You're listening to the “REI Marketing Nerds” podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords Nerds, a high-tech digital agency, focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition, and live a freer, more awesome life. And, now, your host, Dan Barrett.
Dan: All right. Hello. Welcome to this week's episode of the REI Marketing Nerds podcast. As always, this is Daniel Barrett here from AdWordsNerds.com. How are you? I hope you're having a wonderful, wonderful week. This week, here in Connecticut, it is spring. It’s finally springing, and it is actually sunny and kind of nice, so I’m in a good mood. I hope that you're in a good mood. [01:05.3]
Hey, before we get into it this week, I wanted to make sure you know, if you need help developing a personal marketing plan for your market—it means based on what people are doing around you, based on what the market is like around you, based on your budget, your tolerance for risk, all that stuff—you want help building a marketing plan, we will help you do that for free. You can go to AdWordsNerds.com/strategy to get the deets, get the details, whatever the kids say. Put a time on the calendar. We would love to talk to you.
Okay, this week I’ve got a really fun interview with you. I have thought many times as an online marketing person, What would I do as a real estate investor? So, you drop me in the desert—I don't know why that happens, but let’s say you're dropping me in the desert—and I’ve got to make my living from real estate investing, but I still have the skills I’ve gotten from my online marketing. How would I do it? [02:00.5]
I’ve tried to answer that question a variety of ways, but this week I am interviewing someone who really did that. I am interviewing Josh Eberly. Josh is a real estate investor in Lancaster County, Pa. You can get to him at 717Homebuyers.com. But he’s also part of Glanzair Properties, which is a tech company that’s doing both marketing and follow up their holistic marketing solution for real estate investors, so this is an example of a guy who is doing full-time online marketing and has moved into real estate investing.
So, if you're curious about, How did he go about getting leads? What did he do on his website? How does he approach it differently than a typical real estate investor? This is the interview for you. I hope you enjoy it. I really had a blast talking to Josh. He’s a really, really interesting guy. Without any further ado, let’s get into this interview with Josh Eberly.
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Dan: All right, this is Daniel Barrett and I am here with Josh Eberly from 717Homebuyers.com and from Glanzair Properties, which you can find at Glanzair.com, which is G-L-A-N-Z-A-I-R [dot] com. Josh, welcome to the show, man? How are you? [03:13.6]
Josh: Good, Dan. Thanks for having me.
Dan: Yeah, so we're going to get into both. We were just talking about this, how many websites to mention on the show, so we will get into both of these because you're in this really interesting situation where you are both in the investing game yourself. You're also in the investing marketing game and follow-up game or software-as-a-service game. There's a ton of stuff going on here.
But let's just start off with you. If people aren't familiar with you, give me a little bit of context about [yourself], if someone said, How are you involved in real estate? How do you answer that question? Because you do a lot of different stuff. So, how do you intro people to what you do typically?
Josh: Yeah, that's a good question. In the real estate side, me and my partner who I work with, we're mostly interested in either buy and hold rental properties or wholesaling. And so, those are our two big revenue streams and we use a lot of the tactics we're talking about today. [04:04.0]
I'm sure it has generated a lot of the leads, and working with Dan and his team to generate leads, so that we can cherry-pick the nicer ones to buy and hold. And then, all the other stuff that we don't want to keep ourselves, we're able to monetize it through other means.
Dan: How did you get started in real estate specifically? Because people can't see you, but you're a younger guy or at least appear to be a younger guy. So, what got you into real estate investing? What was your in to this industry? Because it's a weird industry, right? I don't know about you, but before I started working with real estate investors, I didn't really know that real estate investing was a thing, so I’m curious as to what your introduction was.
Josh: Yeah, and if I knew shaving would take some years off my face, I would definitely do it more. But real estate, like you said, I really didn't know about it and I was kind of that kid that went to college, had a degree and a career lined up, and I was like, Oh, I'm just going to do my job, and I just wanted more with my life. [05:01.5]
And I read a lot of books, and Rich Dad, Poor Dad, as cliché as that sounds, that was a big book and turning point in my thinking, and I started going on BiggerPockets and looking up house hacking. And that was my first intro to real estate.
