Joe:  Welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast.

Joe:  Jessey and Kevin from Pebble. What's going on guys? How are you?

Kevin:  Hey, hey, we're doing well.

Jessey:  Hey Joe, good to see you again.

Joe:  Good to see you too. I love your podcast, Jessey. I've listened to tons and tons of episodes, and you always got good things on there. You're interviewing people that are doing deals. You're involved with the business of land investing. You've got a great software called Pebble. I asked if I could get you guys on to talk about a few things. I wanted to talk with you guys about where do you see the land investing market going right now. About six months ago, you had an interview with somebody talking about how of people are dropping out of land investing, but the people that are staying in are actually doingreally well. And I'm personally seeing better numbers than I have in years in terms of response rates on our direct mail and deals and stuff like that. But I wanted to talk to you guys about what you're seeing on your side, you know, and then let's talk about Pebble. What is it? What are some of the things that Pebble do? Because you know I use Freedomsoft, but it's not for everybody. I get that. No software is perfect and every software has a learning curve and some people like things better than other things. So like, I wanted to talk about what you guys are doing at Pebble and, but yeah, welcome to my show. Glad you guys are here.

Jessey:  Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having us.

Joe:  All right, so let's talk about first where you see the market going right now. Like what's going on? You guys have a lot of people that are using your software. You also talk to a lot of people that are doing land, you know, it's early 2026 right now, what have you guys seen the last six months or so?

Kevin:  Yeah, it's been a wild ride. We've sort of seen the whole COVID era, zero interest rates bubble, whatever you wanna call that. And then we've seen the reverse of interest rates going up and seeing the real estate market as a whole kind of go through this wild gyration over the past few years. And land is a subset of it. It's somewhat insulated, but not 100%. So what we're seeing is deals are harder to come by just because there are… When somebody looks at their assessed values or whatever, and they see that their properties are going up so much, it's harder to sell. It's going to be a more difficult thing to get somebody to sell if they've seen that their property values have gone up so much. We've generally not seen any sort of recession things going on that have made the kind of push people into that selling scenario. So yeah, it has been harder for I think for a cohort of land investors who maybe are not focused on certain types of deals or maybe they're just sort of at a surface level. But on the flip side, we've also seen these full-time kind of experienced investors who are able to niche down get ton of success. So sort of a tale of two cities going on.

Jessey:  Yeah. You know, when I hear, you know, certainly, I think it's been challenging, more challenging than before, you to acquire property. But I think like when you look at the baseline of what it was, you during the COVID times, it was just, I mean, it was crazy at that time. And so it's kind of a skewed perception here. Like, you know, that is our baseline. So of course, you right now, it feels a little bit more challenging. And I think Kevin brings up a really good observation. Like the gap is We're seeing a lot of people that want to come in, but they're coming in with it with a hobby mentality and they're giving up a lot quicker than they used to. So we used to see people that were going to give the business at least a year. Now, people are giving the business like a couple months and they say, I'm hearing this, I hear that. It doesn't work. I'm out. And unfortunately, like, you know, behind the scenes, like the quiet ones, they're not on podcasts. They don't care to do any of that stuff. I know so many people like Jessey don't put me on a podcast. I know I don't want to be on it. They're hunkered down I know some yeah So many and uh, you know I'll speak to them about technical things and you'll never hear about them But I’ve managed to pull many onto the podcast too You know I’ve reached just recently and um, it's like it's hard to get consistency because for a lot of people They just haven't seen the results But then for those that are have seen the result like they double down on consistency So, you're seeing this widening gap. What else am I seeing and hearing is, on the marketing front, there's just a lot of flood of stuff. Because the turnover is so much quicker now, unfortunately, it's saturating for a lot of people that are doing things consistently. And so, yeah, it is sort of a weird dynamic right now, but surely, I will tell you, we see the numbers. Like people are doing consistently are doing consistently and doing it well. We just looked at some numbers, you know, uh, deals per mail is, has gone up, but less mail has gone out. So less people are mailing, but more deals are getting done, you know, gotten through mailing.

