Heads In Beds Show - Your Cheapest Homeowner Lead Is Your Most Expensive Mistake

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

In this episode, Paul and Conrad talk about all things homeowner lead generation, why cost per lead can be misleading, qualifying the right property owners, paid social targeting, homeowner lead forms, tracking cost per signed contract, improving your owner acquisition strategy, and a lot MORE! Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteBook A Call With Us🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Bet Show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host, Conrad, and I'm your co-host Paul. Paul, good afternoon. What's happening? What's going on? How are you? What's the meaning of life? It's a beautiful fall day. This is where it's good to live in the Upper Midwest, the fourth season, not just this summer all the time or spring end or whatever. This is the good time to live up here, so we're just starting to see a little color and it's cool. down a little bit, like 60 degrees in the morning when we walk to school. It could be, I'm okay with this time of year.

It's been hot, so we'll take this and, yeah, we're a little dry, but like, oh, so how are you doing, sir? Yeah, pretty good, can't complain. Yeah, speaking of, I actually meant to send this to you, and I totally forgot. Speaking of weather and things like that, my boys have started doing flag football. They're in two different kind of age groups. So I was taking Liam to practice, who started at 530 the other day on Monday, and I, So I had to finish work and, like, get right over there, like kind of rushing and got out the door. I had my car parked outside, got in the car really quickly, and it said 100 degrees on the little

temperature on my car. Now, cool down once I started moving, it got down to 92, 93, but those boys are out there. They're running around, and they are struggling in the season. But I know it'll cool down a little bit. And as the sun just goes down a little bit, it gets right down to a more tolerable level. But, yeah, these boys are just dripping sweat when they're out there running around in this very hot weather for flag football seasons. So all good stuff.

I'll see. We had soccer practice last night, and all the moms had the blankets on for the end of practice because they needed it to be warm. So, yeah, a little bit of a change there between the two of us. That reminds me, though, one side's door here, and then we'll start. But that reminds me being back home when we would go to fall football games. And my mom was actually involved in the cheerleading side, so she's like the cheerleading coach. I'd go all the games, and I'd more so care about the football.

But you'd go and, yeah, sun would set, like, definitely, they're kicking off, like, especially a little bit of a later game. And you go get yourself a hot chocolate. When you're like 10, 12, 13 years old and you get to go watch high school football game and you've got a hot chocolate sitting there and I'm sitting my grandparents on the stands. And we're just kind of watching the game. Very, very fond memories. Yeah, what's better than a hot chocolate when you're a child? Just about nothing.

It's pretty awesome. You know what else is awesome, Paul, in my general experience working with vacational managers, getting a lot of homeowner leads. But it's important that we get the right homeowner leads. So that is the topic of today's show, which is that basically cheap homeowner leads can be really expensive. Maybe depending on the scenario, depending on the situation. Let's talk about it. That is where we start out here. And Paul, you have a lot more experience than me.

doing the homeowner marketing side of things and looking at these types of metrics, cost per lead, et cetera, although I'm dipping my toe more and more into this water. Yeah, what's kind of your thoughts here with the hook, the premise of why is a cheap lead a bad lead or can be a bad lead? How do you think about this when you're helping clients are working with this type of project? Yeah, this is one of those where I do feel comfortable speaking on this one because we've done it a lot of times. Where to start with the homeowner leads? I think, yeah, a lot of people do measure these success. of their marketing by the cost per lead or ultimately how many are converting doing stuff like that.

But we do. When we're talking about, I think at a very basic level, we're not talking about the lead pool, opportunity that we have from a homeowner side of things to a guest site. So I think at any point in time, it's very difficult to differentiate and separate those two. So it does become a matter of, okay, how much does it cost? It costs per lead. I think everybody's done their own informal survey of, oh, I'd pay 500 bucks lead. I'd pay $1,000 lead.

I'd pay $1,000 lead. Okay, all very valid and justifiable numbers. But a lead is one thing. And a closed deal is a completely different thing. And where we go between those two areas, is a lot of marketing, a lot of sales, and a lot of hopefully synergy between the two. And I think that's where, more so on the homeowner than the guest items at this many times, we can only market so far.

It is. It's what makes marketing difficult. That cheap lead that comes in for $5 or $10 on Facebook seems great. But all they gave you is the contact information. And we don't exactly know what they saw if you're doing. any type of testing in any type of ad creative testing. You don't know what messaging they saw, what drew them in, if they're even legitimate. So I do.

