Joe McCall On Improving Lead Flow By Hiring VA’s

Episode 432: Joe McCall On Improving Lead Flow By Hiring VA’s

 

The real estate industry calls for realtors to do a huge number of tasks, particularly on the marketing side. Because of having a hectic schedule full of direct mails or cold calls, their lead flow suffers. For Joe McCall, hiring virtual assistants can solve this problem. He talks with Mitch Stephen about how these remote professionals can help realtors get away from CRM, conduct data research and gathering, and get huge assistance in improving and implementing marketing strategies. By finding and collaborating with a skilled and responsible VA, realtors can then stop worrying if the hours they are putting on work are worth it to the money they are making.

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There are at least 100 tasks that a VA can do for real estate investors. Think about that for a minute. If you are spending hours upon hours doing the little things that don’t make you money, the things that are below your pay grade. If you’re wearing yourself out from calling hundreds of people to find one motivated seller, or keeping track of old leads, setting appointments, skip tracing, sending out mass emails, or texting prospects, please, stop doing that and get that over into the hands of a capable VA. I have got at least six VA’s that work for me. They do the things that I don’t want to do and they keep me right where I belong.

They keep me writing contracts, talking to private lenders, talking to agents, lawyers, and people on my round table, my CPAs, the important things, and staying in front of people that make the big deals happen. That’s where I need to be. I need to be at the very highest level of the task chart. One day, I set out and I found one virtual assistant. It changed my life. I started compounding on that. I want you to go to 1000houses.com/VAHelp and find the virtual assistant that’s going to change your life. Start with just one. Let this company help you train them to do what you want them to do in your market. Get some balance in your life and get a company that runs without you.

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I’ve got Joe McCall formerly Podio Joe but we’ve lost that name. I met Joe at the mastermind. What was the mastermind, Joe? 

Collective Genius.

I met a lot of cool people there. In fact, that’s where I learned to own a real business. I went there on purpose to figure out how to get out of my way, get out of my business and make a business that runs. I can happily say thanks to Joe and a lot of people in that room. Even some alcohol, I was able to unwind and then rewind. I let these people rewind me back and I have not seen the last 350 houses I bought in my hometown. I have not seen nor talked to the last 350 people that bought my houses. I’ll do 120 houses and I won’t see any of them, but make no mistake. I’m in control. I’ve got my spreadsheets.

I’ve been in this town for many years, Joe. I figured this out. We did the math. I have bought a house in San Antonio, Texas every 4 to 5 days for years. I got it on my chair with that number. I was like, “Where does it go? No wonder my forehead’s now a seven head.” We met at Collective Genius. What a great group of people, quarterly meetings. It costs you $30,000 if it costs you a penny that year to go to that thing because the seat’s not cheap and rightfully B, you pay for your hotel and flights and C, we go out a lot in the evenings. These people don’t go to Whataburger or Burger King. These people go to nice places. 

I don’t think we ever went to Whataburger.

When I was talking to you back then, that was quite a long time ago. 

It was 2011.

You were doing a lot of Podio stuff but you’ve always amazed me with your ability to travel around the world and do wholesale deals all over the place and doing from afar. One time I interviewed you a long time ago and you were in an RV in Yellowstone or something. You’d bought a couple of houses that week and made more money than most people making a job. They have to show up to 60 hours. 

This business allows you to do that. I have been fortunate. It’s simple. I heard this one guy talk about in his business how he set up his systems and he says, “It’s really easy. I make a list of everything you got to do. I asked myself a simple question, how can I do none of this?”

First, you make a list of everything you’ve got to do and then you don’t do any of it. 

He’s asking the question, what a revolutionary concept. I started doing that in my wholesaling and lease options business. I said, “We got to do the marketing. We got to talk to sellers. We got to make offers. We got to take pictures, show the house, and sell the house.” How can I get myself completely 100% removed from that? I had an acquisitions manager at the time I thought the key to doing more deals and make more money was hired an acquisitions manager. I did. I trained him. It was hard work training him. At first, he went from making $8 an hour at Home Depot. He was all excited about making $3,000 per deal. He thought that was the best thing in the world. I was trying to push him to get $10,000 per deal, the wholesaling profit. Finally, I got him to $5,000. He was comfortable with making a $5,000 profit. I got him comfortable to making $7,000 but then $8,000 and then our average profits started being around $8,500 per deal.