Because at the time, me and my wife were married. We both had really good incomes and I'm paying 1,200 bucks in rent for our apartment, and it was great. The granite countertops were really nice where we lived. But I had no equity. And so, I looked into house hacking. I figured it out. You have four units, FHA loan, all of that, and I just set my mind to doing that and we started out with a house hack. That's how I got into the game.
And from there, I just networked and learned a little bit from a bunch of different people, and got some good mentors for studying the game, and started to grow my real estate investments.
Dan: That's awesome. Yeah, it's interesting, man. It's everybody has a different in, but the Rich Dad, Poor Dad is such a common one. Right? And it's like really successful investors, they all point back to that book. [06:04.9]
But it's interesting because you were able to go on BiggerPockets. You had this slightly different intro where I think most people kind of get in usually with wholesaling, because they're trying to make money. You were just trying to make your own living situation and mortgage situation better, which seems to me a cool, unique way to get into it.
What were you doing before you were investing full time or before you were working in real estate full time?
Josh: I was working in digital marketing, digital media. That was kind of my backbone, doing a lot of stuff on Facebook, doing a lot of stuff with web development, monetizing websites. So, that was my day job per se. And my wife was more … she's a teacher.
So, imagine me coming home a little more entrepreneurial and telling her we have to move from a really nice apartment to a multiunit. That house was built in 1920. It's an old [sound dropped] house. And I thought I was going to get killed. I thought she was going to kill me. And, actually, it was a funny story. She was actually in Florida visiting her family when I put the offer in on this property and we ended up getting it. [07:13.0]
Dan: So, did you ask before? Did you talk about it beforehand or you just did it?
Josh: We talked about it, but on this property it was like do it and then ask forgiveness later.
Dan: Yeah, interesting.
Josh: It worked out. I mean, we're still married, yeah.
Dan: It’s funny. We're still married. So, my second wife, I pray, you know. No, but, I mean, I get it, though, right? Because I don't know if she had this reaction. This was certainly my reaction, right? Because when I first started working in real estate investing, when I first started, I was also doing online marketing where I was doing a bunch of online stuff and I just happened to get an investor client. He’s still my friend to this day.
And I remember having this conversation with him. He was like my age. I was in my twenties or something or maybe early thirties or something. And he was like, Yeah, I buy these houses and then I flip them, and I sell them for more money than I bought them for. [08:08.0]
Wow. That's really cool, man. I've never heard of that—which just goes to show the era was so different, right, because now it's on TV, but at the time, it was like, I'd never heard that. I was like, He must have a ton of money just on hand.
He was like, Oh, I don't use my own money. And I was like, What? What are you talking about? You know what I mean? Immediately in my head I was like, This seems like a scam.
So, when you were explaining what you wanted to do, was she like, Is this some sort of weird scam thing? Did you learn this on the internet? What was her impression of it?
Josh: No, it was really the more traditional like, I want a little bit nicer things I'd say per se and the living situation. It’s the status. It’s the status like you look like you have money; you buy the stuff you don't need, all that kind of stuff. So, she was fully on board. She trusted me in that process, which I'm really thankful for. [09:02.1]
But I had to sit her down six, seven, eight times and work through the numbers with her and show their logic. That's how I operate, you know? And so, in my experience, if you're talking to somebody who doesn't have a lot of experience or doesn't understand, you always go back to the numbers, really walk them through the numbers, make sure they can understand that. And it opens up some eyes when you do that.
Dan: Yeah, and the vision, right? It's like, Here's where we want to end up, right? Because it’s like one thing to be like, Here's where it's going to start, but where it starts now, where it ends, right? That's not the idea.
So, then you progress. Now you are working with 717 Homebuyers, right? So, you guys are home buyers working in Lancaster County, Pa. That's primarily where you buy houses. I know you said you’re doing primarily buy and hold. You're doing some wholesaling.
