Justin B. McClelland

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