We were doing 3 to 4 deals a week, which was awesome but I was busier than ever. I was still going to the title company. I was still putting out fires, coaching him and answering questions from him all the time. Every single deal is different. There was always something that came up at the last minute. We had an emergency to fix something, pay for something, to get it closed. Some buyers were depending on what was going on with the buyers. It’s always something. I didn’t like it. Still, at the end of the day, as I was looking at all my marketing costs, paying the acquisitions manager, and my overhead, I was only netting 45% to 50% of the deal. I thought, “This is a lot of work for just 40% of the profits.” I shouldn’t be complaining because that was still good. I made that list. I said, “How can I get someone else to do all of this for me?”

Can I ask you why you’re complaining about 40%? Was that a month or a year? 

$4,000 per deal on average, about $12,000 a week so $48,000 a month.

I want to get straight what he’s complaining about.

I was complaining about the work involved, not the money. To put it in perspective, the business is doing well. It’s better than I ever have and I’m looking at different opportunities.

The point is, making the money starts to be the easy part. The problem is, how do you get free and still keep most if not all or more of the money? That becomes the new level of the challenge, which was you gotten to a point where that was your new challenge. How do I don’t do anything and make this or more? 

The sad thing too for me and I look at an opportunity and I can only make $10,000 a month doing that. I’m like, “I don’t want to waste my time.” I remember thinking back, if I could make $10,000 a month doing this thing, I would be all over that. I’d be super excited. The more successful you get sometimes, the more opportunities come your way as well. It becomes a challenge to figure out like, “I can’t do all of these things. What’s the number one thing I could do?” This comes back to what I was talking about. I was part of this coaching program called Lifeionaire at that time. I was taught by a guy named Shaun McCloskey and Steve Cook. They were teaching about designing a vision for your life first and then designing a business around that. I started thinking about what do I want my life to look like? I don’t want to work super hard 50 to 60 hours a week, retire, and then finally get to live the lifestyle when I’m 65.

My kids are out of the house. Who knows what they’re doing? They’re living all around the world and I’m like, “I would rather live that lifestyle, go see the world with my kids or go travel around in our RV while we have kids when I can enjoy it. I’m not old and crippled.” I heard many stories of people retiring at 65 and then dying a year later. That’s depressing. I don’t want to do that. I said, “Let’s design a vision for my life. What do I want my life to look like?” I want to work from home. I want to be able to work from anywhere in the world. I want a mobile independent business where all I need is my laptop and a cell phone and I can run my business from anywhere in the world. I’m not tied down to an office. I have low overhead, a couple of employees. That’s it. I have a bunch of VA’s maybe, I don’t want this big organism with 20, 30, 50 people, a big office, and all of that. I thought, “I want to be able to travel. I want my kids to be homeschooled. I want to have a nice house.” We have this house, its three acres, and it’s private. I thought, “Let’s design a vision for life first and then design a business around that.” That was this thing I thought.

We want to travel and go on an RV for three months. A year later we went to Prague in the Czech Republic for three months. I thought, “How can I want to do deals? How can I do none of this?” For marketing, I can get my assistant to do the marketing. Handling the calls, I can get a VA to handle the calls. I had Podio. It’s managing all the leads. I built the systems. I went out and I partnered with local wholesalers. People that I knew and trusted that were already doing deals and I said to them, “What if I brought you pre-qualified, pre-screened leads? Could you get them under contract and sell them and we’ll split the deals 50/50?” I was working with 3 or 4 guys at that time and they were like, “That’s a fantastic idea.” They’re not the ones that like to be handling a ton of leads. They get buried in post-it notes and yellow pads of paper. They want to be in their car or truck driving around looking at houses and talking to sellers.

There are some people that that’s what they do. That’s what turns them on. My business partner Mike Powell is like that. He doesn’t want to do anything else. He wants to write contracts. He likes that game.

Find that guy and say, “What if I did the marketing, I’ll get my VA’s to pre-screen the leads, and I’ll give you pre-screen motivated leads. You to work them, you negotiate and get them under contract and flip them and we’ll split the net profits 50/50.” That worked out great. We did that for a long time.

The challenge for them is, how much can I get in a wholesale deal? They don’t limit themselves. The ones that are good at what they do, they’ll let the predicament predict how much they can make or not make. They won’t call themselves. They won’t say, “I’ve got $3,000. That’s good enough and leave.” They want to know how much is in every deal that they can get. If you’re a negotiator, you let that wholesale profit rise to wherever it can go.

