How to 10x Your Deal Flow Using “Evergreen Content”

David:
This is the BiggerPockets Podcast, show 508.

Trevor:
… and then we say, “Okay, now, where are we right now? And then let’s write down the steps or the things that we need to change to get there.” It oftentimes requires them to make a transition or sometimes a business model change. So if you guys are feeling like you’re in that spot where you’re getting wore out, you’re getting burned out, you think, “Man, I am on the hamster wheel. If I go on a vacation, I feel like I’ve always got to be plugged in to my phone or I always got to be plugged in to my computer,” you need to make a change, you need to make a shift.

Speaker 3:
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David:
What’s up, everybody? This is David Greene, your host of the BiggerPockets Podcast. I am here today rolling solo. The beard is on vacation, hopefully getting trimmed. That thing’s starting to look like a bird’s nest as of late. So let’s all pray for Brandon that he gets his self-put together. I am obviously aerodynamically inclined with my shaved head, so that’s not a problem I have. We have an awesome show for you today. To give you a little disclaimer, it’s a little bit long. So if you’re one of those people that doesn’t like long podcasts, just mentally prepare yourself now that you might have to listen to it in two different segments, and that’s okay.
Today, we’re going to be interviewing Trevor Mauch. He is the founder and CEO of Carrot, a software company providing ready-made and customizable websites for real estate investors and agents. He also hosts the CarrotCast Podcast, where he talks about all things real estate, similar to this, but with more of a business spin. Now, Trevor and I are going to get into a lot of things. A lot of it has to do with the future of real estate and how investors can make decisions that will allow them to succeed in the off-market realm, as well as how agents can participate in the off-market arena to help grow their business.
Now, the main key point that we get into today is the idea of evergreen content. Now, Trevor describes how there’s the way of doing things which is get out there, get it done, go knock on doors, go talk to people. He calls that the hamster wheel because you never stop, you’re always doing the same thing. Whereas evergreen content is something that you make one time and it grows in popularity and people can always find it. And what we want to do is help you as a person who wants to find off-market deals to use your voice, your platform, and your credibility to make it easier for people that have properties that you want to buy to find you.
As we were recording this show, the production staff mentioned that there’s a lot of synergies and similarities between how I built my businesses and what Trevor did. So I can speak from personal experience that this is my future, it is the future, and it’s where the focus of my business has started to go to. When I was a new agent, I would go talk to everyone I could, attend meetups, go meet people, very similar to what we tell you as investors, get out there and meet people and tell them what you’re doing. Then as you start to gain a modicum of success, you shift away from just getting out there and talking to people, to making it for easy to people to find you.
So now I do things like record this podcast, I have a YouTube channel, I put stuff on social media that when people want to know more about me or my business, they’re following it, they see that content and it never goes away. Now, what it does is it builds credibility for me as a real estate agent or as a mortgage officer, whatever needs that I’m servicing for my clients, they see me as the go-to person for that. Now, they may not need to sell their house the minute that they see that content, but if I did a good job building brand credibility, they are much more likely to come to me when they are ready to sell their house or refinance that house or they want to get a loan, because I’ve established myself as a credible source that they can trust.
My business has obviously done very well, and what we want to do is teach these principles and share them with you so that you can help get your real estate investing business off the ground. Now, for today’s quick tip. If you like what you hear today and you want to learn more about what Trevor’s team does, BiggerPockets has an affiliate link set up for you to make this very easy. All you have to do is go to carrot.com/pockets to sign up for a special webinar on this exact topic that we covered today. You can see Trevor break down this stuff in even more detail, go over case studies of investors like you who turn their websites into lead gen machines and had success in areas where it was previously very difficult to do so. So if you want to check that out, head over to carrot.com/pockets to sign up for a more step-by-step exact demonstration of how you can do what we talk about today.
It is time to bring in Trevor. This guy is a wealth of knowledge, he’s done this for a long time, he’s got a system set up that works very well. A lot of really successful investors do exactly what Trevor does and use his systems to get ahead. I’m hoping you guys have as much fun listening as I had talking to Trevor. And again, if you like what you hear, go to biggerpockets.com/508. All right. Mr. Trevor Mauch, welcome to the BiggerPockets Podcast.

Trevor:
David, man, pumped to be on here with you dude and excited about what you guys are starting to hear too with the How-To series.

David:
Yeah. BiggerPockets has got a lot of new stuff going on. So if the listeners haven’t been on the website in a while, they definitely need to go check it out. There’s a lot of new things happening, new podcasts being released, new content being created. BiggerPockets is growing along with the times. So I’d like to hear a little bit about… or maybe you should just tell us what is it you do. Tell me about the company that you started and tell me why you think it’s important for investors to know about it.

Trevor:
Dude, at the start, showing where things are right now, I run a company called Carrot, Carrot.com, where we help just shy of 8,000 real estate investors, a lot of real estate agents too. We love working with what we call the hybrids, people like you, David, where it’s agent and investor, because you can truly serve those sellers and buyers a lot better. And what we focus on at the high level, and this is what we’re going to dive into and teach you guys exactly how to do it, to get more motivated sellers in this tough market, is we teach you how to do it through something we call evergreen marketing. How do you do it to where you’re building momentum with your marketing?
It doesn’t matter what type of offline marketing, direct mail, cold calling, what the ebbs and flows of that type of marketing are, and how do you attract the highest quality, most motivated leads through the internet for motivated sellers? So that’s our bread and butter, man. But the reason why I love what we do here at Carrot is I love helping to build businesses of freedom and impact, and that’s why I’m pumped about being on here with you guys in BiggerPockets today, and that’s why I keep showing up to work every day. It’s like, “How do we help people build businesses that truly set them free and help them make an impact in the communities and the things that matter most to them?”

David:
So to clarify, Carrot is a software that allows investors to communicate directly to sellers, or agents to communicate directly to sellers, people that own real estate. Is that correct?

Trevor:
It is. And the main thing that we focus on… Everyone, grab your cell phone right now, you’re probably listening to this on your cell phone. So many people, including your sellers, are motivated sellers, or if you’re an agent, it could be your buyers and sellers, we’re using the internet to do research. The first place we always go for trying to vet out anything, if we’re going to go buy a pair of shoes on Amazon, what do we do? We look at the reviews on that shoe’s listing on Amazon, and any shoes listing that has no reviews, we bounce off of that thing and we go find a pair of shoes that has good reviews.
Well, the same thing happens with real estate agents and investors every single day. So if you’re doing cold calling, if you’re doing direct mail, if you’re doing open houses, knocking on doors, driving for dollars, every single time you put out a marketing piece, someone’s probably going to use that marketing piece to now go research on the internet to find you or possibly one of your competitors. So we help you get in front of them with the highly effective, we call it Authority Hub and attract the most motivated people who tend to be doing the searching on the internet.

David:
So this is for people that own real estate that are looking on the internet for someone to buy their property?

Trevor:
Dude, buy the property, or I was talking with a couple clients yesterday and, shoot, I’m flipping houses, wholesaling houses in Louisville with my business partner, Beau Hollis, and we massively use the internet for getting buyers as well. So if you’re were type of phrase like discount properties in Louisville or wholesale properties in Baltimore, a lot of the hedge funds right now, that’s the interesting thing about the dynamic in today’s market, is we’re getting such bigger margins on our deals right now selling to hedge funds, and our top three hedge fund buyers came through the internet. They did a Google search in our market that they’re buying in and said wholesale properties in Louisville, and they ended up filling out a form on our website. So it can be used for buyers or sellers, we tend to focus on sellers.

David:
The off-market market has always been like the Wild West, it’s just like eat what you kill, get out there, figure it out on your own. The MLS and realtors have really created like a sophisticated platform for buying and selling property. And it almost sounds like what you’re doing is you’re bringing a little more structure and organization to the off-market arena. Would you say that’s accurate?

Trevor:
Yeah. David, one thing I like to compare to, so Zillow did an amazing job dominating buyers on the internet. So if you were to search XYZ neighborhood homes for sale, XYZ city properties for sale, you’re probably going to find Zillow usually in one, two, three in Google for everything, they own the retail buyers. But the opportunity that we saw, man, is no one owns the wholesale or the distressed sellers, no one, it’s so fragmented. And that’s what we set out to do. We were like, “Man, if we can be the company that helps our clients own the sellers, imagine how powerful that could be, own the sellers online?”
And that’s what we’re doing and what we’re aiming to do. One thing you’d mentioned about the retail side really having the platform with the MLS. Dude, a few years ago on our podcast, we started talking about the shift in the industry and the shift in the market that was happening several years ago, where we would see 2017 or so, we were seeing a Zillow put up their direct home offer page and then they’d yank it down, then they’d put it up for another month in their testing, then they’d yank it down.
And we’re looking at it going, “Okay, guys, this is the direction things are going. You have the retail side over here, which everybody knows eight real estate agents. Then you have the wholesale side, which almost no one knows a direct home buyer, a cash buyer, or now people are calling them iBuyers. And we started to see the writing on the wall with the iBuyers coming in your Offerpad, Opendoor, Zillow, and some of the other big ones too. They’re right in the middle, they’re right in the middle. And they’re basically saying, “We’re trying to bring the professionalism of what the MLS and what the traditional real estate market brings with the benefit that the off-market property buyer brings, which is quick cash, close quickly, you don’t have to worry about open houses and stuff.”
And so they’re bringing the two industries together and that’s really where we see things going, is, if you’re an agent, you need to be delivering something to your seller where it’s not just the listing agreement anymore, it’s, here’s three cash offers or here’s a cash offer. And if you’re an investor, you can’t just be showing up saying, “We’re going to make you a cash offer.” You also need to say, “If you’re looking to get the most out of your property, here’s what we can list it for or our partner agent can list it for.” So things are squeezing towards the middle.

