Epic Real Estate Investing - Social Media for Real Estate Investors - Nate Armstrong | 811

Episode Date: October 20, 2019

During the Master Mind Session, Matt found the time to introduce you to one of the attendees, Nate Armstrong! Nate runs a company that helps real estate investors to find motivated sellers thru social media. Learn more about Nate’s background, how he got inspired to run his current business, how he finds motivated sellers on Facebook, what’s the minimum marketing budget to get some result on social media, and many more!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Terrio Media. Success in real estate has nothing to do with shiny objects. It has everything to do with mastering the basics. The three pillars of real estate investing. Attract, convert, exit. Matt Terrio has been helping real estate investors do just that for more than a decade now. If you want to make money in real estate, keep listening. If you want it faster, visit REA.

iAase.com. Here's Matt. Hello and welcome to the epic real estate investing show. I am in Miami right now at a mastermind session meeting with my business coach to become a better business person and a lot of really good high quality people in the room. And I met one in particular and I thought I would introduce him to you. He has a company that helps people find, or people, real estate investors just like you, helps them find motivated sellers through social media.

And so I was like, wow, I got to introduce you to my audience. They want to know about this. So please help me welcome to the show. Mr. Nate Armstrong, Nate, welcome to Epic Real Estate Investing. Matt, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me, man. You bet, you bet. So this is like the third time we've been able to see each other here,

and we're kind of looking for ways of how we might be able to help each other. And I was like, well, this one's plain obvious right in front of my face. Let's introduce you to my audience and see where there's a fit. I really think there's a really, really good fit. But first, before we get into that, can you just kind of give me a little bit about your background and how you ended up doing this business? Yeah. So I'm hardcore on social media for real estate investing, but it's for a reason.

I started basically flipping houses and scaled it up to the point where I got into development. And I had a big development project crash. $6 million development project. I co-signed all the loans. and the developer on it that was physically managing the day-to-day on it, he called me halfway through and said, Nate, I'm sorry, but we missed the budgets on this one. We're going to lose our tails.

I'm out. And I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, no, dude, I can't work for free. I'm out. And it made me... This was the contractor? Yeah, contractor, partner, everything except for a co-signer on the loan. I did all the loans.

It was a big mistake. But I freaked out first, then second. moved to where the project was. Moved my family. Literally had to figure things out fast because $6 million in debt is a big burden per month. It was over 50 grand per month, which I wasn't making. Right. So I started selling all of our rentals.

How many did you have? Had a little over 100 rentals at one time. A hundred rentals. Wow. So I started cash in on equity pieces that I had in each of them and tried to basically pay bills to see this development project through to the finish line. and it still was coming short, big time short. And consequently, I had to figure out how to reenter the game of quick cash.

And what I had learned basically from day one in real estate is it's wholesaling is kind of where quick cash is. So I said, okay, I got to go back to the basics and start generating cash again fast. And so I started, but what was different about wholesaling in today's world, or this is a couple years ago, I had to jump back in. But what was different is that the market was moving much faster. Making offers with realtors, I kept hearing like, you can't make that lowball offer, not in this market. You've got to increase your earnest money.

There's multiple offers. You've got to waive your inspection period. And like, it's just like this pounding of no, no, no, no, no. It's hard to buy houses at a discount in that environment. Yeah, yeah. It wasn't like 2008, 2010, people like us and all of your listeners. Like, we were able to get houses by just going to the courthouse. steps. We could go on the MLS and make bids on whatever we wanted because we were very few people

bidding at that time. But then all of a sudden now we're in this environment where it's ultra competitive, I had to figure something else out. And I saw somebody on Facebook posting about a house every other day, if not every day. And wholesaling them or fixing flipping. And I'm like the same guy. And I'm like, what the heck is he doing? Like this doesn't make sense. And so I reached out to him and I said, hey, can you show me what you're doing? Like I don't get it. And he said, yeah, I'll have to charge you, but I'll show you. So I paid him and he showed me and I'm like, wow, and it was all social media. It's social media. And I'm like, I wonder if this could be like taken to a little bit bigger level. So I jumped in deep and I just figured out how to use the Facebook platform,

figured out how to use Instagram ads. I'm a part of this group that you and I are at right now. So we're with one of the best marketing guys in the world. And I just started applying those things and I figured out how to systematically get sellers off of Facebook. So no more on market deals, 100% off market deals, and it changed everything for me. We were able to do 121 deals last year, thank God. The year before that, we finished with 116 deals. And now today, I don't use realtors to find deals, period. Got it.