Here’s the crazy thing. I was making more money doing that than I was with my acquisitions manager and doing zero work. Here’s the reason why you’re splitting the deal. I said, “I’m splitting the pie but it’s a bigger pie.” These are better at negotiating deals. They’re meeting with the seller at the kitchen table. They negotiated a lower price than I would have gotten over the phone and because they had good buyers, they were selling them at a higher price than I would have on my own. Because I’m doing this with this guy, I can do more deals so I’ve got more pies to split as well. There’s a lot of things that need to go on administratively and with systems and stuff but people are worried, “What if the guy goes behind your back?” We wouldn’t let that happen because I manage the leads. I owned the leads. All the leads were in my CRM. I had to see the A to B side and the B to C side. All had to be tracked inside of my CRM. I had my assistant constantly following up with the wholesalers. That’s how we were able to travel and do deals virtually. I was on the phone at Yellowstone, talking to sellers. You certainly could do that. I found somebody that could do that for me instead.

In this scenario, are you responsible for the money or are you just flipping contracts?

I’m flipping contracts. When I was doing a lot of lease options when I first quit my job, I would be the guy on the phone getting the sellers to agree to a lease option. Once that happened, I would hand it off to my local realtor, a leasing agent, that would find the tenant/buyers for me. That’s the hardest part of the whole thing getting advertising, marketing a property. I had hired a realtor to do it.

Let’s talk about you were doing it all and you were making $48,000 a month. Even if you’re making $28,000, it doesn’t matter. The point is you got to perfect the system in a way to get above sea level, to get your head and torso above water all the way up to your ankles. You have some R&D money, research, and development money where you can go out and try some things that don’t necessarily work but you’re not going under. That’s where a lot of people hit a roadblock. A lot of people will try to do what you’re telling them to do right out of the gate. It takes a little bit of a cushion. Do you agree or you don’t agree?

You have to have some money to pay for marketing. You have to frontload it with some investment of capital to pay for the marketing, especially when you’re doing direct mail and cold calling. It takes 2 to 3 months to build up the momentum to get the leads coming in. One thing you’ll find out is that most of your deals come from the follow-up. It’s not the first time you talked to the seller. It’s the sixth or seventh time that you talked to the seller.

We’re on our eighth. We’re buying things after the seventh call. After that, something happens. We’re tracking that. 

Many people forget that. That’s the most important thing at this. You got to make sure you have the systems and the people in place that are willing to follow-up 7, 8, 10 times with these sellers because that’s where the deals happen.

 

The more you can automate that, the better it is too but that’s a good CRM. That stuff takes time too and money. We’ve put together a hell of a Podio CRM with the use of Podio professionals. We drew the tree what we wanted to happen and then we coach with the professional to get it done. It’s taken six months and it’s been a pain in the butt. It’s been horrible. I was like, “When can I get my hands on it?” The whole office is going to function from that CRM. If you don’t know how the CRM works, customer relations management out there if you’re new, a salesman gets a house under contract, he enters it in or gets a lead, it’s entered in there and then it’s like, “Who takes it from here?” 

The sales guy’s or the VA’s going to call. Once they’ve made contact, they turn it over to the closer. Every time someone clicks on a button, the task moves on to the next person, “We got this house under contract, Shannon. It needs to go to the title company.” This starts bouncing around and multiple people are getting multiple messages of this house are in this stage and you need to do this for that house. It’ll take about 80% of your load off your office. If you get the right one and you have a good one and everyone’s like, “Can I use your CRM?” I say, “My CRM is not going to work for you. My office is not like your office.” The people I got doing this in this chair, you may have over in another chair doing three other things. It doesn’t work like that.

Let me give you and your audience some advice. A lot of you, you’re a one-man show. You’ve got a VA, you’ve got somebody helping you on acquisitions but this is easy. This is one of the first things that you should automate. First of all, you need to get away from your CRM. You need to step away from the computer. Your money is made on the phone, talking to sellers and making offers. If many people fall into the trap of sitting behind a computer for hours a day trying to update the CRM with notes, tasks, follow-up, and trying to do it all themselves, that’s $5 an hour activity. You need to get a VA as soon as possible to manage your CRM for you, once you find a good VA that manages your CRM. I use Voxer a lot. It’s a smartphone messaging app. It’s a walkie talkie for your smartphone. You can have it on an Android or iPhone or whatever. I can Voxer my notes to the VA, “I talked to the seller at 123 Main Street.”