David:
A few things that I want to just bring some clarity on for the listeners, because you made it some really good points that I want to maybe focus in on and straighten out before we move on. The first is just the difference between off-market and on-market. When we say that, what we’re referring to is, an on-market deal is something that is being represented by a realtor, it’s being marketed through the MLS. This is everything you see when you look at Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, Trulia, these websites are just portals into MLSes and they’re owned by somebody who’s being represented by listing agent and a lot of the work is being done through the agents.
It’s a smoother experience with really less risk, I guess you could say, because agents have some fiduciary duty in their license and their govern. They’re there to smooth out as many hiccups as can happen at a transaction. Because there’s the presence of more people, they’re going to be a little bit more expensive because you’ve got more middlemen that all have to get paid for their time and their energy and their risk and their effort. Off-market deals is any time you’re trying to buy a property that is not being represented by an agent. So the off market is going to be just by definition, bigger than on-market because everything is applicable to that.
And iBuyers would be people who go make the cash offers typically, directly to people that own property that don’t want to list with an agent. Now, there could be the belief that they don’t want to pay a commission. I think it’s basically, in most people, they understand that you’re going to get more money for your house paying a realtor’s commission, but there’s also going to be a little more headache. You’re going to have to get it cleaned up and you’re going to have to get it nice and pretty. And the buyers are going to write an offer form that has contingencies in place and ways that they can back out.
So while it is more work, basically, to try to sell your house that way, and some people just want to say, “Hey, I don’t want to deal with it all, just get me an offer, get it sold. I’m not going to make as much money, but I’m going to get a more convenient experience for me,” and they’re done with it. Anything you want to add on those points?

Trevor:
Dude, you nailed it. The speed and convenience is the offer there. I think everyone can relate to this, as you go down to the car lot and you buy a new car, you buy a used car, the very next thing that they’re going to say… So you’ve just bought retail. You bought at the car lot, you bought retail. The very next thing that they’re going to say is, “Do you have a car you want to trade in?” And most of us are going to say yes to that. If we’re going to do that, we’re probably not going to take it to Craigslist, we’re probably not going to do that, even though we know we can make more money.

David:
That’s great.

Trevor:
Every type of commodity out there, groceries, houses, cars, they all have the wholesale and the retail side, and they both serve a purpose. And so, yes, the dollars are a little bigger on houses than with the car, but when you sign that thing to say you’re going to trade it in at the car lot, you know that they’re going to go down and put it on that same lot for $4,000 more, and you’re totally okay with it. They’re going to make the money, they’re providing a good service, but it’s for speed and convenience so you can walk out of there, “Man, I don’t have to list it, I don’t have to take people on joy rides in the car, I don’t have to know what paperwork to do.”
A deal we just closed yesterday, actually, in Louisville. The girl got a hold of us through what we’re going to teach today, through evergreen marketing on the website, on Thursday. Got ahold of us on Monday, we closed on Thursday, so four days. That could not happen on the retail market. And the girl knew that there was going to be a discount. We were very transparent in how much money we were making on it. It needed a lot of work, needed a ton of work, and it would just have been really hard to make that work on the market. So the wholesale side actually accelerates the retail side.

David:
There’s a lot of wisdom in that concept. If people could understand that business and much things in life tend to operate on a spectrum, they wouldn’t get so caught up with their inability to take action. We deal with this with our clients all the time, “Do you want money or do you want convenience? Because you rarely ever get the same thing. You want that move in ready house that’s amazing, it’s already finished and it’s perfect? You’re going to pay top dollar for that but you’re going to be able to just drop all your stuff in there and maybe that’s worth it to you. Especially when rates are really low, paying more for a property doesn’t cost you as much as it used to.”
If you really want that juicy deal, you’re going to be solving problems. You’re going to get a property that other people passed over for a reason, and you can’t have both. That’s where people get in trouble is when they try to say, “I want all the comedians and the best deal, and they just get stuck. They can’t take action. So, when you venture into the off-market arena, which is great, I buy there all the time, you are willingly walking away from convenience. And it sounds to me like what Carrot does is it tries to bring as much convenience as possible into that realm.

Trevor:
Yeah, dude. The biggest thing that I latched on to this way before we started Carrot… We work with about 8,000 investors and agents in every market you can imagine, Australia, south America the US is the biggest, of course, and our clients pull in about 700,000 leads a year right now. And so when we look at seven, 800,000 leads a year, most of them are sellers. The reason I’m bringing this up is how it happens is this, someone is a seller and they might be in distress, they might have a foreclosure impending or they may be inherited a house and they’ve got a brother over in this state, a sister over in this state and it’s just hard to deal with that whole thing.
Maybe they are moving and they can’t get it sold in time, where they’re like, “Man, we’ve got to pick it up and go.” Maybe they’re having an issue with their employment and they have two houses and this is our vacation home, like, “I can’t pay two mortgages anymore,” or whatever reason is, there’s a million of them. Or sometimes the people just don’t want to deal with the retail market, they’re going to go to the internet and they’re going to do a Google search like, “Sell my house fast,” insert whatever city, or, “Cash home buyers in,” blah, or, “How do I sell an inherited house in Birmingham,” or phrases like that people are typing in every day.
The aim is those people are really motivated, they’re going to be the most motivated type of prospect to us as an investor or an agent can be encountering because they’re actively seeking a solution. They’re going to Google and saying, “I want to solve this problem.” Direct mail, cold calling, they all work amazingly well. We never people tell people to stop them. But what we do tell people is, you have to recognize that it’s a hamster wheel marketing activity. And we’ll talk about what that is here in a second. But they tend to be going broad, and that’s where you’re going to get your volume.
You’re going to get your volume from outbound marketing. You’re going to get your targeted leads, highest margins, usually from the online evergreen marketing. So we help you get in front of the online evergreen side of it more effectively. And we’ll breakdown the steps that people can take to get there, like how do you structure a website to make it happen effectively, the mindset shift, how long does it take, what you have to do, what kind of content to put up there. We can break all that stuff down, man, as deep as you want to go.

David:
So what we’re talking about here is the difference between outbound marketing and inbound marketing. Is that fair?

Trevor:
Dude, outbound marketing and inbound marketing is 100% it.

David:
And how do you define outbound marketing?

Trevor:
So for me, outbound is anything that we’re actually going to be taking a message and putting it in front of someone where they’re not actively seeking me or that solution out. So you get a list. And this works amazingly well, a lot of our best clients do this and get deals every single month on the investor side and the agent side. So you might get a list of vacant properties, you might then cross check it with vacant properties that have code violations in your town. And those are probably pretty darn good prospects. Send out a direct mail of 1,000 of those, and then hope that you’re going to get the 0.5%, 1% response rate.
And that’s great, because you’re essentially sending out a message, tapping people on the shoulder and saying, “This might be relevant to you. If it is, call this number or hit up a phone number or go to the website.” And that’s great. But on the inbound side, you’re getting in front of a flow of people who are actually increasingly searching these things, especially during COVID, outside of COVID, and with the internet being adopted even more, more and more people are going online to find a solution to their problems.
So the big thing here, David, and then I’ll toss it back to you is, the cool thing about the inbound, we hear this all the time from people who add this onto their business is, the types of prospects you’re working with are completely different mindset. You’re not going to get any of that hate mail, “How did you get my address up sending me mails?” You’re not going to get any of the people who are saying, “How did you find my phone number?” Cussing at you, it’s only people who want to work with you, which is a really, really cool and compelling part of the inbound.

David:
I think that’s a great point to highlight. So in the real estate sales space, we would call that an outside sales agent. They go knock on doors, they go to events, they go hand out their business card, they do what we call networking, where they’re introducing themselves to people and trying to figure out, “Do I have something that you would need?” Like, “I want to buy a house, do you have a house that you want to sell?” And that is where you experience rejection because inherently in outbound sales or outbound marketing, you are going to come across people that didn’t ever ask for that conversation and didn’t want it.
Now, for the people that just grind through it, like you said, they can make great money doing that. It’s not like it’s the wrong way, but I would definitely say it’s harder, it’s an uphill battle. But you have a little more control. You’re not dependent on someone coming to you, you can go create your own destiny. On the flip side, you’ve got inbound marketing, which is making it easy to be found by people that have something you want. So that’s the people that may say, “I’m really hungry,” and they Google, “Best quesadilla in Denver,” and boom, they hit a Yelp and there’s like, boom, number one place, that’s where I’m going to go.
That’s typically how somebody like me operates. I don’t want to spend a lot of time. And I feel like if everybody else says it’s the best one, odds are, it probably is, and so I go there. It’s different than a taco truck person driving and knocking on my door and say, “Do you want my quesadillas? They’re really good.” Is that fair?

