it. There's a saying, what is it? Don't kill a cow that gives milk or something. If it's giving milk, just let the cow be.

Seth: Yeah, that makes sense.

So of all those different marketing channel pillars that you mentioned, we got texting, email, ringless voicemail, direct mail, cold calling. Which one is most important? Like, what is the one that you live and die by? Like, you're in huge trouble if that one disappears? Or does that even exist? Like, maybe it's not a big deal because you have these other four.

Meir: I've built my team around texting. Texting is very labor-intensive, so everyone on the team has a scorecard. So we meet every week with the team, and everyone, every day logs in. The texters have how many texts you send, how many people answer, how many leads. So everyone's got a number, which is great for them because they know what they're doing and they have goals they can aspire to. It's great for us because I see what's going on, what's not going on.

And texting is so labor-intensive. There are so many people sending those texts, qualifying those texts, that if texting goes down, a lot of my team won't know what to do. So that's why texting is, I think, the most important. Just because of the amount of families that it's supporting currently, if you will.

Mailers don't take that much time. But mailers are super effective because, like we mentioned before, especially blind offers, they do the qualifying for you. So if texting goes away, I would definitely do mailers. It's more expensive, let's just say, but it's more effective.

And then the rest, RVM and email and cold calling, those are kind of the alternative methods, we should call them.

Seth: Is direct mail, is that something where you may not ever send a mail to somebody? Like, if they just reply to the text, maybe that's all that will ever happen. Is mail like one of the last resorts? Like, if they don't respond to this and this and this, then I'll send the mail? Or is it one of the first resorts?

Meir: No, we scrub out the people who already answered us in the other channels because mail is expensive. We also send, nice mail, color, with questions and answers, you know. We do it proper. And I wouldn't want to send a blind offer to someone who already agreed to sell us via text for cheaper, and that would be a disaster.

But also, I wouldn't want to spend money or waste money on people who said unsubscribe or people who said we sold it or whatever. So we obviously scrub for those. But mail comes after.

Ajay: Yeah. I think it's worth noting that I heard this recently from, can't remember this house wholesaler's name. He's the guy that owns InvestorLift. You know, that big house wholesaling platform that helps wholesalers get buyers, basically.

He was in this interview talking about how anybody in real estate's goal, whose primary objective in acquisitions, in terms of metrics, is to track cost per acquisition and your cash conversion cycle in terms of when you spend money versus when you make money. And your goal is to drive down those two things as much as possible. You want the cheapest cost of acquisition and the fastest cash conversion cycle.

And so with regards to the marketing, I think it's really interesting because with texting, for example, my team's addicted to it because of how fast that feedback loop is. We send out texting in a new market, and we might get a deal that day. And if we do, we can buy it in two to three weeks.

We had one recently down in Florida. It's in North Florida. And we bought this property for $150,000, which is exactly what the seller asked for. So sometimes when people ask for things, and I know I can do it, I don't, and try to negotiate, I'm like, don't rock the boat. We can make money on this. We cut it up into two 20-acre parcels and listed each at 150. And we've been getting good traction.

So that was one we sent out the texting, and it was like, within, I think, two or three days we had this guy, and then a day later we had a contract. Whereas with direct mail, it can be a lot slower, but at the same time, and I think what Meir is talking about, is your leads are so much more qualified.

So maybe, depending on how your team is designed, you get to it quicker, or it's a lot less follow up-intensive. And that's why a majority of investors that try to go from direct mail to text messaging fail. That's the biggest issue I see is, like, our team will follow up usually 24 times before we put them back on a drip manually. We'll double-dial twice a day for a couple of days, and then every day, 24 times.

Meir: Whoa, 24 times?

Ajay: Yeah, we are ruthless, but we get the seller's permission to contact them, and typically that 24. So we have two layers of follow-up. And I'm sorry, Meir, you're supposed to be the one talking here, but we have two layers of follow-up.

The first one is to do that first intro phone call, basically. So we don't talk numbers until our lead manager goes through the basic script. And then that 24 is actually after that phone call. So we may follow up a lot more than that, but it's, hey, we're ready for an offer. We want to get an offer to this person, and that's when we'll go really aggressive because we've done a lot of work. Our cost for that lead is probably around $50 at that point.

And I don't like throwing $50 in the trash and lighting it on fire very often. So I tell my team to go really aggressively to get in contact. But we had a guy who lived in Alaska and does this thing every year where he goes to a remote cabin in Alaska and disconnects from all of his devices. And he said to me, he said, “Ajay, your acquisitions manager left over 17 voicemails on my phone over the past. Did you give her a raise?”

We actually ended up paying her for some maternity leave because she had a baby. So she was gone for a bit. But I think we did give her a raise a little bit after that, too. I can't remember, but I know we did at one point, but it was hilarious and was like, “Sir, that's what we pay her to do.” So I'm glad to hear it.

And he was like, “Well, tell you what. I'm a business person. Anybody that's willing to follow up with me this much clearly is going to follow through. So I'll give you guys my business. Let's go.”

And so that's a double closing. We did. We got under contract at 160, and we've got an offer right now at 230, and we're taking it. So we haven't closed on it yet, but it's a good double closing with good margins. But follow-up wins in this world.

But I'm sorry, I just needed to go through that quick.

Seth: That's worth going on a little tangent about, because a lot of people don't know how to do that. A lot of new people, I feel like they just kind of feel like I just take this first step, but they don't respond to people, or they don't respond multiple times. And it's like, why are you doing anything if you're not going to follow up? It seems like kind of a no-brainer, but a lot of people don't get that.

Well, we've kind of hit the marketing pieces quite a bit. There's a lot more we could talk about, but there are other things I want to move on to.

So tell us about what your average deal looks like. I know you do a lot of assignments and double closings, so what size are we talking about? How big are these deals? And I guess we talked a little bit about how you're finding them through texting and that kind of stuff, but maybe just walk us through a typical deal.

Meir: Sure. So I have this radical idea that many people in the land business don't seem to agree that bills are paid with dollars and not with percentages.

As a company, we make money when there's, like, 20 to 30 grand on the deal, and that's kind of like my sweet spot. I want to do a deal less than that just because of the time and energy. They say that a lion doesn't chase a rat or a mouse because the energy that it uses to catch that mouse is more than the energy that it gets from the mouse. You know what I mean?

So there are so many low-hanging fruit. There are so many amazing, juicy deals to do. Like, why bother with the small ones? So we try to kind of 20 to 30 also work well, because the minute you start doing more than that, there's a lot of earnest money that needs to go down, and it's just more complicated. So that's kind of the sweet spot for us.

And then we work our way backward from there. So if a seller wants 200 grand for a property, and we think it's worth 250, and we'll list it for 240, and we'll get somebody for 230, I'm never going to buy that outright, but if I can make 30 grand in that deal, why not? And sometimes they'll want earnest money, and that's fine. If it's a good enough deal, we'll do that.

So that's kind of why I think we get a lot of the deals that other investors don't end up getting from the sellers is because we'll pay more. And I'm okay paying more because I'm okay with the margin that is left for me. Whereas some investors won't do it because if I'm not doubling my money or if I'm not pieing it $0.40 on the dollar, I'm not going to do it, even though it's just not the way it works.

So we try to do a lot of volume. It's a numbers game, it's just a volumes game for us at this point. And that's kind of one part of the business that's run mostly by the team. And there's already processes in place, and everybody knows how to do it.

But then there are the bigger deals. And there is a housing shortage in America, and there are plenty of developers out there. The developers don't necessarily like buying, finding land, having this million or $2 million land sitting on their balance sheet for a full year until they figure out how to do the entitlements and how to get the permits and all that. So there are people actually that we work with who are kind of the bridge between us and the big developers. So they'll get the property under contract from us, and they will entitle it, and they'll make millions of dollars on these deals because they'll sell it. They'll sell the paper lots. They'll sell the parcel already parceled out to the developers, shovel ready, so they can come and start building. So they go through the entitlement process.

I know there are a lot of land investors who do this themselves. I could technically do it myself. It's just very time-consuming. And right now, I'm kind of super focused on the team and on the company that we have now. So it's hard for me to do that. That being said, I can flip a contract from a seller to an entitler, who then goes and entitles it and sells it to a developer. Now, those deals are more complicated.

Those deals require a lot of money down and require a seller who's willing to work with you. So a deal like that, I will, let's say, put in $20,000 earnest money every 60 to 90 days. I'll explain to the seller that we're going to entitle it, we have to develop it, and we're not going to buy it until everything's ready to go.

Best case scenario, everything's good. We buy the property. Worst case scenario, they keep all of our earnest money, so it's really a win-win for them. And then I go and shop. By now, I have contacts, but we still have to shop for somebody who's willing to buy that off from us with the same kind of time frame and sort of the same earnest money that we put down.

So what's interesting about this is that a lot of courses will tell you, like land courses, or people who are early in the land business will say, hey, you want to double your money, buy a property for 20 grand and flip it for 40. Sound advice, but how about, buy a property for a million, put 20 down, the same 20 grand that you have, and then flip that for 1.5. Now, instead of making 20,000 with your 20 grand, now, you just made $500,000 with your 20 grand.

Seth: It's assuming you can find that buyer in the back end. If you don't, then you just waste the 20 grand, right?

Meir: No, because you could have a 60-day due diligence period for those 20 grand.

Seth: Ah. And then you get your deposit back.

Meir: Then, yeah, you put it in there. But all this with utmost honesty and integrity with the seller, you say, “Hey, listen, I deal with developers. This is an interesting property. It's an interesting opportunity. I need 60 days. I'm giving you 20 grand. I just need 60 days so I can see if this is even feasible.”

And part of feasibility is finding an end buyer who's going to do it. And you're dealing at that level. You're dealing with people who understand business, people who understand what you're doing, and they're okay with it, and they're okay with making their million dollars. So it's just a little more sophisticated, but it's actually a lot more enjoyable and, of course, a lot more profitable.

So that's sort of one of our key hires for the last quarter of this year is going to be someone focused solely on finding. And you don't even have to do a lot of marketing to get these. They don't have to be off-deal. You could just find them on Land.com. The margins are so good that you don't have to go crazy. You literally have to go to markets where you see a lot of development. You see land that just looks like it's sitting there waiting to be developed, reach out to the owner, say, “Hey, what's the story?”

And sometimes there is no story, just nobody has come to them yet. But sometimes there is, there are wetlands, or there's this, there's that. But just a matter of finding these things. You do one deal a year and you're doing better than flipping a bunch of these other ones.

Seth: You're going after a lot of these deals with the intent to assign or double-close them. And that is a big part of the reason why you were able to offer so much more money, correct?

Meir: That's right.

Seth: Okay. And that is another distinction to make compared to those who are not willing to offer so much more money and they're more concerned about percentages is because that thought process is more of, I'm going to buy this thing and take title to it, and then just hang out for however long it takes to sell the thing. So there's kind of more skin that they're sinking into the deal, although it doesn't have to be that way, as you've proven, you could just go into it with the intent of never really owning it long-term at all, or even short-term.

I'm wondering, of all these different deals that you pursue, where you get them under contract with the intent to assign it or double close it. I mean, in my experience with that, the main risk on the table, if I'm not putting any earnest money down, is just that I might be wasting my time. Like, I could be putting all this effort into trying to find another buyer to assign this thing to. Maybe I can't, and then this contract will time out. And I just wasted a lot of effort.

How often does it not pan out for you? Like, what percentage of the time do you successfully find an end buyer in the time frame that you need to?

Meir: Most of the properties pan out because if it doesn't sell within the first 10 to 15 days, we don't get any traction. We keep lowering the price. Now, if we lower the price till we barely making any money and it still doesn't sell, then it's a problem with the property, and then it's a conversation with the seller.

So if a property doesn't sell, there's one of two issues that could be wrong with it: the price or the property. Either your price is too high, or the property has an issue. If the property is good and the price is good, it will sell. So if a property is not moving, there must be a reason, must be something that we didn't know when we signed the contract.

And it's always a conversation with the seller saying, “Hey, we didn't know that the first half of this property is fully wetlands. It didn't show up on the wetland map, or we didn't know that the easement wasn't a recorded easement. We thought you had access to the property.” So a lot of times, we have issues that we have a conversation.

Now, here's the thing. We try to provide value for the sellers. Okay? So somebody who has land in the middle of nowhere, there are two issues, two things that they do not know that we do, and that is why we're in business.

Number one, they don't know how much it's worth. They don't know data. So we're essentially a data company.

Number two, they don't know how to market land. We know how to market. So we're a marketing company. So that's why we have data analysts in the team and we have marketers in the team, because we know how to price land and we know how to sell land.

We also know how to do a lot of the due diligence, a lot of the investigations. We'll find out about the wetland. We'll find out about all these issues that come up. So the conversation with the seller is always, we are the best chance you will ever get to selling this property. You give it to a Realtor, they're not going to hustle it the way we do.

Our dispo team is pushing these properties everywhere, like, we're talking so many platforms, not just the MLS, and we send drones out there, and we literally do our 110% best to get this property sold. If it doesn't sell after a little while, we'll go back to the seller, we'll explain to him the issues. We'll give him everything that we have for free. Right? Here are the pictures. If we had a survey, we'll do a survey, all this stuff, and then it's a win-win. So they either sell it through us or they don't.

But now they have all this information that they didn't otherwise had, and they had somebody who, for free, hustled it to try to get it sold and still couldn't get it sold, which means they have to lower the price, or maybe they have to fix something and then they can sell it whenever they want. So it's really a value that we bring to the sellers, and we also bring value to the buyers. A lot of the time, buyers are so happy with the properties and the price that we bring, especially when we do splits, because we also do some subdivide projects.

We haven't spoken about those, but I do some minor splits all the time. And what's interesting about my minor splits is that lately, I've been double-closing subdivisions. And it's a pretty crazy concept, but it's a very simple conversation with the seller saying, “Hey, dude, you got 80 acres. Okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to start selling these off in chunks, okay? We'll sell them off at 10 acres, 15 acres.”

Every time somebody wants to buy a chunk of the property—so we market it as if it's already 10 or 15 acres, and we write that we haven't yet subdivided the property—but somebody calls me up and says, “Hey, I want 15 acres. I want this.” I literally go in Photoshop, and we do a Zoom, and we're like, “Okay, which ten acres do you want?” And we draw it together. We send over a surveyor.

This is assuming that you could do a minor subdivision with the exemptions, and you don't have to go through the platting process, but in counties that allow for that, then we just do that, and then we create a new survey, a new metes-and-bounds. It's called when you draw the new area that the person is buying. The seller signs and notarizes the A to B, then we do the B to C.

And we started doing a lot of those. And then that's another way of doing subdivisions without fronting all of the money. Obviously, the seller has to be cool with it. And this 80-acre one in Texas was little bit complicated because there were so many parcels that we got out of that one.