The CRM I use records the phone calls, so I can say, “Listen to the recorded phone call. Take the notes from there. Remind me that in the notes at it, it’s listed right now. The realtor expires in two months. Remind me in 30 days to call them back and follow-up with them. Go ahead and send them a letter.” The VA then gets that message, updates the CRM, does the follow-up, reminder tasks, and appointments for me. The VA looks into the CRM to see who’s the next person that Joe needs to call. She sends that to me in Voxer, “Go ahead and call this seller. Here’s the information.” One of the things you could do is on your phone, set up an email account that only your VA has. Every seller that you need to call, she puts all that information into one email and sends you the email. When you’re sitting there in your car or Starbucks, you look at the next email and you see all the information that you need to have on that deal. You call that seller back with the notes. You Voxer your notes back to the VA. You delete the email, go to the next email. Do you understand what I’m saying?

Let’s be clear, Voxer is voice-driven. It’s safe to use in the car when you have the automation. You tell them when he says send them your notes. You’re going to tell him with your mouth into the speaker or ping that off to them a recorded message. Tell me if you agree with this. I don’t think there should ever be a one-man show if you’re going into this business. You have to have at least one VA. It’s stupid not to have one. You can get one for $5 an hour. No matter what level you’re at. There are ten things that they can do for you if you sit down and think about it that you’re wasting your time on.

You touched my heartstrings here because VA’s can do so much for you that you don’t even realize. The most important thing they can do for you is your marketing. There are many things a VA could do for you. They could go and they could scrape data off of websites. They can go to your court websites and pull evictions and divorces. Sometimes you can get public information on utilities or in probates. If a utility has been shut off or tax delinquents, they can go get that data. Another thing I like my VA’s to do is to go and find rentals. I have my target zip codes. They go in to get the rentals that are in that zip code. They put them into a spreadsheet and then they find out who the owner is and send them one-off letters. We send letters one at a time through Click2Mail with a picture of the seller’s house to the seller from rentals on Zillow. They can go and they can send text messages and emails.

One of the things they like to do is find older listings on the MLS and we send the realtor an email. “This property at 123 Main Street, is it still available? It looks like a nice house,” to start the conversation, talk to the realtor and say, “Why hasn’t it sold yet? It seems like it’s a good price.” We’re looking for properties that need some work only an investor would buy that have been listed for 60 or 90 days or more. My VA’s start the conversations for me. When it elevates to a point where like, “I need to get involved.” I join in the conversation at that point. Almost everybody here could hire one full-time marketing VA and have that person or VA busy pretty quickly 40 hours a week doing marketing getting you free leads. It could go to Zillow and send text messages to rentals. Send emails to realtors, scrape data from the County Court websites. There are 100 things that the VA can do for you.

One of the things they do for us is there are 37,000 people that are delinquent on their property taxes in my town. I don’t want to deal with all of them. I want to deal with the top 25% of those houses that tell me through the data that they have the most equity in those houses. There’s room to bargain with me. Get rid of the ones that they got a new loan on it. There’s no equity in it. You can still buy those houses and make money but that’s not what I do. What does it subject to or something? What I want to do is tell me the ones that the mortgage is over twenty years old. Put those in a spreadsheet for me or over 50 years old. There shouldn’t be a one-man show ever in this business. I don’t even understand it.

The first thing you get a VA to do is marketing. The second thing that you get a VA to do is to update your CRM. You shouldn’t be the CRM expert in your business. Your VA should be the one that goes in there and manages it for you. You’re only spending your time talking to sellers and making offers. That’s the only thing you should be doing. Some guys chicken scratch their notes on a yellow pad of paper but it’s legible. They take a picture of their notes on that yellow pad of paper and send a picture of that those notes to the VA. Maybe you have a seller lead sheet with fields that you fill in like bedrooms and baths, address, notes, motivation levels 1 to 5. You can circle and write in these things. Take a picture of that from your phone and send it to your VA. Have your VA update the CRM for you.

If there’s a task or somebody that you need to call that day, they send you one email for each task first thing in the morning and they only send you three emails. It goes to an inbox that only that VA has. The only emails in there are the emails from your VA that things that you need to do. You call that seller, Voxer your notes or take a picture of the notes back to the VA, delete the email, go to the next email. By the time you’re done with those three emails, Voxer your VA back and say, “I need some more sellers to call.” Here’s the whole point. You get away from losing your notes, yellow pads of paper, and post-it notes everywhere to immediately that gets inputted into your CRM by your VA. A lot of times, I like to make offers to every single seller I talk to. Even if they say, “No, I’m not interested.” I still want to send them something in the mail. We send them a letter, an offer, a lease-purchase offer, or a cash offer.

