Epic Real Estate Investing - Capturing Seller Information and More with Lisa Shearer | Episode 194

Episode Date: February 15, 2016

Today Matt is explaining what call capture phone numbers are, why they are so useful, and how he uses them in his own business.  Plus a follow up on last week’s seller finance deal with Lisa Shearer.  Enjoy! ------- The free course is new and improved!  To access to the two fastest and easiest strategies to a paycheck in real estate, go to FreeRealEstateInvestingCourse.com or text “FreeCourse” to 55678. What interests you most? E.ducation P.roperties I.ncome C.oaching Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is Terrio Media. Casting from Terrio Studios in Glendale, California, it's time for Epic Real Estate Investing with Matt Terrio. Yeah. What's up? Hello. Hello, and welcome. Welcome to the Epic Real Estate Investing Podcast, the place where I show people how to

escape the rat race using real estate. Just shift your focus from making piles of money to make. making streams of money change, that one thing, just one time, and you are on your way to financial freedom. It's not the most exciting path. I promise you that, but it is the fastest. And that right there, that is a promise as well. And once you get there, life then becomes exciting.

People think this is a real estate show. It's not a real estate show. It's a money show that uses real estate as the vehicle. And if you do it, right, you get to enjoy life a lot more because, you know what? Face it, life costs money. It puts the food in our stomach. the roof over our head, the clothes on our back, it pays the doctor bills, and allows us to do that for all of the people that we love and care about the most. And it allows us to have fun.

That's when life becomes exciting. That's what the show is about. All righty, so I got a lot of great feedback from last week's episode on Creative Financing with Lisa Shearer, a brand new and an emerging star here at Epic. And I've got an update for you coming up today that we're going to get into on what happened with that deal. I've got a couple announcements as well. March 24th in Manhattan Beach, California is our next Grub and Grow Rich event. So if you'd like to attend or get some more information about that, go to grub and grow rich.com to register and you can reserve your seat there as well. It's coming up soon, March 24th, Manhattan Beach.

And we just hit our minimum raise for the Epic Wealth Fund. So we are open for business. So if you're an accredited investor and you're looking for some alternative investments, looking for something passive, looking for. looking for something with an actual hedge built in, the Epic Wealth Fund may be for you. That just might be the right thing that you're looking for. So go to EpicWealthfund.com to download the executive summary,

get the details, and make up your mind for yourself. All righty. So this past week was the official kickoff for the new follow-through crew community inside of the Epic Pro Academy. And if you don't know, it's a coaching and accountability group to help you get your business setup and get to your results faster.

And we called it the follow-through crew because, you know, quite honestly, most people they do not. So this group is to help people actually follow through this time. This time, face it. We've all gotten excited about something before, right? We've all seen a new opportunity or a new program, a new plan, a new system. Whatever it may be, we gave it a quick try. And then for one reason or another, we got distracted and we just kind of moved on to something

else. You know, especially during this time that we're living in right now, you know, where there's just so many different things that are fighting for our attention. It's tough to stay focused. So that's what this group is for, staying focused and following through. Okay. So after our first seven-day blitz of the follow-through crew, I received a version of the, from a couple different people, the same question, a couple different versions of it from a few different people in it. And it actually kind of took me by surprise. It took me by surprise a bit. But, you know, I started to think about and just kind of realized that there's so much that we all can take for granted, right? And take for granted that, you know, you take something for granted that other people understand and they get, that's something

they know about you or something that they know about what you do, something that just, they just know what you know. You think that they do because you've been doing it for so long. It's like, getting that common knowledge, right? And, you know, when it becomes a normal daily part of your life, that's, it's normal for you, not normal for someone, for everybody else. I mean, something that you think is just so simple, can be confusing or difficult for someone else. Here's a good example.

You know, when people get into real estate investing and are so concerned about where they're going to get the money to do their deals, you know, at first, that seems like the hard part for them. And then at the same time, you've got another group of people getting involved in real estate. And they're wondering, you know, they've got money. That's the easy part. And they're wondering, where in the world am I going to get the time to do all of this? So for one group, the money is the hard part.

