Justin B. McClelland

Now that I’ve increased my advertising by 5 times, I’m steadily getting calls every day.  Pretty much receiving one to 3 leads each day.  The increase in leads is a good thing, however they’re not all motivated-seller leads.  I’m revamping my system now so that I don’t waste my time with the unmotivated people.  At my 9-5 I speak on the phone with people most of the day, this makes me dread talking to people who I don’t care to speak with.  So the plan moving forward is to let my secretary screen each caller, return some calls and follow up with people, therefore I have all of the pertinent information I need before wasting a single breath with property owners.  Tire kicker lead-sheets go straight to the trash can, “Kobe”!  No, but seriously they go to my Realtor.  We have a reciprocal exchange going for us, he helps me out alot, and I give him leads when I can.

My secretary was supposed to start last Thursday, but she came down with bronchitis.  So hopefully she’ll be well by Monday and we can get the ball rolling on some things.  I’ve come to realize that I cannot do all of this myself.  By the time I get off of work most days, I have only a 2 hour window to make call backs.  Half of the time I reach a voice mailbox, the other half I get someone who is long-winded and there goes my time window.  On average it’s taking me 3-4 days to get back in touch with people after they leave me a message.  This is way too long.

I’ve begun talks with a guy I went to college with about Tax Lien investing.  He’s new to the subject, but hey…so am I.  After seeing that some were more novice than me at the auction, I realized it’s time to jump in.  We’re going to get a plan together for next year and possibly form a LLP, strictly for tax lien investing.  I’ve got so many ideas that will give us an advantage it’s almost unfair.  We’re planning to hit many of the Illinois tax lien sales of small counties.  It’s going down!

The past year, I’ve been working on establishing business credit. I followed the steps offered atwhatever reason only one of my seven vendors are reporting to Dun & Bradstreet and none are reporting to Experian.  I’m not sure if this is due to a flaw within their guidelines or if there was something I didn’t setup right or what.  But, I need the vendor lines to report so that I can establish a DNB score.   Once I have a DNB score, I can then start acquiring business credit cards and loans sans personal guarantee.  Abstaining from personal guarantees with business credit avoids the tie to your personal FICO score, it also protects your corporate veil more so than using a PG.  I’ve been in correspondence with the company that offers the biz credit info and they’ve been dodging me lately.  I hate wasting my time with customer service issues.  Waste of life.

Well, I plan on getting some more advertising in place this weekend so that my phone can blow up next week and my secretary will have something to do.  This reminds me, I need to give her a list of numbers to cold-call.  These would be FSBO’s in the newspaper classifieds.  I’ve got some plastic doorhanger sleeves.  I need to get some brochures made and pay some kids to canvas Urbana.  I’ve been putting this off for quite sometime.  I need to just get it done.  As a matter of fact I’m going to call my graphic designer now and put an ad out on CraigsList.  And I wish somebody would flag my ad! The flagging on CL is getting rediculous by the way.

Welp. I’ve got alot to do, so Peace Out!

Business, Marketing, Real Estate Credit card, Credit score, Dun & Bradstreet, Experian

I’ll start out with the bad news (not really).  I met with the lady who owned the house I checked out a couple of weeks ago to submit my offer and go over my documentation.  I had 7 comps, a CMA, an expense report, and a contract.  Here is the rundown of how the meeting went:

8:55am – I show up to property for 9am meeting
9:08am – Lady arrives and I’m irritated that she’s late. If anyone’s going to be tardy, it’s going to be me! (I have ’some’ nerve)
9:18am – Ten minutes of time wasted with small talk
9:19am – I whip it out (the paperwork that is)
9:20am – I choose to go over the comps of her property first. They were good as-is comps that were in the 55K – 65K range.
9:21am – She frowns at the very first comp and I think she rolled her eyes too
9:21am – I ignore her disgust and continue my spiel
9:23am – I show her the CMA (comparative market analysis) which conveys her house-value as-is should’ve been in the 60K range
9:24am – I go over the expense report with itemized repairs needed for the house
9:25am – She disputes almost every item on the list saying that such items need not be replaced
9:25am – I daydream of pimp-smacking her with one of those Styrofoam “We’re #1” hands that you can purchase at any ballgame
9:26am – I snap out of the daydream and continue on
9:27am – I give her my offer of 47K and I met my goal of keeping a straight-face
9:28am – She is extremely disappointed in the offer
9:29am – She continues to talk and tell why she can’t accept that offer
9:33am – She is talking about the offer amount she was looking for
9:33am – I succeed in not laughing in her face
9:43am – She’s still talking
9:45am – She’s still talking some more, I daydream of winning an Oscar for acting like I’m interested in the conversation
9:50am – She’s still talking and is actually dropping hints that she’s warming up to the offer
9:55am – I tell her to think about it and call me if she changes her mind, we part ways