And so all this large number or this large volume of deals that you've been able to do, all from your Facebook strategies of finding motivated sellers that way? Yeah, one side or another or another. I mean, there's still, if somebody brings me a deal, deal, a referral source, whatever, I'm not going to say no to it. But typically what happens is I'm running ads constantly for buyers and constantly for sellers. So either one side of the deal or the other, we're going to use this social or this digital online platform to pull one of the sides. Got it. Good. So yeah, that's a nut that people have been trying to crack for quite a while

on how do you use social media to really generate some business. I mean, the evidence is there that it really works for branding and getting your name out and creating an audience. But how how do you finance the actual motivated seller? And we've made some remarkable gains in that, I would say, in the last 12 to 18 months. And we're getting a little better, a little better, a little better. And I'd just love to compare, like, how you're doing it versus how we're doing it and see if there's something that, you know, we could give the audience to give them, let them try something. Or maybe they just want to have you do it for them.

I don't know. But let's just kind of see what, because things with social media are changing, like, daily, right? I mean, just the design of Facebook changes daily. Their back office inside of the ad platform changes daily. Same thing with Google. They got a new algorithm update, you know, frequently, seemingly every other month or so. Anyway, I'm talking a lot. Yeah, yeah.

Because there's so many different directions we could go, and I just want to make sure this time together is actually productive for us and everyone listening. So, I don't know, start me from square one. How do you find a motivated sell it on Facebook? Yeah. So what we're not talking about, just so we're clear, is we're not talking about like posting pictures and trying to get engagement and stuff like that. We're not talking about the what your neighbor had for dinner kind of posts.

What we're talking about is running an actual Facebook ad or that's the paid side. That's the paid side. I work really well. So I'll give the breakdown for that in a second. Or the other side is that I'll run a Facebook group in my area which cultivates deals. So that's the unpaid side. So you can work both sides, but we're not talking about posting stuff that you had for dinner. Okay.

So here's the ad breakdown. The ad breakdowns are really simple formula. We're going to take an old school technique and put it on a new school medium. Old school technique that everybody knows is the bandit sign. Right. Big old yellow bandit sign with black letters that basically is direct response. Here's what I want. Here's my phone number.

This is how we connect. I like to take that and I put it into the native Facebook environment in the news feed. Okay. So John Beyshaus, Nate Beis House, whatever it is. We put it right in the middle of the news feed. I like to try to tie that to a local landmark that people will recognize. So if I were in New York, I would put the bandit sign in front of the Statue of Liberty. I mean, just like that to catch people's attention.

And then what happens after that, that's the first part of it. I'd say that's about 10% of it. The other 90% and why I think that Facebook and Instagram are a better platform to market than cold calling, then realtors, then direct mail than any of these others, is because on the digital side, these leads, once they come in, we can automate the follow-up process. Now, on Google, you can do the same thing, but on more of like cold calling techniques, you can't automate stuff. You're just calling and dialing and dialing. When you get a digital lead like this, now we've got their email, we've got their phone number, we've got their name, and we've got their

address. Now we've got four different ways that we can contact them. So what we do is we automate, we put them into an email follow-up sequence, which means that they're going to get a, nice warm-up email from us for the next 10 days. Or they're also going to get a voicemail from us automatically. I know that you know this, but maybe the listeners don't know this one, but there's technology now called ringless voicemail. Yes, of course. Mm-hmm.

Right. And so we're going to drop them a ringless voicemail. As soon as they submit their information to us, we're going to say, hey, just want to let you know, we got your information. We're excited to get you that offer. And it'll be on the way. Just make sure you answer our call when we call. We're calling soon.

additionally we can put them into this one's a little more manual but put them into a sequence where we're going to follow up with them on messenger and facebook it's my VA she's typing to them saying hello and that's it so we can follow up with the process does that all make sense yeah totally okay so those those emails those warm up emails and before the call what type of content is that yeah so the first one's a quick video literally shot on an iPhone or an android phone posted on YouTube, no more than three minutes, just saying, hello, this is who I am. Hi, I'm Nate for Nate buys houses. I just wanted to let you know we got your information. This is why other sellers called us too. We hope that we can serve you and get you a good offer. My team's going to be in touch

with you soon. It's just a welcome. I'm a nice guy. I'm a local guy. I should note this too. It's very important to stay local. There's a lot of the bigger companies like Zillow offers now. They're buying houses. Offer pad. These The eyebuyers. The eye buyers. Open door went from zero houses to 10,000 houses in a four-year window. Like, that's a serious big company now. And we don't want to model. Sorry, I don't want to say we don't want to model. We don't want to replicate the corporate look. Instead, we're going to play on the I'm a local person look because there's a lot of customers that would rather work with the local person. Now, what we do want to take from the big eye buyers is this. I spent two weeks. I went through all of their funnels. I submitted some of my rental houses just to see what they would offer and how the funnel worked and what the offer look like.

