Joe: Hey, what's going on? Joe here, REI in your car podcast. Hope you're doing well, I just got back driving, but I just left my daughter's gymnastics. I had to take her there and heading back home, getting ready to park. But I wanted to record a quick podcast for you because I'm super excited about a deal we just got under contract. There's a few things I think are lessons learned in this deal, and I want to talk about it real quick. As I parked my car in the garage and put it in drive or park. Anyway, this is a it's a real simple deal in a there's two lots next to each other. They total about 2.3 acres. And it's very simple deal. And this was an elderly lady that couldn't even email the contract to us or, you know, text it to us or scan a picture of it with your phone, etc.. So it took it took us about three weeks to get the contract. And so you might be thinking, oh, no, three weeks. Like you got to hurry up and close this deal. Well, we that's why we have three months to close our deals. So anyway, this deal came from in a very competitive county. I chose this county because I'm just trying to prove to people that you can do deals in very competitive counties like you're a look, in this particular this particular state is one of the top two or three most active states where there's a lot of land deals being done. And in this county, in this particular state is probably the most competitive county in the state. And we went right in and we sent ugly, boring postcards and we're getting about a 1.1% response rate, which is pretty bad. Like I remember postcards for houses, you know, they used to be 3 to 5% and then it got down to right now you're lucky you can get half of 1% response rate with direct mail for houses and then with postcards for land. I remember I would get 10% response rates. Now they're down to one. But again, this is a very, very competitive county. So I'm not surprised.

Joe: But still, here's the point. Even in a competitive county, my response rates with my direct mail for vacant land postcards is 2 to 3 times higher than it is for houses. And it's all seasonal. But here's the crazy thing, okay? Of this of the leads that we've set, I think we sent out, I forget the numbers, maybe 1800 postcards. We've got 21 leads, 21 leads. And I think two or three of those were a few leave me alone or something like that. So we sent we got 21 leads and of those 21 leads, we've gotten four deals under contract. So that's one out of every six. Now, those are unusual numbers. Okay. I'm not saying this is going to happen to you. I don't make any claims or promises or guarantees. I'm just telling you our numbers and just telling you what it is for us right now. So we're getting one out of every six leads. These are leads. We've not even made offers on all of them yet. So we've got four deals under contract. This particular one, we got under contract for, I think, $13,000. I just posted something about it on my Facebook page. And the contract we're using isn't even the contract in my course. This is an old contract that we've just been using and too lazy to change it and FreedomSoft. But this was a discrete deal. It's we're getting it under contract for 13. We think we can sell it for probably 30 to $40000 and we'll probably just try to sell it quick for maybe 29 grand or something like that.

Joe: So the point of this is I wanted to tell you one thing here. Direct mail still works. It always will work. Number two, this business is a marketing business. It's all about marketing. It's not a real estate investing business as I land. It's not a wholesaling business, it's a marketing business, plain and simple. Number three, how many offers have you made in the last week in your speed? Income in this business is directly proportional to the number of offers that you make, plain and simple. It doesn't get any more complicated than that. So if you want to do deals, you need to make offers. And if you're not doing deals and if you're struggling and you're frustrated, ask yourself a question. How many offers have been made in the last week, in the last month? How many offers did you make today? That's all that matters. When you learn how to make offers, you're going to learn how to make money. And this does not happen overnight. You know, I had to invest this to be sent. Let's say we sent 1800 postcards in this one campaign. I had to invest $0.62 is $0.60 for the list. And the postcard using FreedomSoft, I don't know was to say it was $0.50 would be 900. Let's just say it was a thousand bucks. We had to spend $1,000 in marketing. $1,000. That's a lot of money, Joe. You don't get it. I don't have that right now. Well, then get a job, deliver newspapers, flip hamburgers, drive for Uber or something. Like you got to get some money for marketing. You should be spending at least a minimum, $1,000 a month for marketing to get leads. When you start getting leads, you're going to start sending offers. You need to send offers to every single lead that you get. Let me tell you one reason why our numbers were higher than they normally are. So like could never done the words. We got one contract accepted at every six leads so far and we've not even sent offers all release on this campaign. We are calling sellers back after they leave us a voicemail or text us. So that's important. You could, if you didn't want to talk to them, you could just send them an offer as soon as they leave a voicemail we've done. That before, but our numbers would have been a lot higher or worse, in other words. So we would have had maybe just one or two offers, except instead of the four that we have, if we would have just, you know, they sent out the postcard, they leave a message, we send them an offer, and then we talk to them only after they get our offer accepted or after they get offered. If we would have done that, we wouldn't have had as many offers accepted. But what we're doing now is as soon as they call them a voice message, we're calling them back, we're texting them back, we're following up with them and having a discussion, building a little rapport with them, getting them to know us, getting us to know them, asking them questions about the properties, etc.. Right.

