http://PushButtonAutomarketer.com – Automated software add-on that grabs absentee owner records from you local county recorder, finds their phone numbers and then sends them a recorded message. It then logs their responses and makes it possible for you to find dramatically under market value properties and real estate deals that you can buy on seller terms with zero down payment.
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Joe: Hey, it’s Joe Crump. I wanted to tell you about a brand new add-on to my automarketing system that we just completed last week. I’m very excited about. It’s the “Absentee Owner Add-on”.
Joe: I’ve been doing absentee owners for many, many years. When we started out, we did it with snail mail. We just sent out letters to everybody. The snail mail still works. I’ve still got techniques for doing that that are awesome where we’re getting a really high percentage response rate from them. It’s a great way to go after them.
Joe: We then progressed into voice blasts a few years ago as well, but we had to do it in a way to where it took a while to get it set up and get them sent out. It was cheaper than doing it by mail, but it still had some challenges by getting the database together and by getting the phone numbers of all of these people and then doing that blast.
Joe: Well, now with the “Automarketer”, we’ve made it possible that you can go into the county that you want to go into that you want to work in, you can scrape the absentee owners from that county and then you can send a voice blast to all of the ones that we can find phone numbers for. We can find the phone numbers very, very quickly using this system. I’m going to show you how it works here in just a second.
Joe: Absentee owners, for those of you who don’t know, is when we go into the county tax record, and in the tax record, there’s the address of the property and then there’s the address where they want the bill to be sent. If the place where they want the bill to be sent is different than the property itself, then we know that the person who owns the property (the person on the title) usually doesn’t live in the house, which means that they’re an absentee owner.
Joe: If they’re absentee owners, that means that they’ve either used it as a rental property, or that they’ve got some other reason that they haven’t been able to sell it or that they’re holding onto it other than the fact that they’re like most people who live in their properties. So, they’re a great resource to go after and great group of people to ask if they’ll consider selling their properties.
Joe: So, that’s how we do it. We go and approach them and say, ‘We’re investors. We’d like to buy your properties.’ This is one of the best ways that I’ve ever found to buy under market value properties. One, there’s nobody competing with you; very few people call absentee owners or contact absentee owners, so the competition is almost zero.
Joe: Now, if you go to for sale by owners like we do with Craigslist, we still have great success with Craigslist, but there’s a lot of people that are contacting them, so it’s a different level of competition. With absentee owners, nobody’s talking to them and they may not even be thinking about selling their property until they get the note or the voice blast from you. So, it’s a great source to go after.
Joe: I’ve created a program that teaches how to use this system and I’m going to be adding that to the add-ons, so when you get into this system, you’ll be able to see how to use these leads, how to make offers on them, how to use the zero down structure hierarchy, how to do zero down deals with them and how to find properties that are dramatically under market value that you can either buy for cash or you can get as assignable cash deals that you can assign to someone else; a very simple process to do that.
Joe: Like I said, we’ve been spending the last few years, because of the crash especially, going after properties like this that we’ve been able to get sometimes for 10 or 20 cents on the dollar; almost always 40-60% off. We wouldn’t even have to take properties that are only 20% or 30% below market value; we were able to get 40-70% below market value on a regular basis. That’s exciting when you can do that because it means you can turn around and make a big chunk of money every time we turn around and sell those properties. If you’ve got cash to invest, it really makes a lot of sense. If you don’t have cash to invest, that’s okay, too.
Joe: We’ve been taking these properties and doing some of them with zero interest rate financing, which means that if you buy a little cheap property for $40,000 and you pay $350 a month for it, all you have to do is divide that $40,000 by the $350, and you’ll have the thing paid off before you know it. A lot of the ones that we’ve been doing even cheaper than that to where we’d buy $20,000 or $30,000 properties that we needed to fix up, and we’d do terms on them and we’d make payments on them and pay over a 4 to 6 year period where everything that we pay goes towards the principle and buys down the note, so you don’t have to worry about these 30 year notes any more.
Joe: There’s a lot of really cool things that I’m going to teach in that little training program that’s part of this system in the Automarketer. Now, again, this is an add-on to the Automarketer. It’s not the entire Automarkter. You can’t really use it unless you have the Automarketer, so it’s an extra fee on top of the Automarketer cost. The Automarketer costs $199 a month. The absentee owner module to be added onto it is $40 a month, and then you’re also going to be able to sending out voice blasts which have a cost as well. I’m going to show you how that process works. But, when you look at your costs per lead versus the return on investment, it’s just phenomenal.
