Remote Investing – Invest In Real Estate Without Leaving Your House

Remote Investing – Invest In Real Estate Without Leaving Your House

Joe: In this video I’m going to show you how to work remotely in as many cities or states as you choose to. I have students who are working in eight, ten, fifteen states at the same time, sending out messages to sellers in those areas and making offers on properties in those areas. The only thing you need is someone on the ground to put a sign in the yard for you. Almost everything else can be done remotely. And you never have to go to the property to make that work if you use this system.

Joe: Our system is set up so that you can scrape leads off of Zillow, off of craigslist, in as many areas as you want. One of the things that most investors want to be able to do is expand their market. And if you’re working in a small market or a market that doesn’t have as many leads, there’s no reason that you can’t expand out into markets around you. If you don’t want to work in the state that you’re in, you can work in other states. If you want to work in a different price range, say you’re in a high end market and you want to work in a low end market, or you’re in a low end market and you want to work in a high end market. There’s reasons to do both. But you can make that choice based on working in the system rather than because you’re stuck to a place that you live at.

Joe: You don’t ever have to leave your home. And my goal in this whole process was not to leave home. The only reason I want to leave home is if I’m going out there for fun. So, set up your business so that you can do it remotely so you can have outsource people take care of some of the things that have to be taken care of on the ground, like putting a sign in the yard, putting a lockbox on the door, taking a picture of the house. Those are things that you have your boots on the ground do. And inside the system it actually shows you how to do that, how to hire those people and how to get the ball rolling.

Joe: All right, I’ve logged into the Automarketer and I’ve gone to the Automarketer craigslist and you could go with craigslist or you could go with Zillow, and it depends, you can decide which site you want to scrape based on the area that you’re working. We used to only scrape craigslist and some of the small rural towns that we used to try to scrape wouldn’t come up. There weren’t very many people using craigslist there. But when we built the Zillow scraper, we found that especially in these small little rural towns, specifically in southern Illinois where we were doing it we found a bunch of leads in Zillow. So, depending on where you’re at, you might want to try one, but hopefully both of them will work.

Joe: And if you’re in most major cities, both of these sites will be worth using. Craigslist has a lot more leads coming in on a daily basis. Zillow has a lot more information about the leads, including the address, which craigslist doesn’t usually have. So, you can decide which one you want to try.

Joe: But I’m going to show you the craigslist one here because I think it is a good example of how we’ve used it for multiple cities and multiple areas. If you scroll down the page here you’ll see that I’ve got different campaigns set up for different types of things. I’ve got a buyer campaign which we won’t talk about here. I’ve got campaigns that are, this one’s in Indianapolis, I’ve got one in Illinois. Here’s another one in Indianapolis. Here’s one in Oklahoma City, St. Louis. Tulsa. So, I’ve done these different marketing campaigns in all these different areas and if you want to find out how many people are working in a specific area, you can go into the campaign and check it out.

Joe: Now, why don’t we go into this Oklahoma City campaign and take a look at that. But before I do, I want to show you, it scraped 1,385 leads and it only sent out 554. And the reason is because in craigslist you get lots of duplicates. Now, we give you, we scrape the duplicates, but we give you a credit for the duplicates. So, you’re not paying for the duplicates on craigslist or Zillow, for that matter. But there aren’t duplicates on Zillow. And then it sent out 554 of these. And then we got a response of 200 in this particular campaign. And this is click throughs on the tracking links to the websites. We’ll talk about that in a different video.

Joe: But, here I am, I just want to show you how to tell how many leads are coming in to a system and how you can put as many different cities or areas that you want. If it’s in craigslist you can scrape it. And it doesn’t have to be US. I can be out of the country. If you go to craigslist, and let’s go into the craigslist, Oklahoma City, if you go into here, you can – anyplace worldwide that craigslist has you can scrape because the system will do that.

Joe: That doesn’t mean that they’re going to have local phone numbers. If they don’t, you’re going to have to get a foreign phone number, which you can do inside the Automarketer. But let’s just talk about Oklahoma City. And if I go into For Sale By Owner and then I go into By Owner, I can that there’s 1,245 potential ads in that section.

Joe: So, if I go down here and click on “Click to cost of this campaign” and I type in the number, this doesn’t automatically search craigslist to find that. So, the number is going to be an estimate and this is going to be the maximum that it’s going to find because there’s going to be junk within this as well that we’re not going to find and there’s going to be duplicates in there. But if it’s sent out to every one of those and you click on “Calculate” it’s going to calculate how much it costs to send out this campaign to 1,200 people.

Joe: Now, it’s probably only going to find 100 or 200 of those that can actually send to, so it’s going to be substantially cheaper than this, probably 10% of this, instead of paying $99 it’s going to cost you $10 to send it out. So, this shows you how much it’s going to cost to scrape the ads, how much it costs to send the message, the coast 2.5¢ apiece, the estimated response rate, that 10%. And you’ve got 124 leads out of that, the inbound messages because you have to pay for the text messages that come into the system as well – 2.5¢ apiece – so, the estimated cost of this campaign if it’s sent out this many would be $1.07 per lead, so $133 for the campaign.

