Epic Real Estate Investing - How to Reach Motivated Sellers in a Saturated Market - Larry Higgins | 434

Episode Date: July 30, 2018

Matt Theriault and Larry Higgins are proud to present tips on How to Reach Motivated Sellers in a Saturated Market. Matt and Larry specifically talk about pros and cons of skip tracing and how acquired data from this process can increase mail reach. Learn what to do with all returned mail, how to use the cold calling approach, and how much skip tracing services cost. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And if you'd like to join us, go to Epicintensive.com for all the details. Epicintensive.com. I'd love to work with you in person, side by side, and getting it done. All righty. got a special show for you today around reaching motivated sellers in a saturated market. And I use the word and place emphasis on the word saturated very loosely. And I use it because that's how so many out there are referring to the market. And those that are using this expression, this expression of being a saturated market,

really are mostly people that have never been through a sales cycle or two, a real estate cycle, meaning we've been on a good run for a while. I mean, a decade now. And in terms of real estate cycles, I mean, this is a really long one, typically seven, eight years, and we're going on a 10th year. And for those that have been investing or flipping less than 10 years, when I hear saturated right now, when I hear it from those people, what I really hear is all of the low-hanging fruit is gone. That's all I'm hearing.

It's not a saturated market. It's a very normal market. I mean, it feels saturated because we've been very spoiled for a while. Anyway, I'll agree, though, it is more difficult to find deals today than it was, just say, three years ago, four years ago. I got it. Maybe even just a year ago. But what is there to do? Quit and wait for the next cycle?

No, don't do that. I'd say do a couple things. Do the same things you've been doing. concentrating more on consistency than quantity. Might have to deploy a little bit of patience with that, but really exercise your discipline in the area of consistency, being consistent with the money-making activities that's generating leads, converting those leads to contracts,

those activities, okay? So focus on consistency more than quantity. Quantity, of course, is good, but get the consistency down first and then start working on the quantity. Consistency, it's everything. That would be the first thing. The second thing would be to revisit the time-honored strategies of finding deals, like driving for dollars, like calling the owners of those places that you identify.

And it's probably a good time to really consider what there is to do with all of the returned mail that you've received. you know, if you've been mailing to pre-foreclosures or tax liens or probate or vacant houses, you know, you get a high volume. I don't know, it could range anywhere from 5% to 20% of that mail gets returned back to you because there's nobody living there anymore. But that person is still there. They still own the house. So how do you reach them?

Well, as well, you've spent a lot of money on all that. So let's go ahead and rather than throwing more money at it, let's go find those people. And the solution is skip tracing, where you research the history of someone, a person, and you start with the point of they own that house. That's how you get the name. And you try to locate them. You find past addresses.

You find past phone numbers. And I mean, you essentially put on your private investigator's hat. You put that on, and then you track down that motivated seller and make them an offer to buy their house. So I've never been a fan of skip tracing because it's really time intensive. And yeah, it's a lot of data entry. It's very meticulous. It's a lot of paper shuffling and data entry. And a lot of the time it's an inaccurate practice.

I mean, if you look up one person's name, you're going to give, even with the best services out there, you're going to get 10 addresses to look at and 10 phone numbers to look at. Like, what do you do with that now? how do you know which one's the right one? And I've just always felt it to be a better use of my time to just keep mailing. I'm just going to keep on mailing and keep on my lead generation going. I'm going to keep answering the phone and then I'm just going to keep setting appointments. I'm just going to focus on that and forget about all that other stuff of like going in and deleting people from my database and skip tracing and trying to find the people. And, you know, I actually do still feel the same way.

I still feel the exact same way. I think there's a better use of your time by generating. leads answering the phones and setting appointments. But if there's someone that can take all of that off your plate and do it for you and do a better job than you could do it yourself, all that time intensive labor, if they could take all of that off your hands at an extremely affordable rate, I'm willing to change my tune. And I have. I was introduced to a person that brings all the solutions to these problems and makes skip tracing super easy and relatively cheap when considering the upside of the results. So I had a phone conversation with this person last week, and I recorded it. So I thought

I just played you the recording of that call right here on the show. So please help me. Welcome to Epic Real Estate Investing from Skip Jeannie, Mr. Larry Higgins. Larry, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, you bet. And I stumbled upon you on Facebook. I think someone tagged me in one of your posts or they referred you to somebody that was asking about skip tracing. And as like, I think this is some, this is a very timely conversation to have. I'll just give you a little bit of my background.