What was the jump into proper wholesaling like for you? Was it just really, really gradual, and then you saw an opportunity and you jumped on it? Did you have to quit your old job and go do this? What was that decision? [10:04.4]
Josh: Yeah, so it was interesting. I would say it was operating dumb for a couple of years or blind. I had a marketing agency I was growing or all kinds of niches, big clients, and I'm doing my real estate stuff, but it's on the side mostly. So, I'm trying to find deals through people and I looked at a couple of properties in the MLS, and I'm going out looking at these things and I'm just like, There's got to be a better way to get off market properties. Then I don't have to take all this time and rely on other people. Because obviously the other people are going to make money, too, right? They’re going to be there.
Dan: Right, because everybody's taking a percentage somewhere along the way, yeah.
Josh: So, when I realized that, I was like, Why don't I just use and apply the skills I've learned and -
Dan: What?
Josh: - started. Yeah, just mesh a few things, right? And now I’m like, you just mesh these things together and let me start it. And I'm a firm believer in business of like you don't have to reinvent the wheel to get started in business. So many people, their mind goes to “I have to invent something new or “I have to do something new to get started in business,” and what happens is they procrastinate long enough, they don't do anything. [11:14.3]
So, a lot of people in the real estate game, I see this time and time again, and you’ve probably seen this, Dan, is that they're like, Oh yeah, I want to do wholesale. I want to do houses. I want to do a website. I want to do a website, a website. Well, the website never gets built.
Dan: Right.
Josh: Right? So, I just wonder if it gets up. So, I was like, Okay, how do I get a website up very quickly that will convert for wholesaling and motivated sellers? Oh, there's this place called Carrot and I can do only one to begin, right?
Dan: Push a button. Push the button. That's awesome, man. It's funny, man, because I feel it's almost that trap what you're talking about, just very real. I feel it's almost more dangerous for you. People like you and me, right, we have pretty similar skill sets, but it's like for me the temptation would be like, Will I know how to do websites? So, I could probably do a better one. [12:06.6]
What's going to end up happening is that I'm going to just fiddle with it for a year straight, trying to get it perfect. And, no, I want to do this plugin and I’ve got to do this and I’ve got to do that. Because I want it to be perfect, it never actually happens. I'm pretty impressed actually that you chose to do that, because it would have been so easy for you to be like, I'm just going to develop my own thing.
Josh: Right, and done is better than perfect, right?
Dan: Yeah.
Josh: And you know this from a business perspective. I try to teach this to my team and people. It's the 80-20 rule. So, I'm like, You focus on what you’re really good at, and in this role my role is to grow the business. My role is not to be the person that puts on the hat that builds the website.
Dan: Right.
Josh: But in my other company, that might be my role, but in this role, I'm growing the business. And if somebody can do or there's a software that gets you 80 percent of the way to where you want to be and you can push a little shortcut button or like the Staples “Easy” button, just hit it over and over and over again, then just pay for it. [13:09.1]
Like I said, I think it was a hundred bucks or whatever the heck it was and I had a website in 30 minutes. Your time is way worth more than that $100.
Dan: Not to even mention, right, your time, but then also the opportunity cost of all the time you waste fiddling with this thing that's never going to get up. It's like you could have gotten a deal in that time, so it's not even just your time and then it's $30,000 or whatever it is you would have gotten from that deal.
So, I'm so interested. Around what time was this that you first decided you were like, Hey, I'm going to mesh these skills and do the online marketing thing, bring my tech skills over to the real estate?
Josh: It was about last summer. Last summer, yeah. We had gone through some traditional buyer’s lines of credit, financing, and doing all that stuff. We had done a flip and I just was like, Hey, this is not for me. I don't enjoy these things. And I really just want to be the guy that gets the leads in and then either keeps them because they're really good or I sell them and make money. [14:11.4]
Dan: Yeah.