So, we’ll see if that’s the last of that lady.  She’s a nice lady, don’t get me wrong…but I wouldn’t be surprised if she took 4 bong-hits every morning before getting out of bed.  Anyway, I’ll call her next week and see if she’s warmed up or not.

And now the good news.  I went to my first tax lien sale yesterday and I learned sooo much!  First-off, I don’t know why more people aren’t doing this.  And secondly, I’m definitely going to be there in full force next year!   By the way, I couldn’t get any video footage of the auction, I punked out.  It was so quiet in the auction room (auction was computerized), I didn’t want anyone to hear my Flip camera turn on.  Everyone who has one would know the sound it makes.   The investor who I did some preparation work for allowed me to look over his shoulder while he bid.  He even let me do some bidding!  This guy is a major player in the game.  In the 2.5 hour bidding of over 2,000 properties, I witnessed this guy snatch up over $560K in lien certificates.  I’m going to hang around this guy whenever he’ll let me, I need some of that to rub off!  The speed in which these properties are auctioned at is incredible.  You literally have only 1-5 seconds per property to place your bids.  The auction in Champaign County is computerized.  The county outsources the bidding administration to a company called Rams Auctions and if I’m not mistaken you can do your bidding from home also.  The auction was held at the county building where the Recorder’s office is, the Tax Assessor, the Coroner, everything.  In the bidding room there were tables with laptops setup for each bidder.  Then there was an overhead image projected of all the bidding so that spectators could see what was going down.  To get an idea of how this all worked, check out the video by Rams Auction, but keep in mind they slowed down the examples:

http://www.ramsauctions.com/demo/RAMS%20Tutorial.html

Next year it’s on!  I’m going to be at that tax sale and ready to rumble.  The funny thing is that some of the bidders there barely knew what they were doing!  You should’ve heard the questions asked after the sale was over.  That’s right, I said AFTER the sale.  Questions like, “Now that I’ve spent about $30K in lien certs, what happens next?”  I’m not joking either!

My experience at this sale inspired my most recent BiggerPockets blog post.  There you can read about a few of the strategies and research techniques that I thought of since yesterday.  And that’s just the tip, I have a whole year to think of more!  I cannot be stopped.  You better get-down or lay-down!  Peace Out!

Real Estate Auction, Government, Income tax, Tax

I’ve got an action packed 7 days approaching:

Tomorrow I meet with the lady I mentioned in my last post whose house I targeted with one of my direct mail letters.  My Realtor/Investor colleague and I took a look at the property last Friday.  Man was that thang tore-up.  It will need a new roof, new windows, new kitchen, a new whole bunch of stuff.  But the good thing is that this is the worst house on the street.  All of the neighboring houses look great.  I have some comps, a CMA, and an estimate of repairs to accompany my offer.  So this should take the shell-shock out of the offer.  I think she is expecting an offer close to retail minus just a few thousand in repairs…I hope not.

Tomorrow evening, I’m meeting with the Tax Lien investor who I created the screen-scrape for of the County Assessors’ website.  The scrape just referenced each property by parcel number and extracted the homeowner name, property address, mailing address, market value of land, market value of building.  He mainly wanted this done so that he’d know going into the tax sale which properties have a building attached.  In the past he had inadvertently purchased the tax liens on ponds and vacant land.  I even went a step further and computed some ratios for him in excel, a tax/value ratio.  The lower the ratio the better as in a small amount tax lien could possibly result in a high dollar property.  There’s also some other stuff that I hooked up too.  I think I’ll do a BiggerPockets.com post about Tax Lien research and such on Thursday.  The sale is this Wednesday morning and I’m going to check it out.  I’m interested to see how this goes down. I’ve heard of the fast pace of these things.  I’ll get some video footage if I can.