We'll go from there. I don't have anything prepared or have anything scripted out. I just kind of wanted to be, almost put myself in the shoes of my listener and interview you from that perspective. Because when we do direct mail, and we do quite a bit of it, and we send to, you know,

either pre-foreclosures or foreclosures or vacant houses, is we get a high volume of mail returned. And at one moment, maybe six or seven years ago, we started getting all this mail returned. I was like, what do I do with this? Should I go and delete them from my database? Should I go look all these people up?

And I tried that once, and it was such a time-intensive, effort-intensive task. I was like, you know what, screw it. I'd rather just keep on mailing and I'll eat up the cost because my time is better to use that way. And so when I've been asked by my students since then, I've always told, hey, there's two schools of thought on this. You can go and skip trace this stuff and put it into a database. And that could be a really high, productive, fruitful list.

I know people that do it that way. I come from a different school with other people that I know that that's just, it's a waste of time. And your time is probably better served as sending out more mail and talking to the people that do actually call. So we've got both sides. And with this market now, I mean, inventories beginning. a little bit more less, the market's getting a little bit more competitive. And I'm starting to see, hey, maybe there's a really a need for that. But still, how does it get done?

And then that's when I stumbled upon you, like, oh, my gosh, there's somebody out there that does that just for our industry. So I wanted to have you on and just kind of introduce you the audience in case they wanted to take that avenue. And if you could explain to us how it works, and maybe it's not such a time-consuming task anymore, I don't know how it works. Yeah, everything you just said, I've heard that so many times. Okay, well, there you go.

Even removing them from, if you know, Mike Ambright, you probably don't might. Yeah, and I know Mike well. He's like, our rule was the third time it gets returned, we just removed it from the list. But still having to keep track of three postcards. Do we have three of these yet? Do we have three of these yet, you know? And so everything you said, I've heard it, and I can understand that perspective, especially when you've been in the game longer and you didn't really need to.

It wasn't worth it because mail was more productive a little while. It still works. Now it's about trying to maximize that because you've seen a little bit of diminishing returns on the direct mail end. And to go along with that, the timing with skip tracing is you don't, it doesn't have to be as time consuming. With all the tools and things we can do now with bulk skip tracing where you just put it in a list or you could literally, we've had people mail us 6,000 pieces of return mail or 7. thousand. See, that's where I was getting that. So what does it look like technically? I've got a stack of postcards on my on my desk. What's next? How do I approach that? So for something, in that very specific case, you could, there's two things you could do. You could melt, just

literally put it in a box, a pouch or something, mail it to us. We'll do the data entry for you and put it in the format we need a simple spreadsheet format. Then we'll do what we call a bulk skip trace. And we'll run that entire list. And I guarantee you, if you're doing, if you're doing truly distressed properties and there's hundreds or thousands of pieces of return mill, you're going to find out there's dead owners in there that you didn't know about. They may kill the deal, may make it most generally makes it that much better. Kill the deal, no pun intended. But and then you get all the, all the relevant contact information that we can provide phone numbers.

And so you mail it to us, we would process it. Or if you had the in-house capability, you could put it in a spreadsheet and send it to us. We do it call Bolt Skip Trace. And then the results you get, you know, age, if we can tell you they're deceased, we tell you that. The possible phone numbers for that person, possible email addresses, if you want to try an email blast as well. And address history and what I call financial distress indicators, account of liens, judgments, and bankruptcies. Got it. Okay.

And on your end, it's like, okay, great. I had a thousand pieces of return mail. Great. You gave me all these phone numbers. What the hell do I do now? That's the second half of the equation. I'm always leery of that because people are like, yeah, I want to run this huge list. Maybe it's not a return mail.

They just want to start cold calling. Right. You ever done that? Well, you know what? What's old is new again. So that seems to be the big trend right now is the cold call. So that was going to be the second part of my question. But just to back up just a little bit.

So you would do a bulk skip trace and send them back that list with all updated mailing addresses so they could resend, right? Well, it's address history. So with addresses and skip tracing, we can't tell you exactly where they are right now. We can say, here's your options. Most people, I would say you can look based off of the mailing address you had and what's in their address history and make a pretty good assumption of what a good address is. Nobody can tell you for sure exactly where that person is. especially they have a vacation home, like a beach house or P-O boxes and things like that involved.

It can look like they're at multiple places at once. Right, right. Okay. So I send you one card. You send me back, say, four potential different mailing addresses. Yep. And so what is your advice or what's the practice to try and reach that person? Do you have to go through each one of those individually or you just mail them all again?