And the time that's required is the easy part. And then simultaneously, there's an existing group who has no problem with money, but the time is the hard part for them. And that dynamic, it's working all the time from different perspectives in this business. Whatever is difficult for you is that's play for someone else. That's easy-peasy for someone else. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is about this specific question that I received. And it was essentially the question was, do I need a call-capture phone number for my real estate investing business and why? Do I need a call-capture number for my real estate investing business and why?

So I thought, you know, since I presumed it was somewhat of a no-brainer with my own academy and follow-through crew members and I was wrong, there's a great chance that I'm making an incorrect presumption right here with you too. So let's go over call capture phone numbers today and what they are, why you might want to use one. So in the first seven-day blitz, one of the homework assignments was to set up an exclusive business number for yourself, a business number to operate your real estate investing business from. And I recommended a couple of different services for doing this. I recommended a really basically essentially a free service, like just going to your current cell phone provider and just picking up one of their free. phones, whatever they give away is their promo, just get that little phone and make that your,

you could make that your business number. That's how I got started. That's exactly how I got started. But I also recommended a few different services that you can go through. And one is callrail.com, and I mentioned better voice.com. And these are two call capture services that do the exact same thing. I'm a customer of both services, but you don't need to be. I listed them both in this lesson just to give my members a choice, some options.

and there are at least 10 other services that I can think of that do the same thing or something very similar. I just liked these two the best. That's all my personal preference that I have no hesitation in recommending. So here's the very basic function of what these services do. They will provide you with a phone number, not necessarily a phone, but a phone number that you'll use in your marketing, of which when people call that number, the system captures in a report the person's phone number and sometimes even their name. So first, you want to catch

their number in case they don't leave a message. That's why you'd want to do that. And so if they don't leave a message, you can still call them back. And second, you want their number so you can include it in your follow-up system. We know the fortune is in the follow-up, so that information is really valuable to capture. Now, as your business grows, you'll want to track your marketing so you know that what's working and what's not. So you'll know what to do more of and what to do less of and what maybe to quit doing entirely. And you'll do this by using multiple phone numbers in your marketing. For example, you could use one phone number on, say, the first postcard you send out, that first mailing. You can use another number on the second mailing. Say you set out a yellow letter. So you put a different

phone number on the yellow letter. You could use another number on your property flyers. You could use another number on your website, another on your business card, another on your bandit signs, something maybe another different number through your online classified ads. The list is really endless. You can go on and on and as deep as you want to go with this. And I'm not suggesting that everyone has to go that deep into tracking. I'm a little bit of a nut with it, so I track everything. But you don't have to do that.

But I would recommend that you do sign up for some service that allows you at the very least to capture your caller's phone numbers. as some people will leave voice messages for you and some won't. And you're going to want to follow up with every person that calls whether they leave a voice message or not as there is an equal amount of deals to be had from both of those categories. There's not really any, I haven't seen any correlation between the deals that we do, whether they initially left a message or not. So I'd recommend at least two numbers and you can get it from the same service,

so they're just going to give you two phone numbers, and you're going to have one for sellers, and one for buyers. That's at the very least that I would recommend. But I will provide this disclaimer. You don't need a service like this. You don't need it at all, ever. All you need to make money in this business is a phone number.

All right? Just need a phone number. If you're okay with having your business calls come in on your personal line, that's fine too. You just need to be able to communicate. I didn't use these services when I first began. primarily because I didn't know about them. If I were to start from scratch, however,

I would sign up for a service just like this, absolutely. And the two primary reasons that I would do it. And maybe this will give you a little bit more insight or push you over the edge one way or the other. Number one is your biggest expense in your business is going to be your marketing expense. It is not in the buying and the selling of the real estate. No, it is not there.

contrary to popular belief. Your biggest expense is in the marketing. And with that being the case, I want to know where my marketing dollars are best spent, and so should you. And with the use of these types of phone numbers, I always know where my deals are coming from. And when I notice a pattern of good deals

coming from a specific source of my marketing, I want to ramp that one up, right? I want to do more of that. And when I notice a pattern of nothing coming from a specific source of my marketing, I'd want to make some adjustments to that approach or maybe stop it entirely. I want to say, if no deals are coming over there, from there, why do I want to pump more money into it, right?

You see, it's, it's, we all think that we're in the real estate investing business. That mean that we're listening to a real estate investing podcast and, and you go out and you're looking to buy and sell real estate. And we all think we're in that business. And we are. But even more so, we're really in the marketing business. we're in the marketing business. And it's our job to do our marketing to attract motivated sellers to us.

