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Episode #5: Part 2: The 3 Categories of Seller Marketing, & Which Are Lowbrow and Thoughtful

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SFREI #5:  Part 2: The 3 Categories of Seller Marketing, & Which Are Lowbrow and Thoughtful

Episode Summary

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This episode is the second part of a two-part series of episodes on the critical topic of marketing to property owners (sellers).  In this episode, we discuss why certain very common and popular forms of marketing are Lowbrow and should be avoided by Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneurs, and which other forms of marketing are more thoughtful and successful.    

Free PDF Guide: 5 Critical Mistakes That Make Most Real Estate Investors Accidentally Lowbrow

We’ve created a free PDF guide just for listeners of the Sleaze-Free Real Estate Investing Podcast, called “5 Critical Mistakes That Make Most Real Estate Investors Accidentally Lowbrow.”

 

For instant access to the PDF, just go to http://Pod.thoughtfulRE.com

Music Credits

The theme song is an excerpt of “No More” off the album “Golden Era” by Forest For The Trees.  You can check them out on Amazon, iTunes, and Spotify.

Full Episode Transcript

This is Jeff from the Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur, welcome to episode number five of Sleaze Free Real Estate Investing a show for those of us who never really felt at home in the quote we buy houses, crowd. In this show we take a stand against what we call the lowbrow approach, the mainstream guru seminar distressed seller approach that ends up giving real estate investors, a slimy reputation.

Instead, we discussed the strategies tactics and philosophies that we call the thoughtful way. And enlightened approach to real estate entrepreneurship that focuses on constantly sharpening the sophisticated real estate entrepreneurs, three most critical capabilities number one seller relations skills. Number two, deal architecture skills and number three, opportunity vision.

When all three of these capabilities are successfully and fully emotion. You can make an excellent living today and build long term wealth while creating value for everyone. You touch along the way.

Show Notes for today’s episode, are at thoughtful r e.com, forward slash e five.

Please do yourself and do us a big favor by hitting the subscribe button in your podcast app.

In the last episode we discussed part one of the three categories of seller marketing, and which are low brow and thoughtful, today we’ll be discussing part two. So if you have not listened to part one, highly recommend you go back and listen to Part one before. Listening to today’s episode as it will provide important context for today. But first, a little bit of food for thought as we always do. Because after all, as Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneurs. We like to feed our minds with things to think about. And here’s what we’re thinking on today.

Today’s food of thought is about how it’s really nearly impossible to be over prepared in most situations of real estate entrepreneurship couple weeks ago my team and I put a house on the market that we have just completed a gorgeous renovation on. This is the most expensive house that we have ever sold.

Prices are of course very relative from Market to Market in our market this is an $800,000 house. So it is a luxury home, not the most expensive house in our city of course but on the in the higher overall range, and I found myself, emphasizing to my team earlier in the week, right before we were getting ready to put it on the market that we could not be over prepared.

We could not over clean the house. We could not overdo our efforts to create and manage our punch list, and check up on it, things like touch up paint and little things here and there. We could not build in too much time to allow for things to go wrong, and to allow for our punch list to expand faster and more than we thought it would. We could not overdo looking at every tiny detail. And so by carving out two whole days for them. The two of them and partly for me to just be on site. Just tightening everything up and fixing the inevitable last minute things that came up, we were actually 100% ready, but it took every minute of the time allotted. If you’re familiar with Parkinson’s Law, that states that the the work will expand or contract to fit the time allotted for it. It is never more visible in real estate entrepreneurship then when you’re getting ready to put a house on the market.

