All Forum Posts by: Igor Veden-Vukojevic

I truly believe in staying staying ethical when it comes to handling your transactions, dealing with buyers, sellers and working with your team. I wouldn't suggest that you do anything unethical when it comes to your business or your life in general. However, I disagree that this is "very unethical" and here is why.

It is unethical to have people sign up for one thing and then offer them something else. It is unethical to contact people who posted something on craigslist and solicit them with an offer they don't want to hear about. It's unethical to collect someone's information through your website and then sell it to another investor. it is unethical to have 600 gmail accounts to contact investors and Agents on CL about their property only to collect their email address when they respond.

It is not "very unethical" to be out of inventory, but still put up the floor product on a display for the people that are window shopping. And if they come in to ask about the price or if you have their size it's not unethical to tell them "we don't have anything at the moment, but I'll call you when we get some". Just make sure you don't call them back about something they don't want, and make sure you don't tell the shop owner next door to bug them about something else. Give them what they want, when you have it.

The people that can close fast hate not having properties to close on. They hate wasting their time, so as long as you don't waste it, or run a "bait and switch" scam - it's not unethical. Yes it is sneaky, but not unethical. You are not spamming them, you are not selling their emails, you are simply out of the inventory.

What's the worst that can happen? You may have a house for sale that they may want to buy.

Giving away one email so that you could do the business down the road is nothing compared to some of the things I see in these wholesaling and (pre)foreclosure deals. Even if you want to put this email issue in some gray area, it still belongs to the brighter side of it.

But then again, I am not a Real Estate investor. I am only good in one thing - getting traffic, reading numbers, and getting it to convert. Ok, three things :)

Alyssa is right, Agentpress is a child-theme of Studiopress and a bit more expensive because it uses Genesis framework. StudioPress is a great company, you can't go wrong with any of their products.

I was scanning through the posts and I read a few questions about banners. Something I wanted to share is the banner placement on your website.

We had pages with 7 different banner placements - same graphics, same copy, same offer. Different sizes and different placement on the web page.

The ultimate winner was always a "skyscraper" to the left of your opening paragraph. 50px/600px banner aligned to the left of your opening paragraph, the color should be in contrast with the background color and the font turned sideways, from the bottom up.

This research was done on insurance offers (car/house/health), but the number of clicks those banners were getting were huge. If we paid for a banner placement somewhere, we tried to get that spot. If we were selling advertising space, that was the premium placement.

We do the same in REI industry but we don't use banners enough to do any kind of split testing.

I wouldn't suggest Wix. I would suggest a powerful wordpress template. "openhouse" is the best. Google it up.

The question was "What should my new wholesaler website have as "MUST HAVES" and what do I do if I do not have any properties to showcase?"

Let me try and answer it:

1. Call to action with your phone number/email
2. Lead Capture Form for their properties
3. If you are after sellers, then you probably need nothing other than the form (#2), but if you are after buyers, I would definitely post some properties without the price and tell them to put in their emails to request more information for the property; Then you can tell them the property has been sold but you still have their information. A little sneaky, but ultimately you are getting their email so that you could send them EXACTLY what they need in the future, so you're not spamming them or anything.

Dave, I would suggest a more prominent lead capture form on your website.

Jason's website looks great. The long forms are only ok if they're broken up into steps, for example, name/email/phone in the first step, then more information, and at the end you can hit them up with so much information, they will not want to go to the next investor for another quote.

We have tested about 40 different designs, forms, layouts, etc and one of the most important things turned out to be the redirect page. Once the seller fills out the form, if you don't instruct him to do additional work, or deliver a PDF to read they WILL go on to get another quote from another investor.

So far, instructing them to collect specific information that you know you will need seems to work the best. Redirect to something like "do not talk to investor about your property until you have the following information in hand: a) b) c)..." is a great way to 1. buy you time to contact them, 2. get them away from looking for another investor and 3. get you the additional information that you may actually need.

Another thing that Jason was right about is unfocused marketing campaign. We had a client who desperately wanted their company video on the landing page, but all it did was keep people watching about "how cool" his company was. I ended up replicating the entire landing page with a big red arrow pointing at the form and putting it on a rotator and the conversion rate was much higher.

Split-test everything. Test it like it's a prostate cancer... ;)

Craigslist!

At one point 100% of my income was from Craigslist. 90% of it was Black Hat. Most people will say "why black hat", or why "spam"? It's simple: Because you are up against black hatters and spammers and unless CL is able to stop them, you are up against the guys who will run you over and leave you miles behind.

Here are some terms you should get familiar with:

PVA - "Phone Verified Account". Each account needs to have a verified phone, which can be bought for about $5-$10 per PVA depending on how many you are buying.

Proxy Services - You will need a different IP address and it will have to be tied to your are so you can't use public IPs, they will have to be private. They will also have to match the IP used to generate the PVA so you may have to purchase them from the same company.

GOCLAD - software used to re-post ads automatically. A few hundred's of dollars for the black hat software. If you want to purchase Black-hat version of the software, you can pay $30 per month to have access to a machine in Thailand that runs the software and you can share it with other people who pay $30 per month for access.

PowerLeadX Pro - This is a couple of hundred dollars and comes with different modules. This is not for posting, this is for contacting posters. Easy way to build a list of cash buyers, but you need to keep up with email addresses and buy them in bulks. Also you need to make sure you use URL shorteners and SPIN the text. This is very time consuming.

Ktaiyan from Phillipines and Mhanjur from Bangladesh that will sit there and virtually post ads for $.50 per ad for you and you don't have to worry about any of the above. At the end of the day they will send you a report like this one: http://prntscr.com/xvrbp (the links are cut off and outdated anyways, but this is what we were getting each night to verify the time of the posts and the section)

Here is what's happening. There are offices full of people overseas and all they collect is leads for rental properties and homes for sale. They collect the leads and pretend that they are a seller/landlord and tell people to fill out the little form for credit report. The form is from the Marketing Network that pays $5-$20 per lead who fills out the form. They will collect about 2000-10000 leads per day easy, pretending that they are someone they're not, only to re-sell the leads to the marketing networks.

So my questions is - if you have a house for sale or rent - why not use all these services to offer these people something they're actually looking for - A new home!

PS it's past midnight so I apologize for any spelling errors...

Hullo,

I'm a new guy here. I own a few internet marketing companies and in addition to doing general web design and video production, we decided to focus on a few specific industries. One of them is Real Investing.

It was an accident really. We focused on Construction and Landscaping first, then automotive, then restaurants, but some Real Estate Investors hired us and so we're doing that now. Our main office is in Norcross (Atlanta). Our Video Production studio is in Midtown Atlanta.

I am just looking a place to get familiar with all aspects of Real Estate Investing so that I can figure out how to help our clients.

I hope everyone is having a great day. I still don't know how you guys handle all that paperwork that comes with RE transactions. It just seems too much.

Igor

PS that's me and my dog on that photo, but it's hard to see it.