I think that race for the least expensive lead while valid is going to get you upside down in the overall quality of lead. And even getting further, the retention of that homeowner and that property in your portfolio and whether you want it at all. So it's, there's a lot of different strings we can pull on there. But I do. I think that's, it's certainly something that people want to do it. People know they need to do it for a variety of reasons.

But the approach, obviously, is unique for everybody because of what you have to do to get those people through the door. Let me say one thing. You opened about comparing guest first homeowner. I just had one more thing on that. I think it's probably because when we're in the past reporting on our success, doing direct booking marketing, we go into a guest campaign and we give a very black and white number almost, right? We're like, okay, Mr. Client, we spent $1,000 on this campaign on Google ads,

and we got 27 bookings and the cost per, or the robust on that was X. And they collected that cash. It's in the bank account. So I think in the past when a lot of these vacation rental managers have looked at reporting or even on the same call when I'm talking to a client, I'll say that. Here's our robust. It's very black and white. Now we could account for a small percentage of cancellations, maybe 5% or so cancellations. Okay, that could happen. Everyone knows that. But pretty much you see what you get. You look at the campaign. We got. these bookings that's in the database they paid they're going to come on these dates it's all straightforward on guest when it comes to home where like you said you introduce all these variables

I think that's a good way to describe what you were talking about there and these variables are going to change per market they're going to change based on your criteria they're going to change based on your service area like I'm doing a call with more of like a larger brand who has a much larger service area today and basically they're talking about homeowner marketing and I'm like good news for you guys this is going to be way easier than it is for like our typical client because you service a much larger area like the things that fit for you are bigger than the things that fit for your typical single market, hey, I'm in Destin, Florida, I'm in Myrtle Beach, I'm in San Diego, I'm in Galveston, Texas, I'm in Cape Cod, whatever the case may be,

that type of property manager, because you guys have different models. So the good news is, I think your leads will be a lot less expensive, even for the same, quote, unquote, quality, likely to close because of that reason. You're just fishing in a bigger pond. I always do these fishing analogies with clients. They seem to understand them well, where I'm like, you're the pond that a lot of people that a lot of people that actually would be, quote, unquote, a good fit for our services, your pond is a lot bigger. So if we're throwing all the water and or throwing our bait in the water, we can end up getting a much cheaper lead and you may close them well. Get credit to previous versions of something like a Macassa who was able to advertise in

30, 40, 40, different, 50 different markets simultaneously and gain some efficiencies of scale and figure out what's working. And when Facebook ads in these 40, 50 areas or 30 states at a time, that sort of thing. It'd be like, oh, yeah, like there's someone in your market who you can connect them with. And you got to think if someone's going to figure it out and become one of these national brands that that has to be one of their advantages, right? That we can sign inventory. We can sign homeowners that are a good fit for our services at a much lower cost than the typical single manager is able to do. So that's one thing. Just the nature of, and let's be honest, talking, we were talking about this before record, like, clients don't like doing math. They don't like sitting down

there and going, okay, what's our close rate? Or if we're being honest, they don't even know how to measure it. They're just like, yeah, like I got this lead. I pitched some and I get them and I don't pitch some and I get them. You and I talked to link before about when someone's in that, let's say maybe 10 to 40 property zone. Maybe a lot of those came or from. referral. So they were like kind of slam dunk closings to get them to sign on. Then they start talking to like cold leads that haven't heard of them before. And they're like, oh, this is way harder than convincing someone who was recommended to me to actually close. So that's another variable of play. The more leads you get, your close rate will go down, especially the more unaware

they are of you and your brand in your company. You're going to have to do a lot more work. It's an uphill battle. I see it with my only generation. People that listen to the show, listen to four or five episodes, read a chapter of the book or read a piece of content, follow me on LinkedIn. Then they reach out. It's like much, much easier to get them on board versus like we get people all the time you fill out our form on our website. And they're like, yeah, just Google, vacational marketing. You guys showed up. It's like the joke I make with my team about it is like, they say dance for me.

Tell me everything you guys do. I don't know anything. They have a very different mindset versus, oh, I saw everything you guys talk about. I think there's a little fit here. And they've almost like pre-selected themselves. So yeah, a lot of nuance there. But I would say that's one thing to keep in mind is that there's a lot of variables to play.