Another example is preparing for important negotiations about a year and a half ago, I was negotiating over the course of several months to buy a building that I called Adria beautiful brick vintage apartment building. And I had a big negotiation coming up with my seller. I needed to present all my due diligence findings my projections on what the appraiser was going to come back with for a bank loan, and ultimately propose some pretty significant adjustments to our price, and even asked the seller to consider doing some seller financing. If not, 100% seller financing so at this point this is one of the bigger negotiations I would had ever been a part of. And so what I did to prepare, is that I thought through every single topic that could possibly come up, and I had documents ready in neat little stacks paperclip together with sticky notes to identify what they were in my notebook inspection reports contractor estimates leases emails from my lender insurance information valuations of cops it everything, any category I could possibly think of. And I had everything at the ready, in my notebook. And by the process of doing that. I was entirely confident that there was nothing that the seller could ask me that I wouldn’t have documented info at my fingertips to share. And that even in the process of creating the all that documentation that I memorize so much of it and I knew I wouldn’t even need to fall back on most of it. If because I would know it off the top of my head but if I needed evidence to show him, I would have it right there.

Additionally, it would also demonstrate to him. How on top of things I was, which, if you were considering any seller financing would be an important thing to demonstrate because he obviously would want to feel like his potential borrower had his ducks in a row and all of his affairs in order. So for him to see that I had all that paperwork together was very, very important. It turns out that throughout the conversation. I didn’t even need probably 80% of what I had brought, but the fact that I was unbelievably prepared and organized gave me massive confidence in the negotiation what exactly as I needed it to. So the lesson here. Expect the unexpected and play out every scenario in your mind. Think about how it could play out and be ready for any of those possibilities to come up. That is today’s food for thought.

Alright, moving on to the main course for today’s episode. Today’s topic is part two of a two part series called the three types of seller marketing, and which are lowbrow, and which are thoughtful. Again, if you did not catch part one, it would really make a lot of sense to go back and listen to that before you listen to this one’s that would be episode number four.

As a simple recap in this last episode we discussed the two broad categories of marketing, that’s push marketing and pull marketing. Push marketing is when you proactively take your message out to your audience and pull marketing is when you are making yourself easily found by people who are who are out looking for solutions that you provide so you’re trying to pull them towards you when they’re looking.

We talked about the three types of seller marketing, and we discussed it in the context of a fishing analogy. The first type is bait fishing green put some bait on the end of a hook and put it in the water.

Secondly, we have Net Fishing in which you go out and you try to catch fish in your net. And the third one is spearfishing in which you shoot at specific fish with your spear, to try to catch them.

And as we discussed. There are certain strategies that are low brow and some that are really preferred by trees Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneurs and we discussed why. So now let’s take a look at some of the common pole marketing strategies that we consider to be categorically lowbrow. Now let me just say, none of this is meant to offend anybody.

If you are doing any of these if you have dabbled in any in any of these It is part of your process of finding your voice as an investor, and there’s no shame, and no offense is intended but we do want to clearly make the point of which things and strategies and tactics, align with the lowbrow approach versus aligning with the thoughtful approach.

The first one we want to talk about is seller websites, so this would be a website that is in the pole marketing category where you’re trying to pull people who are searching for an option to sell their property. It often has, what I would call a low brow URL address.

I actually at in this same process of trying to find my voice very very early on in my real estate investing career had a website at www dot Hello, cash.com. Boy, it’s embarrassing to say that, but that’s what I did. I checked just this morning for fun, that address is available.

Although I don’t recommend you buy it. So, you have a low brow URL.

And the message is is very simple and very consistent and predictable on these types of websites, and that is basically get a quick all cash, as is fast closing type of offer.

One of the main strategies with this is to use search engine optimization to pull these people in this is why it’s a pole marketing tactic because people are looking for solutions that are for selling properties quickly and whatnot. And they’re, they’re searching for terms related to that so people use SEO search engine optimization, to try to have their website come up when people are searching for those terms. They might also buy ads on things like Facebook, Google AdWords meant to drive people to these to these websites. So, let’s just take a step back and say, if you do have one of these websites What is it you’re going to get. If this is the bait you dangle out there. What is it you are likely to catch if anything. Well, you’re going to catch quote motivated or quote distressed, people, but you’re also going to catch some people who are also going to be looking for other solutions so you’re going to have competition when you’re in this category.

