All Forum Posts by: Mark Shaver

During the hackathon, you will learn how to record a screencasts. You will record your first screencast. You can choose the subject of the screencast yourself:

• How your virtual assistant has to use CRM
• How the VA has to send out emails
• How the VA has to make cold calls
• etc..

More detailed information can be found on the event page.

Please click the "Attend Event" button if you would like to come to our hackathon.

During the hackathon, you will learn how to clear the data (city date, Craiglist date, your contacts, etc..). This operation is necessary before importing data into CRM or Excel spreadsheet.

More detailed information can be found on the event page.

Please click the "Attend Event" button if you would like to come to our hackathon.

@Marissa Turrubiates, the answer depends on what an income you get now that you do not have an acquisition manager:

• If the income is low, the acquisition manager will not work for you even for 100% of the profit.
• If the income is sufficient to hire an acquisition manager then the acquisition manager will prefer to work for your salary.

It will be difficult to find an acquisition manager who is willing to work for you for some interest.

Those who work on a pure percentage, are mostly high-class specialists. They are looking for a solid company where they can realize their skills. But a high-class acquisition manager is almost a ready-made investor-wholesaler, who is able to earn on his own in wholesale trading. Partnership relations, 50/50, are appropriate with him.

The same is happening to a smart real estate agent, who helps investor-wholesaler to look for suitable real estate. Soon the agent realizes what the investor earns money from. The agent is no longer satisfied with the interest on the profit. The agent becomes a wholesaler and resells the found investment real estate himself. But the investor may have a partnership with the former agent.

@Jason Malabute wrote: "I’ll be using hubstaff to monitor the virtual assistant is actually working during work hours."

I am skeptical about controlling virtual assistants in the Big Brother style:

1) What's the point of working with a virtual assistant if he only works under hubstaff control?

2) The total control is a distrust. Many professionals refuse to work in a climate of the distrust.

3) Investors get a virtual assistant who corresponds to the control parameters. Yes, the investor can control whether the virtual assistant is at the notebook and presses the keys. But then he gets a virtual assistant who presses the keys and does nothing else at the notebook.

It's better to control the results. Then we get a productive virtual assistant.

It is even better not to control the virtual assistant at all. Then we will get a highly efficient virtual assistant, that needs no control.

@Mary Gansallo wrote: "How are you picking the virtual assistants? Just previous reviews on fiverr?"

Our investment department has virtual employees. We have a self-governance. Everyone decides for himself what he will do. Logically, we also trust our future colleagues to decide for themselves whether or not they will work for us.

We do not conduct traditional interviews. We do not ask candidates questions. We do not ask for feedback from previous employers. We don't even check if they can speak English. Instead of an interview, we run Open House, where we answer questions from candidates. We invite everyone to start working in our department.

New employees can do anything they want. Including they can do nothing. Most newcomers are quitting. That stays those who are interested in real estate investments. They work by themselves. There is no need to control them by the minute. All they need is to help them study real estate investments. And we make sure that they work no more than 8 hours a day and rest on weekends.

All the best that people do, they do in love:

Image source via Flickr.com (CC BY-SA 2.0).

@Sardar Mustafa Khan, Marcus Maloney writes in the article "Hire a Virtual Assistant for These 21 Tasks (& Supercharge Your Productivity!)":

"Finding a network of VAs is not difficult. There are many services offered online. I actually hired a new VA recently for database management. Here’s where to look:

• Upwork.com
• MyOutDesk.com
• Freelancer.com
• TimeEtc.com
• ReferralExchange.com
  Fiverr.com
• Zirtual.com"

You wrote: "And how much will it cost?"

This is a great question.

Usually investors try to pay a fixed price. This is normal when the work is standard or you provide a detailed specification. In this case the performer knows how long it will take to complete the task. He will multiply his hourly rate by the time of work and you get a fair fixed price.

But the fixed price is not suitable in your case. If you try to find a virtual assistant with a fixed price, you will have problems. The performer has the standard hourly rate. The volume of work is unknown. The fixed rate is set at random. As a result, the virtual assistant will work exactly the time that you pay him. If you paid through a fixed price only 10 hours of his work, and cleaning requires 50 hours, then be prepared that the virtual assistant will work 10 hours and will clean the data very roughly. The result will contain:

• A lot of unnecessary data
• A lot of necessary data will be discarded.