Josh: And I don't want to be the guy that fixes stuff. I don't want to have to go pick up a hammer. I want to just be able to run a business that we make money, and I know that leads are coming in and we can monetize them. So, that was last summer.
Dan: Yeah. You know what's so cool about real estate, too? It's like I'm totally with it, right? I'm like, You have to pay me a million dollars to pick up a hammer, like even just to pick it up, right? I’m not going to do anything. I really don’t even want to pick it up.
Josh: Are we talking Trump? Are we talking Trump bucks? They’re like, Don’t try.
Dan: Yeah, that’s like, Whatever, whatever you’ve got. You’ve got to buy me a coffee just to do it. But I've talked to so many other investors, right, who are the opposite. They're like, You couldn't pay me enough money to touch a computer. All I want to do is deal with the house. So, it's so cool that it's like there's room for everybody there to kind of be involved in both parts of that process, so that's really fascinating to me.
I mean, it also strikes me … You could tell me. I'm really interested in your take on this and we're going to get to Glanzair in a second because that’s your sort of other part of this industry that you're a part of. But you’ve been on both parts. You've been in the marketing space. You've been in the straight up “I'm doing deals” space, right? [15:18.8]
One of my go-to turns of phrase or whatever when I talk about this stuff is I say that real estate investing is perpetually five years behind what everybody else in the economy is doing. It was like the investors figured out the Google Ads was a thing in 2010, which was a full decade after everybody else. Right?
So, I'm curious, you're digitally savvy, right? You are a tech-first kind of person, right? When you look at it, just real estate investors in general, the industry in general, what is your take on how they deal with the online space, how they deal with tech, how far they've come? Do you think there's a huge gap or is it small? [16:03.4]
Josh: There's still a big gap, in my opinion, from my experience. What I see is you have some bigger companies now that are starting to kind of establish themselves in regionalized markets. And you know they’re going to be four or five counties. They're buying. They have a staff. They have dedicated people in dispositions, acquisitions, and marketing internal. But the majority of people, I'd say, about 95 percent of people are going to be one to three people on their team, right? So, it's super small. You're asked to do a lot of things.
And just based on what I see a lot of times, the basics now are much easier to do. Five, 10 years ago, getting a website up was a lot bigger of a task. We have our software companies out there that do that. The services side, there are companies that do that. Dan, your team does a great job of doing that, of providing that service.
But where it really falls apart is looking out in a year or two years from where you're at now and understanding what I need to do in my business digitally to get to the next level. [17:04.7]
Dan: Yeah.
Josh: A lot of people are like, Okay, I'm just going to pay some kind of money and online, and I get leads magically, but they aren’t going to. Right?
Dan: Put it in the online ATM, but you can press the button, right, and I’m like, Done. Thank you, Internet.
Josh: Right. But I always say, in a business, if you put a dollar in, in my business, I put a dollar in and I can make $10, but I don't track how I make $10, how the heck do I know where to spend more money? Right?
And so, so many business owners are like this, and the real estate game is like they'll just pay somebody to do something and it works kind of or it doesn't work, or it works. And if it works, they're like, Hey, I must be spending the right money. But if they were actually measuring that and figuring it out, they could really increase the efficiency of their business and scale up.
And I'm looking at things like new emerging technologies, too, new emerging platforms like TikTok. We're going really hard on TikTok. [18:01.7]
Dan: Wow. Really? How that working for you. TikTok’s advertising platform is not super publicly available, right? What's the deal with that? Because I don't know a ton about it.
Josh: It's not public. It's not really publicly available. I'm kind of harkening back to the early days of Instagram, where there's going to be requirements like you're not just going to be able to go on and throw up an ad like you can now on Facebook or Instagram with an account. So, you're going to have to have so many verified followers. It's really kind of the Wild Wild West. I don't know if you do a ton of Snapchat, but Snapchat is starting to get organized and get working results there.