Trevor:
Dude, 100%. And the cool thing about it too, if we look at response rates. The thing I’m always going to tell people is, if direct mail is working for you, if door knocking is working for you, if driving for dollars is working for you, if cold calling is working for you, keep doing it. Now, here’s the deal though, is we have to recognize, and this goes back to me back in 2011 through ’12, is I was getting to a spot in my business, David, where hopefully I’m sure a lot of people can relate to this. I was getting burned out. I was making good money. One month we would do $100,000 a month in my previous company, then the next month it might be seven. I was splitting it with a business partner.
And at the end of the year, the taxable income was really strong. You’d look at the tax statement go, “Man, we made some good money.” But the problem I started to encounter was, I was getting stressed. During the year, I was getting stressed out because I couldn’t get off of what I now call the hamster wheel. Because the second that I’d get off the hamster wheel, because the majority of our marketing was outbound, was the second that the lead flow started to go down, then I’m like, “Shoot, I’ve got to get back on this thing.” And so it was really stressful because I couldn’t predict what my lead flow was going to be like in three, six months as well, and also, the income was boom and bust.
And so, around that time, I started to look at my businesses and I said, “Man, what do I like and what do I not like about my businesses that I’ve had up to this point?” And I wrote a whole list of things I didn’t like. I couldn’t find a ton of things that I loved. I did like our customers a lot, our product was great, but I was just getting wore out in my work, energy is depleted. And on that list, I took the several things that I disliked the most about the way I’d been running businesses in the past, and I said, “Well, someone once told me that the best way to find what you do want is to identify what you don’t want and you just pick the opposite.”
And so I looked at it and I said, “What if I can narrow this down to five,” what I now call non-negotiables, “What are my five non-negotiables for business?” And one of them was, I didn’t like the inconsistency in my business. So I said, “Well, what’s the opposite of that? Well, consistency and predictability, bam. Non-negotiable. I’m plugging that into my business now.” Because I’d realized that my marketing, the way that I was doing marketing was actively influencing my lifestyle. If I wanted consistency, if I wanted predictability, if I wanted to build momentum, if I wanted freedom and flexibility, I had to go look at my business systems for sure and my marketing, because your marketing dictates how busy you’re going to get.
If you’re doing a bunch of outbound marketing, looking at response rates, it’s going to be one in 40 to one in 60 leads from cold calling, traditionally, for sellers, turns into a deal. One in 20 to one in 40 leads for direct mail, turn into a deal. One in 10 to one in 20 Google PPC for sellers turns into a deal. One in five to one in 15 with SEO turns into a deal. And so I looked at it and said, “Man.” I listed out the rest of my five non-negotiables, and I looked at those ones consistency, predictability and momentum. And I said, “What marketing method was I doing that actually had consistency, predictably and momentum?”
And it went down to what I now call evergreen. It was such a small part of my darn marketing at that time, like less than 10%. But I said, “What if I just do that? What if the foundation of my business is built on evergreen and not on hamster wheel, and then I can add hamster wheel on top of it for scale if I want to, but I don’t have to?” And that was the shift that I made, and it dramatically changed the way that my businesses ran after that.

David:
I think that’s a really common pattern or rhythm, growth cycle for business is, when I look at real estate agents, you start off with outbound marketing, you are going and talking to everyone you can, you’re calling everyone in your database, you’re going everywhere you can and saying, “I’m an agent.” You’re getting your name out there. Then you start selling houses, you learn how to do the job, word gets out that you’re good. And you switch your strategy from talking to strangers to tell them what I do to talking to people that you’ve already worked with to get them to refer you business.
That’s kind of like a hybrid model. I’m talking to you to get you to give me inbound business. And then you do that for so long that there’s enough people out there that they are just bringing business to you, and that’s when you see realtors start marketing on billboards and putting stuff in magazines and advertising that you’re here, replaces going after deals. And I see this rhythm with real estate investors where they start off flipping homes. It’s very similar to what you said. You’re getting a deal, you do all this work, then you go sell it, you make your money, you got to go get the next deal.
You’re using the principles of investing, but you’re in a hamster wheel. You never get off of it. And flippers eventually get into the BRRRR method or some kind of long-term buy and hold where they keep the property, the property pays them cash flow every single month, and then that property functions as an evergreen income source.

Trevor:
Dude, it’s so important to make that shift because what you brought up there, David, is the cycle that we go on, because to get evergreen, no matter what it is, evergreen is relationship building, like you mentioned, that is evergreen. But evergreen takes time, evergreen takes work. And you can’t just from the first day, go, “Bam, I’m ranking at the top of Google for these phrases my best sellers or buyers are typing. I’m getting leads next month.” Or you can’t go into a new market and within 30 days, have this amazing referral engine of people. It takes work.
And I think that’s the biggest mindset shift that when we’re working with clients, whether it’s investors or agents, we have to have them look at their business and literally write down that list like, “What do you love about your business right now? What do you not love?” And then let’s come up with some non-negotiables. And if any of your non-negotiables are, you want more consistency, you want more freedom, we have to go backwards and say, “Let’s look at your marketing now. And now, what type of marketing are you doing? And if your marketing is actually making you busy, because you have to follow up on so many leads because they’re low quality, you either hire people to fill the gap,” which we do.
I have 50 employees. So you have to hire people to do some hamster wheel things sometimes. So hamster wheel is not bad. As a founder, we just don’t want to be doing that.

David:
Well, it’s especially not bad for those in the beginning of their career. Like I said, you start off with outbound marketing. That’s how you get your teeth cut. So there’s actually a need in the market for experienced people or even semi experienced people to move down this spectrum towards evergreen, which opens up spaces for the new people that come in and learn the business.

Trevor:
You’re spot on. And it’s all about the lifestyle and what do you want out of that business? Because I think when I’m talking to an agent or an investor and I say, “Where do you want to be in five years? “What do you want that business to look like?” Almost all of them say, “I don’t want to be doing things the way I’m doing them today, right now.” And so then we say, “Okay.” I call it the gap, David. And I go, “Okay, let’s create the gap.” Having a gap is a healthy thing. So at the top end is where you want to go. Okay, let’s write that down. What does that business look like? What does your average day look like? And then we say, “Okay, now, where are we right now? And then let’s write down the steps or the things that we need to change to get there.”
And oftentimes, it goes back to the marketing, like you were saying. It oftentimes requires them to make a transition or sometimes a business model change where maybe if you’re an individual agent or an individual house flipper, you might then go, “Okay, cool. Now, how do I buy, every fourth deal I buy, that deal I put it in my rental portfolio?” Or if I’m an agent, “How can I now build a team of agents to have people working with me and underneath me so I can build that part of the model?” So if you guys are feeling like you’re in that spot where you’re getting wore out, you’re getting burned out. You think, “Man, I am on the hamster wheel. If I go on a vacation, I feel like I’ve always got to be plugged in to my phone or always got to be plugged in to my computer,” you need to make a change, you need to make a shift.

David:
If you’re not there yet, but you see your trajectory, don’t wait until it’s time to get into it before you learn, that’s another thing I’ve just learned. When it comes to building new skills, I just did a TED Talk on this very same topic.

Trevor:
I saw you did that, man. That was awesome. Congrats.

David:
Oh, thank you for that. There is going to be a period where you just suck as you’re building a foundation. And everything in life is like that, even building literally a house, putting the foundation in looks like no progress is being made, but that’s where most of the work is being done, and then it shoots up once that’s there. So a mistake that I’ve made many times is seeing, “Okay, sales are getting better, I’m going to need to hire somebody,” but I wait until I am bursting at the seams and I have to hire somebody. And then you’re rushing in a bad employee and you’re trying to make it work.
The wise person has, if you build it, they will come, there’s a component of that, and sees where they’re going. And they start the process early. Now, what you’re describing about evergreen content is that it takes some time to season, in a sense. Let’s start with that. What steps should an investor start taking today if they want to launch a website to make it more effective in the future?

Trevor:
Dude, the biggest thing is the short mindset shift, because what will happen, we’ll talk with an investor, talk with an agent and they are three, six, eight months in, and they’re not getting the momentum that they hoped depending on the market, and they start to second guess things. There’s something I call the 261 Formula. And this actually comes from one of our clients, he’s a hybrid investor agent out of Tucson, Arizona, named Tyler Ford. And essentially, the model with evergreen, you can apply this to relationship building too. So anything that takes momentum to build, but once you build it, man, you’re in the right spot.
The two is, you’re going to work your butt off the first two months once you’re launching what we call the Authority Hub. We’ll talk about it here in a bit, the shifts you have to make away from just having a website and what an Authority Hub is and why it’s so much more impactful and powerful in a competitive market like we’re in right now. So the first two months, man, you’re launching the website, you turn it into an Authority Hub. We’ll talk about the elements to do that to really amp it up.
Then what I like to do is get some sort of hamster wheel marketing going right away if you don’t really have something going. Because like I said, it’s going to take some time to get the momentum going. We don’t want to not have deals for three or six months. And so if we’re just talking online, David, we’re going to do Google pay-per-click first. And when we look at the 80,000 or so leads that come in through our system every single month, most of them sellers, the number three source now is Google ads, bounces back and forth between Facebook ads. Number one is the evergreen, SEO through Google, organic, but we want to launch a Google ads campaign.
And the first thing that I want people to do there is you block out a budget. I’ll walk through a basic quick calculation that’s just a massive mental explosion for people when they think about their paid ads, is a big, big deal. And the reason I’m bringing this up before we talk about the website is because I want to get people deals in the first 90 days. If we can get a deal in the first 90 days, that’s going to buy you time while that evergreen builds up over the six to eight months. So if you guys can imagine this, I’m going to visualize it as much as I can speak it through. I’ve got the iPad, but I think I can verbalize this.
So I want you guys and gals to write down, or if you’re driving, don’t write this down, just mentally, tuck it back in your noggin. What’s your average profit per deal? So if you’re an agent, what’s your average commission per transaction. If you’re an investor, what your average profit per deal? And I’m just going to use a round number for sake of calculations, let’s say 10,000 bucks. A lot of markets are way bigger than that. David, your market, a $10,000 deal, you probably wouldn’t even look at on the investment side. But that might be a good commission on some markets or an amazing wholesale deal in a market like Birmingham or something.
So write down that the average profit per deal. Number two, what I ask you is I’ll say, “What would you trade in marketing dollars to get that $10,000 or in your case, 20 grand or 25 or 50 or whatever the number is? How much would you trade in marketing to get that?” If you’re newer and you’re not sure, write down the 25% number. So what’s 25% of that number? In this case, 2,500 bucks is 25% of 10 grand. I’d be willing to trade $2,500 to get that $10,000 all check.
And so that’s the number that I’d trade. Now, here’s the last part of the calculation that tells you your marketing budget, because what we like to do is we’d like to remove emotion from your budgeting. Anytime people add in emotion and don’t follow the math, now, that’s where we start to inject in our own personal feelings about that number, “Hey, how many leads can I get for 1,000 bucks a month?” Or, “Is 1,000 bucks a month okay?” That’s an emotional number. So if you’re going to a vendor, if you’re going to someone and you’re saying, what can I do with 1,000 a month?
That’s not based off of facts of what the market says you should be able to invest to get a deal, that’s based off of your emotional tie to this $1,000 to say, “I’m scared to lose more.” So we have to remove that. So you’ve got the 2,500 bucks, and now I say, how many leads does it take you with that marketing method to get one of those deals? So with the online side of things, evergreen, let’s use the one in 10 number. So one in 10 sellers turns into a deal. That means your max cost per lead is 250 bucks. So math says, if we have a $10,000 average profit per deal, we’d be willing to spend up to $2,500 for a cost per deal.
We close one in 10 of those with good online marketing into a deal, that’s a $250 lead cost. And that might sound high. People might be looking and go, “I’m not going to spend 350 bucks a lead, my buddy over here is getting Facebook leads for 25.” I don’t care because the math says I can spend up to 250 bucks a lead as long as I close one in 10 and work it out really well. And so nail that budget, and then you just have to ask, “How many deals do I want to get every month? Do I want to get just this one this month? Cool, allocate 2,500 bucks then.” And hopefully, you’ll get the deal way sooner than that.
But a lot of people allocate 500 or 1,000, they stop their marketing and they don’t let math have a chance to actually work for them. So that’s the first part. Get that going, get some hamster wheel going and/or paid ads. Get that first deal, reinvest it back in.