Joe: I don’t know of any other lead generating process that’s better than this Automarketer. I’ve also never seen another system like this, and believe me, I’ve been looking to see if anybody else does anything close to what we’re doing, and I don’t know anybody that does. I cannot find anyone that does.
Joe: There’s a lot of programs out there that claim to be lead generators, but they don’t really bring in real leads. They just teach you how to mail stuff out. Very few of them are actually doing it online like this and bringing in deals like this, and then once you get those leads, helping you follow up with them and helping you go through that whole process. We’ve got a follow up system that works really well with these. We keep adding things to the Automarketer to make it even more effective.
Joe: Let me show you real quick. If you’re in the Automarketer and you’ve got an account, then you might want to go through this with me real quick, but if you don’t, at the top here, we’ve got a new thing here called ‘lead sources’ which wasn’t here before. The default is working with Craigslist and Backpage and eBay Classified ads at Kijiji, so you can go in and use the leads that are on those sites and send out to them. But, the other one is the absentee owner.
Joe: If you click on absentee owner and its set up for absentee owner, then you can pick the county. You pick the state that you want to be in and then in that state, you pick the county that you want to work in. Now, we don’t have all of the counties in here. What we’re doing is putting them in as we have new users who want them. All of the users are going to have access to every county that’s here, but if yours isn’t in yet (and it’s probably not) then we’re going to have to build that in.
Joe: Right now, to have a coder do that for me, it takes two to three weeks to get it done, and it costs me about $200 to set it up for each county. I’m only charging you $40 for the add-on, so don’t do this unless you’re serious I guess is my request to you, because it costs me money to actually set it up and I won’t see any return on it for a while.
Joe: I’m doing it this way because I want to build the area and I want to have more areas that we can search. It’s going to make it possible for me to pay for the new areas that we’re going to put in. And, we’re going to put them in in the order that we need them because there’s no reason to put in a bunch of areas that nobody’s going to use.
Joe: So, enough of that. Let me show you exactly how this thing works. Now that I’m in absentee owner, it changes the way the filters look. If you’re in the other default section, the filters look like this (let me get back there). The filters look like this. These are all of the search criteria that you can use in Craigslist and the other websites. But if I go to the absentee owner, it changes it over and now I’ll see this.
Joe: Now, we don’t do emails with absentee owners. That’s why these are greyed out. We do do blasts and voice blasts. We don’t do text blasts with these right now. You can do them, but I’m finding that most of the phone numbers we’re finding right now in the place that we’re scraping them online are mostly land lines, so the response rates for text blast campaigns are still a little bit low, so we’re looking for another source of phone numbers.
Joe: Right now, when we scrape the leads or the names that are in the county recorder, we’re finding between 25% and 40% of the phone numbers for those people. It’s checking both by the name and by the address of where they live or where the tax bill is being sent.
Joe: So let’s pick Marion County, which I’ve got right now. By the way, not all of them are going to show up here. They’re only going to show up over here in the category and location report of the ones that you’ve picked. I’ve only picked two of them out of that batch right now, so I’m going to look at Marion County. Let’s just do a real cheap group, because doing cheap deals is really nice if you’ve got cash and you want to just flip them out.
Joe: Actually, let’s do really, really cheap, so, $0 to $30,000. I’m just going to pull up everything from $0 to $30,000 that does not… Well, first of all, I want to pull up the phones that have already been scraped. Once you pull them up, you have to scrape the phones. I’m going to pull up the ones that have already been scraped and do just a quick search. Then I’m going to narrow this down just a little bit to show you how that works. When you put this kind of criteria in, there’s a lot of property, so it takes a while for it to pull it up, and if you do a smaller or more narrow search, it’ll happen in a lot shorter period of time.
Joe: So we’ve got a bunch of them pulled up and I’ve got it set up so that 500 show up on the page here, so if I scroll down here, there’s going to be 500 of these. They all have phone numbers, and as you can see, there’s 1106 that we have phone numbers on already. But what I’m going to do is that I’m going to find the ones that don’t have phone numbers.