But TikTok, we're focused on the organic growth right now. So, the videos are short. You can cut them up. My partner is 22 or 23. You're telling me I'm the young guy. He's the real young guy. He knows everything. And I’m a millennial. I don't even know what he is. [19:00.0]
Dan: No one knows what the people below millennials are.
Josh: Exactly.
Dan: There will be a thing soon, I'm sure, yeah.
Josh: So, he's just doing organic videos every day, and we put that on YouTube and other places, but he's getting a lot of interest and a lot of people that are reaching out to him about what he's talking about. House hacking. He's talking about wholesaling. He's talking about real estate investing.
And so, we're really seeing an opportunity not just to generate leads on there, but to generate authority, and authority which also will lead to where you can do coaching out of that and you can do services out of that. You can get on bigger platforms out of that.
So, it's a great platform for authority, especially with younger generations. I know Millennials are, like with the COVID and staying home, there's a ton of millennials now joining it, and that's going to be your buyers in five to 10 years, that generation. So, just thinking about how you can access, leverage the free platforms now before they turn to the pay-to-play model like Facebook has. [20:00.0]
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Dan: You, again, are also talking about a theme that I've been really talking about, which is investors forever, the only requirement to market as an investor has been you just tell people what you do. So, if you think about, What is a bandit sign? It says, “I buy houses,” and it's got your phone number, just all of this. There's no brand. There's no name. There's nothing. It's just “Here's the thing that I do,” and it used to be that the thing that investors did was so unique that all you had to do was tell people that existed and some people would be sold, right? [21:01.9]
It's the same behind yellow letters. A yellow letter is literally just saying, “I exist and I buy houses,” right? There's more to it. Yellow letter people are angry at me because I'm sort of … you know? But it's basically what it is.
But our industry is in the middle of the shift. It was like what we were talking about before. It happened five or 10 years ago for everyone else, which is you have to build the audience before they need you, so that when they need you, they come to you rather than the massive tech company that dominates your space. Right?
So, it's like if you're in a market where Zillow or Trulia is entering and they're making hundreds of hundreds of offers a day, they don't give a hoot if they make money or not. It's like, How do you compete with that? You compete with that because you’ve built a relationship with someone and they're like, Oh, of course, I want to work with Josh, or I want to work with whoever, because I've been following his TikToks since I was in sixth grade or whatever. Right? Now it’s time.
But investors don't think that. We as an industry are not used to thinking that at all. It’s a pretty wild approach, but I think it is, in the future, the only approach that's really going to matter. [22:12.0]
Josh: And it's really earned media. I mean, if you think about the marketing landscape, and let's just say you're out on the internet and you're like, What do you do? I buy houses or we buy houses. A lot of people out there, from the internet media perspective, they're not going to just naturally be like, Oh, I'm going to ask you and link to you, or give you earned media because they understand the game. And there's a little negative connotation, I would say, still of some of the stuff that we do.
Dan: Absolutely true. True stuff.
Josh: Realtors hate us, let's be honest. We're taking their commissions. And everyone is trained that like, Hey, these are the guys that are coming in, giving you lowball offers, and they're just kind of scammy or whatever.
And so, when we talk about earned media, you're talking really about building authority and a brand that people see you as the solution to the problem. They don't see you as the “We buy houses” guys. They see you as a solution to all of the issues of like, I can't sell my house and do all these things. [23:09.4]
And so, you really transform what your company name is in their minds, and that spreads. I mean, you can't be freer earned referrals. I mean, that's going to be money-makers all day.
Dan: I mean, you're talking about just in general but even in terms of SEO, it's one of the things we say all the time. It is so hard to get links, earned links for real estate investors, because I'm like, Who wants to link to you, right? And it's partially a function of the way that the industry has marketed themselves.
And, yeah, I think, ideally, we're heading into a period where folks like you guys are sort of promoting this new way of thinking about marketing, and then I think a lot of people that are established investors are really coming around to it.