And that's kind of the nuance of what we're talking about today is that at least can be very cheap and ultimately be expensive in the sense that like it'll never close. And then you may spend, you may do a direct mail campaign for a thousand. $1,000 get one lead out of it, but that could be the perfect lead for what your next objectives are, what's the perfect fit for you, or your list is very targeted. There's a lot of pros there, but your thoughts on that. It is. And I think that this is where understanding trends versus mirage in the owner's space,

and the owner marketing side of things is so important, is that you may have one campaign. I remember one of the early case studies, adventuary, was that we had one email campaign, or one direct mail campaign when the postcards got eight leads that were all closed within the first. So not only was the whole year paid off, the subsequent five years were paid off because of such an effective campaign.

And I think that's great. And when those hit, that's awesome. And I think they hit a lot more frequently two, three years ago when you had fewer people who were trying to grow their inventory. And I think, again, there's some great solutions

out there. It was a part of one of those solutions for quite a while. And I think that's great, but in, we're going to say, we've diluted the pool a little bit here in adding a lot more vacation rental management companies. Yes, we've added more inventory, I think, as well. But all of that has gone to make our jobs more difficult back over on the gut side here a little bit because now some of these markets that had 2,000, 3,000 vacation rentals in them now have 12,000 or 15,000. And so you need to be more unique. You need to really be driving on whole different things there. But I think it is.

And now in doing so, we've created all these marketing channels and marketing concepts and marketing campaigns. And people have seen a lot of the same messaging over and over, not because it's not unique, but because everybody thinks they are unique in a very similar way. And that's just the reality of our businesses. We build ourselves. We pride ourselves on hospitality. We pride ourselves on responsiveness. We pride ourselves on all those things that create a five-star, six-star, whatever that is,

experience for guests and hopefully for your homeowners as well. But again, when you are only marketing to people who own or may potentially own 1,000 homes in a given market or 10,000 homes in a given market, that is already a very small list. We don't get the, I remember one of my favorite things was turning on USA targeting for some of those national campaigns, backerresource and lodge.com, because you had 280 million people. That was the audience size you were working with. Yeah, you're going to catch some people. You're going to accidentally hit some people.

And I think that's where trends versus mirages, you are going to accidentally fall into some leads. You're going to fall into some really easy leads when you're doing the cold side of the cold, colder digital marketing, traditional marketing, whatever that is, side of things. Don't mistake that for what you're going to have long term because it is. You will have ups and downs. You will have ups and flows. But there's a true seasonality, just like we have on the traveler side of if I'm in the summer market, a lot of my bookings are going to come somewhere between, let's say, December and March. and then we're going to see some fill in, but that's where a bulk of your,

we should be having that kind of booking lead time. Owners the same way. There's not a lot of homeowners who are looking to switch mid-season when they have a semi-full or full calendar. It's one of those things that we can't just think about it like a blanket campaigns or strategy or something like that. We need to be nuanced. We need to have conversation.

You're talking about it. It's not black and white. There's a lot of anecdotal things that go into the sales process on the homeowner side. And when you've already got the smaller pool, boy, does that messaging have to be much more customized and much more, I would say, dedicated in getting people down that funnel. Because any leakage in you are, you went from a funnel of 40 to a funnel of 20 to maybe five qualified leads, two of which you close, and now we have to refill the funnel. So it's not where we want to be on that side of things, I would say.

Yeah, I think, too, understanding the nature of, and not maybe over-analyzing this on a micro basis from one campaign to one campaign, but also thinking about this in terms of quarterly or annually or biannually or something, because I agree 100% of what you said with respect to seasonality. Hey, we only have a certain season where this is really going to work well. And as a result, it's very easy to say, we'll just turn off everything during the season where we're going to sign less. it's tricky, and this is where a lot of nuance comes into play, because if you turn off your ads for a long period of time, and then we could go try to flip them back on, but then someone else was advertising all season, who's going to be more top of mind? The person that was advertising all season and getting postcards out and getting some kind of marketing messaging

messaging out there, or the person that's, hey, let me just come in right now and try to send you a quick message, send you a quick direct mailer, and get you in front of my team to actually reach out and chat with you. And again, the problem I think that you stated there is the fact that this messaging starts to fall in deaf ears. Like when you hear something new for the first time. It's novel. It's interesting. You go check it out. And then over time, as the Seth Godin book says, marketers ruin everything. So everything that was once novel and new, eventually we'll start to perform a lot worse. So you either have to work really hard to explain why you're different in ways that are meaningful to the actual homeowner, which is easier said than done. Don't