David:
Well, is there something to be said for the longer you have the site, the more effective it becomes? So $250 in year one is less effective than $250 in year five?

Trevor:
Well, it depends on the marketing methods. Going into the evergreen side, once we launched some hamster wheel to get traffic coming in for sellers like a Google ad, your cost per lead actually goes down on the evergreen over time dramatically. So if we’re going to focus on putting up content online, we’ll talk about the authority hub now and what you need to do with your website. That 250 bucks actually goes a lot longer way in a year or two, and your work actually goes down with evergreen marketing.
Now, let me show my screen in the iPad really quick. For any of you guys and gals watching the video version of this, the video version of this, go find it on BiggerPockets YouTube. I’m going to walk through this little framework and I’ll visualize it as well as I possibly can. For those of you listening to this, like I said, go to YouTube or I’ll visualize it. But if you were to look at this graphic here, and this graphic essentially shows from left to right month zero to month 12 in that first year with evergreen marketing, you’re going to be hustling your butt off in that first two months to build your authority hub, get some Google pay-per-click going, or some sort of ads or some offline marketing and whatever other kinds of marketing you can do to get some deals in that first three to six months.
And then right here in that six months after you execute and build that authority hub, and I’ll show you guys the elements of that authority hub here in a second, how you should build it out, you should start to get some rankings in page two in Google for those phrases, like a summer house fast, Bakersfield, California, or sell my house, Brentwood or whatever, which those phrases are all phrases Carrot clients own on Google right now. But around the month six to eight, David, we see what we call a ranking sprout. So this period here is like purgatory with evergreen marketing, same thing with relationships.
Month zero through six, you’re going, “Man, why am I putting all this effort into this? I’m not getting the results from it.” But you have a ranking sprout in Google around month six where Google starts to recognize the content you’ve put on your website, it’s a fast loading website. That’s crazy important. It’s not just a brochure site that says, “Here I am” but it’s actively being updated with robust content that your prospects want to see. And I’ll talk about what you guys can do in under 20 minutes a week to do that. And then right here, month nine to 12 is where you start to see momentum and getting that top five, top six in Google.
Depending on your market, you might be number one or number two. And then year two is where the real momentum picks up. That’s where a lot of our clients take the hamster wheel marketing that they did do. And in year two, possibly even year three, they hang up the phone finally and they say, “I just don’t want to do this anymore. The deal volume that I currently have is sufficient enough.” Or they stop doing direct mail marketing because it’s able to give them the consistency and profits because the profits tend to be higher with your inbound marketing. So that’s the timeline of it.
And the cool thing is your work goes down. So as your results go up and build momentum over time, your work actually goes down over time with evergreen marketing. Hamster wheel, your work stays the same. You’ve got to keep on doing the same activities in order to keep results coming in, or hire a team to do it for you. With evergreen, over time, you can put less and less content on your website and your work actually goes down, your cost per lead goes down, your results go up.

David:
What if I hear what you’re saying and I’m like, “All right, I get it. I need to get off this hamster wheel.” In fact, sometimes I even think about quitting real estate investing because I do have some modest results, but God, the work is… I might as well go back to my W2 job, I just traded one job for another, but I don’t know how SEO works. In fact, I don’t even know what SEO means, I was hoping Trevor would tell me what that word means.
How does your company, you, or what advice do you have for those people, help them to overcome some of those challenges?

Trevor:
I’m going to bring up a little page here. The biggest thing is SEO is just simply doing what needs to happen to put the right content on Google so Google likes it and says, “This is the most relevant and high value piece of content on the internet to serve this problem this person has.” So I’m going to share my screen really fast, David,

David:
And it stands for Search Engine Optimization.

Trevor:
SEO is Search Engine Optimization. And it sounds pretty fancy because there’s some technical elements to it and there’s definitely things that have to be done. And the cool thing is if you have a budget, like if you’re making some income elsewhere, you can hire firms to do the more technical parts for you. You can hire a company. We don’t do SEO for you, but we provide the tool and the software that makes it way easier, it gives you an advantage in your market.
Here’s an example. Let’s say I was going to type a phrase like sell my house fast. I guess Martha’s Vineyard is one that popped up in my search because I was looking at it yesterday, and you’re doing a Google search. And you happened to be in Martha’s Vineyard and you’re like, “I need to sell this house.” So at the top of Google, you’re going to see some ads. And the ads are the things I explained earlier that you can pay money now and get right to the top of Google and get in front of your best prospects today
And we’re paying in Louisville. Now, we’re paying about $3,000 a deal, we’re averaging about 40 to $5,000 for a wholesale deal, we’re selling to hedge funds right now. And our per lead cost is over 200 bucks. That might sound like a lot of money that per lead cost is like 280 bucks, but when we’re closing one in 10, one in 15, depending on the week or the month, it really pencils out pretty darn good. So we might be paying 200 bucks and then we might be paying 20 to 30 bucks a click sometimes.
This here down here, and I’ll explain it, below the part on Google it says ad, that’s the organic part, that’s the SEO part. So if I were to click this first one, I’m just clicking a link in Google. If you’re following along guys and gals, you guys can go and check out Google and just do some Google searches near market, type, sell my house fast, insert your city, type best real estate agents, insert your city. Type cash home buyers, insert your city. And so this site that popped up here, this one happened to be ranked number three in that market, it’s a Carrot site and our software helps you launch that high converting website, looks great, loads insanely fast, fast loading websites in the industry.
And it helps you to build a more credible profile, build trust, and convert that person. So that’s the essence of the high level, how does SEO work? You put the right content on the internet with the right technical structure, which we take care of all the technical structure so Google likes the overall package and it says, “You know what, the user experience in this website’s good, the content’s robust, this is probably going to be the most relevant for you.”

David:
So what you’re telling me is that your company covers the technical elements of how to maximize SEO so that the person who is getting the website doesn’t have to learn that on their own?

Trevor:
Dude, 100%. There’s a lot of ways to launch that on site. You can go to Wix, you can go to Weebly, you can go to Squarepace, you can get a broker provided website. If you’re an agent, you can set up a custom site on WordPress. The biggest thing that we help you focus on so you can be an investor is the whole tech stack. Our websites load faster than anything else in the industry. Third-Party studies have studied our system and shown that. the only a website system in this study by freshchalk.com that loaded faster than our websites was Google’s own local websites, which is a pretty cool thing.
And that really impacts SEO, impacts conversion. And then our websites comes stocked with content, stocked with the right design, the right set to convert, you just go in there and personalize it. The one I’m showing here visually to the YouTube crowd, our client popped in here and used Martha’s Vineyard specific photos, put in his testimonials, a little bit about him, some of his credibility with Facebook and his veteran owned business badge. It’s really building the authority for his business rather than just being a brochure.

David:
And what would you say to the people who say, “You know what, I don’t need a website, I have social media. I do all my business through that”?

