How to get organinc leads?

Question

What is the best option for finding motivated property sellers? 1) Cold Calling2) Text Messaging3) Direct Mails4) D4$Are there other ways?

Joe Homs · Answer

@Angeli Ligad options 1 & 2 are the best. Next decision? What lists to pull? I would recommend foreclosures, tired landlords, and 100% equity to begin with. Pull a list of 10K names and skip trace them. Send them to a VA, overseas, to get one simple answer "Would you like to sell your home, YES." Send that lead back to you and start calling...

Good Investing...

Cornelius Garland · Answer

Great question, and I hope I can provide clarity here as I've tried many of the cold outreach methods. High-volume marketing is what's working in this industry right now, so whichever marketing channel you choose, you'll want to keep this in mind. There's no substitute for it even if you are targeting a very niche list - most of the time people want to get their first deal without spending any money. While you don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get your first deal, it will be difficult to do this in less than 3 months without any marketing spend. Now, the question is, what is worth spending your precious marketing dollars on?

In 2015, I started with Driving for Dollars. I was marketing to Charleston, SC at the time. It's a smaller market and mostly affluent, with some bad pockets. Ultimately, I did not find many houses that were distressed. Even if I found a distressed house, I would quickly find that it would be "un-wholesaleable" - meaning that it would be tied up in probate or have a mortgage balance that is way higher than what I could offer. For instance, I found 20 in one day, only 10 would be good to mail. Direct mail response rates are .5% to 1%. With these numbers, I'd have to send off 100 - 200 direct mail pieces just to get 1 response back. I wish the numbers weren't like this, but this is just what they are. We can either get frustrated at it or try something else.

Perfect transition to discussing direct mail. I did direct mail in mid-2015 - 2016 heavily. It was my main marketing channel. Response rates, as I discussed above, are .5% - 1%, so if you send off 10,000 direct mail pieces, expect 50 - 100 leads or responses, in this case. This is enough to generate one deal. Direct mail generates warm seller leads and their quality is much higher than texting and cold calling. However, the leads come in spurts. For instance, if you were to send off all 10k mailers at one time, you'd get most of your calls within a week of the mail drop. Then you'd be left without any leads coming in for the rest of the month. If you want leads consistently every day, this is not the route you should go. Also, this is costly to get your first deal. Atop of that, mail drops aren't instant. It takes a few days for the calls to start coming in.

Texting is the quickest way to get your first deal. Expect 5% response rates, on average. You'll need to focus on high volume here. The days of generating one deal with 500 texts sent out are over. I was able to do this in Tampa back in December 2018, but I was one of the first to do bulk text message marketing.

My vote is for cold calling. I switched to cold calling solely in 2019 and have been using it ever since. Cold calling laws are established, unlike text messaging, so I do not have to worry if one day my campaigns stop due to some legal change. Optimizing cold calling is a pain and it takes time and work. For context, I have managed call teams of 30 virtual assistants and I've tried a lot of dialers like Five9, Xencall/Readymode, Batchdialer, Call Tools, and Mojo. The main issue is making sure your cold callers and your dialer aren't eating up your numbers. For instance, if you upload a 10,000 seller list to your dialer and your cold callers callers ask you for more phone numbers after a week of dialing then you'll need to troubleshoot this issue yourself. Nobody is coming to save you here, and the dialer companies can only offer superficial advice. I've had to develop my own SOPs and troubleshooting manuals for my internal operations. It's worth it, though, because cold calling has proven empirical evidence to work in many industries and I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon. The leads are, well, cold for the most part but given enough volume, you will be able to snag at least one deal in one month. I found 10,000 records uploaded with 1 cold caller working 8 hours a day is enough to generate enough leads in a month to close a deal.Closing Thoughts:

One thought to keep in mind is that these sellers don't owe us anything. I spent so much time on marketing channels that simply didn't pan out that also took significant energy and ultimately resulted in no leads or deals. On the contrary, when I ran a call center, it was so easy to get leads by paying my team to generate them for me. My job was just to vet the leads and forward them to my acquisitions team. The wholesaling process has so many components and cold marketing is step 1 of the process. If you expend so much effort on this, you will lose motivation and lack the focus to zone in on what matters - giving offers to sellers and getting contracts back.

Jerryll Noorden · Answer

This is factually incorrect.

You can't "find" organic leads.

Per definition of organic... they take it upon themselves to find YOU!

So you can't take a direct proactive approach to get them.

So to answer your question... SEO.

Search Engine Optimization.

Kristina Kuba · Answer

Producing content and provided content on Instagram/ Facebook is the #1 way to attract organic leads.  Most of my retail clients have come to me organically and I know of wholesalers that do the same.

Jerryll Noorden · Answer

I appreciate that.

:)

Alfath Ahmed · Answer

I have found the most success through cold-calling skip-traced lists. You can start by pulling lists from your county auditor's website. Eventually, you can other buy skip-traced lists or pull them yourself through prop-stream.

Jerryll Noorden · Answer

if you have a problem, an issue, want to find something out, anything... the first thing you think about is word of mouth?

That is not true right?

You rather call up one of your networking connections than do a quick Google search on your phone?

Networking is more for peers, and fellow real estate investors.

Networking is a tad bit harder to connect with motivated sellers. In fact, you can't. Because not even motivated sellers know they will be motivated before they become motivated.

Think about it. You are giving the advice to start telling people you buy houses. How many people will you reach? 100? 200?

Do you realize that investors send 10s of thousands of mailers calls or texts to filtered lists of people, every month, and still get less than a 0.1% conversion rate? Just answered a post from a dude that sends 3000 sms a DAY and his conversion rate is 0.003%. And this is done digitally, automatically, in a split second. You select a list, click a mouse button enter your CC info, and BOOM 10,000 mailers sent.

3000 SMS sent in 3 seconds and THAT gives you remarkably poor results.

So you advising him to start verbally announcing to others that you buy houses, honestly seems like a very inefficient way to get organic leads.

I am afraid that if anyone were to follow that advice, they would burn out so fast it wouldn't get you anywhere.

Everyone needs to start realizing: Work smarter, not harder.

D’Andre Ortiz · Answer

I am going to give a very basic answer. Start telling everyone you know that you are a real estate investor. When I hear organic lead gen the first thing I think of is word of mouth. The more people that know you are investing in real estate.... the more likely someone shows up in front of you with a deal. NETWORK NETWORK NETWORK. This is the absolute best way to get your name out there and start talking to the right people. I hope this helps!

Kenny Smith · Answer

@Angeli Ligad

I think they all can work, but you have to be super consistent with whatever method you choose. Personally, I don't call for deals, I cold call for my real estate agent business.  However, I do run across folks looking to sell their property off market at times.

I use a prospecting platform called RedX.  They will pull the lists for you, sync your phone up to a dialer in which you can triple line dial (calling 3 numbers at once), and blow through A LOT of numbers. You can choose to pick different lead sources as well, expired listings, FRBO, FSBO, pre-foreclosures, and Geoleads. It is easy to do, efficient, and can hit the most amount of people in the shortest amount of time, in my opinion.

Again, everyone has their own method, but I'd give it a shot if you haven't tried it!

Best of luck,

Kenny

How to get organinc leads?

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