1175 » Can You Do Deals Just from Texting? » REI In Your Car

Joe: Greetings. Hey, Joe here. Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast. I’m doing this from my car. So this is the REI series. REI in Your Car series. Hope you doing well, guys. I’m titling this podcast: Can you do deals just from texting? And the answer is yes, just did one! Blows me away. So this is a vacant land deal in the middle of Colorado. And I won’t tell you the county, but it’s in Colorado. And this was part of I will tell you the county, because if you watch this podcast or listen whatever, I recently did a new market challenge where Gavin and I went and picked a brand new market. He went after houses and I went after vacant land. He chose East Baton Rouge Parish in Louisiana, and I picked Park County, Colorado. Now, Park County in Colorado, of all the counties in Colorado, was one of the nicer ones where a lot of investors are flipping vacant land. And it’s very competitive. And the properties there are a little bit more expensive than maybe I would recommend for beginning students, but I knew would be competitive. And I wanted to do I just wanted to prove that you could do this even in competitive markets.

Joe: So I bought a list of 6000 property owners, I believe a little less than that. And I sent out letters and my response rates were really low. Like, I wasn’t expecting them to be that low. I knew it was going to be low. But yeah, it was bad and I was real nervous. I’m like, Oh my gosh. Now they came in slow because half of them were first class male and half of them were bulk rate, which takes sometimes three weeks and leads will trickle in over a couple of weeks. So I wasn’t planning on that. It was a mistake. I thought all of the mail was being sent first class, but only half of it was. But even still now it’s been four weeks and the bulk rate, the leads are still coming in. And I’m in at about 1% response rate with my letters. Normally I’m at 3%. So I was really, really surprised by this. Now, Gavin did cold calling and direct mail, and he got a huge response rate with his letters. If you want to see, by the way, the updates and all of this and what we did and how we did it. Just go to my YouTube channel and do a search for Joe McCall and we just do a search in my channel for the videos with the words New Market Challenge, and we just did them in September, is that right? August or September of 2022. And we just documented everything and what we did. Well, the goal was to get a contract under a deal under contract in 30 days or less. And we did. We got five of them. So Gavin got three houses and I got two vacant lots and we’re close to maybe a third. But I was so mad, like he beat me. I was supposed to beat him. But that’s what happens when you’re in a competitive market now. It’s crazy. I a lot of people that didn’t even believe I could get a deal under contract in Park County, Colorado, because it is so competitive and more expensive and we got more angry seller responses than any other county I’ve been doing vacant land in and it was surprising but to be expected. So the deal that we got under contract came from texting blows me away. And here’s a crazy thing. I didn’t do it. Now I’m not ready to recommend this company that I used yet. I talk to my students in my land course about it, but I don’t know if I I’ve only been working with them for a couple, three weeks. And so I just I don’t have done all of them well enough to recommend them to my larger real estate audience. But they did a crazy good job. And I got they were a referral from another land investing company who does a lot of deals. And he said, Yeah, I’d send mail. And then after I send mail to a county, I send the list to this company and they cold call it and text it and said, All right, well, let’s try the texting. So I gave them about almost 6000 names. They skipped traced them all cost about $0.07 per name to skip trace. So was 420 bucks or something like that. Right. And then it cost about $550 to text them all. And I’ll just tell you what they did. They sent a text that said, Hey, Jim, do you own a 5.3 acre lot near city Hartshill or something like that in Park County, Colorado? That’s just the main question that was out sent. And the only leads I have seen are the positive ones. And I had respond back. Yes. And they would say, great, would you be interested in selling it? And if they say yes, then they say, All right, what is your email address? We’ll send you an offer right away. And that’s it. Those three questions. I think it’s like one of these. We’re not trying to get a price out of them. We’re not trying to get the condition of the house. We’re not trying to measure their motivation or anything like that. I just want these this texting company to just ask some basic questions, see if they want to sell, and then we send them an offer. So that’s a great thing about land. We don’t want to talk to sellers until after they get our offer. And we make offers at 25 to $0.35 on the dollar. So we. We talk to them again after they get our offer.

Joe: So the way it typically works is we send a letter, a generic, neutral letter that says, Hey, do you want to sell your land if you do text or call our 24 hour recorded voicemail? And we do that because we get more calls when it’s a voicemail. We set up the voicemail in FreedomSoft, assign it to a campaign. We get our phone number from FreedomSoft voicemail set up in there. It’s assigned to a campaign. And then there’s all kinds of really cool automation that happens if they leave a message or even if they don’t, we text them back right away and then we follow up with them and it’s awesome. So anyway, these guys text this seller, my VAs are handling like all of this right now, my virtual assistant, which is awesome. So we sent an offer. No, no. So the text commit we the VAs put it into FreedomSoft and then because we have the phone number, we have all the information we need about the house, we have the API number or the personal ID. We have the acreage size, the GPS coordinates, because a lot of times these vacant lots are out in the middle of nowhere and they do not have an address. Right. They’re just on some dirt road. There’s no address. So you kind of have to know the GPS coordinates and you have to know the parcel ID to get all this information that you need to send them an offer. So when the VA puts all of that in, they even then give us the links. We have a software that will give you that’ll scrape all of the comps, similar comps of vacant land for sale and sold in that area. And they’ll tell you what you should offer, but you have to verify that number anyway. So what we did is we prepared an offer. We and we have the email address for the sellers. We texted them back and said, hey, we have an offer for you, here’s a link. We’ll go ahead and email it to you and send it in the mail, physical mail for you. So we sent a link. This is all done in FreedomSoft. We sent a link to the actual PDF offer, which was a cover letter and a one page contract. After that. Again, we have we talked to the seller yet. No. And we asked them what’s the how many repairs, how much in repairs you needed, what the RV is, what the condition of the house is, their motivation. No, no, we’re not asking them any of these things the seller lives in. Oh, I forget what state outside of the state. Florida. Maybe I forget anyway. I haven’t talked to him. Still haven’t. So we sent the text. They. They open the link in the text. This is all done inside of FreedomSoft. So the whole conversation with the seller is kept in one record. They open up the PDF they said Looks good. They actually printed it, signed it with a pen, and then took a picture of it with their phone and texted it back to us. And there’s our signed contract right there. We’re buying it for about 40 $300. It’s worth about 20, $25,000. We’ll probably sell it for like 19,500 to sell it as quick as possible.