But sometimes it's as simple as somebody like Ajay was saying. He had the 150, he split it into two, and now he's selling at 150 at a time. You don't necessarily have to buy it yet. You just market it as two separate parcels. And if somebody wants the whole thing, great. If somebody wants half of it, then you're on the hook for the other half if you don't find the buyer by the time you got to close, then you got to front the money. But that's another way of subdividing these tracts.

Seth: You had said something a while back about, if a property doesn't sell in the time frame you have in mind, it's either a problem with the price or a problem with the property. And the thought that came to my mind when you said that is, what if it's a marketing problem? Like, what if the price and the property are good, but the right pair of eyes just hasn't seen it yet?

And as I know from my experience, I'm probably not as good of a marketer as you are. But sometimes, it takes many months for a deal to come to fruition. So I guess what that leads me to believe is that you are very, very good at marketing these things. Like you're able to consistently sell these things quickly. And maybe that's a function of just getting really good properties under contract, I don't know.

But where the question is going is, how are you so good at this? Like when you say that we're going to do 110% best to get the property sold, what does that look like? Where are you advertising these things? How does a person get as good as you are at doing this?

Meir: Yeah, I don't think I'm really good at it. I just only go to markets where there's a lot more demand than supply. So I won't touch a market that doesn't have an insane amount of demand.

So it really begins from there. Choose a market that you have at least 100% more demand than supply in the last six months. If you're not seeing that kind of activity, I won't even go there. I'm dealing in a market that works well, that sells quick, that people are looking to buy property, that I'm seeing stuff sell. And if this particular parcel doesn't say, yeah, there's always bad luck and there's always just the right people didn't see it yet, and if it's a good enough deal, I'll buy it, I won't let it go.

But to answer your question more specifically, where do we advertise? So most of our deals come from the MLS. We actually don't really use agents. We feel like when we list properties ourselves, we have more of a finger on the pulse of what's going on. Every lead comes to us, every negotiation, every conversation works with us. We can move very quickly, right? We can send a drone guy there tomorrow, and then, in two days, we can have it listed. We can change the price on a whim if we want to drop it a little bit. We feel like we have more control sometimes.

If it's a bigger property or a property that doesn't have easy access, then we will work with a Realtor. Or, if in the process of comping this property, we asked an agent for their opinion, they gave us their opinion, they were good, and they took the time to go to see it, then I would actually give them the listing just out of goodwill. I wouldn't want them to work for free. So there are cases where we use agents, but most of the time, we list them ourselves.

We also list on Land.com, we have a signature account. Although I wish I could say we have a lot of deal flow from there, we don't. We have a lot of eyeballs. We have a lot of people who want seller financing, but we do know we sell a little bit there.

Facebook Marketplace, a lot of tire kickers there, a lot of time wasters. But we do list there as well.

And we put a sign on every property. We actually asked the drone photographers to go and buy a sign and put it there. That's a nice little tip. You can just give them $50, they'll do it. And we call neighbors, next-door neighbors say, hey, we're selling the property.

Also, because we don't buy property from people who live near their properties, we don't run the risk of them being, “Hey, why'd you put it for sale? Selling my property?” Or, “Oh, you're selling Timmy's property. Why are you selling it?” People don't really know who these people are.

And it's also more value to the seller. I don't want to steal someone's backyard. I just want to give someone money for property that's across the country that they don't even use, that their great-grandmother left them. That's kind of where I'm at.

So, yeah, we really push it. We really try marketing it. We could do better. I think as we scale the dispo team, we're going to start hiring some people to literally do cold calling to agents and say, hey, we have this in this property. Just to kind of give them a pocket listing, as we call it, an industry so they can always sell that if they have an interested buyer. So we could do a lot more outreach that we currently do.

But again, optimize scale. It's hard to be scaling constantly before optimizing what we currently have.

Seth: It's kind of a chicken and egg thing. It's like, how do you optimize until you scale to some point?

I wouldn't beat yourself up too much about, like, I don't really know what the right point is, but it's hard to nail that perfectly for sure.

Ajay: I was just going to say, to chime in, really quick, one of my really good buddies, that's a multi-seven-figure house wholesaler. His name is Chandler Sane. He built out a really pretty framework for people to evaluate whether you just need to spend more money, a.k.a., scale, versus optimize, your current process. And he boiled it down to a couple of key inputs.

So just like, high level, just for everybody here, I want to make sure people leave with something actionable out of this, is typically metrics we're tracking in our business. That model is number one, like net leads. So out of every single lead that comes into your pipeline, what percentage of those can you actually do business with?

For example, let's say like, 40% of your leads are all landlocked properties. Okay. And then it's a question of like, well, what if I filled my pipeline with just properties that weren't landlocked? Is there a way to filter that out on the front end? And now your pipeline is filled with people you can actually do business with.

And I always say people you can do business with, that's two things. It has to be the right property—the type of property I would buy—and the right seller, the type of seller I can work with. Because if it's some type of undivided interest that I can't find the other heirs for, if it's something messy like that, I can't really work with that.

There are a lot of different angles people hit in this business. But the point being, those are the two main variables. So we track net leads, and then you want to see out of those leads, how many can you actually get on the phone? So we track both calls and connection rate, and then it's how many offers you make out of that, then how many people accept, and then how many contracts you get signed.

And that's kind of like the whole flow there. I would love to put something together and share it with the audience if that's something you want, Seth. But that's something we've been working on, kind of, in the background.

And recently, we found a huge gap. We found out a few months ago only 50% of our contracts were getting signed, which is a huge issue, because if you're just looking at verbals, it's like, “Oh, man, we're doing a great job. We're getting all these contracts signed,” but where's the money, right? Or where are the properties? Or where's the inventory, whatever metric you want to look through that at? And we realized, okay, where's the gap? And looked through our KPIs and realized, for every six contracts we send out, we're only getting three signed back.

So something we did to optimize versus scale here was, we don't need to spend more money on ads or marketing. We don't need to send out more texts or send out more mail to get to basically double our business. For us to double our business, we needed to fill a very small process gap. And so what we have our team doing now is we actually on our offer call, our acquisitions manager will preface at the beginning and say, “Hey, Seth, our objective on this call is, if we come to terms on price, to get an agreement signed today.”

And so, as part of the process, if we come to terms on a price, our acquisition manager is trained to put them on a brief hold and draft up the contract. After that hold, walk them through it, so you can work through any contract objections live. Because how many times do you send out a contract and then it either takes three weeks to come back, or they just ghost you? And sometimes people ghost you because they're lazy, not because they don't actually want to do business with you. So we'll follow up aggressively.

But we have found if we just talk them through it live, we are able to get so many more signed contracts, and now we're closer to 80% to 85% if you don't screen for that front-end husband-wife objection. Or are you in a place to sign an agreement that'll screw that up a little bit, but you want to make sure, like, “So you're the only person on the deed. Are you the only person that has to make a decision on whether this is sold that way?” Later on, if they hit you with like, “I have to talk to my wife,” I’ll be, “Oh okay, obviously, please go talk to your wife, man. But just out of curiosity, is this something she would, like, divorce you over? Is this something, like, you mentioned you were the only person on, so I'm trying to get a feel for…”

I train my team to always make it funny. We like keeping things light-hearted and funny.

But anyways, we're putting together a framework on how to optimize versus scale based on what things look like. So it's a fun topic, something you can tell. I get a lot of energy from this stuff, so I just wanted to chime in. Those are kind of the key metrics we run through. I could put together something prettier, but I'll stop there.

Meir: That's great. That's really good. When we meet on Thursdays, everyone's got a number, like I mentioned, but then we also do a check-in.

One is like, your head and your heart, basically. So we do a check-in of clarity, one to ten, where are you? And everybody has to check-in. And also, how are you feeling? How are you feeling your life? How are you feeling at work? And those two numbers are so telling because if someone gives me clarity from one to ten, I'm a five, then you ask, why? Like, why are you a five? Well, because we just went in the new market, and whatever it is, and then I start realizing issues before they become bigger issues. And that's one way to optimize. Literally, just ask the team what's going on. What are you overwhelmed with?

And that's also a way to scale, because if somebody's at capacity, then we hire somebody else to help them out. And then let's say the texter is at capacity, we'll hire another texter, and then there's too many leads for the comper. We'll hire another comper.

So that's kind of how we optimize and scale at the same time. Just getting the feedback there. Yeah.

Seth: A few clarifying questions from what you said earlier, Meir. So first of all, we were talking about you're not really that good of a marketer. You just pick markets where there's 100% more demand than there is supply. So how specifically are you measuring and verifying this? Like, what stats are you looking at, and where is this information coming from?

Meir: We've tried with many different sources of information. We tried with Land.com. Now we basically follow Zillow. Just go to Zillow, just click land, click past six months, there's a lot of yellow dots, which means a lot of sold. And then you toggle over to For Sale and you don't see that much. Then you know that's a good market. Could you verify it with Land.com and with other platforms? Yes, but you're just going to get more confused.

And also, we don't really do counties anymore. I know a lot of people are very, like, “I'm going to mail counties.” I think counties are very big in some cases. And counties could have a city that's super expensive, or the suburbs. Or demand could vary within the county.

So we don't really do counties anymore. We do areas. So if there's a specific city that we think is great, we'll do something like northeast of that city. I don't care what county or city it is. I'm going after trying to stay very objective and very focused into where are we going, what are we doing, where we're going, how can we maximize what we're doing.

Seth: So just to verify. So on Zillow—and I like Zillow, too, think it's an awesome tool to use for this in terms of verifying that there's 100% more demand than supply. What I'm hearing is that you're basically just looking at Sold comps and comparing that to For Sale comps.

And if there's, what is it? Twice as many sold comps than there are for sale comps? And you're just kind of eyeballing it, right? You're not like, literally counting them up.

Meir: No, I am. In the past six months. So let's just pick one. So go. Just look at Austin. Last six months, land sold. If you're seeing 700 and then go For Sale and you see 350, that's 100% more demand than supply. So obviously, I wouldn't recommend you go after Austin. It's a city, but you can go an hour away from Austin in any direction as long as there is more demand than supply.

So yeah, we do count. We do want to hit at least that.

There's also a number that you don't want to go above, which is you don't want to go above too hot of a county, too hot of a market. So if it's too hot and there's nothing for sale and everything's selling, it's going to be hard to get a deal. It's just not necessarily a good place to go. So you kind of want to be somewhere in between.

Seth: And what do you consider too hot?

Meir: 800%. You go to these places where there's nothing for sale and anything that's for sale is already sold within a day. Sellers know that it's a hot market and they'll want market price. So if there's nothing for sale and so many things sold, it's kind of a rule of thumb.

Seth: And on that, the sold comps thing. So are you getting granular at all about the size of the vacant land or, like, any specifics, or is it literally just vacant land? I don't care if it's a half-acre or 50 acres, just vacant land.

Meir: Yeah, we do a minimum of five acres. it's just a random number, but it's very hard to, because we want a minimum of, let's say, 30,000 profit. So it's hard to kind of filter out the cheap properties.

So the sort of way to filter them out is by size. If you use Prycd, then you can technically do that, but that is not that accurate. So if you're just using any data provider, the best way to eliminate the cheap properties that I know of is just the smaller ones. Granted, half an acre in Times Square will cost you a billion dollars, even though it's a half an acre. So not necessarily does size equal price, but that's kind of why we weed out the smaller ones.

Now there are people that do infill lots, and infill lots are very profitable. It's just a completely different business. We're more after the rural recreational rural infills. Infill lots are very good. If you're in that business, then it's a completely different strategy.

Seth: And of all those different selling platforms that you mentioned, it sounds like you're on land, you've got the signature account, but it doesn't do a whole lot for you. You're on Facebook, but you get a lot of tire kickers. So it sounds like there are, understandably, problems with all of them.

But I'm wondering what is the most effective one? What is the one you're actually impressed with? Like, man, we need this thing. We sell lots of stuff on this platform.

Meir: For me, it's the MLS, hands down. If I get a call from an agent who has a buyer who saw the property, wants to submit an offer, there's a 95% chance that we're going to close on it. If I get a call from somebody on Land.com or on Facebook, there's like a 3% chance that they're not even going to go see the property, let alone close on it.

So the MLS is just where the most serious buyers are in the market to buy property with an agent.

And yeah, we give 2% to agents. Depends on the market. It's expensive because, don't forget, they get a percentage of the gross. So if we're buying for 200 and selling for just 230, they're getting 3%, that adds up. That's $7,000 or something, plus closing costs. So that's big.

So we have to kind of be careful also with the seller agent commissions, with the buyer agent commissions. And that's also another reason why we don't always use sellers is because seller agents, sorry for ourselves, is because they also take a chunk. And if we're dealing with very thin margins, relatively, to the price of the property, then it's hard to do that. Unless you work out a deal with the agent and be like, I'll give you a percentage of profits. Which we do.

By the way, I forgot to mention another time that we use agents. I've used this in the past. If in my mind this property is worth, let's say, 450, and an agent tells me, hey, dude, it's worth 550. And he's right. And he's very confident. I'll go with him out of gratitude, basically because it's because of him that I can make another 100 grand. I'll give him the business. So if an agent really was able to show me something that I did not see before, they definitely earned my business.

Seth: But you don't typically list your deals with agents, right? So you're just posting it for sale by owner on Zillow, but an agent happens to come across it. Is that what you mean when it says comes from the MLS? So it's not actually on the MLS, but that's how it's found?

Meir: Yeah, it's on the MLS. It's for sale by owner on the MLS. Flat fee services we use to list our properties. And then it goes through, like, a flat fee service listing provider, and then they forward me the leads. It's a little complicated, but it works.

Seth: Yeah. Which flat fee service are you using?

Meir: Every market has a different one. Flatfee.com is a good one. Beycome is a good one. I've tried others, but some are more annoying. Some are archaic, some are good.

Seth: I know you talked about buying these big, maybe 80-acre properties or something and then selling it to somebody, and then they will put the land entitlements on there, and then they will sell it to a developer and make a lot of money.

So question number one, is there some repeatable formula to find these deals? Is it just like a big old parcel of land and that's all you need to see? Or do you go to markets where you know it's easy to subdivide, or you know it's easy to get these entitlements? Or you're just kind of looking for large parcels where there's subdividing potential there.

Meir: There are two types of subdivisions. There are minor subdivisions, which is what we were talking about, the 10 acres, 15 acres, or what Ajay was doing with the splits.

Then there are the big entitlement deals for major developments. Those are actually super easy. We have LandVision, which is instead of DataTree, it's a different data provider. But they have a filter there where you can have a layer where you can see all the developments and developers with their logos and everything. So if you see a place that's super hot and there are so many developers and you see like a 50-acre tract just sitting there, and it's flat, and there are no wetlands, I mean, this is gold. And it's just a matter of seeing if the seller wants to sell and if they want to sell at a bit of a discount.