Trevor:
Dude, such a good question. Such a good question. I was talking with a client Farr Group out of Spokane, one of the biggest agencies in that area now, and Farr Group is amazing with social media. They’re among the best with social media of any agents that I’ve found. And most of their business up to even just recently has been driven by social media. What I tell people is this is your hub of your content or what I call the hub of your authority should never be your social media profiles, because that means you always have to be posting new things to keep up, which is the definition of hamster wheel.
Hamster wheel is endlessly doing an activity without any end in sight. And so if your Facebook page or your Instagram page is the hub of your content, you are now tied to Instagram and Facebook and you now have to always post stuff to keep it up. And so if you want it to stop doing that for a month or a year, what’s going to happen is that it’s actually going to start to go against you if people find it, because they’re going to see, “Man, their last post was eight months ago. Is this company still in business? Are they still active? Are they still relevant?”
Instead, what we’d like people to do, David, especially for agents on this side, because agents are so invested in the social part, is take some of the longer format content. So let’s say you have your cell phone and you’re out there at a property and it’s a property on a river and you’re a real estate agent in your listing. I would take out the phone and say, “Hey, this is Trevor with ABC Realty in Roseburg, Oregon. And I’m out here at a house on the North Umpqua River. And I’m actually going to show you the five things you should look for if you’re looking to buy a house in the North Umpqua River and dah, dah, dah.”
Film a three to eight minute video, take that video, put it on the Facebook and you put it onto IGTV, but now don’t ignore taking that video and putting under your website or your authority hub so you can have long-term momentum building growth. And a really good example, I’ll just verbalize it. You guys can check it out yourself, but just one of many examples, if you just search a phrase like farmland Roseburg, or there’s thousands of other phrases I can give, you’re going to find those little videos.
I call them video posts on our system, where it’s three minute, five-minute video, the person is talking and being an expert and authority, and normally they would only put those on social. It gets some views for 72 hours, then the views would be gone. And now that same video for farmland Roseburg is ranked number one in Google has since 2017 for that agent for any and all phrases around farmland Roseburg. And he created a three-minute video, took him three minutes to upload it to YouTube, took him five minutes to put it into a feature that we have called video posts that takes all the words out of that on video, writes an article for you and sends you an email two hours later and says, “Hey, your article’s ready.”
And so make the hub of your content something that’s evergreen. So put your longer format videos there, turn them into written content, but use social media for that active relationship building, staying in the market, things like that.

David:
As I think about what you’re saying, you can’t search on Instagram or Facebook how to buy a house, it doesn’t have the capability of connecting you with the people on that platform that do that. You search if you already know who you want to look up. You can learn a lot about a person or maybe a business if you Google David Greene on Instagram. But that’s what we use social media for is I already know what I’m looking up, I want to verify if this person’s legit. Do they have videos of them kicking puppies? Are they crazy or can I trust them?
But when you don’t know who you’re looking for, you just say you have a problem, we don’t go to social media. You go to Google, you go to the internet, like, “Where’s the best quesadilla?” If someone said, “Eat at Fred’s,” I could maybe look on social media to see, “Well, what does eat at Fred’s, what does their stuff look like?” But that’s not what people do when they have a problem and they’re looking for the answer. And so I really liked that idea that if you put this video on the internet as well and it starts to catch traction, for the rest of the time that video is there on that specific thing when someone’s Googling something about Martha’s Vineyard, they’re much more likely to find your page.
And frankly, it’s scary how good Google is at finding those weird niche things and connecting you with the best place for it.

Trevor:
It’s so scary. I’ll give another screen-share example here. And so once again, guys, if you’re listening to the podcast version on BiggerPockets, go find BiggerPockets YouTube channel, they have amazing stuff over there, and you going to be able to see some visuals, but I’ll walk through in an audible way you through this. I’m on a website, simplysold.com. It’s my business partner in Louisville, a seven-figure wholesaling operation. And what we decided to do about two years ago is we said, “How can we take what he was doing which was all hamster wheel marketing, how can we take it and start to build the authority hub?” Which is actually going to make…
The cool thing, David, is when you do your authority hub website the right way, it makes all of your marketing work better. So if you’re doing direct mail, if you’re doing cold calling, if you’re doing driving for dollars, if you’re doing social media, having a good authority hub with the right credibility, the right content that shows that you’re active, it shows you’re an expert and authority on this topic, the right reviews, it’s going to make all that work better because offline marketing drives online demand. You send out that direct mail drop, they’re going to Google search your phone number.
They’re going to Google search your name, your company name. And so one of our clients, Carter Steph, 1-800-2SellHomes out of Oklahoma City, biggest home buyer in Oklahoma City, big agent as well, he’s a big radio and TV guy. And so just by switching over from a normal type of a website, beautiful looking website, everyone would look at it and say, “it look beautiful,” into what we call an authority hub here at Carrot, he added $20,000 a month in new revenue from the exact same marketing he was already doing. No additional traffic source, just from making his website more authoritative and having the right flow.
And so with Beau, when you land on this website, it isn’t just a normal stock type of a thing, he has testimonials right at the top. And so that’s one of the things I would do with your authority hub is immediately look at your website if you have one y’all and say, “If people land here, number one, can they tell what service I offer? Can they tell within five seconds that I can help solve their problem?” And so if you’re looking to buy a house, or if you’re looking to sell your house in Louisville and you land on a website that says, “We buy houses in Louisville, any condition in the area, sell without the headache, get an offer from us,” cool, checks the box, I think they could probably help me with this.
Then the next thing that goes in that prospect’s mind, and you can relate the same thing to buyers, I’m going to focus on sellers right now, off market sellers, is you look at it and say, “Okay, now they’re probably going to say, ‘Well, how does it work? Okay, well, I’ve never heard of selling my house direct for cash, how does this thing work well?'” So you need to make sure to have content on the website that shows how the process works. So now we’re going through each one of those objections on this authority hub, and Beau has done an amazing job taking our model and he’s created really good video.
So Beau in this video on the How It Works page, I just clicked to, tell us, “Hey, here’s how my process works. You’re going to call, you’re going to put in your information, I’m going to be the guy talking to you. Here’s what we’re going to talk about. I’ll come and meet with you at your house if we get to this spot. Here’s what my offer looks like.” It’s adding transparency to the process. And then they’re going to go, “Cool, check, mark that box. I understand how it works.” And then the next thing that’s going to pop up in their mind, David is like, “How’s this different than agents? How’s it different than going and selling on the market or how’s it different than others?”
And so have content on that authority hub that’s helping you compare. So I just clicked the Compare page. How is selling this simply so different than listing with an agent or vice versa? If you’re an agent, how is selling with me, Trevor ABC Realty than the mega agents if you’re a brand new agent? Or how is selling with mega agent me, different than selling with the newer agents who are coming on the block, your aunt Marsha? Break it down. And I’m not going to go through the whole thing, but you want to go through the logical way that a seller makes a decision.
And then after that, they’re going to go, “Cool, I understand how it works, I understand they have a service. I understand how it’s different than the iBuyers, are different than agents or vice versa.” And then they’re going to go, “Are they legit? Are they going to low ball me? Are they going to actually be able to close?” And this is where you really stand out with an authority hub is you start to build in the reviews, the testimonials, building that trust and authority with testimonials and with content, expert-driven content, as they’re bouncing around that site and they go, “You know what, David seems like an awesome dude. He seems like he knows what he is doing. He seems relatable. I’m going to hit him up.” And your authority needs to do that.

David:
Well, what’s so great about this page as I’m looking at it, is it does answer the questions that we’re thinking that we don’t want to articulate. I noticed in sales there’s a couple mistakes that people make. One of them is that they’re afraid to broach the topic that they know, the objections of the other party. So I’m an agent and I just meant you at an open house and I really like you and I want to represent you, but I’m afraid to say that because we just met and you don’t trust me yet, and you may have another agent.
So what happens is I wait for you to make the first move, I wait for you to come to me, but you’re not going to do that because you don’t know me that well yet. I seem cool, you’re waiting for me to sell you on why… You could be swayed, but I need to do some work to do it. So we end up in this standoff and then you go back to using a mediocre agent and I lost the deal. The better way is to say, “Look, I really want to help you, I’m pretty sure what you’re feeling is I just met this person 30 minutes ago, can I really trust them? Do you mind if we talk about what objections you have and I can make sure that we’re a good fit?”
That just opens the door to the conversation that allows you to say why you’re better. This person’s website did that. You know in their head they’re think, “Well, yeah, I’d like to sell my house fast, but am I going to get ripped off? Should I list it with an agent?” And the question literally says, the difference between listing with us and going to an agent. And if the information is portrayed honestly, they do say you can probably make more selling with someone else, but here’s what you’re taking on in order to do that, here’s all the inconveniences that you’re going to get.
And then you work your way through the objections that they have, is this a con artist? Are they going to take my money and take off to Switzerland? You’re way more likely to get people to move forward. And the last piece I’ll say is you can’t make a person work to get their own questions answered. They won’t do it. If I’m trying to figure out, this is weird, I keep bringing up this example, but best case is in Denver. If you don’t have a picture-

Trevor:
David’s hungry, man. It’s lunchtime.

David:
I don’t know how that started, but if you don’t have a picture of that quesadilla on the website when I first go there and in two seconds, I’m gone and I’m going to go to the next one. It’s just how our brain has been evolved to process information now that we’re in the information agent, we’re getting hammered by everything. So what you really want is to make it easy for the person who has what you want to work with you. And that was a great example on that website.

Trevor:
Dude, I appreciate. I want to get people to understand the importance of this, and here’s the deal guys, this is what I do for a living, it’s our business. I’m in the business because over years and years, and years, this is what I found was the most effective way for me to grow my businesses and others. And here’s the deal, I call it phantom expenses. And a phantom expense to me is money that should be in our bank account that’s not for some reason. It’s an under optimization of some process, it’s an under optimization or underperformance in our website, or in our marketing piece, or whatever it is.
And going back to the example of your average profit per deal, let’s say it’s 20 grand, or in Louisville, we’re pulling about 40 grand plus in our average profit per deal selling the hedge funds right now. And so if we’re looking at a $40,000 deal, how many of those deals am I okay with losing this year because of underperformance on my website, because I’m not treating it serious, I’m saying, “Well, all my deals come from offline”? Or, how many deals are you losing right now? Like Carter was, he was losing 20 grand month in deals, but he didn’t figure it out until he switched the way he was approaching his website.
So how many deals are you okay with losing this year so that you can have a cheap web solution?

David:
That’ll fry your noggin, if you just take a second to think about how much opportunity you’ve lost over the years, instead of-

Trevor:
And I’m always the guy who thinks I’m the positive, but sometimes I go like, what’s worse case scenario? What gaps can I plug? Because if I’m always hustling to try to find more things to add on top, more leads, more top line, and not thinking about how I can actually make the existing stuff I’m already getting work better, then I end up hustling and working too much. And so think about that and just picture yourself, do I have an authority hub that when someone lands there, it truly puts my best foot forward. It ranks well in Google for, at the very least your company name and with the word reviews?
But at the very most, for a phrase like sell my house fast in Louisville, or cash home buyers and whatever, or best real estate agents in blah, it’s powerful, guys.