Joe: But just crazy, blows me away. We haven’t talked to them. Text them an offer they say, or they text them, do you want to sell? They say, yes, we send them an offer. We also sent it in the physical mail, but we didn’t need to. So when we do create an offer, we email it to them, we text it to them and we send it in the physical mail. So it’s really important. And then if they don’t respond to that offer, we send them the same offer every 30 days after that, because a follow up is critical. You’re going to get deals from the third and fourth mailing of the same offer that you send. So typically if you get, you know, two deals under contract, you should expect to get another one or two deals under contract from that same mailing or from that same initial list over the next 3 to 4 months. Let’s see. Okay. So anyway, super excited. I just wanted to tell you all about it because it’s important to market in as many different ways as you can when you’re looking for deals, houses or vacant land or commercial deals or whatever it is that you’re looking for. Send letters, send texts, send cold calls, emails. We actually are doing some emails too that are working. It’s crazy. I doubt I skipped traced the list from freedom soft, exported out a ton of emails about 350 actually put them into a tool called GMASS. GMASS.co. GMASS sent about 350 emails from my business email address through Gmail and got about 5 to 7 sellers that said, yes, I would sell. Send me an offer. Crazy, huh?

Joe: So, all right. That’s all I wanted to tell you. Listen, if you would like to, I’m going to give you two links right now. Get ready to write these down if you want the contract that I actually use. In fact, yeah, if you want the contract that I use to get these land vacant land deals under contract, go to this website right here simple land contract dot com, simple land contract dot com. And that you’ll see the letter in the contract that I send to sellers if you want to watch the webinar where I actually teach all the steps and how to flip these vacant land deals, go to simple land class dot com, simple land class dot com. This business is so simple, guys. I do this with my sons. We they’re well right now, they’re 18 and 17 years old. I’ve been doing this with them for about the last two or three years. And this is I wanted a business where you didn’t have to talk to sellers. You could sit down a couple of nights a week like my sons do, go through the voicemails, send them an offer, and then only talk to the people that accept your offer or have some questions about it. It’s absolutely amazing. It’s one of the best strategies out there. And then to sell them, we’re buying just, you know, two, three, five acre lots. They’re selling them is actually really easy as well because we offer we sell them with owner financing or cash. And we don’t worry about Dodd-Frank because there is nobody living on the vacant lot. And yeah, it’s amazing. You can get cash flow like there’s no other deal. I was doing a video about this the other day. We put down $3500. We bought a vacant lot for $3500 and we’re getting $250 a month in cash flow for the next five years. Okay. So I’m getting my money back in like six months, right? Where else can you have a free and clear rental property for $3500? Okay. Did you and I said there, where else could you have a free and clear rental property for $3500 getting you $250 a month in cash flow? No, you can’t. Nowhere. Right. And you don’t have to worry about maintenance and repairs. Fixing it up after the tenant leaves. The tenant can’t. There’s nothing to damage. It’s just. It’s wonderful. It’s amazing. And I’m a big, huge fan. I’m still doing it. We’re still doing houses. But I love vacant land.

Joe: So if you want some more information, just watch my class at simple land class dot com, simple land class dot com. And when you go through that, watch the class. I’m going to make an offer to you at the end of that to get my course. But here’s a cool thing that nobody else is doing. I will refund all your money after you complete the program and try it out. You don’t even have to do a deal. Just go through the program and implement it and I will refund your money. I will pay you to complete my program. It’s crazy. Nobody else is doing that. And why am I doing it? Because I believe in putting my money where my mouth is. I’m looking to do more deals and some of you guys are going to bring me deals. And that’s really one of the main reasons why I’m doing it. But I’m also doing it because, again, I believe that if I can’t make you money, then I don’t deserve yours. And if you become if you go through my program and it changes your life, you’re going to be a raving fan of mine for the future. And you’re going to leave me good reviews and you’re going to give me testimonials, and you’re going to help me maybe bring me some more deals to partner with on our land on I don’t know. I’m excited about it. I think this is awesome. A lot of people go through my programs and don’t even ask for a refund because they got so much value out of it and they got way more money back from doing actual deals. But it’s a blast. I’ve refunded over probably now about $175,000 over the last few years to people who have completed my lease options program and my land investing program. And people think I’m crazy for doing it, but I love it. All right, guys, we’ll see you later. Simple land class dot com or simple land contract dot com. We’ll see you guys. Take care. Bye bye.