I now have 5 different classified ads out and because of my nifty tracking methods, I know which paper is yielding the best results thus far.  And that is the American Classifieds/Thrifty Nickel.  My phone is blowing up with people calling from this paper.  And I must say, I love the ad that I placed.  I took the idea from a Preston Ely ebook I purchased a while back.  The ad says:

I Buy Houses CA$H, Quick Close, All These Other Ads Are Jokes! Call Justin @ 217.123.1234

The bad thing is that alot of the people who are calling on this ad, have properties way out in the sticks.  I wasn’t expecting that.  I can’t spread myself all over central Illinois researching different areas and trying to become an expert in them, just not feasible.

I had this one guy who owns a rental in the boonies call me 7 times today.  That’s right SEVEN times.   He left a message the first time and couldn’t wait for me to get back in touch with him.  I was thinking I had a really motivated seller on my hands.  I call him back and this kid wants 3k less than full retail!?  I told him that he may be better suited for a Realtor (I don’t have time to waste), but then he started rebutting and says maybe we can work something out.  I really think that this guy is desperate but just doesn’t want to show his hand.  He kinda already did by calling me SEVEN times in an 8 hour time span.  We’ll see about this one.  I honestly couldn’t care less (for some reason very positive things happen for me when I don’t try too hard).

Next Monday, I’m going to the REBarCamp in Indianapolis.  This event is basically a conference where real estate professionals come together and exchange ideas and techniques for implementing web 2.0/3.0 into their business.  I see it as a marketing workshop.  Should be enlightening.

It’s 10:35pm and I’ve still got a gang of stuff to do before I call it a night.  I burn so much midnight oil, I should buy stock in this s**t. Peace Out

Internet Marketing, Marketing, Random, Real Estate, Tutorials, Uncategorized, Web Development american classifieds, Real Estate, rebarcamp, Tax lien

It’s 1:46am and I’m kind of up lollygagging around.  Well I take that back, I guess I’ve been productive as I was just over at www.mytechopininion.com which is a tech website for those in Real Estate. Pretty cool stuff over there, check it out when you’re able.  And I also watched a few YouTube videos that focus on some new advertising methods.  I love YouTube to death, I swear…anything you ever wanted to learn, you can find it there.  It’s now the number two search engine, by the way.  Just a little fun-fact.  It’s second to Google.

I mentioned that I’ve placed some “we buy houses” ads in four different papers and my phone is buzzing with calls from those ads now.  That and I still have a trickle of yellow-letter responses coming in (more on that in a bit).  After a month, I’ll report with what I find is the most effective news-paper in the area and how many calls each ad brought in.  Also, I made a blog post last week at BiggerPockets.com that goes in detail about how I’m using Google Voice with Vonage to track all of my calls.  The people who I’ve talked to who have responded to my ads have been as nice as can be!  They all haven’t been extremely motivated but much better than the tire-kicker type.

I figured out why I pissed some people off with my yellow letters and it all makes sense.  You ready for the reason?  Okay, here it is…it’s because they were tricked with the authentic appearance of the mail.  If you get a type-written envelope in the mail that says something like “To the Residence of, 123 Main Street” that thing may go straight to the shredder (you need one of those if you don’t already have one by the way).  But if you receive an invitation envelope with your name and address handwritten on it tomorrow, I’d be willing to bet that you open it before all of your bills and other mail.  Some people were just mad that they didn’t receive a love-letter, a wedding invite, or a note from their penpal (do those even exist anymore).  But anyway, that’s all old news.  Plus out of 800 mailings I only received like 15 heated voicemails, so that’s not even 2%.

I am really procrastinating on writing up some other stuff  I have to get done for tomorrow, it’s now 2:07am.  I swear, this is just like college.  I’m horrible at prioritizing.  I procrastinate with the things I don’t feel like doing.  But a new trick I picked up is to still take care of something that needs to get done in the mean-time.  This way I don’t procrastinate all together.  Baby steps.  I really don’t feel like staying up all night tonight.

But back to the yellow letter calls.  So I received a call today from a lady who is looking to sell a house that has been in her family for years.  She seems to be fairly motivated as the property has been vacant for some time.  While it was vacant she said she even had squatters in there for like 5 weeks.  She just went through the trouble to kick them out.  But they left a trashed property behind.  I’ll cut all of the details short. But I have a good feeling about this because she told me that she has received countless pieces of mail about the purchase of her property.  But she called me first and I’m the only person she has spoken with thus far!  Could it have been the personalized letter that made me stand-out or just a coincidence? I don’t know but we shall see.  I meet with her on Friday to have a look at the house.