VA’s going to contact everybody no matter what. You would beat the price even the ones that tell you to get off their property. You’ve insulted them with your price and they’re mad. We even send to everybody, we still send whatever that offer was to them. You’d be surprised, in eight months, they’re going to call. They finally figured out the property is not worth $1 million. I remember some of these people back when this was happening. I’d say, “That’s the guy that chewed my butt out and told me that kicked me out to the street.” I would acknowledge that. I said, ” I’m glad you called back. Why me?” Many times, the answer was, “You’re the only one that ever bothered to send a real legitimate contract.” Many times I heard that.

Do you send it in the mail or by email?

Every way. It’s all about touches. I’m going to send it in the mail and then three days later. It’s programmed to send out an email with the contract that said, “I sent this out in the mail but in case you didn’t get the physical contract in your mailbox, here’s a digital copy.”

You are going to love this. I’m at Click2Mail.com and it’s easy because here’s the cool thing. Your VA in the Philippines, they should be working for you full-time during your hours 9:00 to 6:00 Central Time or whatever. You have to pre-load credits. I have $50 in there at a time. There are two ways that your VA’s from the Philippines can send physical mail for you from the US. First-class the next day. It’s simple because it’s not like they’re sending mail from the Philippines. They’re sending mail through a website to the sellers for you. There’s something here called Email-to-Mail.

It allows you to send an email from a pre-approved email address to a specific Click2Mail email. If you attach a letter or a PDF, in the subject line, put the person’s name, address, City State zip. You email that to Click2Mail. They will print the attachment and send it in the physical mail first-class to the seller the next day. All your VA needs to do is create the letter in Google Docs or Word and then email that letter to Click2Mail and they will next day print that letter and mail it to the seller. For a one-page letter, it costs $0.80. There’s one more thing that you can do with Click2Mail. It’s called Easy Letter Sender.

What did you say to Google is where it’ll show you how to do that?

What I have my VA’s do is they’ll go to Zillow. I’ll go to Zillow and go into one of my favorite zip codes, and I’m going to look for rental properties in that zip code. There is a house that has been on Zillow for 113 days at $750 a month rental. It’s listed by some listing agent or property manager. I want to send a letter to the homeowner and guess what? This rental property is vacant and outdated. There’s a good chance that this seller might be motivated. What I have my VA’s do is they’ll go to the county records, get the name and the address of the owner, and put it in a spreadsheet. What they’ll do is they’ll go take a little picture of this house. They’ll be going to screenshot that picture of the house. They’ll be going to save it onto their hard drive. They’re going to go to Easy Letter Sender and send a letter to this seller with a picture of the house. This is what the letter looks like. It’s a letter with a picture of their house with a word across it that says something like, “Can I buy your house? Is this your house?” It’s a letter. They open it and you can pick yellow paper.

Every single deal is different. There's always something that comes up at the last minute. Click To Tweet

Is it a huge window envelope? That’s clever. 

I do it an old typewriter font, big and bold, “Sorry for being short but I’m interested in buying your property at the address. If you’re interested in selling, call me.” Since I’m a realtor I’ll say on there, “If your property is listed with the realtor, please give them this letter.” My name and phone number. Your VA’s can do this easily from here. You can do a letter or a postcard. Click start your postcard and here’s where you insert your image. I’m going to select an image to put in there. I’m going to put the screenshot in there. Your VA’s can do this from the Philippines. This postcard cost $0.60. I can do fit to size. Your people will get a kick out of this. I’ll have my VA go to Google Drive and we’ll create a new Google Slide. Google Slides is like Google’s version of PowerPoint. I’m going to create a new slide and I’m going to insert a picture from my computer. I’m going to insert a little text box. I’m going to say, “Is this your house?” I’m going to highlight it. I’m going to make it bold. I’m going to move it a little bit to make it bigger. Let’s do 45 font and I’m going to make it red.

I’m going to highlight it yellow and I’m going to tilt it a little bit. I’m going to do a screenshot of that. I’m going to save it on my hard drive. I’m going to go to Click2Mail and I’m going to select a new image. This is the picture that’s going to go on the postcard and save it. I’m going to say, “My name is Mitch. You wouldn’t be interested in selling this house, would you call me?” I’m going to do this as a Courier font size eighteen, make it bold. This postcard costs $0.60. You can put a picture of the property. You can do another picture of something that arouses their curiosity. You put their recipient’s address. You can go to the County records and get the address of the owner and the name and you put it right there. I’ll do 2977 Hwy. K, 228 Fallon 6368. I’m going to prove this. If your VA is doing 20 or 30 of these, it adds it to a cart and then you can do all of them at once. You can do this as a letter or as a postcard. The reason I said at the beginning, you need to have credits in Click2Mail is because they have a minimum $2 charge.