Now, you don't have to get fancy with LandVision or anything. Just go to markets where you know it's hot. You know, there are a lot of developments. You can see the developments in Google Earth, even in DataTree. You see the developments in DataTree. You see all these little, small, little parcels being built, and you see the dirt and all that. You know, there's development. They're usually near an interstate highway. They're usually near big cities.

And try to find those big parcels and see if the seller, like Ajay was saying, if the seller wants to sell and if the property is a good property, those are the two ingredients. And then, if you can strike a deal, then go to the developers and call them up. Go to D.R. Horton and just speak to the real estate person in charge there. Or go to LinkedIn. It's not that complicated. It's just finding the people who are developing and pitching it to them.

And by the way, many times, they're okay with you flipping it. Nothing's secret. They'll send you an LOI. And if there's a good enough margin for you to make the deal work, you kind of negotiate the terms of the earnest money deposit, the trenches, the timing, and you want to try to line as much as possible so you're not out of pocket so much. But those are amazing deals.

Seth: So let's talk a little bit about your team. So when did you hire your first team member? Why did you find it necessary to hire them? What role were they doing? Who are some of the other roles that you've hired for? And given that your team is the size that it is now at nine people, what is your role in the business?

Meir: I love talking about my team because it's like a family and it's amazing when we get together on the chat on Zoom, it's so much fun to have a team. They're actually getting together now. Some of them who are in the Philippines, they're having like a meetup. And if I wasn't married with three little kids, I would totally go there. But yeah, I love my team.

So the first hire was actually another new land investor who was kind know, testing the land investing waters. And he's trying to do a deal and he asked me if we can partner up, and I said, sure. And we did a deal together. And then I said, hey, why don't you come join? And he was doing, initially, a lot of the texting, a lot of the outreach. I was traveling at the time. So it was kind of good timing because I wanted to keep the machine running. And ever since, his name is also Meir, like me, and he's amazing. He really hustles it, really knows the land business in and out by now.

And as Meir was getting very busy comping and making offers, we had to hire somebody to do the texting. So now we have, our acquisitions team, made up of six people. There are two on the front lines, as we call them, doing texting, doing the RVMs, doing the emails. Then there's, well, it really starts up from the top. It starts with one person.

His name is Dean. And Dean does the finding new markets, downloading the data, scrubbing the data, uploading it to all of our platforms so we can do the marketing. So it all starts with Dean. Meir, he approves what Dean does, his markets, and then it goes down to the actual marketing.

Ron and Angela, they are the ones who are frontline, and their job is to qualify the seller and qualify the property. Right. Make sure the seller wants to sell, make sure he agrees to arrange and make sure the property is not landlocked, make sure the property doesn't have a ton of wetlands, make sure the property is relatively flat. And if the seller is cool, the property's cool, boom. They go into our CRM.

Now, in our CRM, we have Randy and we have Chantel. Those two are the acquisition managers. I would say they get the leads that are somewhat qualified. Now they have to call the sellers and just kind of chat them up a little bit, make sure they're actually interested in selling, because before it was a texting conversation.

Now it's actually like a human interaction, and they comp the property. Eventually, I'm going to get somebody just for comping so they can focus more on negotiating deals and talking to sellers and not, but they speak to the seller, they qualify them, they comp the properties, and then they put all the comps and their opinion of value on the CRM. Meir approves every deal, and then I approve every deal.

And once it's all approved, sometimes we have questions. I'm mostly looking at the property, not so much the comps, but mostly, like, looking at things they might have overlooked. Like, hey, there's this trailer park next door. And it doesn't look very well kept. This might be an issue. So that's something that sometimes Dean and Chantel don't really see that I kind of see those things. That's sort of more what I'm looking for.

And then they go back to the seller, back and forth, and then they send a purchase agreement, and then we're off to the races. Once they get the purchase agreement signed, we have John, on our dispo team, and John orders the due diligence. We don't do it in-house. It just doesn't pay. So we get the due diligence back.

We order a drone photographer, we write the copy, we start listing the property everywhere, and start pushing really hard. Also, once we get the purchase agreement signed from the seller, we have a transaction coordinator who has made my life incredibly better. It was like that one hire that was like, what took me solo… You have no idea. You're dealing with ten contracts a month. That's ten sellers. That's buyers, that's title issues. You don't even know. I don't know why it took me this long.

And also, I've given her power of attorney to notarize everything for me to sign, everything for. You know, these things were huge time wasters. So she really is like the oil of the engine that keeps everything just moving. So she contacts the seller, “Congratulations!” And explains to the seller the process.

And then John looks for buyers. And when we get a buyer, we send it to title, and then we schedule a closing. It's very difficult. There are a lot of moving pieces for double closing. It’s not for everybody. Double closings. You have to make sure the buyer and the seller are both at the same time. If I had unlimited money, I wouldn't do double closings. It's just because I have to sort of rather use the money that I have for earnest money on bigger deals. I'd rather use it to scale the team. That's why I do it. But if you had the money, do it. But that's a side note.

What do I do right now? I'm actually, like I said, I'm in the market for an operations manager or COO, someone to oversee the four pillars of the business, make sure everything runs smoothly, make sure we scale the things that work, and we optimize the things that don't really. So my job is really finding the talent, training the talent, creating the systems, the operations. I try to be in as many of the weekly one one-on-ones that I can. I try to review the team and the process and really working on the business, not so much in the business, and eventually just scaling and optimizing.

I think that would be my role also, like I said, I have a three-year-old, a two-year-old, I have a newborn, and the time that I have for work is very focused time, but it's not a lot of hours, so I really try to optimize the time as well.

Ajay: Meir, man, you dive into so much. I love that you don't hold back here. I feel like you've dropped like a trillion nuggets throughout this. I'm really curious. Thank you.

I think you said his name was Dean? He’s your data guy, is that right?

Meir: Yes.

Ajay: What's his background? Where'd you find him? Because if this guy's pulling 130,000 records a month and then dealing with the flow through all five of your marketing channels, I assume he's got to be pretty advanced and organized to handle all that data.

So if you don't mind sharing, where'd you find him? What's his background? And then maybe what's his pay band, if you don't care.

Meir: Sure. Totally not what you think. He's just a regular guy who follows the process that we set in place. He has to look for markets who are more demand than supply. He has to pull the data more like a data entry job. It's a very entry-level position. Yeah.

And it's more Meir and me who oversee the work and just kind of make sure that it's done properly. And there's definitely a lot of holes that we need to patch, and we're working on that. But again, it's kind of like a spray-and-pray at this point. It's just like a volumes game. It's just text and market to as many people as you can, and try to lowest-hanging fruit, the most motivated sellers, and just get deals.

And it's kind of working. So sometimes I get complacent, so it's hard for me to optimize his work, but he's really just following the process.

Ajay: Got it. And is he overseas?

Meir: Yeah.

Ajay: Okay, cool.

Seth: With these double closings that you're doing, are you using single-source funding, like using the end buyer's cash to fund everything, or do you have to get transactional funding to make this stuff work? And if so, where's that money coming from?

Meir: Yeah, so it all depends on the title company that we use. It also depends on who the title company that the buyer wants to use. And again, I make things seem super easy. And simple. It's kind of a tendency that I have, but things are very complicated the minute you're doing, also the volume that we're doing. But like I said, if you have the money, don't do double closing. It's more if you want to scale at this level and go crazy, then do it.

So depends on the title company. If I manage to convince the end buyer to use my title company, then I vet the title companies that I use very carefully, and I'm very picky because I need them to: A, be okay with this; B, allow for me to use the end buyer to pay for the seller to pay the seller; and C, I don't want title insurance on the A to B on the first transaction because I'm only holding the property for ten minutes. I'm okay not having insurance for ten minutes, especially when my margins aren't amazing and I'm paying everybody out. So I'm very picky with the title companies that I use.

Now, sometimes we need to put up the cash. So I'll put up the cash, or I'll get a transactional funder for the day, and I'll pay them whatever it is to put up the cash for a day. So that answers your question.

Seth: So looking back at your team right now, what would you say is your biggest challenge in managing this many people, or even with your business in general? It kind of seems like you have things going really good and you know what you're doing. But what is difficult, what do you kind of hate about your business at this point?

Meir: I hate that I've become a manager. I'm not a manager. The EOS, the visionary and the integrator, definitely the visionary. There's a leader and the manager are two completely separate things. I'm more of a leader, and I've become a manager. I've become a people manager that I'm just not good at it. I don't like doing it.

I actually like talking to sellers. So whenever there's, like, a complicated situation with a seller, I call him up. There was this seller who wanted to FaceTime. He wanted to FaceTime me. And so Chantel texted me, hey, this guy wants to FaceTime you. And it was before he signed. So I FaceTimed him. I'm like, “Hey, what's up? He's like, oh, it's you. You're real. You're actually a human being!”

He saw my face on the website and on the mailer and everything. He's like, “I just wanted to make sure that you're a person and that I'm selling it to you.” I'm like, yeah, exists. With AI, you got to be a little wary, I guess, these days, but I like that. And every time we close, I call the sellers every single time and I ask them for a video review of their process.

I just want to see their face. I want to see what they say. Sometimes they say, yeah, sometimes they say, we love it and we had a great time. We just don't want to do a video. But I really miss talking to people, doing deals. Maybe I'm a deal junkie. I don't think so. But I really like conversations with people and I've become so far away from that and essentially just managing spreadsheets. And it's also stopping me from growing the team, which is why I think an operator or an integrator running this size team will enable me to scale this to 20, 30, 40 employees, even more.

Seth: Yeah, I've actually found that whole thing about being able to show your face and your voice and all this stuff and show people that you're real. That goes a long way. One way that I have done that is through just, like, video emails, like Loom or BombBomb. And the nice thing is I've actually closed some pretty big deals based solely on that.

Like, I played a major role in getting the deal done, just that they could see that I was a real person and I say their name in the video so it's not somewhere.

Meir: Yeah, but that's also because you're a good-looking guy, Seth. Not everyone can pull that off.

Seth: It is an unfair advantage, I'll admit that. Yeah.

Meir: Yeah.

Seth: No, thank you. But anyway, the struggle that I have with my schedule, is I would get on the phone with people all the time, but for them and me to be available at the exact same time can be kind of hard. So if I can just put a message together and send it, and then whenever they get around to seeing it, they can see it. But it kind of fixes that scheduling issue, I guess.

Meir: I like that. It's actually a good idea, Seth. I think every contract we send, if it hasn't been signed within seven days, I'm going to get on Loom and record a video and say, “Hey, Jonathan, we sent you a contract. This is Meir. I'm just wondering what's up.” Literally a ten-second video to the acquisition managers to have them email. That's a great idea. I'm going to write that down.

Seth: Now and it can be like 30 seconds, it doesn't have to take a ton of time, just something to show that you're real and you took time to actually talk to them directly.

Meir: Yeah. I could also do an AI impersonation of myself.

Seth: Yeah, I would strongly encourage you to do that. See how it goes!

So you seem really passionate about giving money away to charity. Like, that's almost like a core value of your business. And I'm just curious, why? What is your motivation for wanting to do that?

Meir: So if we zoom out a little bit, I believe that it's clear that there was a world before I came and there will be a world here after I leave. Right. So the world doesn't revolve around me. I showed up to this world, and there is a higher purpose. I'm here for a reason. This is not just some sort of accident that the world came into being. It doesn't really matter what you believe in, but it's clearly not just some random accident. Obviously, there is a reason why we're here and the reason why I'm here, and I think that reason is simply to leave the world a little bit better than how I found it.

So land investing and just this business that we're in, it's a very good vehicle for change. So every time we sell a property, we have many different buckets in our bank account. And the first bucket, which is actually a separate bank account, just for the money to be completely gone, is charity.

And we're very passionate about three things, and these are three things that ancient sages tell us that are very basic to humanity. Number one is procreation, having children, infertility treatments, anything that can help a couple who's struggling to have a baby and they can't. We want to back that. We're living in times now where it's amazing how literally, with money, you can solve infertility in some cases, but obviously not all of it.

So that's children. Children are a source of great joy, and this could also be a source of great pain. But that's the biggest one. It's literally making more humans.

The second one is health. Right. If somebody doesn't have good health, they could have a hell of a life. Health is very important, and some people are struggling, whether it's mental, physical health. So we really want to solve as much of that as we can.

And then the last one is putting food on the table or anything that has to do with people making ends meet, whether it's soup kitchens, whether it's just supporting people, helping people get married, helping people through school, whatever it is, just really helping people with their livelihood. And it's a completely different way of doing business because when I go to… I take my scooter every day to work and listen to REtipster. Sometimes there are no episodes to listen to, so I just space out or think about crazy things.

Seth: Not REtipster? Silence. We are the only voice worth listening to.

Meir: That's it. Dude. You got to put them out more often.

No, but it turns my work into something not just meaningful for me. I'm not saying that I'm doing it because it makes me feel good, but it really does. Ultimately, it does make it super meaningful because, obviously, there's supporting my wife and kids, which in itself is also my responsibility. And I don't do it just because I love them, because if I didn't love them, then I would stop doing it. But I do it because it's my duty, it's my responsibility, it's my privilege. So they're supporting those people, which is my family, but then they're supporting and helping the world at large.

And I really encourage everyone to see this as a pillar of their business and as a core thing of their business. And I'll tell you even more. I decide how much money I want to give away that particular year. I do this at the beginning of the year, and I basically tell God, “I want you to give me 10x whatever I'm giving.” But I pledge that money, and I give that money, and if a deal doesn't work out and it's not working out, I'll give money for that deal to work out.

In other words, I'll give the percentage as if that deal already happened. And now it's really up to God, up to the universe, to make that deal happen. So it's kind of very powerful, and it works. I've heard this concept many times. I never thought it worked. At the beginning of last year, I set myself an insane goal. I only had one employee. But I said, I'm going to give this tremendous amount of money away. And I mean, fast forward a year. This has been an incredible year.

So I look forward to New Year. I look forward to doing bigger pledges and to, I guess, educating as much people as possible about this phenomenon of just doing it, but doing it for a much higher purpose, not just flipping dirt and making money. So that's why I'm passionate about it.

Seth: That's a fascinating approach. I don't think I've ever met anybody who kind of goes at it backwards like that in terms of like, “I'm going to give this much away, and, God, I want you to give me ten times more than that.”

It just makes you wonder, has that ever not worked out where you've given the money away and you didn't make ten times more than that? Or do you make more than ten times more than that? Or how does that pan out for you?

