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

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

Not too much to talk about tonight. I’m actually still recovering from the all-nighter from two nights ago. I can’t pull all nighter’s like I used to. Maybe it’s because I’m getting old. Or maybe it’s because when I have them I usually have to spend 8 hours at the 9-to-5, the next day versus a few hours at school. Yeah, I’m going with the latter.  I ain’t old yet, although my left knee creeks at the gym.

Peep my latest contribution to Biggerpockets.com, I’ve linked it below.  In the post I write about my experience with Floorplanner.com and how you can incorporate using it into your real estate business.

It’s amazing how powerful the web and social media is. I speak of one of the many ways; I was on Facebook yesterday and one of the posts in my Newsfeed had a YouTube clip about from the movie Boiler Room. As a matter of fact, I’ll find the clip…one sec…

Here it is:

After watching this four-minute clip on Tuesday, I went out and bought the DVD on Wednesday. I bet Time-Warner appreciates that.

Welp, it’s actually time to pop it in, grab me another Keystone and chill. Peace Out.

- Justin

Blog, Business, Tutorials biggerpockets.com, Blog, Boiler Room, DVD, Facebook, Floorplanner.com, Real Estate, Social media, YouTube

I just realized that I seem to always fail to keep my word when I mention posting again the next day or whenever.  Yesterday flew-by.  I did blog, but yesterday it was to BiggerPockets.com.  Contributing posts to that site is so taxing, I’ve only been doing it for three weeks.  It feels like it takes me all week to thing of a good post to create.  I try to be as unique and original as possible while focusing on a small niche of Real Estate/Technology applications. Uhm…not sure if that just made sense. 

Yesterday evening, I met with a young guy who is just getting started in real estate (I say that like I’m some kind of vet).  Anyway, he responded to one of my CraigsList ads and I liked the tone of his email.  He seems like a very aggressive, ambitious, and out-of-the-box thinking individual.  We chopped it up (slang for conversed, lol) for a couple of hours at the library about how we may work together in the future on some things.  He has alot of trades that may come in handy for sure.  He also gave me an idea about future usage of bandit signs….and I’ll just leave it at that because the feds are watching.  I’m telling you this guy thinks outside-the-box.

As of a few hours ago, I submitted two offers.  One was for a commerical property, I think I blogged about maybe a month ago and the other was for a residential property I think I also mentioned around the same time.  We’ll see how that goes.  Also, my offer-machine just got out the shop, it needed a coil,  so next week offers will made at a 10 fold increase at the least.

I’ve have got to start ‘making’ more time for my daily workouts.  Fitness is a huge priority to me in my life and I’ve have been neglecting it for the past month or so.  I’ve been working so hard, the gym has been out of sight, out of mind.  And the messed-up part is that my appetite has increased!  That’s recipe for disaster, “eat more, burn less”…I’m not trying to qualify to be on “BiggestLoser”, I need to check myself.  Just don’t leave me alone with any type of donuts, cake, cookies, ice cream, or gummy bears…and I’ll be fine.

I meet tomorrow with a local Broker who wants to discuss the possibilities of having my team develop his new website.  Hopefully, he will like the ideas I have for him and I’ll get the project.  It will be the first project for the new IT team I put together.  I’ve invested alot already in this client in hopes of getting the job (and I mean monetary investment, you don’t even want to know how much, I’ll let you know after I get the project).  He’s also an investor so if I can be a one-stop-shop solution that would be all-to-the-good.

By the way, just thinking about the issue I last blogged about still pisses me the **** off.  Some people! 

That situation reminds me of a guy on twitter who tweets all of the hilarious things his Dad says, check him out at @shitmydadsays.  If my Dad were still here, there would be some serious competition with this tweeter, if I did the same.  My Dad was a trip! One of his quotes that he embedded in me at an early age was, “Boy, don’t trust NOBODY but your Mother…and went shit comes up short…you better look at her too”.

Peace out, I’m going to the gym. 

- Justin

Entrepreneurship, Real Estate bandit signs, BiggerPockets, biggerpockets.com, broker, commercial property, gym, website, workout

I’m falling into bad habits again. It seems like every time I go to make a blog post another week has past.  That’s bad for both you and me.  More so for me as a lot of things take place during any given week that I’d love to read and reflect on in my blog (business diary).  I think I just need to stop obligating myself to 400+ word posts every time.  Then, I may not be reluctant to blog when time is sparse. Anyway, here is the cliff notes of what has been going on since last Sunday:

- Lawyer finally got back in touch with me, says it will take $5K for him to compose a legal model for me to follow regarding buyer/seller side birddogs.  I’m going to consider this after I get some more capital established.

- I got the local broker squared away with his website. Hopefully, he’ll think of me when he wants to upgrade it.

- I submitted a bid to develop the new City of Champaign website.  That damn bid application took alot of time, I didn’t expect it to. If I get that bid, I will be a very happy camper.

- Fired my local assistant that I had working on my envelopes and picked up what she had completed. I had to get rid of her not due to performance but due to her undependable nature.

- Found two new assistants.  One that’s local and one non-local.

- Contributed my first guest-blog post to the BiggerPockets.com blog.  I was inspired by Steph’s activity as a guest blogger on that site.  And then I happened to receive a subscriber email stating that they were looking for more guest-bloggers and that they needed someone to blog about the usage of Technology and Real Estate.  I thought to myself, “I can do that”.  I emailed Joshua Dorkin about it, sent him a sample (Yellow Letter tutorial), he liked it, had a few phone convo’s with him, and now I am to post there every Thursday.  I think nothing but good can come from this opportunity.  I just hope I don’t fall victim to the 4 hour writer’s block that I did during the first post.

- Starting to make money as an affiliate of Mozenda, so that’s encouraging.  I spent a lot of time last weekend getting some how-to videos posted to YouTube and I also have starting to target the Data Mining niche of Twitter Users via my additional Twitter Account.  Still have some ground to cover here with the marketing of this product.

- Took on a project to create a video for the Youth Illini Hockey program

- Took another project to create a marketing video for a homeowner in Mahomet, Illinois (10 mi from Champaign).  He’s getting a video and other internet exposure to sell his house, car, and some furniture.  By the way, this guy who is selling his house is my new role model.  He started a construction company about 5 years ago and now is doing extremely well.  He has properties in Illinois and Florida, a sports-car collection, etc…talk about inspiration.  Very soon, I’ll have some toys too.

- Justin

Entrepreneurship, Real Estate biggerpockets.com, hockey, illini, Illinois, joshua dorkin, justin mcclelland, Lawyer, marketing video, Mozenda, website