If somebody is googling, you know, sell my house fast in St. Louis.

Are you the only one that they’re going to be submitting their request with the only website, probably not. They’re probably in a situation where they’re going to be looking for any and all people with websites like that and so suddenly you’re going to be competing with lots of other potential buyers and Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneurs like to eliminate competition by buying properties that nobody else even those are for sale.

You’re almost certainly going to have a one dimensional type of conversation, it’s just going to be about price more than anything else. What price, can you offer. If the deal is as is requires all cash, there’s not going to be any likelihood that there’s going to be a conversation about terms, or any other flexible elements that could be to your benefit in helping provide a solution for these folks. And again, as we talked about in the last episode, so much about marketing is about the pre frame. What is the context that sets up how you’re talking to these people in the first place. And in a situation like this with a seller website. There’s already a pre frame of what they’re already expecting to experience when they submit their request on your site. The dynamic is already pre ordained, they know that they’re in a bind that you’re going to try to come up with something that’s simple low price that the dynamic is already established.

And that’s not the type of dynamic that thought for real estate entrepreneurs like to have or need to compete in the next category of common poll category lowbrow marketing is bandit signs in my mind bandit signs are just oozing sleaze bandit signs are the exact 180 degrees from what I would call Sleaze Free Real Estate Investing.

Who just think about this. Who is it who picks up the phone to call a handwritten Sharpie number on a bright yellow sign that’s been mounted illegally to a phone pole.

And then expects to get a classy respectable and professional person, answer the phone on the other end. That would be nobody, nobody picks up the phone in those circumstances and is expecting something professional and thoughtful on the other end, the pre frame could not be any more clear.

And so, it does not set a Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur up for success because it attracts the wrong type of people but it just pre frames a situation in a way that is exactly the opposite of what trees, really want to have. I being vulnerable here have tried bandit signs, two different times in my career. Again, this is part of the process of finding your voice as a real estate entrepreneur and there’s no shame in it, but I found both times that it just did not aligned at all with. However, how I feel about myself how I see myself and did not feel authentic to me at all. The first time was back when I very first started trying to do off market, real estate investing. These are the days that were leading up to the time when I described the story and episode number one.

A gentleman will say, came to my door where I live, and confronted me at my own house and called me a sleazeball. So back in that era, I tried bandit signs. We bought some printed ones with our cheesy Hello cash. com URL on them, and a phone number, which of course was not a real phone number because we wanted to have a buffer between us and whoever’s calling because we felt so embarrassed. So if something like a Google Voice type of number, and we put them up ourselves had to do it in the middle of the night, after it was dark because it felt so gross. And well, you know, illegal, actually, there’s that part two, and just was not aligned with who I am, I did not want anyone to see me. I didn’t want anybody touching my license plate or anything like that. I actually got very few calls from those signs anyway and the ones I did were either angry people who didn’t like the fact that there was a sign up and then neighborhood or they were just real crap properties. That’s a technical real estate term of course crap properties.

The second time I tried this was in the modern era of my real estate investing experience, my career, about seven years later after I finally got back on the horse.

And I washed off the trauma of that guy standing on my porch seven years later I got started again. And let’s just say things were going very slowly. And I spoke with the person I was working with at the time and I said look I feel like we owe it to ourselves, to give bandit signs a try again they’re so common in real estate investing. We owe it to ourselves to give them a try. Maybe we just need to get over this feeling of being gross. And maybe that’s what standing in the way of our success. So this time we we bought the the signs are blank bought a whole bunch of Sharpies hired somebody off Craigslist to write the right the signs and then go post them, and really nothing came of it at all except more feeling of being disgusting.