Meir: It's been my first year, and so far, I'm happy to report that it worked. Now, don't send me an invoice. If you pledge a million bucks and you didn't make 10 million, and then I got to float that bill. You got to be somewhat responsible, and it has to be a plan. You have to put in the work. That's how God created the world, in my opinion. People need to work for it, so they deserve it, so they appreciate it. And it's not just free, but, yeah, it works.

And even if you don't do it that way, just 10%, 20%. My wife and I just started the 20% Foundation, we call it. It's a nonprofit where we're going to put all the money in, and then from there, it's going to go to all the causes. It gives me so much, even just from a selfish perspective, it gives me so much happiness to be able to support causes that before I couldn't, I didn't have the vehicle to do it. Sometimes we have these humongous deals that we're doing with developers, these subdivisions, and, like, what am I going to do with all that money?

So there's real causes, real people who need treatments, who need food, who need whatever it is that they need. And every week, somebody from our team picks another nonprofit where we give money away, so they get to choose also where a lot of the money goes to. And these are regular people who work at other companies, and they've never been able to give that much money away, and it's going to whatever cause they care about in their communities, and that's also very special.

Ajay: I actually want to jump in here real quick and reinforce this idea of inverse tithing, in a way. Reverse tithing. I Don't know what you want to call it, I don't know if you want to coin a term here, but I actually had a similar situation, I think, two months ago where I had, like, five grand that was supposed to come in, not a significant amount of money, but enough that. I don't know, it was just, like, know where I was.

The moving, shuffling money around sometimes between business and personal stuff, and I just moved recently, so I'm down in Texas now. So it was just like moving money around, and all of a sudden, I didn't have this five grand. It was slightly inconvenient, and I was like, you know what? I'm just going to trust God here. As if I had gotten this $5,000, and I went ahead and tied 10% of it, even though it was the opposite that had happened. Like, didn't come in, and I went ahead and just gave away $500. And it was really funny because I didn't know what to give it away to. And then some things were revealed to me, and I ended up giving it to this orphanage that supports Nepalese women. So really cool. My family's from Nepal. Women just aren't treated as well there socioeconomically, don't have as many opportunities and privileges.

Got this beautiful, beautiful email, this blessing that they were able to use this money for. And I found that God just has this way of turning on the faucet, right, and no way that you can predict it. We had a bunch of inventory that had gone stale. We had a couple of deals fall through. I turned that on. I got a full-priced offer on my one rental property that I owned that I decided to sell for five grand over asking. So immediately He replaced it.

And then I had $60,000 of gross profits in my land business that all came in over the next week. Like, it was like, contract, contract, contract, contract. I just want to reinforce, and again, don't send me the invoice. There's an element of faith component, and it's not in your control. But anytime I have done this on a much smaller scale, I'm sure Meir, I've seen it reinforced. Like, I've seen the money come in 10x over. So it's actually a really cool concept.

And honestly, a reminder for me, I'm sharing this with everybody, but it's not something I do regularly. And I think this is maybe a sign that I need to be, but just really cool. And I appreciate you sharing that.

Seth: I've said this before, but I'll read it again. This is Malachi 3:10-12: “Bring the full tithe into the storehouse so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of Hosts. See if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.”

Let's kind of get into the essence of this. I think for most people having that courage to actually put God to the test, or even if you're not, like, doing it because you expect something more, like just giving until it hurts because it's the right thing to do. Is that difficult for you guys? When you do this thing where you go out on a limb, it's like, okay, I don't know if the money is coming in or not, but I'm just going to do it. Is that a hard decision for you, or do you have this gift of giving?

Meir: It is. There's no way to sugarcoat it. It's not easy. It's not easy. But thank God, worst case, it went to a good cause. So with crypto and the stock market, with 2020, I made a ton of money lost a ton of money, made, lost. The money that was lost, was lost. But the money that I gave away, a bottle of water, is worth a dollar. But if you give it to someone who's about to die in the desert, that's infinite value.

So you're transforming something material into something finite, and you're turning into something infinite. And we have the power to do that. That's like, super powerful stuff. So, yeah, a couple of grand here or there, but it's really the fact that we could do that is amazing.

Seth: There is a book by a guy I know named Clare De Graaf. It's called the “10 Second Rule,” and it's kind of an interesting concept where he talks about this idea of when you see a chance to do something good or be helpful to somebody, like offering assistance, whether it's financially or whatever, just any good, act. Like, if you just have the thought, do it within 10 seconds. Like, don't wait because you can rationalize and explain your way out of it.

Or just, like, daydream about doing something good and give yourself a pat on the back, but you never actually do it. This idea is like, don't think about it. Just do it immediately. Because a lot of times, it could be God prompting you to do that. But even if it's not, even if it's just you having the thought and you do it, worst case scenario is you just did something good to help somebody.

It's like, there's not really a loss to that situation. And especially if you do have the viewpoint of everything that I have isn't really mine. These are resources that God has entrusted me with. So it's not like it's mine to claim or say that “It’'s my own. I earned it. And me, me, me.” it's just like, no, I'm the steward over this. So what's the wisest way to do that. Is it to get the new Tesla, or is it to save somebody's life and build an orphanage or something like that?

Meir: Yeah, we're exactly right. We're bankers. We deal with a lot of money. But it's not my money, it's the bank's money. I'm just here to distribute it accordingly. And, yeah, it's not easy always to have that perspective, but it gets easier as I see what it does. And as it reinforced that pattern in my brain, then it definitely gets a lot easier.

Also, like you said, about the 10 seconds, I get a wire into my account, I don't wait 10 seconds, right away, boom, chunk of it away, gone, done. And it's also very good, by the way, if you give a lot of charity to have an account, whether it's nonprofit or a donor advisory fund or even just a bank account specially for it, then you get a debit card, and then all the charity you give just goes through that account. And then you could also look at the account, see how much money you have left there, how much money you have. All of a sudden, there's like, oh, my God, there's a bunch of money in there, and you can give it away without feeling guilt.

Before I had this, I was always giving and always like, could I afford to give? Can I not? Did I give too much? Did I give too little? Is this showing up? And it was all, like, intermingled in my credit card with all my bills. This is, like, super clean. This is great. Just make an account, transfer money to it. You can Zelle to it, even. It won't cost you anything. And it's really made my life amazing.

We also have different buckets. We could talk about that later. But we have a bucket for taxes, where we put money away every single time. We don't touch it. So taxes can come around. It doesn't hurt as much because the money's already there. We have another one for profits, which is good. It kind of builds up like a profit chest, and then we can do different things with that.

So I advise you to do that as well. If you don't already do that.

Seth: What bank do you use for your business banking?

Meir: I've been using Bank of America since I was little, so I kind of stuck with them. They do have wire fees, which I don't like, especially the volume that we do. So I got a new bank called Rho, R-H-O. It's like an online bank, similar to, like, Ally or Mercury. They have free wires incoming, outgoing. They're like an internet bank. They're super easy to use. They don't have Zelle, which is annoying. But yeah, we also have Ally for the charity bank. Always playing around with different ones.

Seth: Yeah, I was just asking that because I know some banks, like I think it's Relay is the one I know of. I haven't used it, but I've heard it's set up specifically for this purpose to make it super easy to create new accounts and just make it seamless.

Meir: Yeah, they all really work well.

Meir. I totally appreciate your time. I know we've gone a little bit over, but appreciate you sharing your wealth of experience and information with us.

If people want to check in with you or reach out to you, you don't have to share anything. But if you do want to, is there a way they should do that?

Meir: Sure. My email is meir@lotofland.com. And if you want to chat or if you have a deal that it's more than you can chew or you want to partner, I love JV partnering with people as long as, like I said, if there's enough meat on the bone and you need help, whether it's a double-closing or subdivision, whatever it is, you can always feel free to send me an email and we'll review it.

And once again, I really want to thank you, Seth and Ajay, for all the content that you put out. And I wouldn't be here for sure without everything that you've done for the community. And I speak for myself, but also for all the land investors out there. So thank you so, so much.

Seth: Yeah, thanks for saying that. I appreciate it very much and thanks for coming on the podcast and sharing the awesome information.

And the student has become the teacher, it appears.

If people want to check out the show notes for this episode, again, it's retipster.com/170. And thanks again, Meir, and we'll talk to you again soon.

Meir: My pleasure.

Seth: Hey everybody, how's it going? This is Seth Williams and you're listening to the REtipster podcast episode 168. Show notes for today's episode can be found at retipster.com/168.

So today I'm talking with my new friend Joe Roberts. So Joe is a former Marine Cobra helicopter pilot who began his real estate investing journey while on active duty. And he started acquiring single family and small multifamily rentals before making the switch to flipping land in 2021. Joe left Marines after eleven years in 2023 to pursue real estate full time. He is married with five kids.

And today I want to be talking with Joe about cold calling for land investors. Joe actually owns a company that does this, it's called Landcaller.com. And up to this point in time, cold calling is not a major marketing medium that has been commonly used in the land investing world. Perhaps it's going to change after this, but the first time I ever heard about the idea of cold calling a couple of years ago, I honestly thought it was a little ridiculous. It was like the marketing strategy of last resort, something I didn't really want to know or understand.

But the truth is this can actually be incredibly fertile ground for land investors. And I think it's kind of a thing where direct mail has been so easy for so long that there wasn't a need for anything else. But as the competition has really heated up over the past few years and response rates have been going down, a lot of us have been looking around for the next thing and wondering about what else might be able to pick up the slack.

And Joe has about as much experience with this as anybody I know with cold calling in the land investing world, which know definitely a niche in, you know, as I think we're going to find there's a compelling case to be made for cold calling in the land business, and we're going to talk about all that right now.

So Joe, welcome to the show. How you doing?

Joe: Thanks Seth, I am doing great. It's great to get on here finally. I still remember before I'd ever launched Landcaller reaching out to you and asking, “Hey Seth, who does cold calling for land investors?” And you're like, “Nobody that I know of.”

Seth: Yeah, that's right. A lot of times before we get on these kinds of calls, like when I'm going to talk to somebody like this for the first time, I'll go into my email inbox and just do a search for their name or email and be like, have I ever talked to this person before? Maybe I didn't know them, but I just got an email from them and you were there and I saw that first conversation so it's kind of funny.

Joe: Yeah, that really started the track because decided like, yes, I want to do cold calling after kind of proving it myself. But I didn't want to do it myself, and I didn't want to just hire a VA to do it for me either, because I tried that and it didn't work very well. And so I was like, well, if anybody knows a company doing this, Seth does. And you were like, nobody that I know of.

Seth: Yeah, looks like that's changing now that you're around. But I wonder what made you even decide to think of… like, in my mind, cold calling was just, no, I don't ever want to go there. That just sounds like a horrible existence to try to do this and find deals. So is it because you had been sending out mail and it wasn't going well, or what made you even think to do this and then actually put all the effort into trying it and figuring it out?

Joe: I mean, mail and how it kind of went throughout 2021, played a big role.

So when I started in 2021, mail was easy. Probably not as easy as some guys that had started in 2017, 2018 2020, but it was pretty easy. I was landing some great deals. I just noticed as the year progressed, and 2021 was obviously the year of real estate, crazy appreciation across the board of basically every asset class as things kind of got crazy post-COVID or through the lockdowns. And just as the year progressed, things that had worked initially or that I had maybe hadn't worked in my campaigns took some tweaking, but once I'd gotten them working, there was a good almost year where they were running on full cylinders and then things just started to tick down.

And so I tried changing up my types of offers, blind to ranged. I tried changing up the different types of mailers, what I was writing in the letters and postcards, and I just wasn't getting the same kind of metrics and return that I had before. And so spending all that time looking at it and, obviously direct mail is very expensive, I was sending not nearly as much as some people, but I was still doing about 10,000 letters a month, so that's expensive. So I was like, what are my other options, essentially?

So there was SMS, pay-per-click, cold calling. I mean, I was basically just googling like ways to generate off market real estate deals. What kind of landed me on cold calling or at least wanting to try it was I did a deep dive into my “seller profile,” is what I called it. So I basically went back through my last year of mail and I took every positive response to a piece of mail, even if I had never ended up getting it under contract, but a positive response. And I just kind of categorized these people and was like, okay, what do these people look like? And they're primarily boomers. So they're seniors. Many of them did not have cell phones or still had landlines that they use primarily that I was calling them back on when they received mail. They owned their property free and clear.

In my dealings with them, a lot of them didn't necessarily trust tech. I wouldn't always be able to get DocuSign or whatever with them. I'd have to send contracts out after we negotiated over the phone. There were people that were comfortable talking on the phone. And so to me, that's the mess was kind of the sexy thing that people were kind of moving to at the time. But I thought that at least for my sellers in my markets, cold calling was going to be a better way to get to them.

So I tested it out myself, had some really good success. I wasn't doing it at any sort of scale. In fact, I was pretty hyper localized in a very specific area that I wanted deals, but I at least kind of proved the model to myself and that's when I started to kind of explore different ways to scale it into my business.

Seth: And maybe we can talk just a little bit about why did you even start doing land in the first place? Sounds like you started doing single-family and multifamily houses like many people tried to do. Was that not going well or what even led you to start searching for something else?

Joe: Actually, I mean, it went very well. I had a single rental, which had been a primary residence, and then when the Marine Corps had given me orders and moved me to another state, we kept it, rented it out, and I had that single rental plus my primary residence for many years. When I started buying single-family homes and small multifamily in late fall of 2019, I just had those two homes, and by summer of ‘21, I was up to 23 doors. So in about 19 months, I owned 15 properties.

Seth: That's amazing. Nice job, man.

Joe: Thank you. So it went well.

First of all, I think you can only scale so much with single-family before kind of the economies of scale get to you, even if you have property managers, which I did prefer that because even property managers require managing. And there's always something going wrong with every house and that requires your attention.

And then honestly, I just looked at the real estate market in general as kind of ‘21 really took off and I thought it was getting pretty bubbly, to be honest with you. And I was also getting outbid on all my projects. I was doing the Burr model, as I'm sure some of your listeners are familiar with, where you buy it with cash, renovate it, and then refinance and rent it out so you could use the cash again on the next deal.

So I was finding very crappy and fixer-upper properties, but as 2021 kind of kicked off coming out of 2020, I just kept getting outbid on everything by flippers, who could buy it for less basis than I could because they were going to put lipstick on a pig. Whereas I needed to make significant capital improvement sometimes because I wanted it as a long-term asset. So I couldn't find good deals that I penciled anymore. I felt like the market was getting bubbly.

So I kind of just stopped for a while and I met JT Olmstead at a conference by chance, BiggerPockets conference. We sat down at lunch at the same table. I'm sure your listeners know JT, fantastic guy. I know he's been on here, I think a couple of times, but he was like, “Hey, what do you do?” And we got talking about land and it just fascinated me. I'd been sourcing off-market deals for single family with mail. So I had an understanding of sourcing off-market leads. All I needed to do was kind of tweak it for a new asset class.