But it's a different skill set, too, right? It's hard for a lot of people to get on camera and be natural, which is what platforms like TikTok—I mean, TikTok has a lot of issues. It has its own issues. It has all these weird Chinese censorship issues and stuff. [24:08.2]
Josh: Yeah.
Dan: But there was an article in The Atlantic about how there was a leaked TikTok internal document that was like, Ugly people get their videos automatically suppressed by the algorithm and stuff. So, there's weirdness there. But if you think about it, the platform itself is going to change, obviously.
But what we're doing is we're training this whole generation of people that aren't going to be fire on camera, right? You can think, it’s just go on camera and they can talk to their audience, right? That is such a skill, man. It's really going to change things. This is a really good transition. I'm going to say it's a good transition.
Josh: I would reckon it.
Dan: To the other side of your business. So, you are a real estate investor in Lancaster County, Pa. Right?
Josh: Yeah.
Dan: But you are also in the marketing and tech side of real estate investors. Tell people about that part of what you do. [25:04.0]
Josh: This is where it gets really interesting for me personally and from a bigger level business perspective. Just the story earlier that I was telling you, 30 minutes, put a Carrot site up. It was great. We started getting leads in, and what I realized, the difference between people who are consistently doing leads, closing leads, and the people that would do a couple a year was really the back end, because the ways to generate leads on the front side are pretty well known. You can do PPC. You can do SEO. Your bandit signs, direct mail. You're going to get leads in, right? If you do the right things, you'll get leads in. What really matters, though, is if you can close the leads.
And so, I was messing around on the backside and talking to some of the investors. I was like, Hey, what do you guys use for this? What do you use for this? And they're giving me Podio CRM and Zapier, and all these connections and Mailchimp. It just adds to the confusion, I think, as a business owner, right? You talked about earlier. A lot of these business owners in the real estate space, they don't want to do anything tech. [26:09.0]
Dan: Right.
Josh: And so, the website is big enough and now I have an email service provider. What the heck is that? Now I have a CRM. What the heck is that? I have all these integrations. And so, it gets really confusing. And when things get confusing, people normally just give up, right? They don’t want to do it.
And so, my vision of what we're trying to work on right now is an all-in-one system. So, you have a website. Leads come into the website. Your team can go right into that same website portal and your CRM is there. You can sign digital contracts out of it, which is awesome because you can send them right away to people, which is where it ends. This industry has gone digital, towards digital contracts.
Dan: Yeah.
Josh: You can also do email follow-ups right out of it, so no need to integrate with Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign or anything outside of it. And you can really just manage your follow-up of that system without having to buy multiple different platforms or a third-party software. So, it's a simplified system. That's where we're kind of going and it's really going to start training people on how to use it. [27:10.0]
Dan: That's really cool, man. I think you are exactly right that one of my perpetual bum outs is that we’ll generate leads for someone and then they won't follow up with them. And it's understandable to a large extent because follow up can be difficult if you are like, I'm doing everything in a spreadsheet and I follow up with everyone by hand. It's you're going to screw that up sooner. That's just human nature, right?
It’s like literally just recently I was like, I'm going to work with three clients. I'm working with three SEO clients, because I wanted to do a personal deep dive on the process. I wanted to try to improve things. We're always working on making everything better.
So, I'm like, Don't worry, team, because I have the team. They all do this full time. I'm like, Don't worry, team. I got it. And they're like, Are you sure you want to do this? I'm like, I got it, Don't worry, guys. I got it.
I have messed this up so many times, because it's just a lot to remember, right? It's just you’ve got to follow up with this person, this person and this person, and I'm not used to it, right? So, it's difficult. [28:05.6]
Having a system in place that does a lot of this for you or at least forces you along a system that's going to optimize what you're doing is really, really critical.
I'm curious, what do you see as being really effective, either that you guys do as per your system or that investors do as part of follow-up? What makes a good follow-up for REI?
Josh: Yeah, that's an amazing question for me, because I believe and we have seen in our business that 20 to 30 percent of our deals come on the follow-up. We see a lot of people reengage in that 15- to 30-day period after the initial lead comes in, after that first phone call is made.