This will happen because you don't know how to check the quality of data cleaning.

In the end you will save money, but you will lose raw data and get only part of the useful result. The old principle of "How much you pay, how much you get" is fair for data cleansing.

In your case, it's better to pay by the hours:

• Your order is unique
• You do not provide the terms of reference
• The virtual assistant will only understand the amount of work when it is finished
• Virtual assistants traditionally work with hourly pay.

Not anymore. Tesla released the report for the fourth quarter of 2019: "We registered one accident for every 3.07 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles".

Image source Wkikmedia.org.

Doug Elkerman wrote: "Its not so much data points, a ML model can hold a vast superior number of data than a human can but its useless unless it knows what to do with it. These models are built by python engineers not real estate agents".

Engineers and real estate investors are often the same people. See hot list "RE Investors are Engineers"

Image by Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

During the hackathon, we will create a small REI Lead Generation CRM based on the "Free" tariff plan from Podio.

Hackathon is recommended for RE investors who want:

• Learn how to work with Podio CRM
• Jump from Excel or another CRM to Podio
• Delegate the lead generation to a VA.

More detailed information can be found on the event page.

Link to the Zoom

You can find the link to the Zoom room on the event page 5 minutes before the start of the meeting.

Image by PickPik.com.

Schedule of the event

1) The speech “ Using AI to Optimize Rental Investing ”, 15 minutes

The speaker is Severin Sadjina, a long-term rental investor from Norway.

Severin will kick us off by sharing how he leveraged a scientific mindset, machine learning, and computer simulations to optimize several aspects of his REI journey.

2) The speech “ AI qualifies Craigslist’s sellers ”, 15 minutes

The speaker is Mark Shaver, CIO, long-distance wholesaler from Russia.

Mark will tell how Artificial Intelligence is looking for offers from motivated sellers.

3) Pause, 5 minutes

4) Round Table “Machine learning and Real Estate Investing”, 30 minutes

The round table is based on the BiggerPockets' discussion "Machine learning and Real Estate Investing".

More detailed information can be found on the event page. 

Link to the Zoom

You can find the link to the Zoom room on the event page 5 minutes before the start of the meeting.

@Joshua Loh, bots greatly increase the conversion of lead generation.

Freddy AI bot's 30,000+ ML models are trained on diverse big-data, and together with advanced NLP models, deliver Skills that are laser-focused on sales, support, and marketing use-cases:

For example, the Freddy AI bot carefully examines all correspondence between your employees and sellers or tenants. When a home seller or your tenant raises a question, Freddy AI answers the question based on the previous experience of your employees. It can answer 80% of the questions from sellers and tenants.

If Freddy AI detects a question that has not been previously encountered in the practice of your employees, it will pass the question on to live employees. At the same time, Freddy AI carefully remembers the reaction of the live employees, and next time it will try to solve the same question itself.

@Jonathan Greene wrote: "If you are looking to use bots to generate leads, how good do you think those leads will be?"

The leads will be wonderfully motivated. Bots are in no hurry, they have a lot of patience, they can build a sales funnel for any number of potential sellers for weeks.

The ActiveCampaign's bot runs a drip marketing campaign with home sellers. It will be on your behalf, face, and voice:

• Build a relationship with the home seller by sending out useful content periodically.
• Communicate through the video with the seller to get used to your appearance and manner of communication.
• Adapt on the fly communication to the interests of the seller
• Calculate the seller's motivation (lead scoring)
• Qualify a lid as warm or disqualify it:

Read more in the article "10 Best Email Marketing Software Tools for Businesses".

@David Nicholson, it looks like you want to choose one CRM that you will use for REI and for consulting elderly people. In this case, the REI specific CRM won't work for you, it's too expensive and targets itself only for REI.

Look towards general CRM software. They work perfectly for REI and as older people management systems.

Be careful, many common CRMs are not suitable for investors. I sent you through the DM the list of CRM software that are popular among real estate investors and their reviews.

In particular, the most popular general CRM among investors is Citrix Podio. It can work as older people management systems and it also has a free version.