Seth: So it was kind of because of JT that you discovered land?

Joe: Yeah, it was 100% because of JT.

Seth: Wow, that's crazy.

Joe: We had that lunch talk and then I was just fascinated and I hit him up later that day. I was like, “Can I buy you a drink and talk more about it?” So we went to the bar that evening and I think we talked for a couple of hours and I was hooked and I went back and started my land company.

Seth: Yeah, that's crazy man. Those conferences, if you really make an effort to, even if you don't make efforts, if you just are around people like that and have open conversations, it's crazy the connections you'll make and the people you'll meet.

Every time I go to this thing, I know something cool is going to happen. I don't know what that's going to be yet, but I always walk away from them with some “Aha!” moment or relationships that can turn into stuff that lasts for years. So it's cool to hear.

Joe: JT's still a great bud of mine. I use YourLandLoans, his service, and I still pop ideas off of him to get feedback. He’s a great dude.

Seth: Let's get more into this cold calling stuff. So when I think about cold calling, is this something that I should be using in conjunction with other marketing mediums? Like should I be doing this in addition to direct mail or texting or ringless voicemail or emails or whatever? Or are most of your customers using just cold calling? Like that's the main thing that they're doing and nothing else? And I guess if it is used in conjunction with something else, where would this show up in the sequence? Is it the first thing you do or the last thing you do?

Joe: Yeah. So before I kind of answer that, let me back up a little bit and discuss how I kind of view there's two types of cold calling. I kind of break it down into two categories.

There's cold calling that is the equivalent of you handwriting letters, essentially, which is you calling or somebody that's highly trained, excellent negotiation skills, knows the business in and out. That doesn't work at scale. So that works for you have that specific subdivision, that specific area within a county. You know, you want deals and maybe it's 20, maybe it's 50, maybe it's a couple of hundred lots, but it's doable. You can be highly focused and it's something that you could be just individually pulling the data on a property, finding the owner, skip tracing them, calling them yourself. That is one type of cold calling.

That's not what Landcaller does. Because what we're trying to model is essentially the direct mail, mass mail model for lead generation, which is out of 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 records, you find those few that are ready to make a good deal that pencils for the investor. So that's what Landcaller does.

And as that method of lead gen, it really can work either way. Our clients are almost 50-50 between those that use only cold calling and then those that use cold calling plus something else. Some of them are in all of the above. I find those clients tend to be a little bit more experienced. They have their honeyholes, their markets. And cold calling works really well because they're going back to the same areas time and time and time again and now they're hitting it from every possible area or angle.

And if there's a Venn diagram of all the owners in a county, there's overlap between those that are going to respond to SMS, those that are going to respond to mail, those that are going to respond to a cold call. But when you hit it from all sides, you could really take advantage of trying to capture everything else.

50% of our clients just use cold calling, and I would say at least half of those used to use other methods and just switched completely to cold calling because of some of the cost efficiencies, the agility of the model with how quickly you can kind of adjust things. So it's an either or, really.

Seth: Correct me if I'm wrong. So it sounds like when you were first testing this out to see does cold calling work at all? Is there anything here? Was it just you? And like a spreadsheet running it through something like their DirectSkip, getting their phone numbers, you would call them personally and go through these conversations and see if it led anywhere. And that's kind of how you decided, “Okay, there's something here. Maybe we should scale this now and do this other way where we have less specialized people doing the initial call and that kind of thing.” Is that kind of how it panned out?

Joe: Yeah. So there was a little bit I didn't kind of have this idea of the different types of cold calling formulated my mind then. But yes, I was basically using that first model I spoke about and I was calling I mean, I was very rudimentary. I was using Land ID or the GIS to find that I'd look at a lot, be like, I want that lot in a specific area, use Truepeoplesearch.com to find a number and cold call them again. Unless you're hyper-focused on a specific subdivision or whatever, that's a terribly inefficient waste of time for you to be trying to find deals yourself.

So then I tried to hire yes, I tried to use some of my VAs to cold call. So I was like, I'm paying them a lot less than I would want to pay myself to do this, so let's use them. What I quickly discovered, even though they had good English and they were comfortable on the phone, in having my VAs cold call, there was a whole lot more that kind of went into doing it even at a small scale within internal to the company. So I quickly realized I had basically hired myself as a cold call center manager at a small scale, which I didn't particularly enjoy, I don't think I was particularly good at. There was a lot of tech aspects. I'm not a very techie guy with the dialer system and all that.

And so that was actually when I reached out to you because I was like, okay, I just want cold call leads is what I really want. I think I'd proven a bit to myself that yes, cold call leads can work. I just want a bunch of cold call leads. And that's when I started my search for a cold call company that worked for land investors.

Seth: I mean, I know there's other cold call agencies out there that work for like house investors and that kind of thing, but to my knowledge, I think you're the only one that does the land specifically, right?

Joe: Yeah. And that was what, you know, talking to you JT some other people I do in the space, like, yeah, I haven't heard of anything like that existing. So I interviewed three or four of those kind of real estate cold calling companies very popular with wholesalers for single-family homes.

And I mean, they were good. They follow much the same model that we do at Landcaller. It was just when I tested them or when I interviewed them, I just didn't get a feeling that they understood kind of the intricacies of vacant land. A couple of them, I had their caller kind of call me and I ran through some things with them and I didn't get the warm fuzzy that they really understood the niche. These callers have been calling kind of single-family homes forever and they were just very much focused on what that looked like. And so I was about to hire one regardless and just figured over the months we'll work out and hopefully my caller sticks with me and we can get that caller comfortable with the vacant land niche.

And then I was just talking to my wife and I'd seen something on Twitter about starting your own call center and I was like, well, what if we just started a call center, hired a manager, so I'm not managing it. I'm sure I could find other land investors that would want to do this so that I make the investment worth it and go from there.

Seth: It makes me wonder, is there anything different about how you build your list in the beginning and ultimately decide which people to call? Like, do you only go after higher value properties or property owners that fit a specific criteria, like being more likely to respond on the phone or anything like that? Or is it literally just take the exact same list you would normally send mail to and just give that to you and go from there?

Joe: So we have clients that do every basically we have every type of land professional at this point as clients. We've got large scale, like big, big-time developers looking for vacant land. We've got land-specific agents, plenty of flippers, those focused on larger acreage and doing subdivides and stuff, those focused on infill lots and flipping them to developers and builders. So the only difference I would say is that because it is quite a bit cheaper than mail, you don't necessarily have to spend as much time scrubbing it or upfront doing so much work.

Because I know flippers—I never did this—but I know flippers who had a team of VAs who prescrub all their lists prior to mailing. They're looking for slope, wetlands, landlocked stuff, and they've got multiple people working on this going like looking at the properties in Land ID or GIS. And it makes sense because they've worked out the economics of mailing for all in cost of record or what it may cost to mail, versus hiring a VA for $4 or $5 to do that. With cold calling being about 60% cheaper on average than direct mail, there's really not a need to do that. So that's kind of the only difference I see in how you may have to prep a list or go after a list.

Cold calling works for the same types of properties that direct mail does. It's cheaper so if you don't want to spend the time scrubbing them up front, you don't have to.

Seth: Well, it's interesting that right there is something that it makes sense now that hear you say that, but I wouldn't have assumed that, not having knowing any better.

But you said that cold calling is 60% cheaper than mail, so what does that break down to? What is the cost per call for somebody to dial a number? Because I guess that doesn't include people that hang up or don't answer, right? It's just making an attempt to reach someone.

Joe: Yeah, so I look at it more as a cost of kind of per record. So a record is going to return multiple numbers, obviously once it's skip traced. And not every record is going to be skip traced. Just like when you pull a list, not every piece of mail is going to be delivered.

But if you look at a list of 10,000 (that was a pretty standard month for me mailing) all-in cost, including property records and mailing and stuff, depending on how much bulk you're buying, between 65 and and 70 cents a record. So you're looking at 6,500, 7,000, 7,500 depending on what scale you're doing it.

Whereas all-in cost for calling 10,000 records with land callers, about 3,000 to include the property records and the skip tracing and the TCPA scrubbing and all that and the caller working full time on the campaign. 3,000 to 7,000 is kind of the comparison there.

Seth: So I guess in terms of a land investor scrubbing their list before they hand it over to you, I guess they would just kind of go through their usual steps, like take off the stuff they absolutely know you don't want or stuff that you're 100% sure are not going to work with you, like a government agency or something. Is that it? Or should they be doing more or less or is there any notable difference in how they should be processing that before they put it in your lap?

Joe: No, not really. Again, that kind of depends on the flipper and what their strategy is. But a good chunk of our clients we pull the list for because we can get the data for cheaper than they can because we're buying in bulk, like DataTree data. So we'll take their criteria, we'll pull the list based on their criteria, and then skip it and scrub it. But other than the common sense things like you're not trying to call the Forest Service for their 50 acres in your county, no, there's no need to really scrub it out any more than that. And that's also something that we can scrub out when we get it. So there's really not even a need if you don't want to scrub it.

Our goal to be honest, is whether you're incorporating cold calling with other lead gen methods or we're your only lead gen method. And to me this should be the goal of any cold calling company that you potentially go with, is to be kind of, I call it as a Marine Corps background, a “fire-and-forget” weapon system. So it can be as involved as you do as much scrubbing as you want on the front side, but if you don't want to, you can fire-and-forget it. You can give us the county and the criteria and the acreage size and then you forget about it until warm leads start showing up into your CRM.

Seth: Maybe that's a good segue to help us understand. Take us through the cold calling journey. What exactly does Landcaller do, and at what point is it dropped into the lap of the land investor? Like, how many calls does it take for this entire journey to first contact the person to actually close the deal, and which of those calls are handled by your team? And at what point is like, okay, here's the information we got. You run with it now, land investor, how does that work?

Joe: Great question. So we are lead gen. We're not negotiating lead gen with some due diligence. Caveat, some due diligence, okay.

And that's based on the flipper as well. We individualize our scripts. We'll work with our client to build their script out, split test things with them, let them know what we've seen work, et cetera. There's any number of qualifying questions or whatever that they could put into the upfront script so that it does or does not get passed along as a lead.

But when you think about, okay, what does a cold call lead look like when it comes from the cold call center? It's going to look the same as when you sent out a mailer, and let's say you had somebody answering the phone and taking down that information, which then gets sent to your email or your CRM. That's the same kind of place where you're picking it up and taking it. So you have somebody who's interested. If you've got qualifiers in terms of things that you do or don't want, then it's not passed along. But if you have some due diligence questions in there, for instance, I'm running a campaign. Now, I know I don't want any of the HOA properties that are in this area. So that's one of my qualifying questions. Is it an HOA? Answer is yes, I don't see the lead in my CRM. It's not a lead.

So the negotiations and all that is on the client because they all have different strategies, right? Like I said, our clients are vastly varied. And even within the flippers, we've got very different strategies. We've got folks that they just want to buy cash at 35% of market value. That's all they're looking to do. And then we've got folks that are like, yeah, I'll put it under contract at 60% of the market value and wholesale it and make 20K. Sure, why not? So we don't get into the business of negotiating for our clients.

Seth: So I guess maybe one question is how many phone calls is this process, and which of those phone calls is handled by you and which of them is handled by me?

Joe: We will have one phone call ultimately with the lead, maybe two. If we call them, we start the conversation, and they have to call us back. So we pick it up later. But once we've got the information that's on the script or the information the client requires for their CRM, we pass it off, we're done calling.

On the client side, it typically looks like two or three conversations, maybe more. I'm sure we've all had those leads, even with direct mail where you go back and forth on negotiations because you're pretty close for a little bit. But typically what it looks like is— I'll use my land of business as an example, and my partner in Landcaller, John Lowry, also a land flipper with his own land business, he does it very similarly. So when the lead comes in, our first callback is rapport building plus more due diligence. So the lead came in, my VAs have pulled the deed, they've run the comps based on my script. We asked the question, hey, what are you hoping to get for this property?

So if they gave an answer, we have that number. We have other questions that kind of get after what level of motivation the lead might have, which helps us to prioritize who we're calling back. But that first callback is really to build rapport, build a relationship, be likable on the phone, and then answer additional due diligence questions that help us really pinpoint the value on improvements. Any number of standard due diligence questions, I mean, most of them come from the REtipster due diligence checklist straight off there. So anything that didn't get asked on the cold call is asked then.

We don't make an offer on that call. Some investors do because they've pulled comps, they know what they want. In my business with my sellers, I have found a higher conversion rate if I just use that call to get them to like me and to get the information. And I come back on a third call when I'm actually making an offer. I have a theory that it comes across as a little bit more professional, it gives time for the relationship to develop a little bit more.

So I'm making a third call, which is including the first cold call. So cold call from Landcaller, follow-up rapport building, due diligence call, and then offer call.

Seth: That’s helpful. So to recap: three calls, call number one, that's what Landcaller handles and that's ultimately the lowest value call. That's where I don't know what percentage, but a large percentage of people probably will not fit the bill.

And like the biggest time waster, if you were trying to do this yourself, yes, that would take you the most time.

Joe: Yes, exactly.

Seth: And once you actually have verified, I don't know what you ask like, are you interested in selling below market value or how you ask the question, but it sounds like by the time it's delivered to the land investor so that they can pick up call number two. In order to do that, they're armed with the knowledge that, yes, this person said they're interested in selling at a discount and it's not an HOA or whatever. Other basic questions they want answered. Is that accurate?

Joe: Yeah. Because to give you an idea, again, a caller on a campaign for us, they're working full time for that campaign, 40 hours a week, calling all day long with a multiline dialer or changing out the numbers up to twice a week. And they are going to make around 3,000 to 5,000 dials per day on average. And they're going to contact typically 200 to 300 people. And in a month they'll send about 60 to 70 leads.

Really, the number of leads has a lot of variables, but I would say that's our average smaller lots, lower price points have higher lead gen than more sophisticated big lots with high price points, a few hundred K-type price points. But I'd say our average is around 60 to 70 leads in a month. You're going through a lot of numbers and a lot of dials to generate those leads, which is where the economies of scale kind of work themselves out.

Seth: Yeah. And having a lead doesn't mean it's going to be a deal. It doesn't mean that they're going to sell for any specific price. It just means like, hey, this is the one to pay attention to. There's a hot one in the line here.

And then on that second call it sounds like it's a mixture of rapport building and also just verifying the facts. There's a link to the phone call checklist that I put together years ago, we still use it today. You can get a free PDF of it if you want, but that's kind of like the list of stuff that you want to verify. Just understanding the facts. Am I correct in assuming that a lot of that stuff you can find out on your own before you call the person back?