I interview a potential virtual assistant/phone receptionist tomorrow.  Hopefully she will be legit and I can start forwarding my calls and what I’m more excited about is having someone complete some cold-calls for me.  Like some cold-calls on classified ads and such.  She seems like the real-deal, but I’ve had such thoughts before.  I’m going to grill her and see where she’s at.  Grill her like the job pays 50K a year.

Peace Out.

- Justin

Real Estate biggerpockets.com, Real Estate, virtual assistant, YouTube

This past weekend, I spent alot of time behind the computer.  I mentioned a while back that I was going to create another tutorial/video about how to use Mozenda with CraigsList (at least I think I did).  I took a few hours on Sunday and came up with a screen-scrape for CraigsList.  I would’ve created the video then, except I was having an issue with my account.  Stay tuned for this as it might just be something that can replace a virtual assistant of yours.  You know I’m all about that.  I’m a firm believer in the adage, “if you want something done right, you do it yourself”.  Yeah, I know about delegation, time-maximization, blah blah blah.  But if you can get a computer to do what you’d normally have to hire a person to do, you’ve just eliminated a liability from your operation.

Marketing: I’m still working on calling people back who originally responded to my last mailing.  The game of phone tag is on.  I feel like this may be a waste of time as I’m following-up with luke-warm leads.  The Realtor that I had answering my phone calls didn’t have any lead sheets that were fully completed.  Part of this is probably because I just didn’t have any motivated sellers and the other part is that as a Realtor he is pre-occupied with what Realtors do on a daily basis.

Last week, I mentioned an investor who has about 60 properties in town and whom also invests in tax liens.  Well check this out.  He said that he was looking for someone to do some busy work for him to aid in preparation for the Tax Sale next week.  He was offering to pay $15 an hour for someone to manually go through the tax delinquent list and check to see if the tax delinquent parcel numbers have a building attached (he accidentally bought a lien on a pond before).  It’s 2am and I’m too lazy/sleepy to break down the exact detail.  So I’ll just say that I will be able to do exactly what he is looking for with a screen-scrape of the tax assessors website.  Perhaps, I’ll make a video about that too.  So instead of sifting through 2,000 records at a one minute/record pace of 2,000 minutes (33 hours * $15) or $495.  I’ll be able to get him squared away with everything he needs with about 18 hours of labor using Mozenda.  Uhmmmm….yeah, I’ll just have to post again about it when I complete it.  I’m not sure this paragraph makes sense in it’s brief form.  Anyway, my eyelids are heavy. Peace Out.

P.S.
I’m posting this just cuz. One of the funniest comedies of all time.

Marketing, Random, Real Estate Marketing, Mozenda, National Association of Realtors, Tax lien

So it’s been over a week and the calls have drastically tapered off.  I had planned to give some exact call counts, but I kind of screwed that up when I was altering the settings for my Vonage account when setting up my Google Voice accounts (the counts got off).  So I’ll approximate.  After 1 week of the letters being in possession of homeowners, I received about 70 calls with about 12 of those being leads.  Out of the 12 leads about:

4 turned out to have their house listed on the MLS
2 I’ve played phone tag with
2 I’ve yet to call
1 Is in Pre-pre-foreclosure*
1 Plans on moving to ATL in February
2 Will most likely sell retail when ready

* The guy who is in pre-pre-foreclosure is disabled and is soon to be receiving disability checks.  He said he just caught his mortgage up from being 4 months late to 1 month late.  He said that he wants to sell because he doesn’t know how long the disability checks will last and needs to downgrade.  I’ll check back in with this guy in a month or so and see where his motivation is.

The guy who wants to move to Atlanta this winter may turn out to be gold as well.  He didn’t seem too motivated when I spoke with him, but this may change.  I’ll also check back in with this guy next month.

One of my letters hit the property of an investor in town that has over 60 properties.  He responded to the letter just to chat for a bit about investing.  We met in person last Friday and he’s looking to divest his portfolio and needs someone (me!) with a creative mind to market them.  He also invests in Tax Lien certificates and needs someone to perform some follow up with the liens that may soon convert to deeds.  So perhaps we can work out something there, we haven’t negotiated any particulars but I expressed my interest and we may meet later this week.