David:
One of the things you mentioned was this hybrid model. We didn’t really get into that a lot, but I think that that’s cool because we can share that’s something I’m doing with something that you’re doing. We mentioned earlier, the website you have and how people are looking for that thing. So what was funny to me is I started a loan brokerage called The One Brokerage. And as I told people about it, I assumed that they would just be like, “Oh, that’s David’s company, we’ll use them.” But every single person said, “Oh, send me the website, I want to check it out.”
And what that statement said as crazy that is, the website has more credibility than the word of the person that owns it. And I didn’t take it as an insult, I just took it as that’s what the human brain’s looking for to feel comforted. For some reason, they didn’t ask to follow me on social media, they said, “What’s your website of your company? It’s theonebrokerage.com. And they wanted to go there to I guess verify. I think they wanted to probably dig in and they felt uncomfortable doing it to me as a person. So that social proof and credibility is wildly important.
And people do this a lot of the time for agents. Do you have something you want to say about that?

Trevor:
No, dude. I was going to say, they do that for everything. I’m bringing up a screen here again guys, go to BiggerPockets YouTube, subscribe over there, I’ll visualize it. This is another big home buyer in Florida. I think they are a hybrid actually. I believe, don’t quote me on it. This is where the hybrid opportunity comes in here, is this David, and I’ll show this page and why it’s important. They’ll take about 80% of the leads. So when you’re marketing for a motivated house seller, someone who types a phrase like sell my house in blah or sell my house fast, or cash home buyers in, or like this phrase right here, sell house I inherited right, sell house I inherited in Birmingham or whatever.
So let’s say it’s Birmingham, Alabama. In Birmingham, Alabama, if I knew how to spell. Someone might type that phrase, are there going to be a lot of people typing the phrase? No, it’s not going to be a huge volume, but the ones who are, you can better believe they’re going to be so highly targeted and so amazing that they’re probably going to be great leads. And so if you look at these ones here, leads are all customers using our system to get ranked really high on Google with our content, our automated content. We teach how to do this in our training.
But the reason I brought this one up here is no matter what type of prospect you’re going after, a probate prospect, inherited prospect, or just someone who’s looking to sell, about 80% of those motivated leads actually want retail. So you might get 10 leads, eight of them out of 10 are probably going to want retail, maybe seven out of 10. And so a lot of investors are taking those leads and they’re throwing them away. They’re just going, “Well, they’re tire kickers, they’re not serious,” whatever it is. And so that’s where the hybrid opportunity comes in is a lot of the agents who are also investing, they’re approaching it a little bit of a backwards way than we’re seeing is working best is approaching it from the retail side.
Instead, spin up something that’s marketing directly to a motivated house seller, say, “I’m going to make you an offer, and/or I’ll get you the best that we’ll put the most in your pocket.” And then take the 80%, 70% who don’t want the cash offer and say, “Awesome. I can list this and put more in your pocket.” And that’s where an amazing sources coming through. That’s what they’re doing here.

David:
Let me speak to the agents for a minute here. It’s a very big topic of contention in the real estate world that Zillow became a brokerage. People are very worried that Zillow is basically going to take business away from agents when agents created the Zillow platform by buying leads from them and everything. And Zillow said for a long time, they weren’t going to do that. So if you’re not an agent, that probably makes no sense to you, you just really like Zillow. Agents are very, very worried about that. What Zillow did right or wrong, I’m not getting into that, is they got to the top of the funnel.
And what everyone has to understand is if you control the top of the funnel, you control the whole business. Zillow is where eyes go to. And so that’s how they’re able to sell leads to realtors. If realtors did a better job of creating stuff, like what you’re talking about and people came to them first, Zillow would have no business. They’d have no place in the market. They only exist. Because they can get people to go look at houses there, then they can sell the leads to the realtors. Eventually, they can cut a realtor out and they can just sell the house themselves.
So if you’re a realtor and you want to a relevant in the future as iBuyers become more prevalent and hedge funds become more prevalent and the world shifts to where everyone wants to own real estate, it’s not just this niche market of cool people that listen to Josh and Brandon, it’s scary in some ways. I don’t love it that everyone knows about it, but as interest rates are pushed low and the government just keeps pumping out money, I could go on and on, but basically, real estate becomes much more desirable for the masses. And they’re learning how to crowd fund and gather money and go buy real estate.
If you want to survive, you got to be at the front of the funnel. What that means is the person who has the property needs to find you before they find Zillow or your competition as an agent, or whatever the case would be. And so what we’re really getting at here is if you can get to the front of that funnel, you have options. Like you said, the water hits your funnel and then you say, “Well, I’ve got the bucket of, I can get your house sold right off the bat. I got the bucket of, I can list it. And I got the bucket of, I can fix it up, and then list it and get you even more money.” And human beings love options.
My team is literally trained to share information with the sellers that we work with as option A, option B, and option C, and we set it up like Goldilocks. This one’s too cold, this one’s too hot, the one in the middle is just right. And they always pick the one in the middle. There’s something human psychologic. And it makes you feel if I just gave you the middle option and there wasn’t one on either side of it, you wouldn’t like it.

Trevor:
No, they’re going to go compare your middle option against someone else’s option.

David:
And that person is going to portray the information better and make it look better than mine even if it wasn’t and they’re going to go there. So that’s exactly right. I can stop you from shopping me if I can give you all the options right here. And that’s basically what you’re talking about. So what do you recommend for agents who like me, I was an investor, then I became a real estate agent and I operate in both spaces and it helps me be better because I can advise my clients from an investor’s perspective. And then the more money that I make in selling houses, the more I can go invest. So both of those things feed each other.

Trevor:
Dude, here’s a couple things. I’m going to share the screen again and I’ll walk through it verbally, but here’s a big age agent in Brentwood, California. If you were to Google sell my house Brentwood, that’s not even like a motivated term, that’s just sell my house. Sell my house fast, sell my house quickly, sell my house for cash, those are motivated type phrases. But sell my house, there’s a few people paying for ads on the top, and then you have this one up here, Krista, by Krista Mashore. Amazing agent, using a Carrot site here.
She’s as an agent ranked number one on Google for the phrase sell my house, Brentwood. And most agents are so focused so hard online on the buyer side and you’re trying to compete against Zillow on the buyer side, which you can do that. I’ll do another search, like North Umpqua River home for sale. I can type a bunch of other ones. That’s a niche in Roseburg, Oregon. Zillow actually when they don’t control the number one ranking for a phrase, they tend to put ads up. And so this client here has been ranked number one in Google over Zillow for two years now for their best niche for houses.
So North Umpqua River homes for sale, G Team Go Ahead is a care client there. So you can do that for buyers. You can beat Zillow by being more hyper local and by creating more robust content on your location pages. But on the seller side, what you guys and gals need to do is launch what I call a location pages or just niche pages on your seller site as an agent. And you could even keep your existing site if it’s set up to perform well. If it’s set up to load fast, great on mobile, if it enables you to put content up online, just create a page that’s literally like, I call them location pages.
This is the second part of the authority hub. The first part was what I showed you before having the core of your website nailed so it builds the credibility. That’s what I call the core conversion pages. That was your, how it works page, the compare page, your reviews, that’s your core conversion page, is going to make all of your marketing work better. The second part of it is the location pages, and this is where you get new traffic now, is you write down like, what are all the areas that I want to buy off market properties in? Or what are all the areas that I have off market discount properties that I want to find cash buyers?
Or if I’m an agent, what are the areas that I want to find retail sellers or buyers? Write down the list of those cities, write down a list of those niches in the cities, and then create a page for every one of them just like Zillow did. So when you look at Zillow now over here, and I’m going to show the visual and I’ll talk it through, but Zillow’s homepage is never the thing that ranks number one in Google unless you literally type Zillow or homes for sale, maybe. But Zillow’s location pages are, so it’s their North Umpqua River page. It’s their Umpqua River that are ranked there.
And so if you can reverse engineer the same thing as an agent or an investor and say, “I want to create these niche location pages,” and what I suggest people do, David, because they get overwhelmed, I say, “You know what, the core conversion pages,” let me show the iPad because I’ve got a cool picture on it. But right here, the core conversion pages are this part here, it’s this part, you set it up, it’s a one-time thing. It might take you a few days to set that up or hire it out. But then as you get new testimonials, as you add a new person to your team, as you want to refresh it, maybe once a year or twice a year, you’re updating the core conversion pages, so that’s not a ton of work. But then next, you do these location pages, like I’m talking about. I suggest just blocking out a little bit every quarter. Do three to five a quarter.
If you want to really go crazy, do 10, 20, 30 a quarter if you wanting to do the Zillow scaling type of thing. We have a lot of clients that are doing that. But do three to five a quarter. And every quarter when you’re doing your planning, just pull it up and say, “Cool, what new pages do I want to create on my site or hire us to do it or hire someone else to create those pages?” And it could be a, “Sell my house Brentwood,” page, it could be a, “Sell my house in this neighborhood,” page or whatever it is. So do three to five of those. And we don’t have time to talk about how to specifically optimize the page, but the basic of it, and this is going to get a little detailed, is you ideally want to have at least 500 to 800 words on those pages to have any kind of a chance to have it ranked towards the top of Google.
That’s pretty technical, but that’s what we do for a living, that’s what we help people do at Carrot. So a few of those a quarter. The last part is those things I called the video posts, like the one where I showed you, “Hey, take out your cell phone, you’re there on the property, you are in your office and you have a whole list of types of things that people might be searching in Google.” It could be for your niches, it could be, “How to sell a house I inherited in Birmingham,” it could be whatever. Try to do one of those a week, and that really stacks on that momentum. It’s the stuff you would normally post on social media. It’s that three-minute video of a tour of a property, it’s you standing up there teaching about how to get financing in the new market, it’s whatever it is.
Make them three to five, three to eight minutes, because going back up to this number here, five to 800 words, the average person speaks 120 to 160 words a minute. And so if you were to take a five-minute video where someone’s speaking through educating the whole time, that’s about an 800-word article. If you’re to take a three minute video, it’s about a 500 word article. And then you put them up on your site using a video post where you guys don’t have to use Carrot, you can go to Rev.com and transcribe that video, and then you put it on your blog, put the video at the top, your transcription below it, a good headline, do one of those a week. We just saved 80% of your time and make it happen in less than 10 minutes.