Other things that are in the category of lowbrow pull marketing are paid ads. Now this could be like a billboard, I think most kind of independent investors probably aren’t buying billboards, but some of the big networks of the We Buy Houses crowd, certainly have billboards newspaper ads, even like Craigslist ads which you don’t have to pay for but things saying that you’re in the We Buy Houses crowd. Basically it’s anything where you put a message out where somebody would see it in it effectively says, We buy houses on it.

Again, the pre frame that’s created by this type of marketing has already preordained how the conversation is going to go. You’re already going down a path with a certain type of person. And it really closes off all are so many of the options that make certain real estate deals, so amazingly powerful for your wealth building and your income generating efforts.

So now, let’s go back.

And let’s look at thoughtful push marketing. Back to our fishing analogy. Okay. So the big question, the big question you need to ask yourself, of course, is what is it that you want to buy.

And really, there’s sort of two types of answers that you could think about.

Okay. Answer number one is you might say, I want to generally buy things in a certain category so you might say, I want to buy duplexes in the northeast part of town, or I want to buy lower end homes that could be torn down for builders on the west side of town, or I’m looking for lots, or I’m looking for houses that I could buy, and resell and that would be average first time homebuyer homes in this particular neighborhood, however you define what it is you’re looking for. Doesn’t really matter that that part is all well and good, it’s totally up to you as to what you define.

But it’s like saying, I want to buy things that are generally in this category, and I’ll be happy to look at all of the options in that category.

That’s the first type of answer, you can have the second type of answer is where you say, I want to buy a very specific piece of property.

I’ve been looking at this particular house, this address on this street, that’s the one I want. Whatever your reason might be for that doesn’t matter either but the two different types of answers you can have is, I want to buy things that are generally in this following category and I’ll look at all the options in that category or, I have a short list of specific addresses that I would like to buy.

So let’s talk about Net Fishing. Okay, back to our fishing analogy Net Fishing Net Fishing is where we take our net to a lake or a body of water, where we know there are fish that we’d like to catch okay this is now this is a lake, whose fish tend to match your general type of thing that you want to catch.

And so you’ve identified a lake that probably has a good likelihood of having these types of fish. You take your net.

And you drag that net through the lake right so you you turn your, your boat on slow, the motors not going very hard you’re going very slow trolling perhaps you’d say, and you’re dragging your net through the lake.

And you’re seeing what will end up in the net. Okay, now when you do this you don’t know exactly what you’re going to catch, but you’re confident that at some point.

There’s going to be fish in that net when you pull that up.

and you’re confident that regardless of what you catch you will be able to do something productive with that thing that you’ve caught. And you’re only fishing fishing in a lake that has decent fish that match that target. So, you pull your net up you drag the net for a while you pull that up you look at it, you see what’s in the net. And then you will decide the most productive thing to do with it. So let’s say that I’m doing this and I pull up my net after dragging it through the ocean, and I’ve got three fish. I see one big nice sort of juicy fish, I see a medium sized one and I see a smaller fish. So I might decide based on, I didn’t know what was going to be in the net but that’s, that’s what’s in the net. So, I decide, perhaps that I want to keep this nice big juicy fish from my own family, to eat for dinner tonight. Okay, so in our analogy, this would be like buying a rental property and keeping it as Rambo property.

The nice big juicy fish, I’m going to keep from my own family to eat for dinner tonight. Then there’s the medium sized fish, and I look at that and I say I think I see a guy standing on the shore. And he looks like he’s looking for a fish to take home for his family for dinner tonight to maybe he’s even fishing right now but he doesn’t.

He doesn’t seem to be catching anything but I’ve got something here. So I’m going to resell this medium sized fish to him for retail price. So that he can take it back to his family to eat for dinner tonight. Right. So this is sort of like flipping a property. I’m going to sell it retail to him as if I were a store. And the third thing is we have our little small sized fish in our net as well. And so we might decide to take the small fish and sell it to the woman who’s running the fish market. Back on the land.