For example, does this property have road access or is it in a flood zone or whatever the question might be. So is the idea like on that second phone call you're not necessarily asking all those questions but you're verifying what you already think you know? It looks like this property doesn't have road access. Is that right or am I mistaken? That kind of thing?

Joe: Yeah, 100%. So I'd say it's three aspects to that. One is how much work do you want to do on the lead prior to asking them? And so that's a time value equation. There like how many VAsdo you have working for you? Are you doing it yourself? Do you really want to go pull every deed, every plat, look at every GIS for every lead prior to calling it back? Maybe you do, but there could be some things where you're just like, I will ask and then if it turns out we're close on price because I haven't made an offer yet, I can now go verify it before we go make an offer.

Then there's the aspect of just using those questions, and that's verifying like you said, but also just using it to have the conversation. A lot of these cold call leads, they're relational people. It makes sense. They picked up a call from a random number and talked to somebody for five, six, seven, ten minutes, and now they're talking to you again. Sometimes they just want to tell you the story about their land or they want to tell you like oh yeah, when they went to their grandfather's lot to go hunting when they were a kid. And so being just an active listener and then just some of the questions are just an opportunity to get them talking and again to get them to like you.

I mean, I'm sure you've had this with direct mail leads, Seth, but I've had many leads where they say something know I've had higher offers in the past but I want to sell to you because I like you. Maybe they're blowing smoke but I get that more often with cold call leads because they are relational people.

So it's a verifying of facts or it's getting the facts if you don't want to spend too much time on the front end before calling them back to do it. Although I recommend you do some due diligence. Like when I call them back, I've got land ID up, I'm looking at the lot so I can ask them about things on the lot and that sort of thing.

Seth: And I think that's a good thing for people like me or people who might be, like introverts or people who just despise getting on the phone for any reason, to understand that the point of phone call number two is not just to check boxes. I mean, that's part of it, but it's also to build a relationship with the person.

I can totally understand why that might be uncomfortable for some people, just picking up the phone and talking to a stranger, but I'm sure it works wonders when you can humanize yourself in any way. And it sounds like contrary to the way that direct mail works, how sometimes you get lots of hate from people and they just are livid. I mean just illogically angry at you when you have these kind of phone conversations.

Even when you get to call number three and you make the offer and it's below market value and they say no, how often do those turn into just vicious, hate-filled phone calls? Is it like a nasty experience or is it like they're just more civil because you've humanized yourself and they almost kind of like you in a way because you built a relationship? Is that accurate?

Joe: That's very accurate. Very accurate. I can count on one hand the number of people, even after making offers, which I knew we were going to be way far apart, that have even just hung up on me, let alone I don't know that anybody's yelled at me. And to be fair, I also don't do a fair amount of my calls anymore because I've hired an acquisitions manager who I've trained to make these calls and that stuff.

So we split my leads. But she's the same thing because she gives me reports every week on how the calls went. So it's exactly that you've humanized. It's not some disconnected piece of junk mail that they've gotten that they feel like is kind of a slap in the face.

Which is another reason I like giving the offer on the third call. If you give the offer right off the bat on the second call, it comes across as a little bit more business-like. Like, hey, yeah, you said you wanted to sell, here's my offer, take it or leave it type thing. That's why I don't know that it necessarily works as well with this type of lead. It filters like you are saving yourself some time. I will 100% give that. You will filter out more leads. You will lose leads, though, that you definitely could have worked.

And I feel like anybody who's doing this, regardless of what lead gen method you're using, should have follow-up drips. A lot of people that are doing mail, they'll drip their mail, right? Like they'll send a mail and then three months later they'll send it again. But with cold call it's nice because you've got their phone number.

So it's very easy. Maybe you're 20,000 apart and their motivation level is meh, but you call them back or text them, you've got their number. It's very easy. Just put in a CRM or a Google Sheet and be like, all right, in two months I'm going to hit them back up. You've already established that relationship.

I've landed many deals in the last two months from calls that were made in March and April, three or four I can think of off the top of my head. The lead gen method works well with follow-up campaigns and drip campaigns.

Seth: So I mean, aside from maybe the demographics and just the way that they interact with you, is there anything different about cold calling leads versus direct mail or texting or otherwise? Have we kind of covered it or does anything else stick out to you, yeah, they tend to accept lower offers or anything come to mind?

Joe: So a couple of things. So for one, there are people that you're only going to get with cold calling because they either don't have a cell phone so I can't respond to SMS or they just don't trust SMS. They're never going to respond to a text and they never respond to mail. Many times I've had leads that said, yeah, I get junk mail all the time. I get letters every day of the week asking me to buy this property and they all go straight in the trash. So there's one aspect, there's a subsection there that are only going to be reached by cold calling.

In terms of how the lead looks different. I would say this is if your business model is completely built on the self-filtering model of I send mail really it's the blind offer, right? Like kind of the least amount of work possible. I send the mail with the blind offer. I only get people that see that exact number and want to sell for that number and then I bet and make sure I offered the right number that actually makes sense for the property once the lead comes in.

This is different. It's not going to work the same. Now there's some things you can do up front like having that number or a range of numbers in that initial cold call conversation that our callers are having with them to pre-vet, that kind of narrows the funnel when it gets to you. But ultimately a cold call lead I would say is slightly more work. Like you're probably having at least one additional conversation over on the phone that you would a direct mail lead. I mean ultimately I spoke on the phone with every direct mail lead I ever got. So speaking on the phone is just part of the business regardless of what kind of lead gen method. You're just doing a little bit more with cold call leads.

Seth: I wonder, do cold calling leads tend to assume that you know more about the property or that you're smarter than if you were to just send them a blind offer since a blind offer is such an impersonal cold thing, like you're not really displaying anything about what you know about the property. Whereas with a cold calling sequence, you've had these conversations with them. You've asked the questions, you've had a chance to point out potential flaws in the property. Not saying that their property is worthless, but it kind of plants the seed that this might not be worth as much as you think it is if it's landlocked and if it has these issues, that kind of thing.

Do they tend to just sort of accept what you're saying as reality easier? Because you've sort of displayed your competence and that you know what you're talking about.

Joe: I personally would say yes. I don't necessarily have hard data to back it up other than anecdotal. And what I would say is so, first of all, we spend so much time customizing these direct mail letters and throwing in the tidbits here and there. Ultimately, who's reading that whole letter? Probably who's, like, picking up on the things that we're trying to imply in the conversation of making ourselves an expert in the air or whatever. They're scrolling down till they see your big bold price and then deciding, hey, cash offer. So I feel like it's easier to kind of drop those hints or those implications that we are professionals in a conversation.

So for instance, like one question that we script into a lot of our campaigns is it goes something like the cold caller says, “as I'm sure you're aware.” So right there—I love the psychology of cold calling, by the way, because it's fun to kind of just play with—you're establishing yourself as an expert because you're about to bring the facts, but you're not talking down to them because you're telling them that they're aware. And so when you bring the facts, the implication then is that this fact is true because you've just implied that they're aware of it.

So that's how we start that sentence: “As you're aware,” “As I'm sure you're aware, land in this market, in your market, can take a very long time to sell on an average of over a year for full market value. With that in mind, where would you say you're at with this property on a scale of one to ten, with one being ‘get the highest possible price I can,’ and ten being ‘sell as quickly as possible.’” And so now not only have you implied your professionalism and knowledge, you've implied that they also know this. So now they want to accept that because you've just implied that they're knowledgeable.

And then you've also given them the opportunity to demonstrate what their motivating factors may be, while not necessarily having to say, like they're vulnerable and saying, “Oh, yeah, I need to get rid of this thing as fast as possible.” Because even people that don't understand sales or anything else understand that when they do that, they give up leverage. But if they're just giving a number on a scale, they don't feel like they're giving up as much leverage.

So the psychology there can work. And now when you get that lead into your inbox, now you can prioritize it based on where on that scale they landed, but you can also take that and use that in negotiations because you've already implied your company as a professional. So you call back, “I saw you answered one that you're interested at the highest possible price. Absolutely understand that I'm not going to mess around with any low offers with quick closing timelines. Understand. Highest possible price, a little bit more risk. I might need a little bit more due diligence.”

So you can use that to your advantage. And then they're assuming you had multiple price points. You took their input of, hey, I want the highest possible price, and that's what you're now offering. So even if it may not look on the surface as a lead that might be any good, they're like, oh, I want the highest possible dollar amount. You can still use it in negotiation.

Seth: I'm wondering what percentage of these warm leads that you get end up as closed deals. And I know this is… I hate this question. I feel bad that I'm even asking you this because it's a giant “it depends on how much you're offering and what you're looking for” and on and on. But just to give people just a wild guess, like if I get 100 warm leads from land caller, what would be like maybe a percentage range that I could expect to actually close on those deals? Like how many of these callbacks and conversations would have to be had to actually walk away with the deal? Would it be like maybe, I don't know, five out of 100? Or one out of 100? Or 20 out of 100, or have any thoughts on that?

Joe: Well, it depends. That is probably the most individual client or flipper or land professional dependent. We have land flippers who are realtors. The vast majority of these leads or could end up a high percentage of them can end up as clients for them because they're people interested in selling. They're realtors who also flip. So even if they can't buy it, they'll sell it for them. We've got land developers, all they want is like 15% to 20% off market value because they're going to subdivide the thing and build on it so they get a nice high percentage. We've got flippers who use the kind of traditional model of, yeah, I just want to buy at 30% of market value cash and close in 30 days. I don't wholesale, I don't double close, I don't assign. They have the smallest percentage, I would say 2% to 5% of leads that come in.

And then I'm a little bit of… so my business, I average about 8% to 10% conversion rate off my leads. But I'll get creative and find ways to do a deal. I don't have like a very strict, “I need to purchase at this percentage of market value.” Because a lot of that is predicated on the deal size. Like that kind of like sub-100k or even sub-50k deal where you need to buy it at 30 to make it worth your time. Right? But if I'm calling for a lot, that's worth 150k and I know I can sell it for really going to only offer 40% of 150k lot if I could make 50k off of it with a quick wholesale? No.

So I would average higher than some of those other flippers because I'm willing to double close stuff, put it on a long due diligence period, see what happens. If I could make 15, 20k. And especially on higher price point properties, I'll take well above 50-60% of market value and put it under contract because I'm going to make more money than I would on the property that I bought for 10k cash at 25% of market value on the same property.

So I know that was kind of all over the place, but if your kind of land business looks similar to mine, I would say expect that 8-10%, 7-10% conversion rate.

Seth: No, that's super helpful. And it sounds all over the place because it is all over the place. I mean, there's all kinds of different people using your service, so I appreciate the different examples there. That's really helpful.

One thing I will say for those of you out there who are wondering, what exactly do I say in this conversation? Like give me a script, give me a word-for-word thing that I can use.

So Joe and I actually worked together on putting together a script. You can download it in the show notes, retipster.com/168. We'll have an email opt-in thing. You can download it there. We also had a completely separate and much more in-depth conversation about this where we even did some role-playing and that kind of thing to explain what does a call sound like. And Joe was very good at this stuff.

And that's in module one of The Land Elite Masterclass, along with a bunch of other advanced strategies. So if you're interested in that, check out landelitemasterclass.com and I'll have a link to that in the show notes as well. Again, retipster.com/168.

I'm wondering, who do you hire as these cold callers? For Landcaller, it sounds like they're not from the U.S. So I'm wondering does it matter if they have a foreign-sounding accent or anything like that or, I don't know, is that an issue or anything?

Joe: We've done some split testing with callers that we have that essentially have zero accent. Either they were born in America and they've moved back and the split testing hasn't indicated that for that initial cold call there's not a statistical difference. I think it potentially matters more on the follow-up calls where now they're kind of getting down to brass tacks and deciding, do they like you? Are they going to sell you the property? Trust is being established, but on the initial call it doesn't seem to matter.

So we have two centers right now. We had to open a second one to kind of keep up with demand that we opened up in Egypt. So we have a call center in Egypt, in Cairo, and then one in Manila in the Philippines. Classic offshore worker location. Both centers are in-person call centers, so the workers are coming into the center so we can keep things like internet speed, quality. We're trying to keep as many variables constant as we can. Internet hardware, management by floor managers on the floor so we can QA things quicker and that sort of thing.

And then we do a pretty extensive hiring process. So we only hire cold callers, first of all with excellent English skills, little to no accent. A lot of our callers, and then they have previous real estate cold calling experience, so we have no newbie callers. And what a lot of them we're realizing come with is a pretty unique ability to mimic American accents, particularly Southern accents and so they actually can sound almost a lot of them almost undifferentiated from an American caller.

And then we give them our own training package that we've developed, teaches them kind of the specifics of what land investing is, kind of what do our clients look like, what do these sellers look like? Who are these people you're going to be talking to? What is the process when it leaves here? So they kind of understand what's happening with the lead and why they're trying to get the lead and why they're trying to gauge motivation levels, those sorts of things. We do role playing with them and then we hire them on.

You lose all of your kind of cost benefits or most of your cost benefits over other lead gen methods, particularly direct mail, if you try to onshore this and use American callers because it is monotonous and tough work. You're dialing thousands of numbers a day and having hundreds of conversations a day. So to be able to do that at offshore prices versus U.S. prices is the difference, really.

Seth: If I were to try to hire my own telemarketers in the Philippines or something like that, just take this on myself, why should I not do that? What are the biggest challenges of trying to find those people on my own versus just going with a kind of a proven entity that has all the kinks worked out?

Joe: I would say that kind of what I mentioned. When you do that, you're hiring yourself as a cold call manager. You just have to realize that and what all that entails. So there's the hiring process, finding somebody with experience who understands the space, or maybe they don't understand the space, they probably don't, but at least experience cold calling. Make sure they have good enough English.

Then there's the training. There's figuring out the payment that you're going to use. You're going to go through Upwork or Wise or whatever. You're going to use contract training. How are you confirming? What's their internet speed? What's their setup at their house? Do they have the right hardware for calling? Do they have a good mic? Do they have a quiet space? They're probably working at home. So is there going to be traffic in the background?

Then there's the dialer system. So picking a dialer and understanding all the intricacies because you're not going to do this with an Open Phone number. I mean, you could, but you're not going to get nearly that amount of volume you need to sift through all these numbers to find those leads, right? When we talk to clients that previously used VAs to cold call and they're blown away by the numbers of people, we're reaching, like we're reaching more people in a week or two than their cold caller we reached in two months.

And it's because they're just using a single line dialer. They're just using an Open Phone number or whatever it may be. And just manually dialing numbers. So you want a dialing system and I don't even understand all that. That's why we have managers with 20 years experience that take care of that aspect because there's all sorts of variables when it comes to the dialer, the settings you set up in there.