You could go through individually and pick a new address in mail based off of using that scenario I laid out. The vast majority of people that use us, I think we've had two people that we're only looking for that we're really just looking for addresses. Everybody else is trying, they said, yeah, I'll just try and call them. That's not something I see a lot of, but that's how we work that when that is the end goal. Got it. So with that, Daddy, you have the option. I would think I would lean on the side of just mailing all the addresses, even if I'm hitting four to one,

or I'm saying out four pieces trying to hit one person. That just seems like what we're talking about right now, very few people would take the time to do. It's still probably mailing the four pieces. Could have a really good ROI because nobody else is reaching them. That's what I call the overkill approach. Not in a bad way, but I do that. Like when I see a very distressed vacant house,

It's obviously abandoned huge tax delinquency or something like that. I don't just pull a report on the owner. I pull a report on the owner, husband, wife, sisters, parents. I call it overkill because I know certain types of properties. It's hard to reach those people for various reasons. I don't mess around. It's like we're going to call grandma if we have to, but we're going to get in touch with somebody. So I like your approach.

That idea is pretty good. just mail all the addresses. Yeah, yeah. I mean, at 33 cents, so I spent $1.20 on a higher quality lead. Probably not a bad investment. Yeah. Okay, so there's that. Now, let's talk about the cold calling because you provide the phone numbers as well.

And I'm pretty sure, just like address history, you get a phone number history as well. So you don't know exactly which phone number is going to be the one. Is that right? Correct. So on average, we have probably about six phone numbers per person. Sometimes it's only one. Some people that you'll see have 12 or 15. They tend to be more unstable.

You'll see that if you look at the liens and judgments, they may have a bunch of them. You'll get prepaid cricket phone numbers and places of employment like nail salons and tire shops. Because these people are just using, they just keep changing numbers. Right. So that's the case there. Okay. So then the strategy with the people of the call calling, well, they'll just load all of those phone numbers in and just start. call in and asking right yeah and depending on your volume what you know we

have people that are just starting out and they're driving for dollars and so it's it's a manageable volume they're just using their cell phone and just mainly dialing others when you're doing these larger lists they're using auto dialers which tremendously speeds that process up rather than mainly in all those numbers yeah I have history with those auto dialers they are very quick you can make your hundred dials in about ten minutes and you know talk to the four people that were home. Okay, so great.

So we got the direct mail thing. We got the phone number thing. What are some of the other strategies or applications for your service? Am I missing anything? Well, that's the data and what kind of what we provide. For some people, like, depending on how, at a higher, the people that are at a higher volume and they're doing 100, 200 deals a year or more.

They're not going to take the time to dig in on some types of deals. Other people will, and they're willing to put in the effort where it gets outside of, I've gone so far as to hire a genealogist to help me find relatives because it was very worth, it was extremely worth it. I don't spend much money on marketing. I'll pay her $200. It's a marketing cost. But to know when to do that, how to do that, how to really dig in, how to find the hard

to find and things like that. Sometimes you have to get outside of skip tracing and get into other resources. So we have a weekly phone call. It's me on the call every Wednesday night. And I'm just there to help people, whether it's an overall strategy or, hey, I've got this house. It's vacant. The owner's dead. I can't find any relatives what I do and just walk them through that process.

So that's because there's a lot of, with skip tracing, it's hard to say step one, two, three. It can be, well, if this, then that, if this, then that, you know, I could put a flow chart on my wall and fill it up. Right, right. I understand. Okay. Yeah, so I came to this conversation with you kind of on purpose not to know too much about what it is that you do so I could just come from a real fresh brain and asking my questions. Your, let's see. Is there anything that I should be asking or is additional things that you do?

or that we should know. So there's different types. I'm talking about what we do as far as our service. Some people only want phone numbers. And there's options for that out there where it's more of a data pending thing. You get lower quality data. But if your goal is to say, I just want to call 20,000 property owners, you're trying to get pennies, you know, data at, you know,

two, three, four cents a search, that kind of thing. on the execution end you can get creative on how you using this data how you how you try and market to people we've talked about letters and phone calls I'm sure you've seen ringless voicemails pick up in popularity yep that's a time saver and so you can just load everything up send that message out but there there are constraints to that and that you can't have a very tailored message when you're you send an exact same voicemail to a thousand people Correct, correct. But it is, if it's a truly motivated seller, my view is it kind of gets the low-hanging fruit.