** One quick note about this guy. I don’t think I mentioned in an earlier post that I went to the County Recorders’ office one day and looked through the judgment books.  I wrote down the information of all the purchasers from the previous years’ tax sale (for buyer’s list building purposes).  I then Google’d each person to see what I’d learn (did I ever mention that I love Google, I could almost be a P.I.).  So when I met with this guy, I already knew a little about him.  But then again, I’m pretty sure he Google’d me before he called me because he mentioned my blog.  So that means he may read this…awkward…

Another letter made its’ way to a Real Estate broker who was a former investor and she called to chat about investing, what she’s doing Real Estate wise and her consulting business.  This lady was cool as a fan.  She was very wise and said that I’m free to call her whenever with questions.

So besides the leads there were many positives to overcome the negativity from early last week.  Sometimes I post my frustrations and speak of slacking and what not, but that’s all part of the experience.  The purpose of this blog is to document it all.  So don’t think that I’m going to give up or get depressed by these suckers who waste their time hating.  I would never lie to you and I honestly think half of what people say is funny.  Now the other half can meet me in the octogan…but I digress.  The point is I’m going to blog about it ALL…give it to you straight, no chaser.

Since I’ve launched my Yellow Letter campaign, I’ve also launched some other marketing.  I’ve got a Sunday classified ad that is going to go in the Champaign News-Gazette, the Savoy Star, and Accent.  I’ve also got an ad that is going to run in the American Classifieds.  And my Yellow Pages Ad prints and should be delivered in November.  I’m going to follow-up to my mailing list in about 6 weeks with a postcard.  I’m also thinking about buying a list from YellowLettersComplete.com, perhaps the pre-foreclosure list.  And the Bandit Signs will go in effect again very soon.  I ordered some more.  This time instead of buyers, I’m going to target sellers.  And I’m going to place them out on Friday and pull them on Sunday.  All of the Realtors do this.  I just needed to cross the line so I knew where it was the first time.  I shouldn’t get any heat for this.  If I do, I have an arguable case.  I also am going to ramp-up my CraigsList activity.  So as you can tell, I’m grinding…but still have a ways to go.

Yesterday, there was a Rich Dad Poor Dad seminar in town.  You know the seminar that gets people amped up about Real Estate investing, and claims that they’ll teach all of the ropes for $500 3-day seminar.  Once you get to that seminar you learn that to really learn all of the ropes, you need to pay $30,000.  I mean, I’m not saying this is a bad deal but DAMN!  At least that’s what the attendees usually say as they leave the hotel banquet room.  I’ve been there done that and so I spontaneously thought of a way to capitalize.  I made up some flyers at the last minute that were aimed towards finding someone to birddog/partner with.  The flyer was folded into a 3-part brochure and in a nut-shell it said

Interested in starting out in Real Estate but can’t afford the training? Call Me! I’m a house-flipper that is looking for partners to work with in Champaign-Urbana.  No experience necessary.

I put those flyers on about 40 cars in the parking lot outside of the entrance to the seminar.  I was scared to death, I didn’t want to get caught and fined.  I almost didn’t do it.  But I did it anyway.  It’s time to start making things happen.  I really don’t care anymore about the rules.  I ask myself, “What’s the worst that can happen?”.  And if the answer doesn’t involve an arrest or bodily harm, then I’m doing it.  So anyway, I did all that and didn’t get one stankin call!  Oh well.  Maybe next time.

Welp, that’s all for now.  I need to kick out a BiggerPockets article for tomorrow.  I think I’ll focus on the features and uses of Google Voice for investors.  Writers’ block, here I come! Peace out.

- Justin

Internet Marketing, Marketing, Real Estate, Tutorials CraigsList, Google, Marketing, Real Estate, Real estate broker, Rich Dad Poor Dad, Vonage

I pretty much took yesterday off from doing any Real Estate stuff.  Not that I could afford to do so, I just am trying to avoid burnout.  And not burnout from Real Estate, it’s just that I’m always working.  And even in my time off, I can’t really enjoy it because I’m typically thinking of how broke I am!  Catch 22, I guess.  Sometimes I daydream of copping out, getting an MBA and just finding a job somewhere to settle with $100K a year.  But then those daydreams turn into nightmares when I think about (a) going back to school and (b) still working for someone else.  But anyway the time off was appreciated, but I still kinda feel like taking a few more days and not doing NUTHIN! But that wouldn’t make sense.