David:
So what are some of the biggest mistakes you see people make when it comes to this strategy?

Trevor:
Dude, the biggest mistake I see people make is stopping before it has a chance to get momentum. They cranked out weekly video posts or whatever it is, weekly blog posts, if you’d rather sit down and write, most people don’t like to write. So just use the video post thing, three to five-minute video, eight-minute video, upload it. We have a whole list that I can give you guys if you wanted, David, where it’s literally video ideas one a week for 52 weeks, so you guys don’t have to think about what do I do videos on.
But the biggest mistake they’ll do three, four, five things, 10 things. They’ll do it for two or three months and then they’ll stop. And they’ll say, “Man, I’m putting in all this work, and this thing over here, this hamster wheel activity over here is getting me leads, so I’m going to keep doing that. And this evergreen thing, man, I’m just not getting results from it.” And that’s number one. Number two biggest mistake that people make is they make an assumption that a website is a website as a website.
And one thing that Google’s doing right now in big ways, they just rolled out something called core web vitals. This summer and Core Web Vitals. And Core Web Vitals actually takes the page speed into major consideration with Google rankings now across both mobile and desktop. And so it means if you’re just on a website, you’re paying for $10 month shared hosting or a really slow website where it’s a really just bulky WordPress insult, a bunch of plugins that load slowly, you’re going to have a harder time ranking well in Google. Not that you can’t, it’s just going to be harder.
And so they’ll use something that’s clunky and low cost up in the upfront and they’ll actually lose potentially tens of thousands of dollars down road of lost deals because of performance. Number three, and I’ll stop with this is people try to over-complicate it, is they go, “Man, I have to be an amazing rider.” Or, “Man, I’ve got to be good on video.” Oh guys, I used to hate being on video until you just get out and do it. So literally, just take out that phone and shift the mindset to go from, “I don’t have time to do this,” to say, “How do I just document what I’m already doing?”
And you’re out there on a property or you’re literally working up an offer right now. You’re at your desk in your office and you’re working up an offer for a house that you’re wanting to purchase. It was an inherited, say, “Hey guys, this is Trevor with XYZ home buyers. I’m actually writing an offer for Marsha, and Marsha inherited this house. Her brother is one state and dah, dah, dah. I’m going to walk you through how I’m making this offer so you guys and gals can see the four steps for me and how I come up with a dollar amount and then dah, dah, dah.” Put that on your website, put it on your social. Don’t over complicate it.
So those are the three, not patient enough. Number two, the wrong tech stacked, the wrong website that’s going to make it so all the work you’re doing is not going to be as effective. And then number three is over complicating it.

David:
Now, when it comes to actually setting this thing up and having to fork over the money, how much does the whole thing tend to cost?

Trevor:
If you’re going to do it like, let’s say a custom website, you’re going to go down the road to your buddy or cousin Eddie who knows how to set up a WordPress site, it could range depending on their aptitude with SEO, like building a website to rank in Google and conversion rate optimization. Those are specialties that most web people that don’t really know about. So if you’re going to set up a legit good custom site, you’re probably talking five to 10 grand to have it done pretty darn right, and then you’ve got the monthly maintenance. So it might be 30 to 50 bucks a month for a good virtual private server hosting. You don’t want to get the shared hosting.
And then you’re going to have to pay your web person to make updates and things like that, whatever their rate is, 65, 70 bucks an hour. So you’re talking five to 10 grand plus 100, 200 bucks a month on average to pay for your web hosting, things like that. I was going to say with Carrot, that’s what we do, and it’s all under a couple hundred bucks a month.

David:
Who are some people that we can research if we want to see what this looks like done well?

Trevor:
Simply Sold is a great one. So simplysold.com, Beau Hollis. What you guys can do too, is just literally go to Google and type up, “Sell my house fast,” insert any city in the country, and you’re probably going to find three, four or five Carrot sites somewhere in the top of Google. Oftentimes it’s number one in Google, sometimes it might be three, and just click through some of those and pick up the ones that are Carrot sites and see how they’re doing that. See what they’re doing. But Beau Hollis of simplysold.com. He’s my business partner in the Louisville market. And he’s been doing a really, really good job with video.
Him and I were talking today on the deal that we just closed, and he said, “Dude, this one came from,” he asked the gal and he said, “How did you find out about it?” She said, “I was on your website and I saw your video.” And she said, “I just felt comfortable, I felt like I knew you and I felt like you’d be a reputable person.” So he’s a great one. A guy named Keith Sant, Keith with Kind House Buyers, kindhomebuyers.com, amazing, crushing it, does eight to 10 deals a month using this method right now in a couple of markets. Man, househeroes.com, their website doesn’t look the prettiest, it’s on Carrot.
They’ve done a lot of adjustments, but they bring about two to 3,000 leads a year, seller leads between land and house. But yeah, just Google search, “Sell my house fast,” or any phrases like that and you’ll find all kinds of Carrot sites out there dominating most of this.

David:
Now, I want to wrap up with your perspective on where you see the market going. So you had me as a guest on your podcast, it’s called the Carrot podcast? Is that right?

Trevor:
CarrotCast. Yeah.

David:
CarrotCast. It was episode 246 if anybody wants to go listen. We talked a little bit about how we see where the future of the industry is headed. Would you mind sharing your thoughts on what you think is happening right now and how online authority plays into the future?

Trevor:
Yeah, David. I’m going to give some thoughts, and I want you guys to take it with the grain of salt, because I thought the market was going to soften in 2020, I think a lot of people did, but it did the opposite. So right now where we are, and this is something I’ve been talking about for three, going on four years is we’re in that transition of the market just like the stock market was in the ’90s and ’80s and 2000s, where technology had caught up with the inefficiency in the market in the stock world.
If I wanted to buy a stock, I had to physically call a broker, they placed a trade. It took a while to make all that happen. And then in the late ’80s, 1989, the stock market crashed and everyone was rushing to call their brokers, and the brokers weren’t picking up the phones because all hell broke loose. And so technology over the next two to three years caught up with it and people started to go, “Well, shoot, how do I cut that broker out of the middle to get a more efficient transaction?” And you started to see the brokers fees go down, the E*TRADE or Charles Schwab started going online. You’d get a $10 trade, then a $9 trade, now with Robinhood, it’s $0 trade.
And so you start to look at other industries, travel, the stock market. loans, all these types of industries, and we go, at some point technology catches up with the inefficiency in the market. And that’s what’s been happening with real estate the last three to five years. So now how does that impact you as an agent or an investor? Well, number one, it creates more competition. It drives margins down for the person doing business the same way, like agent commissions, we were saying years ago, the agent commissions are going to get compressed. And agents were like, “No, I’m still getting my three to 6%.” I said, “Well, it’s going to happen, so just be ready for it.”
Investors, if we don’t change the model and add more value, your wholesale deals and flips might get compressed if the market’s a normal markets. It’s been crazy last year, so the growth and appreciation is covering up some bad business operations, is what’s happening right now. And so it creates more competition, when a market’s hot, more people want to invest, more people want to be agents.

David:
It’s not as scary, that’s what I was thinking. Let’s say the stock market’s going down, you really want that broker to give you their professional opinion because you can lose money. So like, “Man, make sure I’m making the right call.” If real estate’s not doing well, every single problem with that house becomes a big deal. But when it’s just going up, up, up, up, you start to value the advice or the council of the expert in the area less because the risk decreases as the amount goes up. And I think that’s what we have seen in real estate as well as in the stock market, and the that’s why a lot of those traditional jobs became less important.