If you have prepaid credits in Click2Mail, they don’t require that. I could send this postcard for $0.60. We could go into Missouri Casenet and your VA’s can go in here and they can look for all of the evictions that are going on in Missouri. I’m sure Texas has something like this. I could go to St. Louis County. I can pick a certain day of the week and then it looks for all the evictions in those seven days. Once a week or once a day, your VA’s could go in here. Some of these are judgments. You can see a breach of contract and landlord actions. That’s an eviction right there. This is an apartment complex. If you wanted to, you could send a letter to the apartment owners. There are 68 pages of crazy stuff. This company REVI Rentals LLC is doing three evictions on these tenants. Here’s an eviction from the plaintiff. The plaintiff is the person doing the lawsuit. This is the owner. He may be an attorney but here is the defendant. The defendant is the tenant that’s being evicted. I have their address so I can send two letters.

I can send a letter to the owner of this property at 65 Alpha Drive in Florissant and say, “I can see you’re going through an eviction right now. I’m sorry to hear that. If you’d to sell this property and get it off your hands, I’ll buy it right now as is with a tenant in there. Call me and we’ll talk.” Your VA can do all of this right from here. They can go and get that address. I’m going to go here to look it up and I’m going to get a Google Map of this property. Google Street View and I can go right here and my VA can get a picture of the house. I can put that picture on a postcard or letter. “Is this your house? Are these your tenants that you’re evicting right now? I’d like to buy it.” I can go into the County records. I use Prop Stream sometimes to get property data. I can get the address of the owner.

Here’s the property and it has been listed at one time on the MLS so I could use this picture. Here is the owner, YETI Holdings. They’re out of Denver, Colorado. Out of state and they’re going through an eviction. As soon as that hits the court records, your VA is sending them a letter with a picture of their house saying something along the lines of, “Are you tired of being a landlord? Are you tired of evicting tenants? If you’d to sell this house right now, we’ll take it as is and with the tenant in it. Give me a call.” He gets this letter or postcard with a picture of his house the week that he’s going through the eviction. Do you think he might be motivated to want to sell you something?

 

The one thing I would look for. It doesn’t happen often enough but the last name of the plaintiff, it has the same last name as the person that’s being evicted, which means it’s a family member. That means it’s been heated and it’s been very stressful. A lot of times, I’ll buy those houses with the guy in it because the relative doesn’t want to go through the heartbreak of doing all this stuff. They’ll say, “Screw it. I’ll sell the house with him and it won’t be my problem anymore.” This guy is going to be the one to put them on the street, not me. I would be matching names of for sure. 

You can also go into court records and get divorces. You can get judgments. If somebody is getting a judgment for a $500 Target credit card that they’ve not paid yet, do you think they might have some financial difficulties? They might want to sell their house, which is interesting too because of look at this house. The plaintiff is in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. This property owner is in Denver, Colorado. Maybe this is the property management company that’s managing it from Minnesota. The attorney is in Missouri. One thing you could do is you could send a letter to this person, Beth Wampler. You could send a letter to the attorney and the letter could be, “I see you’re working with some clients and doing some evictions. Do you have any clients that would to sell their properties and be done with them? Please call me. I’d even like to buy this house. Let me know if there’s anything that I can do to help you.” I would also send a letter to the owner of the property of the defendant. Your VA’s can do all of this for you, from a computer from the Philippines. They can get a picture of the house do something silly like this and then go to Click2Mail, send it as a letter or as a postcard. It prints the same day. It says $2.27 but that’s not what it’s going to cost. I’m going to click proceed to checkout and I’m going to do user credit and it cost $0.64 to send that postcard.

Let me ask you what phone number do you put in there? In the beginning, they need to but a lot of people are going to say, “That has to be my phone number. I have to take those calls.” I know you’re not doing that because you’re way too free. What phone number are you putting in there and where’s that call going? 