So if you're starting a campaign of calling, before you start calling, send the ringless voicemail out, see who calls you back, then start your calling. Other people, I haven't done this yet, but you can take the email address as we provide you, and you can load them into Facebook. Yep. If that email address is associated with that person's account, they have a Facebook account and that email address is associated with it, then you can start running targeted ads to them. That's something I need to get smart on, and I really want to start playing with that. I just haven't done it yet. Yes, yeah, we'd do that already.

So, yes, that would work. I can't believe I even overlook that. So you get emails, you get phone numbers. So you get the actual addresses. So the other thing that we could do with that is you can load a Google service where you can find their IP address for the actual physical address of the house and do retargeting that way. Yeah. And then, say, you know, in some places you can pull a list of estates.

They're not on a probate, but it's an estate. So another type of report we have is obviously that person is deceased. You can't reach them. We have what we call a relationship report. So we don't give you all the addresses of the relatives, but we can give you a ton of relatives that show up as likely relatives for that. deceased owner and phone number for all those relatives. That's a pretty handy list to have.

Anytime you know you're dealing with deceased relatives and just allows you to speed up that process of contacting somebody. Got it. I'm going through your frequently asked questions here on your website. Website, skipjeanie.com, by the way. So you have scripts. So if someone hasn't never done cold calling, because I think we talked about that. I don't know if we'd hit the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

record button or not when we've mentioned that. But someone that's never done that before. What's the history behind your scripts? Because there's so many different approaches that you can take. Do you have a certain approach that you found that's work best? The history is I have a lot of painfully awkward and bad calls when I started out. Yes, any of us that have done that before we do. When I started, you know, I kind of started going down this path.

I never had a script. I'm just, I just winging it. And then through repetition. and learning, having calls go sideways and badly, I just tweaked it over time. But our overall approach is to not sound like a business, to sound like the average person, like, hey, my name, my name is Larry. I was just interested in buying this property. So I don't do any calls anymore, but when I did, intentional pauses and hesitations and kind

of coming, especially if I don't know, I don't have the right person, come out and tell, hey, you know, I'm not sure if I have the right number or not. My name's Larry. And I was trying to get in touch with Bob about the house. I think he owns over on Main Street. Again, I know this is kind of out of the blue, but just want to see if you have any interest in selling it. Just like that. My goal is for them to be comfortable.

They tend to be, people tend to be more open and comfortable if they're dealing with a person rather than a business. And the vast majority of times, nobody. even ask us our company name. If they do, then we overwhelm them with credibility, drive them to the website, better business bureau and all that. You let them open that door, though. Yeah, exactly. Got it. Well, I can tell you've done it before already because that's exactly how I'd recommend it. I like the all-shucks approach. Like, gosh, I hate making these calls and I had to make two of them today and they didn't go well. Hopefully it's got a lot better. Is Bob there?

You know what I'm saying? And some people, you kind of come across as a little needy in some circumstances. And like people will want to help, even if it's not the right person, but they know how to, I'll give you an example. Got in touch with the lady other day. It was actually the owner's mom. Oh, sweetie. No, no, no. This is her mom.

Don't you worry about that. You didn't know. I'll tell you what, here's Sharonda's phone number. You tell her, you talk to Carol. Did you give me everything? You know, it's funny that my philosophy is if you sound in trouble, a lot of people come out and rescue you. Do you know John Martinez?

You probably know John. I know John very well, yeah. The okay not okay principle. Oh, yeah, that's... Yeah, I was doing that before I knew what it was called, and that specific, you know, it's just be needy, be in need of help. Yeah, I think that's David Sandler is the one that originated that or pioneered it at least.

Yeah, yeah. The Sandler sales is too. I'm like, okay, now I know what that is. But it's very effective. It's very effective. Absolutely. Well, super. Let's see. Anything else I'm supposed to know? I mean, pricing, how do you, do you want to share how the pricing works? So we are, we're not, we don't do just individual one-off searches. Most people are routinely doing stuff with us. So it's a membership. So got it.

Two different levels. One's 47 a month and one's 97 a month. And at 47 a month, it's $1.50 a search. And at 97, it's 95 cents. Okay. With that, you get, you know, we can do the bulk skip tracing. You can send us the return mail, access to our weekly phone calls and our scripts and things like that. Okay. So the, those monthly subscriptions, those are the different prices per search.