Because she is looking for fish that she can put in her case of fish that are for sale. So, this is like a wholesale deal right so we’re taking our fish to somebody else and selling it to her so that she can sell it to an end user. Okay, so I pulled up my net today and I found three fish and I decided to do three different things with those three fish. Tomorrow, when I pull up my net.

I might find that I have five fish, and perhaps tomorrow. All of those five fish are small ones. And so I decided to go to the woman running the fish market and I decided to sell her all of my small fish so that she can put them in her case to sell to the people who will ultimately eat them. Or maybe tomorrow. I have to medium fish that I decided I want to retail myself back to a person standing on sure who will use the eat the fish themselves. And I see three more keepers. So I’ve got two that I can flip, essentially, and three that I can buy and hold on to for my own family.

So the idea with Net Fishing here is that if you go to the right, Lake, you know that you’re going to be able to find fish you’d what you don’t know is exactly what you’re going to pull up in your net, every time you go out and of course what we’re talking about here is our marketing so we send out a batch of letters to a market that we know has fish in it. And this week we might get three calls next week we might get to the next week we might get 10. We don’t know who’s going to call we don’t know what fish are going to be in our net as we pull it up. But over time, we know that we will get a great mix of fish, some of which we can take home, some of which we can resell on a retail basis to others who need dinner, and some who that we, we can sell to a fish market, who will ultimately sell it to end users who will eat that fish.

So this sets you up for what I like to call the Triple Threat acquisition strategy and this is a key concept for thoughtful real estate, entrepreneurs who called the thrill of the Triple Threat position because it’s like in sports I remember when I was in sixth grade, and kind of joined the the middle school basketball team and the coach says, Jeff, you know, get in Triple Threat position, I was like, I don’t know what that is, he says, Okay, what your feet a little just a little bit wider apart, then your shoulders. I want one foot just a little bit more in front of the other, I want your knees bent, just a little bit. And when you’re in that position you are ready to pounce. And you’ve got three different things you can do. You could shoot from this position you could pass you can dribble, but you’re in a position that gives you options and you are agile. Well that’s kind of the same thing here with this concept that’s why I call it the Triple Threat acquisition strategy.

It allows you to keep your options open to buy and hold to buy and flip, or to wholesale or assign.

So, I hope you’re following my mixed metaphors and analogies we’ve covered basketball, we’ve covered fishing. And we’re talking about marketing and real estate, but hopefully that’s painting a clear picture for you.

Now for trees couple real estate entrepreneurs.

The trees. Net Fishing medium of choice is targeted, but high volume direct mail, so done thoughtfully you know you can do direct mail and and not thoughtful way. Certainly, but we’re talking about a high volume direct mail that is highly targeted. So in this case what we mean quite literally is we’re going to get a list of properties and the properties owners right these are our fish. And we’re going to get a list of those properties that meet certain criteria based on our business goals right so my business goals might be very different than your business goals.

But based on your business goals, you’re going to get that list. And then you’re going to send the owners of these properties, a nice non sleazy letter, you’re not going to be saying anything. Okay, I want to emphasize you’re not saying anything in this letter about fast offers as is buying with cash or any of that other sort of common lowbrow stuff. What you’re going to be doing in your letter is simply introducing yourself, letting them know that you are looking to buy a great piece of property and asking them if they would consider discussing, letting you buy that piece of property that they own either now or in the future.

When you do this, the impression that you want them to get is that you are a regular relatable person, just like they are. You’re not intimidating. You’re not a shark, you’re not interested in pressuring them. You are approachable. And you’re just wanting to have a conversation, should they be interested in entertaining that conversation.

One of the really important things with this letter is that you’re going to do your best.

When it comes to producing the letter and the way it’s written and just that all the logistics that go into it, you’re going to do your very best to make this letter feel like they’re the only ones who got the letter right if you’re going to be sending a letter that has a mail merge in it and there’s all sorts of awkward mail merge evidence and things that are in all caps when they shouldn’t be in all caps and extra spaces and things like that. It’s going to be real obvious that they’re not the only ones getting the letter but you want them to feel like this is a one to one, communication, even though from your perspective you want to be able to get a large volume of these letters out that all feel reasonably personable.