They re-engage via either opening email, which we can see in our system. Triggers other things to go out. They re-engage via text. Text is amazing. If you haven't looked at SMS, that's where everybody's at. Everyone's on their phone. Right now they're sitting at home probably on their phone. And phone, too. [29:06.7]
So, you kind of combine the three together. When you mesh those together and understand usually what the user behavior is, it works a lot better. We look at like, Hey, did someone open the email? If they opened the email, that means they probably read it, so I'm going to give that person a phone call. If they didn't open the email, I'm probably going to text them. It's a less aggressive play.
Dan: I like that lesson.
Josh: Yeah. We see and we try to tailor it, too, on the follow-up side. Think about your clientele, who your clientele is. If it's someone who's maybe working during the day or is younger, or is busy, text them later at night. Do that. If it's an older person that's maybe up and probably up at 6:00 a.m.—which I wish I would do, but I don’t—call them early. Call them before the workday. It's really about thinking about the identifiers for who your clientele are.
I've gotten deals where I'm texting people at 11:55 at night who are 35, 40 years old and they're up, and that's the time to communicate with them. But if you try calling them during the day, they're never going to answer. [30:08.3]
Dan: Right. Yeah, because they're out somewhere, right? I'm curious, do you notice a pattern, older people versus younger people? Do older people prefer a phone call and younger people prefer a text?
I would say, my generation is the official, and I always say this and I don't know if that's actually true, but I'm 40 as I'm recording this, so it’s like I was born in 1980. My generation is the first one where it's like, Don't call me. Just text me. I don't want you to call me.
But sometimes I want people to call me, you know what I mean? It's like I'm sort of right on the borderline where I'm like, Don't text me to break up with me. You’ve got to do that in person, right? But it's everything else, just text me.
But the people below me, they don't even know that your phone can call someone. They think of some weird app they have to buy, right? And my mom's generation, it's just like, Don’t text me. Just call me if you have something to say, right?
Do you see a real breakdown there? [31:00.7]
Josh: Yeah, I do. It's a big divide. But I will say when you get probably about 50+ is when a call is going to be more effective for you, because you’ve got to remember, a lot of parents now, their kids have iPhones, so they're texting their kids all day, so that they're being assimilated into that SMS game.
The younger the person, definitely text is going to be a more effective option for them.
I would say between probably what we normally see as between 35 and 55, email is really good. Those people are usually on top of their email. Once you get past that age, it's like, I check my email every seven days.
Dan: Yeah, that's so weird to me.
Josh: Yeah.
Dan: Sounds really weird.
Josh: Inbox zero, right? Inbox zero.
Dan: It's a professional’s thing, right? It's like I'm in the office and I have email or whatever on top of it. That's really interesting.
It sounds what you guys are doing, and this is something I really believe in, too, it’s multichannel funnel, right? So, it’s like you don't just email. You don't just call. You don't just text. You hit someone on every possible wavelength because they're going to have one that they're going to more. Is that the case? [32:13.1]
Josh: Yeah, that's the case. It's just like when you do marketing. If you're just on PPC, you're relying on one revenue source and one lead source. The more that you can do, the better you're going to do, essentially. Those are the three big ones there are, obviously. Those work very effectively.
Even sending people postcards in the mail after they’ve contacted you is very effective. They already have that relationship. So, instead of just sending postcards out to cold prospects, why don't you send them to warm prospects that haven't closed yet? Things like that, they just add little touches. And we know from marketing, I always tell people, it's seven to 11 touches sometimes before somebody makes a decision, depending on the industry. The real estate game has traditionally been that like, Hey, I want one or two touches and I'm going to close. [33:04.1]
Dan: Yeah. Otherwise it's a bad lead, right?
Josh: Right, it’s a bad lead.
Dan: Otherwise it's a bad lead, yeah.