I made some progress on my master-marketing plan.  I’m placing classified ads in both the “American Classifieds” and the “Champaign News-Gazette”.  Both circulations have online components to them included with the print advertising.  So this should be good. At least I hope so. But the beauty of this is that this won’t be a guessing game.  Through separate Google Voice virtual phone numbers, I will be able to track the amount of incoming call activity from each advertising method.  And each virtual phone number is forwarded to my main phone number.  Google Voice is dope!  I’ll be able to see if a form of advertising isn’t worth it and place my marketing money somewhere else or see what’s clearly the most effective and place more marketing money into it. Gotta continue to work smart.  I have a total of 5 different Google Voice accounts.  If you know anything about Google, you’ll know that for some reason they love to use an invite-only system.  Each invite takes approx. 6 weeks to be honored.  If you want to skip that wait, your solution can be found on eBay.  Invites are going for about $6 a pop.

The phone calls from the Yellow Letters are beginning to taper off.  When a week has passed, I’ll report with a synopsis of total phone calls and total leads.  I still have some leads to call back, but I just didn’t feel like talking to anyone on the phone today.  I also had some calls come through today as well that I ignored.  That’s not a good thing.  But when I’m forced to answers calls 40 hours a week, it’s kind of hard to do so on the weekend when you don’t feel like it.  Especially when you’ve got someone talking crazy on the other end of the phone.  I really don’t feel like going to jail.

Welp. That’s all for now. I figured I’d post while my chicken wangs are cookin’.  I’m out.

P.S.
Bud Select 55 is the best extremely light beer out right now.  It has a surprisingly decent taste.  I’m officially back to drinking beer since three of these are the equivalent of one non-light bud, calorie-wise.  I luv it.

- Justin

Marketing, Real Estate Classified advertising, EBay, Google, Google Voice

Today wraps up the end of day one of the Yellow Letter campaign.  I received 30 calls in total.  That’s already a 3.75% response rate.  However, there are only two leads (one warm and the other is semi-warm).  This technique is reported to yield a 10 to 15% response rate, so that means I should have another 50 responses or so.  Hopefully, I’ll get some more leads.  I could care less about responses.

Which brings me to my next topic.  I have about 7 voicemail messages that are utterly ridiculous.  These messages were left when my Realtor was occupied with other calls or after 6pm.  And I mean they are pure comedy!  I bet the callers would be infuriated more if they could hear me laughing when listening to their messages.  I’m choosing the top two to share for your listening pleasure.  I worked on my six-pack by listening to these.

“Like I didn’t already know this”

“I’m really tempted on this one…”

The last message really inspires me to make an offer.  He wouldn’t have received a letter if he had a house with a tax assessed value over $150K, in-case you couldn’t smell the sarcasm.

Perhaps I’ll FedEx this guy an offer tomorrow.  The offer would be an option to buy his house in 2 days for $500k.  I’ll include a $100,000 option-consideration check, however there would be an inspection contingency.  He must have heated marble floors throughout, even in the garage!  I would definitely do this if I could hide in the bushes and secretly video tape his reaction when he read the offer.  That would be sooo worth it!  You don’t even know!

I mean seriously…there were many people who called and spoke to my Realtor or left a message pissed-off that I mailed them about buying their house.  If you didn’t care, don’t pick up the phone and waste your breath and my time.  Some people just have way too much free time on their hands and want something to have an opinion about.  Some of these messages remind me of the Family Guy episode with the lonely old widow cut-away.  A few of these ladies got my letter today for sure and called in.

Seriously, these people just don’t know I was making it rain with their letters hours before I sent them. Kick rocks! I’m out.

P.S.
If my CraigsList ad gets flagged one more time, I’m whoopin some ass!

- Justin

Marketing, Real Estate Business, Comedy, Marketing, Real Estate, Realtor, Yellow Letter

I stamped all of my letters today and sent them out.  Turns out I only had 800 letters and not 900 like I had thought.  Don’t know where the math went wrong on that one.  Or perhaps I skipped printing 100 when I was printing them out.  Damn, I’m craving sushi and king crab legs right now.  That has absolutely nothing to do with this post, I just thought I’d add in that fun fact.  I dropped the mail off a few hours ago, so the letters should go out on Monday morning and they will probably show up in peoples mailboxes as early as Tuesday.  This should be very interesting to see what type of results I receive.  I’ve got my Realtor ready to go with my call lead sheet and calls will be forwarded to his cell.  I think I’ll hold off on the second assistant for now.  It’s too late to try and find someone and build a rapport in time for them to take my calls.  It’s hard to find someone who’s not flakey so, I’ll stick with who I know for now.  I’ll definitely keep you all posted on the results on this campaign, how many calls received, how many leads, etcetera.  It’s always hard for me to end a sentence with an abbreviation, thus “etcetera” was spelled out.  And I could cook eggs on the exhaust vent of this laptop, seriously it’s that hot.  Those were two more fun facts for you.  I’m rarely a serious individual and here’s the video to prove it.  And I’ll post another like it soon but with Benjamins.  Peace out.