There’s a lot of thinking that goes into every little detail of how your letters are created how they’re produced.

You know, is, is the letter handwritten is it types is what type of envelope is it what type of paper is it what color is the paper. How heavy is it paper, what type of ink, what colors the ink what type of stamps. How do you process or how do you put your return address on there.

If that is outside the scope of what we’re talking about today but it’s certainly within the scope of what we will discuss in this podcast, but the point is I can put a bow on that whole thing and say, The point is to be very thoughtful about how you choose all of those details because they certainly impact the experience of the person, the seller who is receiving that letter contributes a lot to that pre frame, and to how they’re perceiving you when they get the letter and how they’re going to perceive you. if they choose to call you as well.

So who’s on the list that you mail to, well it’s absolutely a personal decision that’s based on your business and what you want to accomplish, you may want to buy a whole lot of rental properties you might want to do a bunch of flips, you might want to do a bunch of assignments and you might have some idea of the have a certain mix of those things. I personally, I’ve got an idea of a certain mix of those things that meets my particular business goals.

But let me tell you what I do.

I tend to really focus on quality locations.

I tend to focus on what I would consider a and b neighborhoods, only.

I don’t go out in the boonies I don’t go to the transitional areas I don’t focus on trying to predict what the next up and coming areas, I go to classic A and B, quality neighborhoods. I tend to send my letters to non owner occupants.

I tend to send my letters to non owner occupants who owned the property for 10 or more years.

I’m trying to avoid finding somebody who’s basically just bought it or they’re still maybe in the process of doing whatever they might do to the property, I want to see somebody who’s owned it for a while. And, you know, is probably experienced some increase in their equity.

I send letters to all the two to four unit buildings in my area, because in my good neighborhoods that is, who meet the criteria of non owner occupants in 10 plus years of ownership, but I sent to all the two to four unit buildings because I like two to four unit buildings.

As I see them as the juicy fish that I get to keep for my own family.

They also are great for resale as well but I really like those as keepers.

I also send letters to homes that are in the kind of lower middle say 40% or so of the values in those good areas. Okay. I’m looking for properties in this case that the average people who are going to live in those neighborhoods are able to buy I’m not looking for the extreme lows or the extreme highs in those neighborhoods I’m looking for the things that the average people in those neighborhoods. Goodbye. This is my effort to look for fish that I could resell resell on a retail basis, or I could wholesale.

And I also send letters to almost all of the apartment buildings in my great neighborhoods, because these to me. Are there my definition of juicy fish that I want to keep.

So depending on the size of your town or your city, this is going to result in a lot of letters probably one way or the other.

But these letters will all be reasonably targeted to owners who are most likely to be the fish that you feel like you could do something productive with. Okay, so the next category of thoughtful, marketing, in the push category is what we call spearfishing. So if you picture yourself standing in water with a spear in your hand you have one spear in your hand, and you can only throw one spear in your hand at a at a time, at one fish at a time. So, if you’re going to throw your spear at a fish. That means you’ve chosen very clearly, for some reason that you want that particular fish, and again, why you might want that fish completely up to you. But you’ve decided that’s the fish you’re going to shoot at, and you’ve got your one spear and you’re going to throw one spirit of time at one fish at a time that you want.

Now, for some reason. This is a fish that just fits exactly what you’re looking for and that could be for a lot of different reasons but it’s just, it’s basically what you’ve decided, you want to eat for dinner. It’s exactly what you know maybe that the people standing on shore would love to buy retail from you, or you also might know that it’s exactly what the woman running the fish market wants to put in her case to resell to people, but you know this fish has got potential, you, you could do any of those things with this fish and you’ve identified it and you say, I want that fish, specifically.