I have a CRM called REI Simple. It’s a CRM that I white-labeled from FreedomSoft. When I’m doing a campaign, I’ll create a new campaign and then I’ll get a unique phone number for that campaign. I have zoomed in some lease options in St Louis. If I’m doing a direct mail campaign, I’ll get a new phone number, its $4 a month. Every call that comes into that number will be automatically assigned to that campaign. From there, we can manage the lead. There are a couple of different ways you can do it but I’ll make sure every different campaign of my direct mail has its own unique phone number so I know where the lead came from. It automatically puts it into my CRM. I can see the status of all my leads and here’s where I can associate a phone number with that campaign. REI Simple will record the inbound and outbound phone calls. I can send and receive text messages to the sellers as well. We use SMS a lot with texting the sellers. If we called and we’ve got a voicemail, we send them a text “I called you, I left a voicemail.” We can also put them into an auto responders drip sequence where they get text messages and emails from us.

The other cool thing about this we’re talking about Click2Mail. Let me give you an example of one of our leads where this was a property I was messing around within Hermann, Missouri, a little town. I sent the seller a text message, “I saw your property at 402 Stark Boulevard in Hermann on Zillow. You wouldn’t be open to leasing it for a year and then selling it, would you? Thanks, Joe?” They sent me a text back. It came in a different way but that’s my fault. I duplicated the lead. He said, “Thanks for your note. That’s not our current plan but I’ll keep your info if in case that changes.” I went and I sent them a letter. I generate a document and I created a letter. It’s a simple letter. I could have created this with my logo. I haven’t done that yet but it’s sent to the owner, “Dear Catherine, I saw your house on Zillow. I’m an investor looking for more properties. You wouldn’t be interested in leasing it for a year and then selling it, would you? Give me a call.”

From here, this is the crazy thing. Remember I was telling you about Click2Mail Email-to-Mail? I have a mail template called Email-to-Mail and I type in bot here. If I click to send an email, it’s attached that letter right down here and it’s put the information in that subject line. It’s got the owner’s name, property mailing address, property mailing city state zip. Because it’s coming from a pre-approved email address to a specific Click2Mail email, Click2Mail will send that letter first-class to that seller. All I did was click a few buttons. The other cool thing about REI Simple the way I do it, I’ve already done it but there’s a button up here that says Find The Owner. When I click that, it pulls up the owner’s information. I get their name and their mailing address. I’m not trying to sell my CRM or whatnot but there are many simple things that you’re VA can do.

You need to step away from the computer. Your money is made on the phone talking to sellers and making offers. Click To Tweet

Do you have the CRM for sale? 

I only sell it to my students who buy my course. If you’re interested in getting it on your own, you can go get it from FreedomSoft.

You’d done a lot of modification to that. 

I’ve customized it for lease options because that’s my thing. I teach lease options.

You can do the whole process of what you saw? What’s that course called? 

The Simple Lease Options is the name of my course.

I’m interested, for people who don’t do lease options but still need leads, is there a way they can benefit from all of that computer moves that you did with all the different resources tied together?

I’ve been thinking about creating a little $97-course teaching people how to do what I did.

I would love for you to do that. When you say, “I was thinking about making a simple little course.” There are no simple courses. They take a lot of work. 

That’s not a bad idea.

I would love to help you promote that too. You make it look easy because you’ve done it so much. They got to have the 1, 2, 3 steps for all of us monkeys over here until we can figure making a routine. 

If some of you reading this and you’re like, “I have no idea what he did.” You could take this blog, go give it to some high school kid and say, “Look at what Joe did here. I want you to figure out how to do this for me.” You can go to Upwork and find somebody that’s good with spreadsheets or databases and say, “Follow what he did there and do it for me.” You’ll find somebody that can do it. That’s a good idea. I will create a little simple $97 course that teaches people how to do marketing like that. It’ll be good. People will appreciate that. It’s simple.

I understand that you say that but you come from a technology background. It could use some simplification for people not as savvy and tech with you. The concept I get right away. The concept is brilliant. It’s easy to get your head around that. Could you imagine what you’re driving for dollars would be on a day? By the end of the day, you’ve got 100 letters going out. As you’re going, the VA’s figuring out each house. Even driving for dollars is gone extinct with the amount of data that you can get on the computer. There’s something to be said for getting out there and getting in your neighborhoods. Especially when you’re new, getting the feel of all these neighborhoods, calling on the houses across the street for sale, and becoming an expert in your territory. Many of the people we’re talking about, Joe, are brand new or haven’t even bought one house yet. It does a lot of good to get out there, immerse yourself in your market, see what’s going on, where the pockets are, what’s the zip codes, and what they look and smell like.