get me wrong. Or you have to overwhelm them, I think, with proof on the fact that here's what I said versus here's the proof of this situation. The classic sort of chisholm, if you will, that we've come up with in the past about this is that you say you're the best manager in the market that has these massive managers, yet you have 12 homes. Those odd things seem to be very at odds. If you're this great manager, why do you have 12 homes? That's what a homeowner might say when they're looking at that. But if you say, here's the type of home that I manage and here's the result of the data

showing that I've managed this type of home to a vastly superior level of performance than my competition, backing it up with something like from AirDNA or backing it up with with third-party data or going and saying, here's all my 12 homeowners. They've all rated me five stars. Here's a video testimony from each one. Here's a pull-quote from each one about how they enjoy working with me. here's the type of revenue that they get from their properties, then there's less to argue with, right? It's if you take the other side of everything that you're talking about, the more effective it is.

So again, if we're doing direct mail to 100 people, it is going to be pretty expensive to get one of those 100 people, two of those hundred people, five of them to put their hand up and say, okay, I'm interested in learning more. But it doesn't mean that's bad, like going back to the whole math side of it for a second like you were talking about earlier. You can pay $2,000 per lead. If they all close, then that's probably going to be very effective for you. Sure. Like $2,000 per lead is not necessarily inherently a bad thing versus having cost per lead. of $100, but 1% of them closed.

What's your math there, right? Like you're paying significantly more $10,000 or more per close, per close deal. So there's a lot of nuance in that. And I think that's probably where there's sort of this desire, I think, for the vacation rental manager. And I understand why. I'm not saying that this is an easy gig. I know very well doing this now for 10 plus years that it's not.

But they want to look at one number to dashboard and just understand instantly. Okay, this is what I'm getting out of this. And this one just doesn't work that way. You need to figure out and do some math initially on how these things are working. The full, like you said, the full funnel, the full A to B. end process to figure out what's actually helping. And in that time frame, though, you're going to have the frustrating situation of knowing that some things are going to be very straightforward.

And you can get in front of them. Some things are hard. Like when someone just Googles your brand and then fills out a form and then it ridges out to you, what do you attribute that to? Was it the mailor they got two months ago? Was it the Google ID you ran that they happened to see? Was it the one meta post that you had that showed the property area? Was it you showing up to a local event, a realtor event and giving a presentation to

realtors? and then that person mentioned your name to one person while the property was closing, that's where it gets really hard. So that element of, hey, I'm going to try to measure everything. Sounds good on the surface too, but it also becomes very challenging once you start to dig under there and go, wow, this is a lot of work to figure this all out, which is why our general opinion is, you need to be doing more marketing because you're probably under investing in marketing, and you need to think about the total cost of your lead generation as it is.

But you may have to turn things off, turn them off, test things, see what happens when you do different things to figure it out. there's not one playbook because there's not one way to, as Alex Hermose says, climb the mountain, to get to the top of whatever you're trying to achieve. If you're trying to be a 500 unit company and do 10, 20, 30 million year in gross revenue, those are very lofty goals. There's many different ways to get there, many different paths to get there. And that's where the, again, that's where the nuance comes into play. But if you just try to boil it down into, here's my little scorecard and here's the cost

per lead I'm paying from this one channel, there's going to be a lot of stuff that you're going to miss by having that very simplistic view. And that is the nature of kind of this, the messy nature of this marketing and how it unfortunately. It's nailed all the thing. I do think that it's just a difficult measurement, that attribution path, all the different ways. And none of them may ultimately prove

to be all that influential in whether or not they signed the deal there. It's, yeah, I don't know. I think that's something that if you, I think you're talking, we've talked about it many times before is that not now, Google's even saying, I've showed you the unreliable claims. Some of the things that if you're not able to demonstrate,

and this is very new, and again, I'm interested to see where it goes from here. It's only on homeowner side of things. Oh, goodness. Golly, gee, it's so much fun. But Google is actually questioning some of the things that I'm putting in ad content that is pretty benign in the grand scheme of things

of superior property management or short-term rental management in some cases. That's something. that Google's trying to identify, and this is AI-driven, bot-driven, we know that, but some of those are warnings on the back end. But at the same time, I think Google's trying to put their own thinking caps on and say, as a user, if this business only has 20 or 30 rentals on their site, and I can look and see, I think Google's getting smarter. And they're saying, maybe this isn't the most reliable claim. Now, again, it bothers me to no end that they're trying to determine

things that are like, we deliver this, we deliver full service management, we do these things, that not being a reliable claim or not being backed up on the landing page, maybe something we have to work on, but that's concerning. But put yourself in the same shoes as Google. And I think that it's why, as you've talked about many times before, the lead volume, for some of these larger companies, judge generates itself. They don't have to do. The marketing that they do is not the owner's side. Let's pull it back just a little bit.

