How Do I Do Deals Remotely While I Travel Overseas?

“How Do I Do Deals Remotely While I Travel Overseas?”

Joe: Hey, it’s Joe Crump. Another video, this on automation and this one is on doing deals remotely. “I like to travel and I want to do the for rent method deals while I’m out of the country. I’m pretty good at the phone and I can usually get at least one memo signed for every five seller leads I talk to.” Good going! That takes some practice, I’ll bet. “I don’t mind spending an hour or two a day on my business while I’m traveling, and I have access to the internet most places I go, even if it’s just an Internet Café. I have two questions. One, do you know of a good phone system that will allow me to call through the internet, and two, how do I arranged boots on the ground in the places where I’m selling the houses?”

Joe: Well, first of all, let’s talk about automation, or doing it remotely in the first place. Because the Automarketer and the way it works, it sends out these leads to people and they’ll just respond. It’s all done over the internet and over the phone. So you get on the phone with these people and you put together the deal over the phone. You don’t meet them face to face. At the beginning I suggest that people you know, do it in their own backyard so that they can meet people face to face. Because when you meet people face to face they feel a little more comfortable with you, you feel a little bit more credible. But once you get good on the phone you don’t really need that anymore and you can put these deals together without meeting them. And most of my experienced students never leave the house.

Joe: I believe whenever I have to leave my office, I lose three hours immediately. So I try not to leave the office except for things that I enjoy, for fun. So that’s going to be your goal, too. Try to go do it remotely and it doesn’t matter if you’re in Spain or in Paris, or, you know, in South America, you know, and, because I know this person, I know they travel a lot. So, it doesn’t matter where you’re at, you know, as long as you’re traveling and you have access to a phone, you can do this.

Joe: Now, the things that you can use are the phone system inside the Automarketer. There’s a phone system and for $3.00 a month you can get a number, a local number, to anyplace that you want to work. So, you say, okay, I want to work in Kentucky. You can get an area code that is local to Kentucky, and you buy a phone number there, and it’ll set up a phone that you can call through the internet. So it’s called a VOIP line. And you can actually, as long as you’ve got a speaker on your laptop, wherever you’re at, you can click on that button, it’ll dial up the next number on your list and you can talk to them just like you were talking to me on the phone. It makes it really easy to do. You have to pay per minutes, but it’s 2.5¢ a minute, so if you talk to somebody for an hour, it’s costs you a buck. You know, it’s not very expensive to do that. So that’s the first thing you do.

Joe: And you can have different phone numbers for different locations that you’re working. I’ve got some people that are working in eight or ten different states so they set up different phone numbers for each different state and different Automarketer accounts for each different state so they can have a different series of websites for each state. So if they’re in Atlanta, they can have an Atlanta set of websites. If they’re in Indiana, they can have an Indiana set of websites and an Indiana phone number. And they can do that in multiple places.

Joe: Now, you don’t want to do this at the beginning, when you don’t have any money, because it’s too expensive to set up those Automarketer accounts. But that $200 a month that you’re paying for the Automarketer account is peanuts is you’re doing a deal, or two or three, out of every city or state that you’re working every month. Then that becomes you know, worth it if you’re making $5,000. If you have to spend $200 to make $5,000 it’s completely worth it. So don’t do it at the beginning, but do it as you get better at this process and start expanding into other areas. So that’s the question number one.

Joe: Question two is, “How do I arrange the boots on the ground in the places where I’m selling the houses?” All you need to do is run a Craig’s List ad for somebody to go to your house and if you’re in my mentor program you’ve got the ad already. It’s on the contract zip file on the member site, so check there. But there’s an ad, basically, we say, for $8 to $10 an hour, you know, we need you 10 hours a week, we’re going to have you go to the houses that we you know, we’re investors, we’re going to have you go to the houses that we have for sale and take a picture of the interior and the exterior, put a lock box on the front door, to meet with the seller, put the lock box on the front door and you know, take those pictures and send them to us. And we have our admin person then put them up on Craig’s list and put them onto the site.

Joe: And sometimes our boots on the ground will actually post them on Craig’s List for us as well because they’re local and it’s easier to post on Craig’s List if you’re local. So that’s another way that you can do it. But it’s pretty easy to find somebody that does this. You have them take a picture of their driver’s license, you have them take a picture of their car so you see what they look like, because they’re representing you, you see what their car looks like, you have them take a picture of their insurance so you know that they’ve got insurance as well. And then you pay them and you can expect it to take between two and ten hours per house. So if you’re paying $10 an hour, you’re looking at $20 to $100 per house to buy boots on the ground.

Joe: So now you’ve got another $100 that’s going out for that. It’s a lot easier than hiring a real estate agent, which we’ve also done in the past, but with a real estate agent they’re going to want $1,000 or $1,500 to do a transaction like this. So it’s not worth it. And I find them to be a lot less reliable when you’re hiring them out. They work for a commission because they do it for themselves and they want to work for themselves, so find somebody who wants to work for an hourly wage because they’re going to be much more consistent. They’re actually going to put in the time and you’re going to know if they’re lying to you because you know, if they’re showing the property three times, they have to drive, and you know they’re a half hour away from the property, you know how much, approximately how much time it’s going to take them to do that. And if they start sending you bills for much more than that, then you can say, hey, this doesn’t make sense you’re, you know, you’re not actually putting this many hours in and you can stop them and you can find somebody else.

Joe: Because typically when we run that ad in Craig’s List we’ll get, you know, between 10 and 20 responses within the first day. So I wouldn’t even run the ad until I had a lease option memo signed in a new area so when you open up a new area start calling to sellers, get a lease option memo signed, then that same day you get one signed, call and get boots on the ground. And it’s possible that you know, you won’t get somebody right away and you might lose your lease option memo deal because of that, which is frustrating. So make sure to tell that lease option memo seller that you’re not going to be out to the house for three days. That way it gives you a few days to get things up and running. You’re going to be out there, you’re going to get pictures, you’ll get things rolling and then once you have that boots on the ground and you know you can put deals together in that area, then it becomes a lot easier and you keep that person on retainer, you just keep, you just keep sending them business as you put more deals together. Even it’s only a you know, 10 hours a month, that they’re working for you, they’ll usually keep working for you. Or you, again, you pick somebody else on the list that responded or you just post another Craig’s List and you can find somebody else to do that.

Joe: So working remotely is not a difficult process. The process is learning how to talk on the phone, that’s the most difficult thing until you learn how to do it, and then after that is trying to keep up with the leads that the Automarketer brings in, because it brings in so many leads it can feel a little overwhelming and I find that most of my mentor students are most of the people that are using the Automarketer either stop the leads because there’s too many of them, or they just let them drop. They don’t respond to them all. So don’t get into that habit. Eventually you’re going to hire somebody to help you talk to those leads and we’ll talk about that in the future.

Joe:
All right – hope that helps.