Does that include us, that includes the service of just sending you all my postcards and you do it? Well, you still pay per search, but yet you can send it to us. And we do give you free search. At 97, we give you 25 free searches a month. You know, if you're sending in a thousand postcards, it's not going to make a huge difference. Right. And I was thinking more along the lines of the data entry part. Is there a difference if I do the data entry, create my own spreadsheet,

or if I just send you the postcards and let you do it? Yes. If you do, so, okay, I apologize. I almost got off track there. So when you send in the mail, there is a, it goes from 95 cents a search. If you can process it And off the top of my head, I don't know the number But I think it goes up to $1.35

And I apologize to I'll stop doing that But if you send us the spreadsheet, then it's just a normal search rate. Got it. A lot of people just kind of do the math like, hey, I'd spend this much labor, this much time in labor processing it And they just make a decision from there. Got it. Okay.

Super. Well, it's been a pleasure, Larry. Anything else that? I need to know or ask. I could go off down a lot of rabbit holes with this. We went over what it is. So we can skip trace, meaning you can search people, their history of their background as far as where they lived, what their phone rolls, what their possible email is. We went over some of the different strategies of how to use that.

We went over the costs. We went over how to work with you. We got your website is skipgeny.com. By the way, I signed up as an affiliate for you. I'll be promoting that inside Deppapapro Academy. So if you are listening as a podcaster and you want to help me keep the lights on over here, go to Epic SkipTracetrae.com. EpicSkipTraces.com.

I'll take you right to SkipGy. Or you can just go straight to Larry. Either way, it's fine with me. I want you to get the service. But let's see what else. If they go to SkipGeney.com, if anybody wants to do a test search to see how the, because we do the bulk skip tracing, but we also have a dashboard that you can log into and do your searches on your own.

Okay. So if you go to skipjee.com, a box pops up offering you a free search. You just enter your email, and then we'll create the account for you, and you'll get a search and kind of get a fill for that process. Oh, sweet. Okay. Well, that's a good service. That'll give you a good test run.

Let's see. How to base report costs. We've got the relationship reports that you talked about. You do bulk processing. You'll do the data entry if you need it. We just talked about the Skip Jeannie Dashboard. Let's see. What do you mean by unlimited submissions for the perfectionist plan?

What does that mean? So some people need to submit multiple lists during a week. At 47 a month, you can send us one list a week and we can process it for you. At the perfectionist plan of 97, you can send us two lists a day, once a day. Just we're committing to processing that as often as you need. Got it. Got it. And then, let's see.

Cancel subscription after last billing cycle. How do you cancel? You just make it simple. Just click and cancel. Got it. All right. All looks good. And you're in Texas.

So we got local mailing rate supply when you send in your postcards. It's pretty straightforward. I'm trying to search for more to talk about, but I think it's pretty simple. Yeah. Talking about the service is pretty straightforward. When you get into skip tracing strategies, that's where we go and I'll go off on tangents and rabbit holes. I see.

For your audience, it's generally people who are doing this, it's either the newer investor driving for dollars with a tight budget, and there's things we can show you to help prioritize and make the most effective use of your limited time and budget. Other people, it's just return mail. Other people say, hey, I want to start just a true cold calling operation, and we can work with you on different lists and how to create better list and things like that. Got it. Got it. Sweet. Well, Larry, it's been a pleasure. If I have any other questions or anything,

maybe I'll give you a quick call and we'll, you can answer those questions for us. Absolutely. We'll go from there. All right. Thanks for putting together a service that I think is much in demand and was very much needed for what we do. I appreciate that. I've been there. This didn't come up. about by accident. I had a lot of those same pains. And as this became our, as we became more and more proficient at it and what we were doing, just recognize there's so much frustration in true demand out there for something like this. Yep. You couldn't have come up with this idea if you weren't in the trenches to some degree.

I had some growing pain. I can tell you that much. But yeah. Right. All right, Larry. Thank you. And it was a pleasure to talk to you. We'll talk soon. Thanks, Matt. You bet. Take care. All right. That's it for today. If you like what you heard, check Larry out over at Epicskiptriace.com. Epic skipptrace.com. If it makes sense for you, give it a shot. And next week, I have another phone conversation that I'm going to play for you

with someone that makes the perfect compliment for Larry's service. All right? God bless to your success. I'm Matt Terrio, living up the dream. Yeah, yeah, we got the cash flow. Yeah, yeah, we got the cash flow. Yeah, yeah, we got the cash flow. You didn't know home world.

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