The reason why in Tori and owner, point, res, whatever, are so effective is that they are the experts. They know. And you uncovered that. You're pulling that string out of why you need to really devote a full-time resource to this. And this is.

The owner acquisition side of things is lumped under sales, lumped under marketing, a lumped under the homeowner relationship building, but not really in a specific area. That's why you do. You want to go to one of those experts who can do a full dive, can do a three-hour strategic session with you, walk through all the business.

You may not know how to describe your business. They can. And I think that's something where the owner messaging can be effective, and you can try to put this beautiful profile together. But realistically, homeowner marketing, again, falls under these three areas and is maybe a third or fourth priority for those, unless you're really putting an emphasis on it as a company. So it's not that it's not that it's not important because it is, especially if you're. you, let's say, are churning 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% of your owners, and are wondering why your direct booking revenue is down, and then we have to start thinking about putting those numbers together as well.

And it is easy to say we're not getting as many bookings. That's because we don't have so many homes to book. Or if it's just doing some of that reverse math, man, the holistic marketing pipeline and bubble that we get to try to attribute not just where the bookings are coming from, but where we're losing them on the back end as well. So I think that's got to be part of the conversation. When you are thinking about owner growth,

is that what's your owner's stability right now? You laid it out there. It's hard to figure that out. Some people just can't figure it. So where do we go with that point? Yeah. And again, how many people have done the math and what their homeowner turn actually is,

what it actually looks like? I suspect the number is single digits if we're being honest, right? The truth is the majority of people have not done that math or they also haven't looked at why a homeowner might churn. Maybe they, in some cases I totally understand and I've seen this over and over again in my career. It's completely outside your control. The example I always give is someone has a second home. They're selling it because they're going and doing something else of their life. They don't want the second home anymore.

They take it out of your program. Probably nothing you did wrong. There's a chance. Of course, you could retain the next person if they're going to keep it as a short-term rental, vacation rental. Good chance you might lose it. Someone's going to move into it. The other example I always give. Our goal was always to retire and move to Myrtle Beach and living that home. And then they go, how are you going to sit there and say that's a failure, right? Like they bought their home 10 years ago. Maybe now it's close to paid off or half paid off. And you help them pay down the mortgage while managing it over a five year period, 10 year period. Now they're moving into the property. And it's like, I have a heck of a hard time hosting

guests when you guys are sitting there on the on the couch every day of that property, right? We are not shared listing Airbnb, as it were, most of our clients, which is a funny thing to think about. But, yeah, I wouldn't turn the page a little bit. Maybe we can go down this path for a moment, Paul, because this will help, I think, contextualize a little bit what we talked about so far. What makes a lead more expensive or less expensive? Like, what are the actual physical changes with respect to the marketing channels that we're using, the forms that we're making people fill out, kind of those types of things. So I've got some of the little ideas here that I wrote down in my notes of getting someone in theory a little bit more qualified, but it may

raise your cost per lead or getting someone in theory may be potentially a little bit less qualified, but it might lower your cost per lead. So client I'm working with has a very kind of strict rule about, hey, show me leads that are in these areas. Are they not in these areas? I pretty much just don't want to talk with them. So one of the first things we ask in their form is tell me where your property is located and there's like a drop down with a list of cities or a list of areas. Luckily there's only two or three. So it's not like a knowing to fill out or anything like that. But if it says like my area is not listed, it basically gives them one little text field of, oh, tell us more about where your property is located. Give us your phone. Give us your name. And then it kicks

it to them still. But it's marked as I think there's some abbreviation that he comes up with it or it's not a fit or something like that. Not a Fit or that sort of thing. And then he gets the lead. And he's, yeah, every once in a while, the not a fit will catch someone who, like, went through the form super quickly, he made a mistake, whatever the case may be. But he's like 90% of time those leads, I look at them, but they're not a fit. So I just can basically email back and say, oh, totally you're outside of her service area, all the best to you, but you're not a fit for now. So it only gets on the phone with leads that he feels like are a good fit for him, versus if I take it the other way for a second, and I say, if your first form field in your