So, when you hit the fish with your spear right you’ve only caught one fish at that point, but you know that this fish that you’ve caught is something that you can work with you’ll be able to do something productive with this fish. So we’ll just transition, you know the metaphor back to real estate.

It’s really no different, right so you know you’ve found a deal that you can work with, like, a, you know, it’s a property that you want to own and keep.

So it’s your perfect property or you know it has big upside or it’s just an exactly the location that you want to be in over the long term or something like that. Maybe you know that this piece of property that you have just speared is something that you could easily resell on a retail basis to another user, you know that the buyers, the families and whatnot who are looking to buy homes in this area would just line up to buy this property from you, especially if you made some improvements to it. So you’re setting yourself up for a great flip. In this case, or maybe you know that this deal that you’ve just speared is something that other buyers. Other maybe flippers maybe other renovators would love to take off your hands in the form of a wholesale deal in the form of something that you assigned to them.

This in this way, this is kind of what some people call reverse wholesaling if you already know what your buyers are looking for, you might take your spear out to the market and just throw your spear at the things that you know you could easily assign to your buyers.

So maybe it’s a great buildable lot. Maybe your buyers that you’ve already talked to our builders you know exactly what they’re looking for what they would build their how, how they evaluate the profitability of a deal. So you go find a great buildable lot or a tear down house or something like that, and you already have a list of builders who would love to buy it. Maybe it’s a property that zoned for a much bigger building that it’s our then is currently there. And you can wholesale it to them to to a developer to do a much bigger project. Maybe it’s a strategically located property, and you know that you could assign it to the person who owns the property next door because they would have a strategic reason for wanting it. Whatever your reason for identifying a particular piece of property that you want to throw your spirit you you’ve identified it that reason is yours that’s good enough and you go after that property, specifically, you don’t have to share your reasons with anybody. And you might not even come up with the seller whatsoever. But the point is, you’ve decided that’s the fish I want and I’m going to aim my spear at it. So if you’re doing spearfishing as a Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur the medium of choice here is what I would call a gently assertive, direct communications campaign it’s probably going to be a mix of media. So because this is a one to one communication, this is this is the opposite of mass communication you’re, you’re creating a strategy for reaching a particular person about a particular piece of property. You want to make sure that those communications that they receive whatever form they are in that it’s very clear that this is not a mass communication that you are reaching out to them, and only them because you’re interested in their property, and specifically their property. Now, just to step back for a second. Ideally, if you’re doing things very well. From the perspective of the seller them receiving a spear phishing letter from you, and a Net Fishing letter from you should basically feel the same. They shouldn’t be able to tell any difference because to them, it should feel like this is a letter that was meant for me. So that’s kind of the standard that you should be shooting for.

But as you put together this gently assertive direct communication campaign spirit to try to spear this one particular fish. There are different media that you could use some great choices are of course personal letters, especially even handwritten letters right you very well may choose to just grab a nice piece of paper and a nice pen and write the letter out by hand because that it has so much more impact to somebody when they receive it. You can’t do that if you’re sending 1000 letters a week to your Net Fishing list but when you’re spearfishing you absolutely could you might leave a note card handwritten on the door of the owner of the property, because the owner might, you know, that the subject property that you want to buy you want to spear, they may or may not live there but you could go to where they do live and leave them a note card. You could knock on the door of where they live, you could find their phone number or try to find their email address and reach out to them directly. That way, In all likelihood, you’re probably going to do a combination of those things. But the point is, it’s a custom strategy that is crafted for each person that you want to, whose property that you want to buy with your spirits very very intentional. It’s very very deliberate.

I’ll give you a quick example there is a building that I would love to buy here in my town, and this is a small apartment complex it’s probably eight or 10 units.

