How To Set Up A Database Of Real Estate Buyers, Sellers & Investors

Read Transcript for “How To Set Up A Database Of Real Estate Buyers, Sellers & Investors”

 
A database of buyers and sellers is one of the most powerful tools you can have as a real estate investor, but talking to those people is just as (if not more) important. I’m going to talk about that and how to build one in this video.

“Joe, I have a question. Could you go over the mechanics of setting up a database for buyers or sellers or whatever so as to make it useful for me?” – Tony DeFonzo

Joe: Tony is one of my mentor students. Let’s just talk about the actual structure of a database. You’re going to want to create lists of buyers, sellers and investors, at a very minimum. These lists can be worth a huge amount of money for you. I have 50,000 investors on my list right now. I sell them rental properties, investment properties and I sell them information on how to invest in real estate, and it’s very, very profitable, so you’ll definitely want to build a list.
 
Joe: What I suggest you get is a ‘CRM’. This is a ‘contact relation management’. Basically, it allows you to put in their contact information and keep information about each contact that you have.
 
Joe: But in addition to a CRM, you’ll want to have an autoresponder. An autoresponder is a sequential email program. It sends out a sequence of emails to a particular person, depending on what category they’re in or what group you put them in, and you can create different sequences for different types of groups, depending on what you’re trying to sell them or trying to do with them, and then that autoresponder will then send them emails on a regular basis to keep them up to date.
 
Joe: Every one of you is in different autoresponders in my database. A lot of you get lots of emails from me, emails that I don’t sit down and write every day that I’ve written over the years and added to this database, e.g. articles, videos, all of this stuff that I send to to build a relationship with you. It’s really not about how many people you know – it’s not about who you know – it’s about who knows you, so try to get it out to as many people as possible with your information and have them feel that they know you.
 
Joe: What I’m doing with these videos is building a relationship with you. I learned this from watching my sister. My sister was on a soap opera on General Hospital for about 18 years. She played a character called Felicia. Back in the 80’s, when I would drive around with her in L.A. (because I lived in L.A. at the same time and we used to spend an awful lot of time together) – people would come to her all the time and they would feel like she was part of their family because they saw her on TV all the time. They saw her in Moat. They saw her as a real person, and they loved her and trusted her. They’d come up to her and would be star struck, but they would also treat her like family.
 
Joe: Now, that was a great lesson for me, because I learned that through video, and through my writing and audios, that I could build a relationship with people that I don’t even know, and that it would make them feel that they know me.
 
Joe: You can do the same thing with your database. Once you create this list and autoresponder, you can then send out emails to them, you can create videos if you want and you can create audios if you want, you can use the ones that I’ve created for you and it’ll build the relationship so that when they finally start dealing with you and decide that what they want to work with you or do the things that you’re suggesting they do, they already come to you knowing who you are. This is a very vital process.
 
Joe: Getting back to the mechanics of building a database: use one of my favorite autoresponders – ‘AutoResponse Plus’. Use that database; it’s a great way to do it. I also use a company called ‘Infusionsoft’, which is also very good, but also very expensive and probably not necessary for you unless you’re building a fairly large business.
 
Joe: There are some other good ones out there. There’s one where you can actually have a shopping cart you can sell things through. There are a lot of different ways to do it. If you’re going to send out a lot of email, AutoResponse Plus is one of my favorite ways to do that and it’ll help you build a database.
 
Joe: Now, if you want to actually get it into that database, they give you all of the instructions on how to do it, but basically you can put them into a text file, which is open up WordPad or TextPad or Notebook, and put in the name one after the other, and it’ll create a field for those people, or you can put it into Excel and do it that way. This is a very simple process.
 
Joe: That’s not what you need to learn. You can have somebody do that for you if you need to. What you need to learn is how to put the deals together, how to make money and how to build a relationship with these people. All of this is pretty advanced stuff.
 
Joe: For those of you who are just getting started, the first thing you should learn is how to put together a deal, how to make an offer to a seller and how to talk to a seller so that they feel that you’re credible and knowledgeable enough to want to work with.
 
Joe: When you begin, you’re not going to know what you’re doing. So, you need to get as much knowledge as you can and then get out there and start making offers, and screwing up (they’re going to ask you questions you don’t know how to answer).
 
Joe: You’re going to feel like an idiot. You probably will be a little bit of an idiot at the beginning, but and every time you feel like an idiot, you’re going to get off the phone and think to yourself, ‘What could I have said that would have been different?’ or you’re probably going to say, ‘Joe said to say this. I should have said this. Darn it! I forgot to say that.’ And then the next time that you’re on the phone, you’re going to remember and be smoother at it. You’re going to sound more confident and eventually people are going to work with you.
 
Joe: Once you’ve made 50 to 100 offers, which is very easy to do – if you have free leads, you can go make 20 to 30 offers right now if you know the right offer to make. You can get this experience very, very quickly and by the time you’ve made 100 of these offers, you’re going to be a master at it and you’re going to be good at talking to these people.
 
Joe: When I go to the Two Day Buying Event, one of the things that I spend the most time on is learning how to talk to sellers and how to make offers that are going to be acceptable. We do a lot of role playing. I put you into groups and you learn how to do this stuff so that you can be effective on the phone.
 
Joe: One of the biggest fears that people have when they get started is making an offer and not knowing whether or not they can fulfill their end of it. Well, I show you how to do it in a way that protects you. I call it my ‘Safety Net Method’, and that safety net that I create for you makes it possible for you to make offers without having to come up with money, without having to use your credit and without having to worry about whether it falls through or not and whether you get it closed. You have contingencies in there to protect you and there’s always something there to catch you if you fall.
 
Joe: That’s the way I’ve designed this. I designed it that way because I personally went through the fall back in 1991. A lot of you know my story. I went through that fall personally and I don’t want any of you to experience the same thing.
 
Joe: And, throughout what’s happened in this new economy, this big down turn and recession that we’re in, I didn’t lose my shirt this time. When it happened last time back in ‘89 to ‘91, that’s when things went south for me, but it was because of the way I invested at the time. If I had done it the way I do it now, I wouldn’t have lost my money then.
 
Joe: Learn how to do it in a way to where you won’t lose the money and you might be a lot happier. I hope that helps.