Joe: I will say this too, and full transparency of those four contracts, one of them is pretty marginal. Like I think we got another contract for 23. It's probably too high and we're looking deeper into the numbers. We're going to be calling some realtors here soon. I mean, maybe we can sell it for 35. So then after you fix, you figure out our closing costs. And this is a if I tell you any more than you'll know state we're in. But like after our closing costs and we pay realtor commissions, we might only make five grand on this deal, which isn't nothing to sneeze at. I mean, that's a good number, but it's, you know, we're not used to that. Our average profit in the last 12 months on our deals. So there's been about $10,800. And so this deal would be about half of our average profit. So we're trying to decide right now whether we should go ahead with it or not. We're probably going to go back to the seller and try to negotiate a lower price or just recommend some realtors that can list their property for them if they don't want to lower their price. So the lesson from that is don't be afraid to walk away from deals if you're not going to be making enough money on those deals. You don't want to become the motivated buyer. You don't want to try to chase deals. You don't want to turn non deals into deals because we are deal finders, not deal creators. And once you start chasing those nominal average below average deals, rather, you're going to be spinning your wheels and wasting a lot of time. You need to have more margin for error margin in your deals than that. All right. The other lesson I wanted to tell you from all of this is FreedomSoft is amazing, FreedomSoft. They've made so many improvements over the last few months. They've added. Now you can do your direct mail from inside a FreedomSoft. And the more I'm doing this now, the more I'm helping my students do set up their campaigns in freedom. Soft. It's amazing because you get the best pricing in direct mail and it doesn't matter if you're sending one letter or one postcard or a thousand. Some of these direct mail companies, you have to like to get their discounted pricing. You need to buy like 5000 at a time or something. Then sometimes their best pricing is only bulk rate, like second class mail with FreedomSoft at the level that I'm in FreedomSoft right now, which is the middle subscription level, which is 297 a month is $0.52 for a postcard and I think $0.80 for a one page letter, first class mail. And so I could send 100, I could set one, I could send 10,000. I'm still getting that low discounted rate for the direct mail. And it's first class mail, which if you think about it, the money that I'm saving in just direct mail costs from what I was doing before with Click to Mail and with other direct mail companies, pays for my FreedomSoft subscription. So sometimes people get intimidated. Oh man, I got to pay FreedomSoft 197 a month or two, 97 a month and all me and it costs me $4 a month for every phone number that I get that can add some stress and pressure, right? I get it by looking at a big picture from 30,000 foot elevation, the savings in money and time with doing direct mail through FreedomSoft pays for the phone numbers and things like that. And then when you start doing direct mail, guess what? You're going to start doing deals. You're going to start making money.

Joe: So just like with any business, you've got to invest money to make money. This is why I love FreedomSoft so much. And once you learn how to use it, it's not a perfect CRM. There is no perfect CRM out there. But once you learn how to use it, it keeps everything organized for you really, really well. And so that way, you know, leads fall through the cracks. Okay, you can set up your automation and your follow up can be done all inside of this tool, which means it does the follow up for you. It automates all of that stuff. It has the phone numbers and the texting all done inside of FreedomSoft. And it keeps all of your conversations with the sellers inside the lead. So anyway, I'm excited, pumped. I love getting these emails with pictures of the these contracts and we're the first thing that we're going to be doing with this. By the way, now we have this property under contract is we're calling every single realtor in the area that has sold a property vacant lot in the last 6 to 12 months. And we're calling them up and we're saying, hey, this is Joe. We're investors in the area from out of town. We see that you sold a property recently for $7,000 an acre or whatever, too. And in this area we've got a deal. We think that we don't have any realtors representing us, but we're selling this deal for $5,000 an acre. And we're just wondering if you have any buyers that might be looking for this, looking for land. We pay 10% commissions and we pay bonuses commissions. If you can bring us a buyer that can close in 30 days or less. So we're not asking realtors to list the property for us. We're just asking realtors if they have buyers. The buyer bought this. Would they be looking for this? Do you know any buyers that are looking for land? And so they're thinking, Oh, wow, generous commissions bonus. All I need to do is make some phone calls and send some texts. So, you know, you might need to call five or ten realtors, but eventually you're going to find one that says, Yeah, you know what? I might let me let me take a look at it. Send me some information. You can tell them. Listen, we're in the process of closing this right now. We don't know what we're going to do with it yet. We were thinking we would buy it and just sell it with owner financing. That's typically what we do for cash flow. Right. But if we find the right buyer, we'll just assign our contract to them. If you can help us do that, you know what a signing is. So now we're telling them up front, we're wholesalers. We don't know what we're going to do with this property. We may close on it, we may just assign it. And that realtor now can help you assign that deal to one of their buyers, which is going to save you a bunch of money. Right? You can also tell the realtor something like, Hey, you know, if we can just assign this, we can save your buyer, your client a lot of money. Because if we have to if we have to close on it, we're going to have to bring in some private money. We're going to have two extra closing costs. So we're going to probably have to bump the price up from 30000 to 35000 if we have to close on it. But if we can find a way to just do a simple assignment, it's super simple and easy. If you can find us a title company that can do that and you can help us with all that with your buyer and they don't mind paying our assignment fee. It's just simple and cleaner. We'll just do it that way.