Josh: It’s a bad lead. But in all reality, it's probably going to be three to seven at least for a lot of these leads. So, we just have to follow up.
Dan: I absolutely agree with you. In fact, I think that, for us, we've seen an even bigger percentage of deals come through follow-up, right? So, I think it's one of those things where maybe he was just leaving so much money on the table, and then there's a recency bias, too. So, if someone has seen a bunch of your stuff and then you call them, they're just so much more likely to respond, right?
We did this experiment where we had some clients send out direct mail pieces and then we had some clients send out direct mail pieces saying we ran ads that looked like the direct mail pieces simultaneously. And the people that saw the ads were more likely to call from the postcard, right? So, it's like it's just because they just saw it and it kind of felt familiar, so they're just less likely to throw it straight in the garbage, or at least that was our theory. Yeah, I think it's one of those force multiplier things where it’s just so absolutely huge. [34:07.3]
If someone is curious about what you guys do at Glanzair, right, which is the company that's primarily in this marketing space, follow-ups space, how would they learn more about what you guys do, that piece of it? Because the audience here, they're investors. They're tech-savvy. They're always looking for that kind of leg up. What's the next step if they're curious about what you guys do?
Josh: Sure. Yeah, just check us out on our website. You can fill a contact format or our phone numbers on there as well. I'm more than happy to have a conversation. I know we're in beta right now, so we're testing some people out.
So, we are looking for some investors maybe to partner with to get some beta testing done, just get some feedback, because we want to make this a product that real estate investors actually want to use. Not they have to use it, but to actually want to use it.
Dan: That’s good.
Josh: From a real estate investor mind, I want to see what people are saying and how they want to see things structured, because, at the end of the day, that's the best way we can serve our clients. [35:07.6]
Dan: Yeah. It reminds me of the old Listerine marketing motto or whatever it was. It’s like the feeling you love to hate or something, because they're just like, Objectively it feels bad, so we're just going to lean into that. And I think leading the idea of like, Hey, CRMs and software for real estate investors, I think it’s kind of a nightmare. It's like, This one is actually going to be awesome, right, so you're actually going to enjoy it. I really like that.
For everybody listening, okay, Glanzair.com is the website. I'm going to have a link to that at AdWordsNerds.com/podcast. Show notes for this episode and everything is going to be there.
You can also check out, and I highly recommend this to everybody, and you guys know I do this all the time on this show. So, Josh is an online marketer. Here's a dude. He eats his own dog food, right? He pays his bills with his own skills. So, if you are curious what a guy that is doing on his investing website, it's 717Homebuyers.com. You should go check it out, right? You've got to. You want to learn from the people and know what they're doing, rather than the dude who just happens to be down the street from you. [36:12.8]
So, go check out 717Homebuyers.com and Glanzair.com, which is G-L-A-N-Z-A-I-R [dot] com. I’ll have links to both of those at AdWordsNerds.com/podcast.
Jash—Jash. Jash! Yeah, Jash.
Josh: That’s awesome.
Dan: Yeah, I almost got through the whole thing without screwing up. Josh, thank you so much for coming on the show, man. It was refreshing to me. I loved hearing your take on everything and you bring a really unique perspective to this, and I can't wait to see what you guys do at Glanzair. Yeah, man, thanks so much. I really appreciate it.
Josh: Thanks, Dan. Have a great day.
Dan: Cheers.
…
That's it for this week's episode of the REI Marketing Nerds podcast. Hope you enjoyed my interview with Josh. I know I certainly did. As always, join our Facebook group. It's free. It's the REI Marketing Nerds Facebook group. I'm in there every single week, posting, answering questions, giving trainings. It is “the” place to be. [37:06.2]
You can get there by going to AdWordsNerds.com/group, or just go on Facebook and type in “REI Marketing Nerds,” and you will find us. I hope to see you there. I hope to see you next week.
Thank you so much for downloading and listening to this show. It means the world to me. I hope you and your friends, and your family and your employees are happy and healthy, and safe. And I will talk to you next week.
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