Trevor:
Dude, huge. And so what they had to do and all these had to do is they had to shift and they had to say, “How do we now add more value to the transaction? How do we make sure that I’m not just a gateway between a transaction happening and I happen to make money because I’m in the middle as a wholesaler, because I’m in the middle as an agent. How do I actually add value to the process?” And so I feel over the next five years, we’re going to see a flushing out of both sides of the industry as iBuyers more and more properties, every quarters they’re buying more and more.
It’s going to force the retail side to really embrace the wholesale and cash offer side. And we’ve been talking about this for years where agents have always poo pooed that side saying wholesaling is illegal, saying, can you even do that? All these things. And it’s not illegal, but I think you’re going to see a lot of the traditional real estate lobby starting to get laws that make wholesaling harder. So we’ve been telling investors for two years, “Guys, go get your license.” None of them want to, I’m like, “Get the license because that’s where things are going.”
And so I really see that the person who’s able to do both like what we call the hybrid, where you’re truly able to serve that client better, you go to that seller and say, “You know what, I can solve any problem you throw at me. It doesn’t matter if the house is distressed, it doesn’t matter if you want to list and you’re willing to wait a couple months to get top dollar. It doesn’t matter if you need to close four days later,” like we closed this deal yesterday, “I can help you, I can serve you.” Instead of casting that lead to the side because they don’t fit in your pretty little box.
And the iBuyers are forcing that issue right now because they can do both right now. Last thing on prediction wise, because of where we are right now in the market, and this is what we’re getting from the hedge funds that we’re working with, that we’re selling to, we were talking to them and saying, “Which markets are you guys buying in?” So they gave us a list of 16 markets, and we’re like, “All right, we’re going to go after any of these markets we can.” And here’s the interesting thing right now, David, I think there’s an amazing, amazing opportunity for the wholesalers or flippers in this market or an agent to go into this part of it to serve the demand that’s coming from hedge funds for the next 18 months to two years.
And the hedge funds gave us their calculations, they told us why they think the market’s going to keep doing certain things for next 18 months to two years. And the numbers, the reason we’re able to make so much bigger profits selling to the hedge funds right now is they’re not buying based off of market value, which is crazy. So if we’re a wholesaler and we’re able to buy a property, we get one under contract for 75 grand, let’s say. Let’s say after retail value for that is 150, we get under contract for 75. We would maybe get a 10 or 20,000 wholesale fill out, which is amazing.
Contract to a flipper, they repair it, get it in the market., they make their 30 or 40. So in that same deal, the other wholesalers are going after that same property where they would normally never pay more than 75 using this example. We can pay 85 to 95 to that same seller and pay them more. So the seller’s getting more in their pocket so we can claim in our market, “We will pay you more. We’ll pay you more than any other home buyer in the market.” And then we go to the hedge fund and they’re working off of an arbitrage. They’re borrowing half a billion dollars, a billion dollars at a point and a half is what one of the hedge funds told us.
He’s like, “We’ve got $300 million, we got to deploy, we borrowed at point and a half. And our whole aim is, how do we get 8% returns in this? And so they’re taking their calculation, what rent can we get from this property? Work the numbers back to get their six cap rate, their six and half cap rate on some of those. And they’re going, “Cool. What dollar amount is that now?” Almost every time, it’s 95%.

David:
Completely different model evaluating the real estate. And this is so important for people to hear. I know it’s coming at the end of the show, but if you’re a person who’s listening to this podcast and you want to know about the future of real estate, you have out to consider this. The reason it sounds crazy that hedge funds are paying over what we call the market value is for a long time, prices were relatively stable, and so whatever the house was worth, your goal was to get it for less than that. That was the safe way to invest. And we’ve told people, it’s still better obviously if you can get it there.
The problem is, with prices going up as fast as they are, the hedge funds don’t care what the house is worth today, they care what it’s like when they have to exit two to five years later. And it’s relatively easy to get an 8% return with the way that properties are appreciating. So the old way that we valued a house was what are the comps look like? But the comps are set in stone from six months ago, or three months ago, or whatever it was. If prices keep rising, that house is worth what they’re paying it to the hedge fund. And it becomes a good deal because the prices rose.
Now, obviously we don’t want people just throwing money at houses assuming it’s going to go up in value. You have to make sure that you can afford the property, otherwise, it doesn’t make any sense to have it. But Wayne Gretzky said, when they asked how he scored so many goals, “I don’t skate to where the puck is, I skate to where the puck is going to be.” And that’s really what hedge funds are doing. And a lot of our clients get stuck in, “Nope, I’m just going to wait for the perfect deal and I’m not going to do anything.” And those same perfect deals they couldn’t find are $50,000 more now than they were three months ago. And so it’s just something you have to consider depending on the market that you’re in.
It’s very competitive, it’s not just BiggerPockets listeners that want houses anymore, everybody wants houses. People want to live in them, people want to house hack, people want to rent them, hedge funds want to buy them, small mom and pops want to buy them. Everybody wants to own real estate. And so as long as that’s the case, in order to get in the game, you may have to look at real estate from a different lens than just what’s the ARV? And I want to be at 80% of that

Trevor:
Dude, 100%. And a couple of the dynamics here as we close is you guys know these numbers, the housing marker or new housing starts was under built by half the last decade from 2010 through ’20. Usually there’s eight to 10 million housing starts in a decade, there was about five to 6 million from 2010 through 2020. So if you look at it and a lot of people are going, and I was originally too going, “Man, things are going to do something soon.” But there’s a lot of fundamentally healthy reasons why the market’s strong, and there’s some fundamentally not healthy reasons. There’s a lot of foreclosures that are not hitting the market because of moratoriums, and that will have an impact.
Interest rates are really low, they’ll change eventually, but the foundational healthy things, the millennial generation is in their prime home buying years right now. They’re the generation that are the most mobile with their careers, especially after COVID, they’re making great money. They’re moving into suburbs, things like that. They’re buying houses right now where a lot of them are in the city. And that’s a really healthy thing. So as long as you guys can look at the healthy reasons, well I look at some of the things that could change as COVID starts to get behind us hopefully soon and dive in.
And the reason why I’d suggest you guys to shift the marketing model right now, with all the competition, with the focus on the sellers, with the hamster wheel marketing and lifestyle you might be living is in a competitive market when there’s a lot of options, we have to stand out. And the way that we stand out is by building authority, it’s by building authority and showing how we are more trustworthy, how we can actually solve your problem. And the best way to do that, especially as certain other marketing methodologies dry up, text messaging, cold calling, they still work great, but what happens if the government squashes text message marketing, which they’re already starting to do in some spots where you can’t do it?

David:
Oh, I hope they do. Just for myself, I get about 30 text messages a day that are unsolicited.

Trevor:
Yeah. Someone’s been trying to sell me for a month on this Shark Tank thing to lose six or seven inches. I get it every single week, it seems like. And so when I look at those marketing methods, I say, “Do I want to base my business off of those? They might work today, but do I want to base my business off of those one, two, three years out? Or do I want to base my business off of something that’s going to keep growing, which is the evergreen?” More people are hitting the internet, more people are trying to seek out solutions. And if you can get in front of those sellers and buyers, well, let’s talk about sellers, and build authority and make it so you’re getting people consistently coming to you.
If something happens in the market, or if something happens to that marketing methodology, the leads still come to you and they’re the best, most motivated leads, guys. So make the shift. Think about it.

David:
I want to clarify, I’m not telling everybody to just go throw money at houses because there’s certain markets… We have an episode coming out where I interviewed somebody from Rochester, New York, and they mentioned how the population is decreasing and employment opportunities are decreasing. The puck’s not going that way, so you’re not going to go over what a property’s worth there, but like you said, if hedge funds are in that area and they’re scooping up all the inventory, there’s going to be decreased inventory and you can sell to them, that would be an area where you have to be more aggressive.
And so the world has changed, there’s information about different markets that everybody can get. Let’s say the market does crash, I would rather have, like you said, some seasoned authority that people are going to find me first when they want to go sell their house fast, especially if there’s not a lot of buyers to buy their house on the MLS list. And the seller knows, “If I list with an agent, it’s just going to sit there forever and I need to get this thing moved.” You don’t want to wait until then before you get your website going.

Trevor:
100%. Get it going now. And I want to clarify this one last spot and the hedge funds too. I want to double down, I don’t want people going away and going, “Man, Trevor’s telling me to go buy this stuff at 8%.” No. The hedge funds are actually arbitraging in the rent to income. And so they’re not even looking at the appreciation, and they’re going in there saying, “We’re borrowing at a point and a half, we want to arbitrage it and get to the eight” So they have about a six and a half percent, six points in the middle, because they’re taking the point and a half and they’re saying, “Where can I put this money that’s safer?”
Stock market, not right now. They’re seeing it overvalued in the stock market too much. You can’t put it into treasuries right now because the rates are too low. And so you start to look at the category. You go, “Well, shoot, we’re likely in an inflationary period, is that going to stop? I don’t know, I’m sure more inflation’s going to happen.” What happens with rental real estate is you raise rental real estate rates up every single year. It follows an outpaces inflation sometimes. And even if the economy were to take a hit in the next three to five years, rental real estate is still going to be needed now more than ever.
During the last downturn, rents actually outpaced other returns in big ways while the housing market was taking a dive. So the hedge funds are looking at it saying, “We borrowed at a point and a half, we’re going to be buying properties that get us the rental income that give us an 8% sustainable return. And then in two years, if we can sell to big return, we’ll exit that and go into another asset class. If not, rents are going to keep skyrocketing, their returns now go to eight, nine, 10%.” And then they’ll exit when it makes sense. So, it’s an interesting time right now.

David:
Well, Trevor, you and I could talk all day. I know we were going to wrap this thing up. I wanted to pull back the curtain and let the listeners of the podcast hear the kind of conversations that those of us that are deeper into the industry are having. I have a mastermind and we’re constantly bringing people in that are doing exactly what you’re doing and sharing that information because the industry is changing faster, of real estate, than what people that are on the outside looking in actually realize. Some areas are getting really hot, other areas are staying the same, and you really need this information to figure out how to make the best move for you.
Thank you for your time today. We’re going to skip the Famous Four because we’re already in overtime. But before we get out of here, tell me, where can people find out more about you and Carrot if they want to take the next step?

Trevor:
Yeah, dude. Go Carrot.com. We have tons of free content over there. We’ve got a webinar that we run each month on evergreen where we dive into it in detail. It’s Carrot.com/pockets, is for the BiggerPockets community. So Carrot.com/pockets. But dude, find me on Instagram. I post a lot of stuff that we’re doing there on the real estate side and just general entrepreneurship, or the CarrotCast. Check out David in his episode over there. So anyone of those spots, find us, but we’re pumped to hopefully work with you guys, or at the very least, add as much value to your world as we can.

David:
All right. Well, thank you very much, sir.

Trevor:
Thank you guys.

David:
This is David Greene for Trevor “Super Carrot” Mauch, signing off.

Speaker 3:
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