There's maintaining TCPA compliance… well, not necessarily compliance, because if you're making offers to purchase, you're not subject to it technically, but there's still a lot of rules around it that you want to follow to keep yourself out of trouble. Even though you're not technically compliant. Then you've got training, so you got to make sure how are you training them? You're doing follow-on training because we do follow on training weekly with all our callers, and then QA is an aspect of that too. Are you listening to calls, providing feedback to the caller, incorporating that into future training modules for the caller, and making hiring and firing decisions based off that?

So I mean, that's some, not all the aspects of managing a cold call campaign at scale effectively.

Seth: No, that makes total sense. I know I actually work with a bunch of different individuals for various things. And maybe seven total that come to mind immediately. But all of these people, I could have them be my own full time employees. But there's just so much wrapped up in that, like the training and overseeing them and all this stuff. It's way easier to just outsource it to an actual company that does this and then they can figure out all the HR stuff and they already have the systems figured out. So it makes total sense to me.

Joe: And I think people, they just run the numbers of like, oh well, I'm sure I could find somebody who can do this for $4 an hour. First of all, good luck. But you can find a VA overseas for $4 an hour. Whether they can do it as well remains to be seen.

What's the price difference between them calling full time and us? Well, maybe let's just say it's $1,000 a month all-in cost. So what's your time worth for all those things that I talked about? Are you getting the same quality? So I feel like most people very quickly arrive at the conclusion that you're not really saving yourself anything by trying to bring this in-house most of the time.

Seth: What does it cost to hire a land caller at this point in time?

Joe: It's a little bit dependent on whether you are providing us a list or we're pulling it for you. So the caller themselves is just a flat fee for that full time caller on your campaign. And that's $1,500 to $1,700 a month. Based on the length of the contract you signed with us, we can go down to as short as a month-to-month contract for the highest cost.

And then on the data side, we can pull the list based on your criteria using DataTree data. That would be four cents a record. And then we will skip trace it and scrub it through a TCPA scrubber, which removes all known litigators and their family and friends, essentially, and plainers to the FTC. So essentially anybody that's at possibility of causing us or you problems with litigation gets removed out of the list so they're not being called.

Just a side note for all the listeners who are either cold calling themselves, hiring a VA to cold call, thinking about hiring another cold calling agency, or texting, you should be doing that because go look on Facebook. There are groups with tens of thousands of people where they just teach people how to conduct TCPA litigation. Like they don't even need to win in court. They can just file a suit and then, we or you, depending on what stage of the process it works, or they decide to file, then gets served with a notice.

So anybody dealing stuff on the phone should be doing that. Even though offers to purchase property are not subject to the TCPA, that doesn't keep anybody from filing a suit. And so it's very important to remove those litigators with a good software prior to it getting into your dialer.

Anyway. That’s 11 cents a record. So all-in cost. If we were pulling your list, skipping it, scrubbing it is going to be around, let's just say 10,000 records in a month, $1,500 for that, because fifteen cents a record, and then another $1,500 to $1,700 for the flat fee for the caller.

Seth: It's not that bad. I mean, you compare that to the cost of direct man, l I mean, it almost sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong, but do you recommend that people have Landcaller pull the list and skip trace it and do all that stuff instead of me? Like getting my list from DataTree, running it through Direct Skip and then I give it to you? Is it better for me to just put that all on you guys?

Joe: So we actually don't even allow people to give us skip trace lists anymore. We make some exceptions every once in a while. But the big reason there is we used to allow people to bring us their skip trace list. The problem is the quality of skip tracing available out there ranges widely. Let's just say that. And the vast majority of companies are all white-hatting the same data. They're just putting their brand on it, and it's this white pages data and it's not great.

What we did is we just require that we skip trace the data. Because for us, we can't perform for a client without good numbers. So it would made it very hard to pinpoint things going wrong with campaigns, split or test things if we don't know that we're getting good data back in the first place. So you pay more than you're probably your average skip tracer because we use credit bureau data, which is a lot more expensive. On average, it's bulk discount.

That's why somebody might hear that and say, “Oh, 11 cents skip tracing, that's crazy. I paid Direct Skip 9 cents.” But even just a few percentage points of better, of more numbers that are accurate, leads to one more, you're talking about saving like a couple of hundreds of dollars versus one more deal for a year for hundreds of thousands of numbers you're dialing. One more deal that lands you 20,000. So that's why we require that we skip trace it.

But yes, people can still bring us data. Lots of people have lists that they've been pulling forever. Land doesn't change hands that quickly. If they've got a list, bring us the list by all means. But if you want to move into a new area where you're probably pulling it for cheaper than you are and it's your data, we give it back to our clients. That's how our clients are doing their own SMS campaigns and direct mail campaigns with the data that we pulled and skipped and gave back to.

Seth: So aside from TCPA stuff or known litigators and that kind of thing, are there certain types of property owners you simply won't call? Like, “Oh, we noticed there's this characteristic about this person, so we're not going to call them or you shouldn't call them.” Anything like that come to mind or is that not a thing?

Joe: No, not really. And here's another tidbit for your folks that are doing cold calling themselves or hiring it out themselves, go ahead and call “do not call” list numbers.

I see a lot of or I talk to a lot of clients that used to do cold calling themselves maybe or had a VA do it. Yeah, half my list I can't use, and that's right about half your list is going to be people on the federal “do not call” registry. You are not subject to that if you are calling them in order to ask them to purchase their property. There's multiple court cases you can look up that have established the TCPA does not apply if you are offering to purchase and you were not marketing.

So if you're a realtor trying to find leads, it's a little bit different if you are trying to market yourself to provide a service to them. But if you're calling because you want to purchase a property and some court cases have even established that putting it under contract with the intent to purchase it or even wholesale, it also works. You can call “do not call” list numbers.

So a lot of you out there listening to this, if you're cold calling, you're artificially limiting yourself to half your possible list by scrubbing out “do not call” folks from your list.

Seth: So what if I hire Landcaller and I pay you guys thousands to call people and no leads materialize, or no deals are closed? Or I guess those two different questions. But does that ever happen where people spend the money and it just gets them nowhere? They just flush the money down the toilet?

And if so, how often does that happen? Why does that happen? Is it because people aren't following up fast enough? Or is it because they're terrible on the phone? Or any insights on people who try this and it doesn't work for them? If that ever happens, why doesn't it work for them?

Joe: Yeah, that's a great question. I'm sure everybody has that in the back of their mind.

So we have had one client to date that did not land a deal with us. We sent them close to 200 leads over the course of three months. No, actually it was about 220 leads. They were averaging close to 80 or to 100 leads a month. I think it was 220 or 230 leads, and it was about two and a half months of calling.

I don't know why they didn't land a deal. I looked at their leads that were coming in. Some of them seemed plenty motivated. They were a relatively experienced flipper, also a realtor, I couldn't say. I had coaching calls with them where I tried to figure out what they might be doing differently. They ended up getting out of land flipping altogether, or at least stopping their business for a while, not sure.

We have had nobody else that hasn't landed a lead. We have people that have landed, obviously, like much fewer than our average conversion rate. That's why our average is there. But the biggest probably, I'd say the biggest variable that you can control is—aside from your general strategy, which we talked about earlier, which is going to raise or lower what type of leads you're ultimately closing—is how quickly you're calling them back.

So this is not the guy that didn't land any leads, but we had another client. I see a lead come in, and I see in the notes that he talks about how he wants to move out of state. He wants to get it sold quickly because he wants to go live with his kids. He's 80 years old, and he's got like five other parcels he wants to sell as fast as he can. This is all in the notes. And so I hit him up on Slack. Every one of our clients, we set up an individual Slack channel for them where we communicate with them. We give them their daily KPIs, and they can ask questions and that sort of thing.

So I hit him up on Slack. I'm like, “Hey, great lead. Let me know how that goes. That sounds like a killer lead.” Yeah, I'll let you know. About a week goes by, I hit him up. “Hey, how'd that lead go?”

“Oh, I haven't gotten back to him yet. I'm going to do it soon.”

I'm like, “All right, man, get on that. That seemed like a great lead.”

About another three, four days goes by. Hit him up like, “Hey, how'd that conversation go? Did you get all those properties locked up?”

“Oh, man, I called him this morning and he went under contract with somebody last night for all of them.”

“You're killin’ me, Smalls.”

Seth: Yeah, that's a good lesson though.

Joe: it's warm.

Seth: These people are probably getting hit by other land investors giving them offers, and it's front of mind, like, they're thinking of selling.

Maybe the question is, what should the time limit be? Like, the second you get that lead, you got to call them within 24 hours? 48 hours? I know the answer is as soon as possible, but…

Joe: I try to do 48.

Seth: 48? Okay.

Yeah, I try to do 48. We have a couple of clients that we do live transfers with, and if we can't transfer to them, those lights are a little bit bigger. They have pretty built out robust systems, but we're handing off the lead. We go through some questions and they're like, hey, do you have time to talk to a manager? And then we're handing the lead straight connecting the call. I mean, that's as warm as you get.

But we haven't seen any data that actually indicates that that's necessarily any better at conversion rates than calling within 24 to 48 hours. Once you go past 48 hours, I think people start to kind of back to that, like, building, presenting a professional and serious face of the company that you represent. If you go past 48 hours, how serious are you? Like, 72. If you're calling back a week later, how serious are you about this transaction? Do you really want to buy it? It may be the implication to some sellers there.

So when a lead is warm, you definitely want to follow up as quickly as you can. But, yeah, 24 to 48 is what I do.

Joe: I'm not the expert that you are, Joe, but I would almost think 24 hours would be exponentially better. I think back to different real estate people I've called over the years, and psychologically, there is a difference when somebody calls me back that day or the next day. But once you start waiting, like days or weeks even, it's like, okay, I already written you off. I know I can't rely on you because you're not getting back to me.

So I guess ASAP is the answer.

Joe: Yeah, ASAP is definitely best. The only kind of caveat is a lot of times, our callers, we usually finish the conversation with, “Our manager is going to call you back. Is there a good time or what time of day works best for you?” And so a lot of times the seller is giving us a convenient time, which may not be like this afternoon. But all things considered, yes, the sooner the better.

Seth: And another thing that comes to mind here is the time commitment of calling people back. I mean, if I'm getting 100 warm leads a month, that's got to take a lot of time to actually call those people. I mean, never mind the discomfort of it for the introverts out there, but just like the time of following up.

I know it doesn't all happen in one shot like this, but if I get 100 leads dropped into my lap, how much time should I set aside to make sure I'm following up with those people? Is it like 15 minutes per lead or 20 minutes or five minutes or what would you say?

Joe: Yeah, I would say a little bit of that is what are you front loading that second conversation with? We kind of talked about that earlier. How much due diligence of online sources are you doing on that lead before you call them back? And how good are you with your systems? How quickly can you comp a property?

So that's kind of a whole aspect which I'm not going to speak about because that ranges widely. I take about three minutes to comp a property, and I know people that will take an hour to comp a property. At least I take three minutes to get a number that I'm comfortable going under contract on.

But I would say if that second call is about eight to ten minutes, and then a third call is typically shorter because you make the offer, you do a little chitchat, you make the offer and then pretty quickly, you know whether or not you're close and maybe there's a follow-up call or two to negotiate the last few thousand or not. So that one can typically be a little bit shorter. So I would say 15 minutes is probably a pretty good average.

So how do you manage that? First of all, 100 leads, that'd be a pretty successful campaign. That would be abnormal. But even 60 leads, that's still a lot of time. So the things you do are you either tighten the funnel on our end with our scripting, so you're only getting sent higher quality leads (which you just understand that there are leads that you don't get sent that you could have probably turned into deals, but you're just recognizing that you don't want to spend the extra time sifting through some of the other ones), or honestly, you hire a VA to do a good chunk of it. Because if your VA is doing a lot of that due diligence on the front side, it's very manageable to carve out a couple hours in the day or in the evening when a lot of people ask to be called back in the evening, you carve out a couple of hours and you just knock the phone calls out one after the other.

But if you work in a full time W-2 job, and you're also trying to do all the GIS, Land ID, deed registry poll, due diligence ahead of time, now you're probably running out of time to additionally do the phone calls. And so that's where a VA can really help you do those kind of monotonous tasks.

Seth: How knowledgeable are your cold callers about their clients? Like, if I hire you and somebody's calling on my behalf and the property owner's like, “Hey, I got you on the phone right now. Let's get an offer. How much can you offer me?” Are they authorized to throw any numbers out there? Or if not, how much information can they share about me before I get involved and start calling them?

Joe: Some of that's dependent on the client. So at a base level, they have standard responses. We get some information obviously during our onboarding about the client, where are they based? And you're always a local company, right? That sort of thing. And that buys. And so they understand the standard land flippers company looks like, and they can answer questions that just kind of come up, like, “Who are you? Why are you calling me about my piece of land I haven't thought about in ten years in another state?” they could answer those questions.

In terms of pricing, they will, unless it's a campaign where a client has provided us a pre-priced list and said, hey, either in the script, “I want you to bring this price up. You're authorized to bring this price up during the call.” Then on a question about pricing, they're just going to demur. They're going to say, “We want to give you the most accurate offer possible because we want to make sure we're maximizing the return for you. So we need to get this conversation and then make sure that we accurately comp it before we offer you a price.” And they'll just demur essentially to the manager, which is the client.

Seth: I'm assuming you don't record these calls, right? It's not like I get to listen to exactly what we said. There's just a few basic pieces of information that are passed along to me so I can kind of have some context for who I'm talking to.

Joe: So calls are recorded sometimes. Every state has different rules about recording conversations, so if we're allowed to record them, they are recorded. There's not an easy way to get recorded calls to the client that doesn't take a lot of man hours. So providing with the lead a recording of the call to every lead is not something we do.

That being said, we use the recorded calls most importantly for quality assurance. So we have a whole quality assurance team, which is listening to calls, a percentage of calls from every caller on a weekly basis, providing grades to that caller feedback, and then follow-on training. They're important for the QA aspect.

And then if it was a place where we could have recorded. We had the recording. If something in the caller's notes doesn't make sense or know, the client calls them back. And just what the caller or the seller is saying now is not jiving with what the caller said. They said on the initial call, we can pull that call on a case-by-case basis and provide that recording to the client so they can kind of parse through what the issue may be. I mean, that doesn't happen very frequently, but that is something we've provided for clients before.

Seth: When I jump in and do call number two, does it matter which phone number or area code I use? I guess along with that, is there some trick to getting people to actually answer the phone? Because I know whenever I get calls from numbers I don't recognize, I let it go to voicemail because I don't know you. And I guess if people do that to me, do I leave them a voicemail? I don't know, just any thoughts on how you best manage that?

Joe: Yeah, so when we're calling, we're calling either with an exact match or more likely a near match area code. So an area code from a nearby county. Best practice, I feel like this is regardless of lead gen source, is to call people back with a code from the state that you're operating in.