form is name, phone number, email, that sort of thing. And then tell me a little bit about your property or how we can help you, you're going to get a lot more leads that are probably going to be less qualified if you're saying, hey, I'm in Myrtle Beach and I don't want a property that's in Polly's Island or I'm in Destin, Florida, but I don't want a property all the way over in Panama City. Like, that's not what I'm going to do. Which is totally reasonable stuff, by the way. I'm not saying do or don't do that. Don't expand your service area if you're going to provide not the best service to your homeowners, because to Paul's point from a second ago, they're just going to churn. But these are like actual tactical changes that

will make your cost per lead drastically different. Booking a call versus filling out of form. So I've done this test now probably half dozen times. And what I mostly hear and what I mostly see in the data when I go look at this is that people will book a call. generally speaking, have a better connect rate. And generally speaking will close a little bit higher versus people who fill out a form. People can fill out a form and just sit there in fire away messages all day. And I think every service provider that works with people now has seen the sort of chat TBT lead come through. What I mean by chat CBT is not a lead referred by chaty BT. The lead that is using chaty BT to want to answer a million questions before you go and chat with somebody.

So this happened now as recently where someone came in, they filled out a form. They didn't want a book call. They were kind of just reaching out to us and saying, hey, here's my 97 questions that I have about hiring an agency before we hop on the phone. And I'm just like, cool, we're probably not a good fit for you. I'm not going to answer 97 questions before I even know if we're a good fit or not. But I've seen it come through with some of our clients as well. They fill out this form and they go, tell me the answer to these 47 questions about how you manage my property.

And the funny part is one of my clients took this and then drafted it with AI back. So the AI is talking to AI and there's people on the other side of it. The whole thing's super messy. But needless to say, like if you have someone filling out a form, the commitment level there is a little bit lower than even a 20 minute of phone call. So having someone come in and say, book a call with us or chat with us to pick a time if you're choosing, we'll kind of call you at that time. That simple thing alone, your cost per lead on Bucca call will likely be higher than your

cost per lead on form fills. But generally speaking, the quality and a close rate of a book of call leads are better than the general forms from what I've seen with working with a few dozen clients on this looking at some of their data. We talked about this already, but just add one more thing in there. And then I'm curious your reaction on those few service area. So just this idea of like the more, I'll put for lack of better word, the more picky you are, that's great.

But the more narrow you're going to be to find that person, right? like unlike marriage, we're not just trying to find one. We're probably trying to find 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 80, 100 homeowners, right? So for us to kind of get good levels of lead flow in, we've got to have a broad enough criteria to where when we're doing advertising, we're going to find enough people to where it really makes sense. So there is, one might argue, a little bit of an odds thing at play where the more pick you are, perhaps you can deliver a great service and these really are listings that you can take

care of it and you can grow or you can do well with those listings, but it's going to cap your growth. If you say, hey, I'm only doing homes that are $100,000 and more in these areas, and this is what I want to do, and I want to do organic marketing, and that's all I want to do. You can set up whatever rules you want, but these are all going to be, like, limitors or governors on your ability to drive a lot higher volume leads flow. So just be aware of that when you're going into it. And what you can't do is, like, there's things that don't combine well.

Like I always talk about the car analogy of cheap, fast, reliable, at best pick two. If we're being honest, mostly you're picking one. You can't, there's combinations of things that just don't work in this space, right? You can't be like not willing to spend a lot of money on advertising, looking for very luxury premium high-end homes, and then also expect leads to be very cheap. Like, those things are not going to happen together. One of those things is going to go way out of whack if you want to get the results that you're after. So that was a lot.

But your thoughts on those few and as you build on them or add some new ones in there. I think it is. I think all of that is exactly where owners want the leads to be. It is where you want to land those. I think even taking it back to the Google ad side of things in the search, that's something that we can. We can drive leads when you do property management. property management and market talking about the market, okay,

if we restrict that market, if we say property management in the market, I guarantee we'll get leads. And I guarantee three quarters then will be long-term intent of someone looking for someone who's going to be a, where they can be a tenant. This is there, again, this is just some of those subtle nuances

of market by market, when Gatlinburg, it's cabin rental management in Burnell Beach, it's condo rental management, vacation rental management, short-term rental management, Airbnb management, my goodness. Is it so much fun to try to identify the intent of these individuals. Now, if someone is doing that search, that's gold.