Joe: So, this’ll give you an idea of how it works and this isn’t going to be as accurate as the Zillow cost of the campaign system is. Because that’ll actually go into Zillow and find out exactly how many it’s going to scrape. We can’t do that with craigslist. But, anyway, you can put as many different cities in here as you want.

Joe: Now, let me go to Zillow, because you can also do this in Zillow, and go to a campaign that’s there as well. So, this is the Zillow Automarketer and it’s set up a little bit differently. Let me go in to look at a campaign. And you can set up your campaigns so that they search either by city and state or Zip Code when you’re in Zillow, because Zillow allows Zip Codes as a search. And then once you put that information in here, you can click to see the cost of the campaign and it’ll figure out how much it costs to actually send to that campaign.

Joe: You can also click on “View Generated URLs” and it’ll give you the URL to the search page on Zillow that shows you how many leads are actually there. So, if you scroll down below you see that there’s 40 ads at 8¢ an ad that’s $3.20 for this campaign. It’s going to cost 2.5¢ per message to send out so it’s going to cost a buck to send it out. If you get 30% response that’s about 12 leads and you have to pay for your inbound leads at 2.5¢ apiece so your cost of your campaign in this situation is $4.50. Your cost per lead is 38¢ per lead. Dramatically cheaper than if your sending out snail mail.

Joe: And you can do this by Zip Code or you can do it by city and state and you can ad as many states and cities as you want to here. What I would strongly suggest is that you do one state, one city, one little section per campaign and just set up more campaigns in the dashboard. You can have as many campaigns as you want. I’d also make sure that the phone number that we have attached to that particular campaign has an Area Code that is local to that area that you’re calling in to.

Joe: So, this allows you to explode your business because when you’re just getting started you’re going to need more leads. Because you need to talk to more people to get good at it. You’re probably going to have to talk to a hundred people before you actually put together your first deal just because you have to learn how to do it. You have to become competent. After you’ve gotten good at it you may only need to talk to three people, five people, ten people before you put a deal together. It’s going to be much, much easier after you become competent in this process. But until then you need as many leads as possible.

Joe: And if you’re working in a small or medium sized town and you send out some leads and you only have, you know, three people to talk to, that’s not going to give you enough experience to get good at this. So, you’re going to want to be able to get enough where you have at least a hundred or two hundred scraped leads. It doesn’t have to send out to that many leads. You just need that many leads because you can also call the people that didn’t respond. So, again, there’s three types of leads that you’re going to get. You’re going to get the yeses, or maybes, you’re going to get the no’s, I’m not interested and you’re going to get the people that didn’t respond at all. And you can call all three of those groups. And I suggest you call them all, especially at the beginning when you’re still learning this process.

Joe: Maybe later on down the line when you’re good at talking on the phone and know how to put a deal together without any problem, you can talk to just the people that say yes or maybe and go through that process and put those deals together and have a few deals every month because of that system because you know how to close those deals.

Joe: But until you’re good at it you’re just not going to close those deals. There’s no question to it. And if you’re experienced as a real estate investor, let’s say you’ve been working as a wholesaler. You’ve been fixing and flipping properties. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to put these types of deal together because this is a different dialog. You have to learn how to do this in a different way. And if you go into the tutorials I have some training audios on how to do that. I’ve also got a role play .pdf file that shows me going through a role play.

Joe: I’ve got some other things in here as well that make it easy for you to learn objection handling so you can get better at that stuff as well. The beauty of this, though, is that you can expand, you can start hiring people to make calls for you eventually after you learn how to do it. And then you can expand into multiple states, multiple cities. If you’re also, if you’re in a high end market to start with, I would also suggest that you work at the same time in a lower end market. If you’re in a $400K or $500K market, let’s say you’re in Los Angeles or you’re in New York or you’re in Boston and you’re just getting started, you might also want to work in a market where you’ve got $100K or $150K properties as well.

Joe: Or maybe even go into some rural areas or urban areas that are in the $50K to $100K price range. It’s sometimes a little bit easier and less intimidating talking to someone who’s got $100K property than it is talking to someone who’s got a $700K property. I’m not sure what it is that does that, but it does create some intimidation in most of my students talking to people that have higher end properties.

Joe: So, have more than one market that you’re working in. You can always get boots on the ground to help you. And you don’t ever have to go see these properties to put these deals together because of the way we’re structuring them. So that’s all taught in the tutorials and I’m going to be talking about some of that stuff as we go through this series on automation.

Joe: Tune in for the next video. I’m going to be talking about how to get the phone numbers you need with the local Area Code that you’re working for three bucks apiece per month. So, they’re really cheap, you can have as many of them as you want. You can work in multiple areas. Also, remember, you get a $20 credit with your Automarketer every month that goes towards any scraper fees or phone fees, phone numbers of phone minutes that you might use. So you can do this typically in a small to medium sized town for about $20 a month. So, every town that you add is going to cost another twenty bucks or so to add that to the system and be able to market to that system.

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