The way we kind of get around people ignoring that call—and they will ignore it sometimes—is kind of setting the expectations with the seller when our caller gets off the phone. So, “Hey, you can expect a call within 24 to 48 hours from our local manager who will follow up with you on this.” So they know to expect it. So if they see an unknown number, they might call back again. Why that kind of follow-up as quickly as you can kind of makes sense.

But then the other aspect is just leave a voicemail. I have to do that relatively frequently. It helps when the seller said, hey, I want to be called back at this time on this date, or whatever it may be, because then they're even more so expecting it. But sometimes you're not going to hold them because they're normal people and they're doing normal things. They don't have their phone on them. So just leave a voicemail. You'll get contacted back most of the time. Hey, talk to so and so. We can provide you with the name for your caller if you're a client with us so that you can reference it. You talk to so and So, my assistant. Just call them back with a few more questions about your property to make you an offer on that piece of vacant land we discussed.

Seth: And then if a person just doesn't answer, like ever, how many times should I be calling them back? Is it three and you're done, or do you just do it forever?

Joe: It happens. So I'll typically call them. I'll alternate calls and text if it is a cell phone and on a landline, usually every other day or sometimes every day for about a week to ten days. And then I'll usually just send a final text if it is a cell phone. Or I'll leave a voicemail which goes something like, “Hey, it seems like you're no longer interested in selling your property. I'll stop bothering you.” That will sometimes motivate people into no, I am interested, and they'll get back to you.

But if not, then I just transition them into a drip campaign and I'll follow up with them a couple of months later.

Seth: When you say drip campaign, you mean drip for phone calls, not like some other type of texting or mail or something like that?

Joe: Texting as well. But yeah, typically a phone call. There's a whole list of all right, this week we're following up on these phone calls from six weeks ago. Quickly make a dial, they pick up. Great. Hey, we had discussed buying your property a couple of months back. We lost touch. Or is that something you're still interested in? If they don't answer, then call them back the next month at about the six month mark. I typically just drop them off.

Seth: Now with all these I mean, even if you're just doing cold calling and nothing else, but especially if you're doing cold calling plus texting, plus direct mail, plus email, plus ringless voicemail, all these other things you can do, it seems like the need for a good CRM system of some kind goes up and up and up, because how do you remember what the last conversation was and what the first one was and how that went and when you've called them back and all this stuff? Do you recommend any specific type of system or do you use anything specific that's helpful for you?

Joe: So I use Pebble. I like Pebble. Pebble is a good CRM. Pebble I got because of how optimized it was for mailers back when I mailed, but I don't mail anymore. But it still works well, it has a public form like any good CRM should have, so that my caller on my land caller campaign just fills out the form and it drops it straight into Pebble. Pull it straight into a deal. That's pretty standard for any good CRM.

Airtable? I don't know. Airtable? Airtable is a pretty popular one with like we have a number of clients that have Airtable, but you're absolutely right. I mean, none of our clients that are doing multi-pronged lead gen are doing it without a CRM and doing it without VAs. I don't know how honestly it'd be possible to try to send mail, text, and get cold call leads using Google Sheets and doing it all by yourself.

Theoretically, I guess it is. But they all have VAs, and they all have pretty robust CRMs. But for somebody just starting out or wanting to bootstrap a little bit. We have plenty of clients that we are their only lead gen source, but they're just getting their leads in a Google Sheet, not spending the time working out how to maximize a CRM's efficiency because it works well enough for them.

Seth: We've actually got video tutorials explaining how to use both Pebble and Airtable. So if anybody's out there is like, what? What is this? How does it work? Check out the show notes for this episode. Again, I have got a ton of stuff that's going to be in there, lots of links to these tutorials and different things. So again, retipster.com/168.

So as we wrap this up, I keep coming back to this whole shy introversion thing. People who just really do not like talking to strangers on the phone. And I have an interesting history with this, but for somebody like me, cold calling, I mean, I guess doing that first call especially sounds awful. Luckily, we don't have to do that because of you.

But even the second phone call, whether it's the time commitment or just the discomfort with it, is there any trick to getting past the discomfort? Anything that you go through, it doesn't sound like you had this discomfort. Correct me if I'm wrong, and maybe the question intertwined with this is like, what kind of person should or shouldn't consider using cold calling in the first place? Is there a type of customer? It's like, yeah, you don't even go here, do something else.

Joe: I mean, I think there's definitely an aspect of know thyself and what your kind of strengths and weaknesses are. I would argue a little bit that just the land flipping niche, like making this a full-time business or even a lucrative side hustle very much lends itself to people that are good conversators. Like, even if you're doing direct mail and you're sending blind offers and you're only getting mail back from people that agreed to your offer, like I said, most of the time you're still talking with them on the phone, so you still have to be able to converse professionally.

Part of what's helpful for some people is just a little bit of, it's almost like hype man, or just envisioning how you'd want to appear to the other person before you get on the phone with them. Like when I was active duty Marine Corps and doing this as a side hustle and calling from my Google Voice know, after the kids were in bed. Or like, I'm not like Joe Roberts who's just got started in land flipping, and I don't actually really know what I'm doing yet. I'm the owner of New Life Lands. I'm a professional land investor. We buy and sell lots of land in this space.

Just tell yourself that right before you get on the phone and then act like it. It can be an act. There's actually a very interesting video, go try to find with so Deion Sanders, right. He's all the rage right now for the CU Buffs as their coach. It's fascinating. He did an interview, I think pretty recently of talking about how he's a very introverted or was a very, very introverted, shy person. But he had this goal of being a superstar because he wanted to provide, he's coming from a single mom whom he wanted to provide for. He wanted to give her the things that she had never been able to give him.

And so in college he realized, like, I need to build a persona and the persona is not me, but I can build this persona and then I can just go act out this persona and I'm just acting. It's not me. So I could still be Introverted Deion. But his persona was Prime and really fascinating interview that anybody that kind of struggles with this, I would say go look it up because I thought it's exactly that, build a persona. You're a professional land investor. You own a successful company. You're calling them back because you know the value of their land and you want their land and that will come through in the conversation.

Seth: Actually reminds me of two different actors, James Earl Jones and Samuel L. Jackson. They both struggled with stuttering as children. Like it was like a debilitating stutter. Like it was very, very difficult. But both of them got into acting because it's actually a fairly common thing. I don't know what it is about acting, but when you're reading lines and being somebody else, you don't stutter.

It's also a similar thing. Some singers, I can think of at least a couple singers off top of my head where they stuttered horribly when they would speak. But as soon as they're going to a beat and they're singing, they don't stutter at all. It totally clears up. And it's almost like if you can visualize who you want to be and what you want to be, you can make it happen.

I think I remember hearing I think it was Jack Nicholas, the golfer, where every time he would step up to the ball and take a swing, he would clearly visualize exactly how he wanted to hit it and it would go perfect, like perfect form. It would go exactly where I wanted it to go. And that was like a huge tool that he would use to hit it right every time.

It's probably a similar thing where your behavior and your actions and all this stuff kind of follow your thoughts, so you have to train your thoughts and take every thought captive.

Joe: I learned that flying helicopters in the Marine Corps. Like before I would go on a flight, especially a particularly tough, complicated mission, I would sit down and typically try to do it in a quiet space in a ready room. And just visualize the flight, like visualize the control inputs I would need to make for a particularly tough maneuver or when something was going to happen in the objective area, a particularly complicated portion of the flight. Just visualize it, walk through it. It's not the first time you're seeing it when you're there flying and things are shooting and you're shooting and everything's going on.

So you could apply those same principles to golf, to getting on the phone, to talk to a lead that's in your inbox.

Seth: Did you ever fly a helicopter upside down or anything crazy like that?

Joe: No.

Seth: Is that even possible?

Joe: With some models it is. There's a rumor that it's possible with the Cobra, which is the model I flew. There's a rumor that it's possible with it, but I don't know anybody that's tested it out.

Seth: We haven't done this in a while, but I want to do this because I think we got a little bit of time, and I'm interested to hear these answers. So at the end of some podcast episodes, when we have time, I like to ask three final questions to understand more about our guests and understand how they think and how they work.

So, Joe, first question is, what is your biggest fear?

Joe: My biggest fear is that somebody else controls my ability to take care of my family. That was my entire motivation to get into real estate was some things that happened while I was in the Marine Corps and I realized that this could just all go away at a moment's notice. Whether that's my life or that's my job, but somebody else is controlling whether or not my family is going to be taken care of for the rest of their lives.

So that's my driving motivation, really, with anything I do, is that I'm not dependent on anybody else to provide for my family.

Seth: Yeah, it's interesting. I heard this on some podcast probably like, seven or eight years ago, but a lot of people have this idea that I don't want to have a boss. I want to work for myself. But the reality is, when you work for yourself, you actually have hundreds of bosses. It's just that it's, like, spread out and diversified. And if one of them disappears and fires you, it's okay because you have 99 other ones.

Joe: Yeah, exactly.

Seth: But I hear you, for sure. So what are you most proud of?

Joe: I mean, I'm most proud of my family, my kids, and my wife. And there was some tough years. I was deployed three of my last four years in the Marine Corps. By the time I got out of Marine Corps, I'd been gone for, almost all of my kids, more than half of all their lives. So just how they came through that experience and then my wife standing behind me as I left the safety of a guaranteed pension, a good career, essentially just kind of left it all aside so that I could pursue my real estate companies full time. And then when I have harebrained ideas, like, let's launch another company, call it Landcaller, and see what goes from there, she still stands by me. So I'm probably most proud of the woman my wife is and my kids for sticking with me.

Seth: That's got to be hard, man. Honestly, I can't even imagine that. I don't think I even let myself think about it like being away from your family for that long. I had a cousin who was deployed using the Navy Jag, and he was on a Navy ship for a year and a half on the Pacific, and he said it kind of felt like he was just in prison for that entire time because maybe it's different when you're on a Navy ship. I don't know. But that's tough. So my hat’s off to you.

And I bet being a Marine is that kind of wrapped up in your identity, do you think? Is it sort of part of who you are? Do you kind of look at a lot of life through that lens or not so much?

Joe: I actually like to say that it is not part of my identity and is why I was able to just walk away from it. It was a job that I took seriously, that I tried my best at every day. But ultimately, the people that treat something like the Marine Corps as being one and the same with their identity, they're let down, because when they get out of the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps doesn't care about them anymore. And many of them had left behind broken families. They may not have any faith to ground them to speak of.

And so when that's your identity, what are you left with when that's no longer there? So did the Marine Corps mold and shape me and teach me discipline and critical thinking? All sorts of things? Absolutely. I probably can't even count the ways that my experiences in the Marine Corps and with the people I served with have impacted my life, but it's not part of my identity.

My identity is first and foremost a child of God, a sinner saved by Christ, and then a husband, a father, a brother, a son. Those things are my identity.

Seth: Yeah. That's awesome, man. That's great to hear.

So, last question. Suppose you just got $100 million wired to your bank account, and you're not allowed to stay on your current career path. So no more land, no more cold calling, none of that stuff. You got to hit the reset button and do something else, but you can do anything else you want for the rest of your life. What are you going to do?

Joe: So no real estate at all or just no land?

Seth: Let's go extreme. Let's say no real estate.

Joe: All right, so I would probably start a and there's a little bit of real estate involved in this, but it's not the main part. So I think you can forgive me, but I would like to start like a company which finds big pieces of real estate in great areas. But what it does is it develops them out to train first responders, military, and that sort of thing in unique ways that they may not be able to otherwise.

So, for instance, in the Marine Corps bases it's very difficult to get ranges, get training areas. There's so many units and everybody's fighting for the same little piece of ground on the base. It's the same similar thing with EMS, police forces, and that sort of thing to get a big cool piece of real estatem maybe has the lake on it, it's got a mountain, it's know, backs up the national forest and then you can set up all sorts of good training for various first responders in the military.

I think that'd be something that would kind of pull from different aspects of my life. I've got a brother who's a SWAT officer who would probably be all about coming in and doing training and that sort of thing. And then I would also offer courses in survival, like wilderness survival. That's a big passion of mine. I did a lot of wilderness survival courses in the Marine Corps, all over the world, north of the Arctic Circle, in the desert. So I really enjoy that. And it would be fun to just have a wilderness survival kind of compound or big piece of land that people could come to and learn wilderness survival skills.

Seth: You ever seen that show Alone?

Joe: I love it. That's a great show. It's probably the best survival show out there.

Seth: How long do you think you would last in that situation?

Joe: I think I would last pretty long.

Seth: Of course.

Joe: Definitely when I was deploying all the time. And you have to have a mindset when you're leaving your family, especially when you're going into a combat zone where you have to be able to flip a switch from missing them, right? Because if you're missing them and you're not focused on your job, especially in your place where people are trying to kill you, then you probably don't come back alive.

So I'm sure you've watched Alone. You see the mental aspect is a big part for most of them. And they don't know that switch. They don't have that switch. So I think I would last quite a long time.

Seth: It is fascinating. You're absolutely right. I mean, so much of it is in your head. I mean, sometimes people have to leave the show because they're sick or physically they're totally worn down. But I feel like more often than not, they just miss their family or they discover themselves and realize this isn't actually what I want, and all this stuff. It's a fascinating show, just psychologically seeing what it's like to go through that.

And it's also interesting to me, I don't think they ever point this out on the show, but I keep thinking, like, what if it wasn't a single person on their own, but what if, like, two people could survive together? Because then you can start specializing. And it kind of goes back to this idea that two are better than one and three are even better. It's this idea that as soon as people can support each other, keep each other warm, one person can be like, okay, I'm going to look for food, you build the shelter. But when it's one person, they have to do it all on their own. It's like it's really, really hard and it's very difficult to survive in that scenario.

Joe: Absolutely.

Seth: Joe, thank you again for doing another conversation with me. I say another because we already did another one for the Land Elite Masterclass, but both of them were fascinating. I learned a ton. I hope people listen to this, learned a lot as well. You're a great guy. It's great to know you.

And again, if people want to find out more about Joe, where do they go? Landcaller.com, is that the website?

Joe: Yeah, Landcaller.com that will have just kind of information about the company. I'm not very active on most social media. I don't have most of it, but I am pretty active on X, formerly known as Twitter. So if you want to give me a follow on there, I post not just about land and cold calling. You'll also get my thoughts on military matters and geopolitics sometimes, but I do post a good fair amount on land investing and cold calling for land investors.

So @joethelandguy is my X handle.

Seth: And I will include that in the show notes as well. Well, thanks again, Joe. Thanks everybody for watching. Again, I've said this several times, but it's because there's out there. Go to retipster.com/168.

I can't think of a recent show in recent memory where we had this much stuff in the show notes, so definitely check that out. I think you'll find it interesting, and I'll talk to you again in the next episode.

Joe: Thanks, Seth.