That's exactly what we're looking for. The problem is 100 people, 150, maybe 200 people do the searches for those keywords in an average-sized market. Let's talk about, we'll go up to Minnesota. Brainerd likes Minnesota. Knowing if you're in Minnesota, outside of that, probably not. So the search volume there is probably 10, maybe five per month. maybe there's no search volume. Probably no three of them.

That's a funny part. It's like, oh, yeah, that's my cousin. But I think that's where it is. You have to understand in your market where, and this was not a fun conversation, where digital is a fit in different levels. Again, anybody can put a Google Ads campaign out there with thousands of management-related terms. If nobody's doing those searches, that will sit, That's the unfortunate part about we can't drum up demand.

In almost any market, there's some type of traveler intent. I've seen very few where you're not... You may be paying a little bit of a premium, $2 a click, $3 or click in some spots because it's so low, but there's still 30, 40, 50 people doing searches a month for different Airbnb vacation rental related terms. That's not the case here. So how are you? So it is?

So then how are you going after the 5th,000? going after the 500 owners or the 400 owners or maybe the 300 owners because I'm trying to advertise those people on Facebook is probably going to be difficult because list based targeting is pretty limited as you get below 500, below 1,000, all those things. So postcard is the only way again. We start to pin corner our way into some difficult types of conversations. We talked about some of the people who have really focused on putting together some amazing Facebook creatives.

And I love what people have done on Facebook because I think that is an area where you can showcase some of the things that are more anecdotal, that are more not quantitative, but qualitative about your business. And you can put a human face on a human spin. Again, you put that well-produced video in front of just 200 people or 300 people. You're going to hope to get a dozen leads out or two dozen leads, but it is. It's very difficult to, it is. I want to invest.

We have to understand where we can invest and where we can invest, and that is something that probably is, it's where the difficult conversations come into play with those people who are trying to grow from 10 to 40, from 40 to 50 to 50 to 60 to making sure that investment makes sense. You've got the scenario up here, which I love talking about the campaign of where are my numbers here, the good campaign and the expensive, a good lead in the expensive lead. $3,000 a month a month for budget is a substantial budget. One gets 100 leads in, $30 a lead. One gets $15 leads, $200 a lead. But again, as we break that down further, which you've laid out here, 3% are qualified owners in the market.

So three prospects out of 100. 3%, just like we talked about. Close 1 in 5,000, you sign 60%, cost per signed contract, 5,000 bucks. Math doesn't work for us so well. On that other one, $200 a lead, 60% qualified leads, nine real prospects. Same 1 in 5 close rate, you sign 1.8 owners, cost per signed contract about $1,600. So it is not all leads. If we're going to drill down to anything here, not all leads are created equal.

The highest intent leads are going to be the most expensive leads And there might not be the one called closed leads either Because likely you're going to have to do more than just get them to fill out of form You're going to need to have further conversations with them You're going to need to run a full sales process with them You're going to need to email them reach them through different channels Because other people are doing the same thing if they're actively looking for a property manager because we're all really really competitive in this space and we all want the top homeowners and the top properties to be in our

portfolio. It's going to math for some people, but there's more than just cost per lead. We know that. But it's hard to really put that into a real-life figure because it's hard to invest that much as well. And you would have talked about this before in many offline and online recorded conversations, this idea of unfortunately, homeowner marketing is layout cash. Even when it's working really well. You're getting homeowners back in the door, but the cash coming back in is very slow, which is we've talked about this before. Maybe this is worthy of its own episode, but the idea of I would say it's imperative if I ever ran a vacational company, it would be imperative for me to figure out, how can I try to collect more cash up front from the homeowner when I'm signing their

property? And people are terrified of doing things like sign on fees or set up fees. They're terrified of doing some of those things. And I think that's the, that's a scarcity idea of, oh, my competition doesn't do that. So I'm going to lose out on the sale because I'm a property manager charging a set up fee or some kind of fee up front and my other guy down the street is not. But it's like, yeah, but is that property set up perfectly for success when you're taking it on? Because if it's not, I would argue it's almost your mortal duty or your imperative to get that property ready for rent.

And that may mean, hey, like if you're in this market, you need a hot tub. If you don't have a hot tub, I'll get one installed for you. But it's going to be $6,500. And then you go buy for $4,000 and you install it and you just made a little bit of money back. Or, hey, your interior design is awful. Don't worry, though. I'm going to send in my interior designer.