It’s in a good area that has got a lot of new development around it. But this property is still kind of sitting there being very minimally maintained and I know that the owner happens to live about two and a half hours away. I have sent her a letter, a few times just one a one off letter straight from me to her. Very handwritten very personal and not respond or not received a response. I’ve tried to call her I have not received a call back. And now it’s my time to figure out what the next step is and I’m seriously considering that the next step is for me simply to take a drive, two and a half hours away to her house and knock on the door, because I would like very much to buy her piece of real estate, and I need to get in front of her and I need for her to see that I’m not like the other people that she’s probably receiving letters and communications from.

Alright guys, so I’m going to recap what we’ve talked about in episodes four and five here which are parts one and two of this marketing conversation.

All marketing can be put into two big buckets, it’s either push marketing, where you’re taking your message proactively out to an audience or pull marketing, where you’re trying to pull people towards you, who are looking for the types of things that you want to offer in real estate pull marketing is like fishing with bait. You know you put the bait on the hook.

You make sure that if there are hungry fish or looking for something to eat, that they can easily find your bait, and your hook.

Push marketing is Net Fishing, or it’s spear Fishing Net Fishing is like going to the promising waters and pulling your net through those waters, knowing that you’ll catch some good fish you just don’t know exactly which combination of good fish you will catch until your pool, until you pull that net up and you take a look at what you got.

and spearfishing is targeting a very specific fish and going after it on a one to one basis lowbrow investors tend to be about pull marketing. But what they end up pulling towards them are I would I would consider to be very low quality leads desperate people, low grade leads with in low grade areas, and they’re, they’re pulling them towards them in a way that creates a pre frame where the person, the seller is already expecting to have a negative and exploitative dynamic. With this potential buyer before they even pick up the phone or visit that person’s website trees. On the other hand, Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneurs prefer to push their message to the people who own the types of properties that they would like to buy and establish a non threatening comfortable conversation with the two parties, being on equal ground that and that leads to much better quality of opportunities, much better diversity of deals and diversity of the way those deals are structured, that can really facilitate different levels of income and wealth building for you as the Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur. Now, before we go, I want to talk to you here about kind of what we are teeing up with this conversation what’s coming next. In our dialogue together on this podcast.

I want to just talk about an advanced Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneurship strategy for a moment, because I’ve been hinting at it here in these last couple episodes lowbrow marketing is really all aimed at creating a price based conversation with the seller, and ultimately a price based deal, but there is so much more to Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneurship than buying properties for a low price so much more than a buy low, sell high mentality. Trees are strategically and thoughtfully building a portfolio that has a vision.

Trees are just as focused and sometimes more focused on negotiating and acquiring the right financing for a property than the property itself.

They might be more worried about negotiating the right terms on a deal. Then negotiating the right price on a deal.

And these great terms, often comes from the sellers themselves, the odds of negotiating amazing terms from somebody who called you from a bandit sign or googled sell my house fast are almost non existent thoughtful marketing sets you up for the Triple Threat acquisition strategy, where you can make much more out of the deals that come your way.

And I also want to just quickly plant a seed with you about other marketing related topics in the near future we’re also going to be talking about branding and positioning branding and positioning are very near and dear to my heart because of my background running a brand strategy, agency and consultancy for a long time, and branding and positioning really closely relate to marketing that we’ve been talking about these last two episodes, and they can make a really important and unbelievable impact on your marketing efforts.

But the funny thing is that branding might not likely be exactly what you think it is right now. So, I, I am excited to share more of that perspective with you in the near future.

So thank you very much for listening to Sleaze Free Real Estate Investing. On the next episode we are going to begin discussing the Triple Threat acquisition strategy which we’ve now sort of introduced through our marketing conversation here too. So again, please do yourself and do us a big favor by hitting the subscribe button in your podcast app. And then that way you’ll know the second that the next episode is released. As a reminder, you can also grab the show notes, which include a complete transcript of today’s episode at thoughtful, art, e.com, forward slash, he five. Until next time, this is Jeff from the Thoughtful Real Estate Entrepreneur, and I’m signing off. Thank you.


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