That's really what we're up to. And in the world of marketing and advertising, you're always testing. You always want to see what's working and what's not. And when you want to ramp up your business, when you want to scale your business and you want to get bigger and make more money and do more deals, data and feedback, it's everything. The data and feedback that you gather from. your marketing is everything. And that's what these types of phone services do for you.

Now, the second primary reason that I'd sign up for a service like this is it acts essentially as a database for you to follow up with. And the more marketing you do, the more this database grows. And it just, it kind of snowballs. So if you're in this business for, you know, you're doing a bunch of marketing for six months. You know, that first month you got a little bit of follow up and some people called you and you've got some people to follow up with. But after two months, you've got like double the amount of people.

Then you've got triple the amount of people. And then four times the amount. And after, you know, a year's worth, you got a huge, just giant pool of phone numbers, a giant pool of opportunity for your deals. You know, it's only 2% of all business is converted on that very first contact. Only 2%. 80% of your business is converted between the 5th and 12th. contact.

So you want to be able to follow up if you want to capture the large portion of the business that exists in your leads. So the ability to follow up over time is where the real fortune in your business lies. And we're going to get probably more into that in these coming weeks. But by using a phone service like this, you're setting yourself up to win in the long run. You're building a giant list of property owners who at one time they raised their hand and inquired about you helping them with the sale of their property. Some are going to say yes today.

Absolutely. Those are the great ones. Okay. But the majority of the people that do say yes are going to say yes to you at a later time. That might be tomorrow. Might be next week. Might be next month. Could be six months from now.

Okay? So you want to be able to follow up. So the biggest reasons I use it is I want to be able to measure my marketing to see where I'm effective and what's ineffective. and I want to be able to capture those numbers so I can put them into my follow-up system and I can continue to follow up with them and contact them. Now, again, with all that said, you don't need a service like this to make money investing in real estate, but it sure helps.

So if you already knew about call capture phone numbers and why they are extremely useful, now you've got an insight as to what I use and why I use them. If you didn't know, well, now you do. Callrail.com, that's the one that I'm using mostly right now. I do have numbers over at better voice.com. Vumber.com is a very popular one. Freedomvoice.com is another one. There's a bunch of them out there.

I mean, a quick Google search would probably turn up at least a dozen others of varying features and capabilities and price points. You need to do this. Go to Google and say type in services like callrail.com. You'll probably get three or four blog posts that line up the top 10, 15, 20, and they'll probably have the features and benefits aligned so you can compare. A lot of bloggers do that kind of thing. All right, so that's what I got to say about the call capture phone numbers.

If you knew, cool. Now you know more. If you didn't know, then now you do. All righty. So next, we're going to go ahead and we're going to catch up with Lisa Shearer regarding her seller finance deal from last week to see how it turned out. And we'll do that right after this. Attention, attention.

Shocking website reveals that shocking websites aren't really that shocking. All kidding aside, go to find motivated sellers ASAP.com to get the inside scoop on how the nation's most successful real estate investors really find their deeply discounted properties. Go to find motivated sellers ASAP.com. Deeper discounts, less secrets. Find motivated sellers ASAP.com. All right, Lisa, how are you? Good. How are you? Fantastic. We've got a lot of super excited people from our conversation last week about your seller finance deal.

I have done a lot of deals this week and negotiated a lot of deals. I'm trying to remember exactly what the terms of the deal were. I remember we had a, it was like a $35,000 offer with a two-year balloon interest-only payments at 3%. That's what we were countering back at. Is that pretty close? Yeah, with a six-month moratorium. as well. Right, with the six-month moratorium. So a lot of people thought, wow, you'd be crazy if you get that accepted, right? Or some people I think would be afraid to offer it. But you did. So tell me what happened. So originally we had the percentage at 6%, but that was with a longer balloon payment. So when I went back to the seller, I said, hey, you know, we're willing to work with you at the $35,000 at two years, but you got to work with me on the interest rate.