We're going to make it look great. But you're going to need $14,000 to improve the interior design before you the photos, but good news, Mr. Homeowner, that stuff's going to last for three years. And your home is going to make $30,000, $50,000 more over that three-year period by having really nice pictures and a really nice interior design. Boom, we can make 10%, 20% margin on that. So I don't think that I think a lot of property managers are, they're overly competitor-focused. I think that's an affliction that I think I'm lucky that I don't fall too deep into that well, but I see how it's easy to do that. There's a lot of people I've worked in my career who are overly worried about the competition

or they're overly concerned about my competition does it this way, so I probably should as well. But like, how do you know what they're doing is even working well? They may have I once had a client that was very worried about competitor that went out of business like six months later. This was like a hundred unit company and crash and burned and like really embarrassing owner funds being mixed in, not trust accounting. This guy was doing everything wrong. I'm like, if you were modeling your company off his, you'd be at a business in six months too. Why would we, in the world would we ever want to model off that? So that's not the right idea.

I'm going to do it because this is how my competitors do it or I'm going to use this offer because my competitors do this offer. You got to think about it from your perspective. You go back to what you makes you unique and what your service actually offering actually is and build a plan from there. So it could agree more. So it kind of comes to a close year. I know we're up against the time-wise. It's understand your cost per sign contract, not your cost per lead. You need understand what you're spending on our acquisition,

how many leads are coming in from those different channels, how many of them sign, how many are qualified from each of those channels. You may need to do some playing around with how you qualify people in the front end. If the answer is, hey, it's easy. I'm going to fill out of form and you're dealing with a lot of quote-unquote junk leads. Address that. Maybe there's a way to put a little bit of a gate up and potentially get much better quality. Are you actually tracking your conversions in a way that's compliant?

do you actually track how that lead goes from conversion all the way through to sale. This typically requires some level of CRM. But even if you have a Google sheet, like that's okay. Like maybe you're not signing 100 homeowners a month. You can do this on a Google sheet, but you've got to be very diligent with tracking. And it's tedious and hard and not the most easy thing to do. I'm not denying it. But that's the only way you're actually going to get clean data and make it happen from there.

And consider different forms of engagement. Consider, hey, book a call with me, fill out this form, download this white paper. Consider all these things and do some testing and figure out what kind of person would be a good fit for you. Don't worry about cost per lead. Worry about a cost per sign contract. do the math, figure it out, and you may find that the channel that actually produces expensive leads is great for you, and the channel that produces cheap leads is bad for you, but you don't know until you go through and do that whole process.

Sometimes you find a bit of a unicorn, a cheap lead channel that costs per lead that is actually converting at a high clip, and maybe you should be doing 10x more of that or 5x more of that, but you won't know unless you do the math. So, Paul, any parting thoughts before we put a bow on this one, put it up on the shelf and send it out to the great people listening. Homeowner, marketing is not easy. So don't expect easy results. And it is.

And understand that it's a sales and marketing process, and there's more than just that first interaction and a quick glow. Yeah. Maybe to drive your point home, there was an article posted on the VRM website today from the C2G advisors guys. And they were talking about the value per contract, how it's trending back up again, right? In a sale.

And why would a contract be worth 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, $80,000 or more if it wasn't hard, if it was easy to get, it's like, hey, do you just snap your fingers and, like, a brand new car shows up in your driveway? No, you got to work hard to get that. a brand new car in your driveway. But that's what are you signed contracts worth. It's worth a brand new car. So it should be pretty difficult and challenging to get that homeowner because if you retain them and they're on your program and they're doing a good job, it's worth a brand new car when you go to sell your company at some point down the road. So it should be a little bit hard.

If it was super easy, then every property manager would just have all the properties and there'd be this abundance of supply and everyone would be happy. But we know that's not how it works. We know that it's hard to get these properties. But we also know that the value those properties is extremely high when you go to sell, especially if you're running them very well. So money talks, everything else walks. One thing someone has got to do was, their little fingers over to their podcast app of choice iTunes, iTunes, Spotify. We get the most downloads there. Go there, leave us five stars.

We appreciate it. As we always joke about, there's tens of thousands of downloads of this podcast. Paul and I look at the numbers all the time. We look at it, but we certainly know it on tens of thousands of reviews, so we appreciate you. Go over there, clicking five stars so we can keep producing awesome episodes. Thank you, and have an awesome rest of your day. We appreciate you.