Let me tell you a story. I had a friend, a super cool guy. He’s from Israel. He was a virtual wholesaler when I was talking to him. He’s still doing that, but he was doing this thing where he had an army of VA’s, about 4 or 5 of them. Every day, each of them would send 100 emails to realtors in about three different markets. Not sending a contract but sending an email to realtor saying, “I saw this property you had that’s been on the market for 65 days. Would your client accept something in this price range?” They were sending emails with doing making offers at 65% to 75% of list price. He’s consistently doing deals from that. There many things you could get virtual assistants to do for you to find deals for you. You got to be a little creative. It’s a number’s game. You overwhelmed the market with your marketing, you’re going to do deals, and you’re going to get leads.

I love that you have to overwhelm the market and you have to get someone doing it for you. I was telling everyone, I was talking on a show, and they asked me, “What’s the number one thing.” I say, “It’s not one thing. It’s several things but the top two things are you have to be consistent. It has to happen every day. You have to be fast because it’s competitive out there.” When someone raises their hand and shows an interest, you got to get the contract. Joe’s been around a long time and he knows how to make money. We were going to talk about getting over that fear of doing deals outside your immediate market because that’s been a big fear of mine. I did 2,400 houses in my town but I have a big town. I also have a town that has affordable housing. There are people in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Nevada, and other places that it’s not conducive to do certain strategies in that area.

You have wholesaling and lease options. What we’re going to do is we’re going to give you a free copy of a book and we’re for shipping and handling, it’s called Wholesaling Lease Options. I want you to go to 1000houses.com/McCall and get your free copy of the book, but also check out his Wholesaling Lease Options Course. He also has a course out there called The Z Code, which he and a friend perfected how to find motivated sellers on Zillow. That’s a $97 little junket here and there. How many deals did you get to do to get back $97? A fraction of a deal. Will there be contact information over there? If you want to learn more about this guy. He’s been around a long time and he’s a genius at what he does. I don’t use that word lightly. Do you have your 10,000 hours in? 

I do. It’s fun I enjoy it. I love hanging out with people Mitch Stephens who every time you talked to him, he was like, “I did 100 deals.”

Maybe a year or so. I don’t do 100 deals a month. I’m also been around a long time too and have my scars. I have my 10,000 plus hours in. God only knows. We’d be around 40,000, 50,000, 100,000 hours. Who knows? 

I’ve never counted my hours. That would be an interesting activity.

I don’t even know how you do that. James Michener said, “The master and the art of living knows not if he’s working or playing. To him, he’s always doing both.” You couldn’t separate my play from my work about 50% of the time. Am I working or am I having fun? I’m having fun. I would talk to you whether there was a show or not about all this stuff. That’s how I’m wired. I started talking about real estate years ago and I haven’t stopped. 

I’m only several years into it. I’m hoping I’m as passionate and energetic as you are when I hit that mark.

Overwhelm the market with your marketing, and you're going to do deals and get leads. Click To Tweet

You did it a lot more effectively than I did. I spent the first ten years banging my head against brick walls. You are way ahead of me but some of us take a little longer. Some of us take a little less long enough. I want to thank everybody out there for stopping by to get you some Joe McCall. Please follow up 1000houses.com/McCall and get a free copy of his book Wholesaling Lease Options. We’ll pay shipping and handling. Check out the Z-Code, How You Find Motivated Sellers on Zillow. I appreciate you. It’s wonderful the conversation we had. It was very enlightening. Thank you very much. 

Thanks, Mitch.

 

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About Joe McCall

Joe has been doing deals virtually in multiple markets for over 10 years. He also has one of the most popular, longest-running, podcasts called, “Real Estate Investing Mastery”.

An avid family guy, who enjoys hanging out with his family at the zoo, or golfing with his boys, or swimming with his girls in the pool.  Nothing is more important to Joe than family and God.

Joe has flipped over 100 deals and helped students flip 100’s more.  He loves doing deals and coaching students to do the same.  He has been fortunate to receive more student testimonials than he can count.

He invests remotely in multiple markets.  He loves creating automated marketing systems.

While living in Prague, Czech Republic (twice, for several months) and traveling across for the NW corner of the USA in his RV for 3 months, his teams have flipped multiple lease options and regular wholesale deals – without him seeing the house or talking to the sellers or the buyers – ever.

Joe believes that the greatest part of this business is that he gets the privilege of working wherever and whenever he wants – from home, from Starbucks, the pool, a condo in Colorado, a coffee shop in Prague, a farmhouse in Ireland – wherever!

He has a highly-rated podcast, The Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast.  Check it out in iTunes, Sticher, or TuneIn Radio.

He also wrote a #1 Kindle book, “Making Extra Money Flipping Houses While On Vacation“.

 

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