Internet Marketing, Marketing, Random, Real Estate Lead sheet, Mail, Realtor, Sushi, Yellow Letter

So I’ve covered alot of ground since Tuesday’s post.  I met with my Realtor on Wednesday and we went over my plans for making MLS offers.  The majority of our meeting was spent going over the Champaign County Association of Realtors contract.  I don’t know why, but I was expecting that contract to be more complex than it turned out to be.  That thing is only 4 pages long and very easy to understand.  I now have it saved in PDF form and since I have Adobe Acrobat, I can manipulate it so that I can do everything electronically, even my signatures.  You know I’m all about using technology for sake of efficiency so it’s on now!  To supplement each offer, he suggested that I enclose a letter explaining who I am and why I want to buy the seller’s house and also a bank pre-approval letter.  The bank pre-approval letter is going to be a mini-hurdle.  I have a 700 credit score and a decent income, but my debt to income ratio is through the roof (I finance a lot of my business on credit cards)!  I’m pretty sure that is a deal breaker.  I mean it’s not like I’m going to close on any of these houses, I just need the letter.  This is a classic, “It’s not what you know but who you know” situation.  I’ll figure it out.

I blogged yesterday at BiggerPockets.com and gave a very descriptive tutorial regarding the use of Yahoo Pipes and Hootsuite to automate some of your activities on Twitter.  Check it out:

Also, a while back I mentioned that CallFire interviewed me for a case-study.  They noticed the blog post at BiggerPockets.com I made about the use of the CallFire VoiceBroadcast service for Real Estate.  Check it out:

And speaking of VoiceBroadcasting; the other day I logged in to my MOHELA student loan account to check out how much I had left to pay and such.  I rarely log-in and check my account, I just send them my payment every month.  When I logged in I received a notice that said:

Required Profile Update:
The following items need to be updated on your profile.

Our records indicate we have a mobile phone on file for you. The following applies to mobile phones:

I authorize the school, the lender, the guarantor, the Department, and their respective agents and contractors to contact me regarding my loan request(s) or my loan(s), including repayment of my loan(s), at the current or any future number that I provide for my cellular telephone or other wireless device using automated telephone dialing equipment or artificial or prerecorded voice or text messages.

If you do not wish to give us consent to call you on your mobile phone, please update your profile.

Since I happen to be “in the know”, I knew exactly what this message was all about.  And this knowledge was obtained from researching the laws and regulations behind voice-broadcasting.  The FTC changed the rules on September 1, 2009, where every company now must obtain written consent from their clients to call them in an automated fashion with an recording.  This new law changed the game a bit for my marketing strategy, but I have another trick up my sleeve.

Today is the big day, well second biggest.  I’m going to pick up my 900 stamps from the post office.  Maybe they’ll let me get a couple of those bins to borrow to bring all of the stamped envelopes back in.  And check this out.  So I already mentioned that on Wednesday I had a meeting with my Realtor.  I was telling him about my Yellow-Letter technique and what my plans were and how I still needed to find a receptionist.  And he volunteered to take the calls!  This should be good because he is also an investor, he has the added edge of being a Realtor as well, so he should be great at taking all of the pertinent information and answering any real-estate-specific questions on the fly.  All I have to do is forward my phone to his and I’ll be all set.  I’m still thinking of getting another person to take calls in addition to him though.  He’s very responsive, but I’m expecting alot of calls and I don’t want any going to voicemail.  I can setup another receptionist and forward my number to that person as well.  The beauty of my Vonage line is that I can forward to as many numbers as I want.  Whomever answers the phone first receives the call. And I can track all of the calls online.  Gotta love VoIP!

Welp, that’s a wrap.

- Justin

Marketing, Real Estate Adobe Acrobat, biggerpockets.com, Voice over Internet Protocol, Vonage, Yahoo Pipes, Yellow Letter