Can we bump that down to 3%? And he said, absolutely. So it still would have been a good deal at 6%, but it was worth asking. Right, right. And then we still got the six-month moratorium. Yes. Perfect. So I think the big thing there was is when the seller asks for something and you're okay with acquiescing

and granting them that, granting that. granting that to him, you don't want to limit your negotiations down to one term or one term. So when they ask for something, then you just agree to that, but then ask for something else. And so what we asked for was a reduction in the interest rate. And you got a 50% reduction in that. Yes. Oh, and also zero money down. Zero money down.

How could we forget that? Awesome. So you have that contract signed now, right? Yes. Very good. And what are you doing with it? So right now I'm marketing it and your team is marketing it as well. This is the lead that I got from you to try and find basically get an assignment fee for that contract.

Got it. Perfect. So if somebody listening wanted to look at that deal and this deal's in Nashville, right? It's in Ashland City. It's a suburb of Nashville. Ashland? Ashland City. Ashland City.

Okay. Suburb of Nashville. Nashville is a booming market in the last year or so, maybe even a little longer than that. And then it's a single family residence. What's our bedroom bathroom configuration? Two one. Okay, so two-bed and one bath. With an unfinished basement.

Unfinished basement. Okay. And then the rent, what do you think the market rent is for it? Between 600 and 900, but I think 700 is a really good conservative. estimate. Right on the low side in the middle. That's a pretty broad spectrum though, so it's a nicer area. Yeah, well, in the way that Nashville's been growing is pretty incredible. And Ashland City has a direct highway from Nashville where there's not a lot of traffic. So the rent will continue to grow over the next few years because of how much it's expanding.

Cool. So if somebody was interested that was listening to this, that wanted to potentially acquire this from you, how should they get in touch with you? All they have to do is email me at Coach Lisa at Epicrealestate.com. And I would be happy to get you photographs the full breakdown, everything. Super. So Coach Lisa at Epic Realestate.com. Fantastic. Well, good job.

And I know you got a couple of others that you're working on too, right? Yes. And how did those pan out? Or are you still working? I have another one in Springfield that we, just got signed. I still have to go out and take photographs of that property. Now, that was an interesting one. That was one that we had initially classified as a suspect, but once they received the three-option letter of intent, they really liked cash price. And they had already hired

an agent, so it was already listed, but they gave the agent, the three-option LOI and said, I want the cash price, and the agent reached out to us. So that's two in a row that probably weren't going to be a deal unless you actually submitted the three-option letter of intent. Absolutely. I know that it's a common fear when people are getting started that you may be taking advantage of a seller by doing a low bowl price or creative financing terms or something like that that we're the only ones getting benefit here. And that's just absolutely not the case. And with the seller in Ashton City, the deal that we went over last week, that seller, I met with him this week to pick up the keys. And he said three times, thank you so much.

Thank you so much. I'm so happy I can work with you. That's all he had to say. I think that it's very underrated the value that we are giving to people by solving their problems creatively or quickly. Good share. Thanks. Well, enjoy the rest of your weekend. The weekend will be over by the time everybody hears this,

but I appreciate you coming in last minute to tie up all the loose ends on our story last week. Anytime. You know how some people want to invest in real estate, but they don't know how? Oh, yeah. And you know how some people want to invest in real estate, but they don't have the time? Oh, yeah. And you know how some people want to invest in real estate, and they simply don't want to do all that work?

Oh, yeah. Do you know someone like this? Mm-hmm. Perhaps that someone. Is you? Uh, yeah. If so, subscribe to the Turnkey Real Estate Investing podcast, the show for busy people who want to invest in real estate, but don't have the time or the desire to take on the

heavy lifting. Turnkey, real estate investing. Subscribe today. It's free. Yeah. Turnkey, Real Estate Investing. All right, next week, Grub and Grow Rich in Manhattan Beach. Go to grub and grow rich.com for all the details and registration.

Looking forward to me. you face to face, talking shop, raising our glasses to the prosperous year ahead that awaits all of us. You just got to go out and get it. And that's what we're going to talk about. All righty. So that's it for today. See you next week or catch me tomorrow for a brand new episode of Turnkey Real Estate Investing. I'm Matt Terrio, living the dream. You've been listening to Epic Real Estate Investing, the world's foremost authority on separating the facts from the BS in real estate investing education. If you enjoyed this show, please take a minute to visit iTunes and share your thoughts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time

here at Epic Real Estate Investing with Matt Terrio. This podcast is a part of the C-suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-sweetradio.com.