Joe: What do you think? You see where I'm going with this? I'm trying to get now working with realtors. So this solves all of the brokering without a license issues. This is solving all the problems with having to bring money to close the deals. It's solving all the problems of closing costs and all that extra work and is solving the problems of brokering without a license. Okay. This is amazing, isn't it? We did some deals like this in Florida, two different deals that were from the same seller selling them to the same buyer. And we this is crazy that they bought these deals from us for about $35,000 each and our assignment fees were $23,000. So 35 minus 23. We bought these deals for 13 grand and he had zero hesitation, zero problem writing us to $23,000 assignment fee checks on these deals. Why? Because we were selling them as such good deals. He didn't care what we were buying them for. We were selling them to him at a discount cheaper than he could buy anywhere else. He had some money that he had to put in this. So that's one of the easiest ways I found to do simple assignments. You just find a realtor, tell him what you're doing, and get a realtor to work with you because it makes sense.

Joe: All right. So way longer, I guess I thought I would do. I wanted to tell you about this land deal, tell you some of the lessons learned from this. But I also want to let you know, coming up, October 5th and sixth, I'm doing an implementation workshop with my good friend Gavin Timms are going to be doing this virtually over Zoom, October 5th and 6th. It's a two day implementation workshop. We're doing it virtually. You don't have to fly to Saint Louis. We're going be teaching you all of these things that we're doing here. We're going to be showing you how to do all of this stuff I'm talking about, and then we're going to set it up with you and for you. So it's an implementation workshop. We're going to be doing the stuff with you and for you during the workshop and whenever we can't get done with you or for you during the workshop in terms of setting up the systems, selecting the marketing, pulling the list, doing the direct mail marketing systems, all of that, we will do it for you after the workshop. So by the time that we're done, the goal is for you to start getting leads and you're going to start, you're going to know how to make offers, how to talk to sellers, how to pull the lists, how to find comps, how to do the marketing, etc., etc. and make offers using FreedomSoft. Okay. So if you're interested in that, I want you to go to this link right now. Joe McCall dot com slash workshop, Joe McCall dot com slash workshop and you will see some information there about what it is that we're doing and get the information about it. It's not a cheap workshop. We're only looking to work with people because we work really, really closely with you and you're going to learn a lot, but you're also going to implement a lot and we're going to help you. Whatever you can get done at the workshop, we're going to help you do it for you with you after the workshop. If you're interested, go to Joe McCall dot com slash workshop. Now, how much does it cost? It just depends. You know, you might be an existing student that already signed up for something else. So we might give you a discount. We might be able to split it up. But with payments over time, we're only letting ten people in. So what we do is an application process. If you go to that website, put out your fill out your information, you schedule a call with our guy handy, or he'll text you and ask you some more questions. And if you feel like you're a good fit, we feel like you're a good fit. We'll give you an invitation to join us online. And if we are already full and maybe we can give you a special deal or can't afford the price for the workshop or whatever, we might just let you watch at a discounted price. Even more is just all depends on what your situation is. And. And where we're at. So if you're interested in more information, again, go to Joe McCall dot com slash workshop. Click the button, fill out your information. We'll get in touch with you, tell you about it, and answer any questions you have and work something out. Is that cool?

Joe: All right. This has been fun. Appreciate you guys. I am in my garage, my other garage right now, and I need to go. We have a waterfall, and I need to go put some algae killer in my waterfall. If you don't do that, it gets nasty with algae. So I'm out of here, see you guys. Again, Joe McCall dot com slash workshop. It's going to be fun, it's coming up. See ya.