The one thing that we do want to model from them is how they present the offer. If you haven't yet gone through one of their funnels like Open Doors funnel, I suggest looking at it, that these guys are genius and what they've done. They literally, they give a side-by-side breakdown of what the realtor would bring them versus what their offer would bring. And even though they're offering a discount from market value, they make it look like it's market value. So it's a little bit genius. It's not like the old school investor offer that's like, I'm going to pay you 70% of ARV and that's it. It's in my lips and said it's, hey, Mr. Seller, here's an open book approach and I'm

going to give you market value, even though it's not market value. So I find that very interesting. And then the one thing that I missed, so I talked about the paid side. So running Facebook ads and doing a digital follow up is the paid side. If you want to stick, if you're on a tighter budget and you want to stick with an organic side, then running a Facebook group is a little bit like running an REI. club. You've probably been to REI clubs. I know Matt, you have and a lot of your

listeners have. But when you go to REI clubs, you meet a lot of interesting people. And sometimes there's other people that have deals that you can connect on and make money on one side or the other, the buy side or the sell side. And I like to start Facebook groups in each of the markets that I'm working in just to host a virtual RRII

club essentially. And I pick up deals. I've picked up two deals in the last month off of a brand new Facebook group that we started in one of our markets. Nice. So advertising, marketing, it, it's not free, right? So your KPI's, are you running those types of numbers at all? Are you seeing like what the cost per deal is right now? Yeah, absolutely. So it varies by market heavily and it varies based on the person taking the

calls experience. If you're really good talking to sellers, you can get deals super cheap. I've drilled it down to now where I can pick up a deal for 700 bucks. Okay. Now, it's not going to be the same if we're talking about a really expensive market with someone that doesn't have as much experience. but I'll give you some KPI's for the lead costs. If you're in the Midwest or if you're in a slower states, so to speak, on Facebook, you should be paying around 15 to 25 bucks per lead.

Okay. If you're good, you should be able to close one in 15 leads. That's kind of how the numbers shake out. If you're in a more expensive market like L.A., San Francisco, even a faster moving like a Houston or Miami, you're probably closer to 50 to 80 bucks per league. lead. Similar numbers, though, you should be able to close one out of 15 out of that.

If you're brand new and you're trying to make Facebook leads work and you've got to do a lot of practice calls with sellers, probably going to take you more like 30 calls, 30 leads to get a deal done. So anywhere from set, so if you do the math on that, it's going to range from 700 bucks up to $2,800, maybe $3,000 per mail. So pretty comparable numbers like to direct mail. I mean, you can certainly get it down much lower, but direct mail is between $2 and $3,000 is typically what I'm hearing nationwide.

So good. There was something else I was thinking. Oh, what would be the taking this old school strategy and putting on this new school medium? I like how you put that. What is the like the minimum ad budget that someone would spend to get some results? Yeah.

So it's a great question. I have a student today. He posted a deal in our group right now. He's spending $10 per day. $10 per day. $10 per day. Yep. He's on his six, maybe seven day of running ads in our program,

and he's got a deal under contract right now. Fantastic. So one deal in seven days. Yeah. All right, good. So obviously, not the norm, but that's a good example. And then demonstrating that it's possible.

So 300 bucks a month is kind of like probably the entry level or the minimum you'd need. Yeah, yeah. Especially if you're in a slower market. If you're not in a ultra-competitive city, then easy slam dunk. You can get leads off with Facebook, no problem. If you're in a more competitive market, it's not that you're competing against a bunch of other real estate investors.

There's very few, as a matter of fact, on Facebook right now. Very, very few. But what there are is local competition. McDonald's is running Facebook ads. The Chevy dealership in towns running Facebook ads. Toyota, everybody else. So you're competing if you're in an expensive market. You're competing against bigger players.

That's all. And they still work. I'm in Sarasota, Florida, which is a kind of a little bubble. in that market, I paid as much as $140 per lead, but I ended up getting a really good deal, a $900,000 house seller came to me because of that lead that I took in. So the math kind of shook out and it worked for me. Yeah, nice. Good. So you now have started a business where you're doing this for people or for real estate investors, right? Yeah, we've got a coaching program. We help people. We show them the ropes and basically everything that we do inside of our business to get deals. We show

home and then we jump on the line with them twice a week and check their ad accounts and make sure that they're doing it the same way we are so they can get results got it so it's more of a marketing and advertising type coaching then yeah okay got it if people wanted to learn more about you how would they do that what would be the best way yeah uh social media real estate investor dot com and if you can remember to put slash epic then we'll send you our side-by-side offer sheet as well. So social media real estate investor.com slash epic. And you'll get this awesome. It's the ibuyers formula. It's how they show their offer to make it look like it's market price, but really it's a discounted price. Nice, nice. Thank you for doing that. Did you set that up like already? Well,

you and I were in session today. Oh, that's cool. I didn't even know that was coming. So a special gift to you from Mr. Nate Armstrong. You get the side-by-side analysis, probably make a great presentation tool. It's how your corporate competition is doing it. So let's go fight fire with fire. Yeah. Right? Yeah. All right. Well, thanks, Nate. Let's do this again. Let's stay in touch. Awesome. Thank you, man.

You bet. All right. So that's it for today. God bless to your success. I'm Matt Terrio. Live in 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 for it, we got the cash flow. This podcast is a part of the C-suite Radio

network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-sweetradio.com.