Joe: I want to send out a new batch. So I’m going to undo this. I’m going to hit ‘phone number not yet scraped’, and I’m going to put ‘Never sent a voice blast’. I want to send only to people that I’ve never sent to before. And, I think I’ll get more specific on my zip code. Let’s do 46229. And one of the ways to do this is just to go to Google and type in ‘zip code map’ and then the city that you want. This is at city-data.com, and then, I can find out.
Joe: I think I’m going to look in this 46219 area code. So let’s go back to the site; 46219. This also does wild numbers, too, so if I wanted everything at 462 I can put ‘**’ on the last two and it’ll do a wildcard. It’s going to be people that I’ve never sent a blast to, between $0 and $30,000, don’t have a phone number and in that specific zip code, so let’s see how many people we come up with in that area.
Joe: There’s 12,486 in that one particular zip code, so as you might guess, there’s a lot of numbers here. We’ve got about 400,000 in Indianapolis that we’ve scraped, so there’s a lot of data to work with.
Joe: So now, I’m going to come down here and I’m going to find the phone numbers of these because as you see here, none of them have phone numbers. What I’m going to find is that maybe a third of them have phone numbers. The first thing I do is ‘select all’ and it puts a checkmark into all of these all the way down the line. Let’s make this easy to do. I’m just going to do 10 of them here, or maybe I’ll do 30; let’s do 30.
Joe: We’re going to have 30 of them. And then, I’m going to select them all and I’m going to ask it (let me scroll down the page. That’s not 30. Sometimes when you click too fast, it plays havoc with it.) So now, it’s 30; there’s 30 of them on this page here. I’m going to hit ‘select all’, it’s going to do that and then I’m going to click on ‘Find phone number’. Then, it’s going to start going through each of these and looking for phone numbers and it’s going to tell you if it finds them.
Joe: It found the first one. It didn’t find the second one. It found the third one. It’s working on this one. So, as you can see, this doesn’t happen real quickly. I’m only doing 30 here, so it’s going to take a little while to go through this. If you’re trying to do 500 of them, which is what I recommend that you do, because when you do 500 of them, you’re going to have 150 to 200 to send out and if you do it that way, then it’s probably going to take 20 minutes for it to go through that whole process and search all of these. I’m going to pause it for a second and I’m going to come back when it’s done and show you what it came up with.
Joe: I’m just doing a real quick guess here and it looks like about 10 or 12 of them got phone numbers, and I’m going to then still select it, so I’m going to put them in a voice blast queue. That’s going to change this queue thingy here from a red minus to a green plus. I’m adding it to the voice blast queue and it should queue up all of these.
Joe: Now, when I go to voice blast campaign, I should see 30 of them that are now in the queue. You’re going to want to do more than 30 at a time. You’re going to want to do 100 to 250 at a time so that you’ll have a decent amount to look at. You can see them down here. It put all 30 of them in the queue because I didn’t redo it, but if we count it here (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12). So out of that 30 that we searched, it found 12 phone numbers, so about 35% is pretty consistent to what we’ve been seeing in the past.
Joe: I can start the voice blast right away because I’ve already got the outbound messages set up. You can record your own outbound message by doing this and it’ll allow you to do that. I’ve already done my recording. If you want what I’ve done, you can use that just by clicking on this help button file and you can read the script and put it in there. And then the inbound message is just like a voice mail. It says, ‘Hey, this is Joe. Leave a message at the beep and I’ll get back with you as soon as I can.’ That’s all it says. Then, you can run a quick test call and it’ll send it to your phone number and you can listen to it.
Joe: You can also upload your own list of phone numbers if you’ve got a different list, or if you just want to put your own list in there, what I’ll do is put my own phone number in almost every time I do a blast just to make sure the blast went out and I got that information.
Joe: As soon as that’s done, you can hit ‘Start voice blast’ and it’ll start sending out the message that you recorded to these people. Again, you can change the message that you recorded in the system here. It won’t send out duplicates. It’ll only send it in the time zone that is not going to wake people up, between 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. so you don’t have to worry about it calling in the middle of the night. You can queue it up in the middle of the night and it’ll start going out at 9 a.m. the next morning with your time zone, not mine. It bases it on the time zone of the area code, so if it’s got some phone numbers that are on the east coast and some on the west coast, it’ll hold the ones that are on the west coast to send them later if 9 a.m. has not arrived yet. It’s the same with the evening.
Joe: You can also look at your stats on this, which is pretty cool. The system will actually show you what you’ve sent out and how much has gone out if you want to look at what’s gone out over the last month. You can see what kind of response rate you got and how much it cost you to do that. We’ve sent out a lot of stuff here for very little money. We got 119 leads for $78 so that’s .66 cents a lead. Now with that said, you kind of expect somewhere between $1 and $2 per lead to be average for you. We’re optimizing things and hopefully. you’ll be able to do the same and get some good responses, too, but even if costs you $2 a lead, you’re still doing very well with this thing.
Joe: So, that’s the stats. Now let me show you the leads that are coming in; the voice blast lead tab. It’ll pull up the people that are responding to these things. We’ve just got a few of them on here. The reason there’s only a few here is because a lot of those voice blasts that we sent out were for the default method not for the absentee owner. We just started doing the absentee owner and we haven’t sent out a lot yet for the absentee owner.
Joe: You can go through and you can click each of these and you can read each of these messages that they sent or you can go down here and see. You’ll get both positives and negatives. Let’s see if I can find some. Let’s see if we can see a little bit of both. Most of these are overwhelmingly positive but you’re going to get some negative, so be ready for that as well.
Joe: One of the nice things about this is that you’re going to get an email with this response with the message and with the recording in the email and a link to the ad itself. So if you click on this little link here, this isn’t the ad – this is the actual tax record – and if the guy owns more than one property, it would come up here and it would show several properties here, or several properties that are attached to this name. You can scroll down here and see what the assist value was, what the land value was, you can find out who the property is, etc. That information is all here.
Joe: Then you can pull those people up on Zillow, or Trulia or HomeGain. You can use those things or if you have access to the MLS, you can get the value of the properties there. You can search and save and flag them and keep track of them that way. Like I said, you’re also going to get emails for each one of these that’ll go right to your cell phone (if you have a smart phone) and you can call those people immediately at the time those things come in.
Joe: You’ll notice that a lot of them come in at the same time when you send these blasts out and you’ll get responses a couple days after. I think all of these were sent out on the 10th and then on the 11th and 12th we got a couple more, so most of them came in… Oh, it looks like the 9th – most of them came in on the 9th, and we got a few of them on the 10th and then a couple more of them on the 11th and 12th. This is from one blast that we did.
Joe: You can get a lot of great leads from doing this and all you have to do is learn how to convert them. If somebody says that they’re not happy with you and you want to put them on your blacklist, you can just copy them and you can put them on the blacklist and add them to that.
Joe: Anyway, that’s the absentee owner system; the add-on that we’re doing. If you’d like to sign up for it, first you need to sing up for the Automarketer. Just go to PushButtonAutomarketer.com (right here) and sign up for that program. It’s $199 a month. Then, just let us know that you want to sign up for the absentee owner thing. There’s not even a place to pay for the absentee owner thing right now. You just need to tell us that you want to do it and we’ll set it up. There’s no information on the site about it – it is that new. So, if you’re interested, go ahead and sign up for it.
Joe: The other thing that I’m giving you in this is I’m going to put some training materials on how to deal with absentee owners and also how to do the zero down hierarchy and different types of offers that you can make. Then, I did an interview with one of the partners that I have where we were doing lots and lots of absentee owner types of deals. It’s actually two years old. I’m going to give you that as well. You can listen to that interview and listen to us discuss that process as well. So, I’ve got two and a half hours of training that I’m going to give you in addition to the program to kind of help you get started and get you launched with this type of investing; it’s a little bit different.
Joe: Now, if you’ve never been an investor before, maybe this isn’t the best way to launch unless you’re just looking for cash deals. If you’re looking only for cash deals, this is a good way to do it. But, if you’re looking to create cash flow and get business money coming in so you can support yourself, then the “For Rent Method” makes a lot more sense, and then you’d probably want to use the default method and use the Craigslist and Kijiji and eBay Classifieds and Backpage for your lead source.
Joe: Anyway, with that said, I wish you the best and I’ll talk to you next time.