Joe:  Yeah, it's funny too, because I have been trying to interview some people that are doing deals right now and they're like, I don't wanna talk about it, because they're afraid they're gonna give away their secrets and you gotta understand, and I tell them this, there are no secrets in this business, right? There's no secret magic list, there's no postcard or letter, there is no secret, but you know, whatever, so they don't want to share the details, I get it. But just this morning, I'm looking at this Facebook post 11 hours ago, one of our clients in Dirtflipper said, I wanted to share this and encourage the group. Our first mailers went out around Thanksgiving, so this was four months ago. 500 each week through the middle of January. We've had 400 sellers call us out of 4,700 mailers. Okay, that's like 9% response rate. Now, the mail I like to send, just so you all know, the neutral postcards, neutral letters, right? I want as many people to call as possible so I can get their phone numbers, so I call them and call them and call and call, and call forever, right, Like we, I want as many phone numbers as possible so I can talk to as many people as possible. So I can send as many offers as possible, so I follow up with as many as possible because you mentioned before the whole hobby thing, right? Some people,they're in it to hobby the people like this that are consistently doing the marketing. Listen, direct mail is not dead. I tell this to everybody all the time. It's not dead, it still works and there's fewer people doing it. But listen to this, I'm not done. She had 400 plus callers, sellers, different people call in the mail. She sent out 115 offers. So she's sending offers to people after they call in, right? She's talking to them. She's getting some information about the property, building a little rapport, talking to him just for three, five minutes, nothing long, no fancy sales tactics, trainings and all that, right. 115 offers, currently they've got nine accepted. They're getting one out of every 12 offers that they're sending accepted. The feedback that many sellers give us is that what differentiates us is they're actually talking to a real person, not just texts, not letters, not emails. And we educate them as to why many of the offers are lower than they expect. So, do some people hang up on us? Yes. We just move on to the next person. And noactually gets you closer to your next yes. So she's actually right now in the middle of selling these deals. Some folks call us back after the shock of the offer wears off. Some actually accept it. Listen to Joe when he says the gold is in the follow-up. Now they're praying for these contracts to close, right? And their hope… And this is what I tell people, you're going to make some mistakes. So if you can close like 75% of the deals you get under contract, you're doing good. So the only way to win is to not quit. If you don't have enough time, you're overwhelmed, find somebody to help you and partner with you. Thank you, Joe, and the team. Thank you for your support. Boom, I love it. So it's working, and I'm seeing this right now in our own marketing and in other clients that we're helping with marketing right now with the direct mail. We're seeing double the response rates we were seeing a year ago on our mail. And I'm excited about this business. I'm exited about the people that are sticking through it, the people that, cause you've seen a lot of people quit and leave recently. The same with houses. It's not just land. A lot of household sailors are leaving the business, right? They're just kind of… You see the same thing with realtors. A lot of realtors have left. Well, this is the best time to stay in. And if you… I wanted to say this too, and I know I'm supposed to be interviewing you guys, but I just go so passionate about this. If you… Land is not dead, it's not even close. You go into Florida, North Carolina, California, we're seeing increase there, Arizona, even New York, Pennsylvania, and you go in Zillow or Redfin, and just look, last 90 days, vacant land sold. You still see, like in some counties in Florida right now, you still see hundreds and hundreds of vacant land deals selling in the last 30 days, 60, 90 days. So whoever said that it's dead is not working. Just go look to see who's finding these deals, who's selling these deals. Who's buying these deals? That's where you go and you focus, like some, and my philosophy has always been And if that ding-a-ling can do it, then why can't I do it? If 500 people can sell land in that one county in the last 90 days, then, why can I be one of them? You know what I'm saying?

Kevin:  And it just takes that consistency. I guess this business is all about just consistency and doing the work every day. Know, eventually figure stuff out. And what we're also seeing is that people are trying different things and going after deals that maybe seemed too difficult before, either specifically going after landlocked stuff or doing complicated probate stuff or weird, you know, subdivides, things that scare off most investors, those land investors who are willing to put in the effort to see those to completion. And yes, they're not easy flips, they take lawyers and they take, you know, all the things that the complexity adds to it. But the result is, if you can get through that process, you stand to have a significant profit at the end. So we're seeing a lot of people's sort of deep diving into those types of deals.

Jessey:  I'll talk a little bit quickly about the consistency side of things. I think that's really, really challenging. Like as business owners and entrepreneurs, like we're emotional. We're quite emotional. Most of us are, I mean, that's, that why we end up in this space. And, and I can't, I think, that sort of deters a lot of that consistency. It's not a revolutionary statement, but I've, I've heard somebody's literally try your best to stick to and trust the system and it's, it's hard for you listening? Like you're in it and you're like you're getting nothing and you like you're asking me to be consistent. Like I guess I'm saying from looking at it from the other side, I see the data, I see it. I see people are doing deals, I see it and it's happening. So if they can make it happen, you know, you just have to kind of take that leap of faith. This, I mean, just like any business, this is not for the faint of hearts. You do need to stick to it. And if you're not going to, you might as well cut your losses now and get out. But if you want to make this work, the reality is…

Joe:  I tell people, listen… If you're just going to dip your toe in the water, try it for 30 days, maybe just send 500 letters, like forget it. Don't even start.

Jessey:  That's the problem, we're getting flooded with too many of those. I'm gonna try for a month, send out 500, and I'm out, like 80% of people are like this. And so, it makes it so challenging for all, it affects all of us, to be honest.

Joe:  I heard the other guy say, everybody's an entrepreneur until the invoice comes due, right? I mean, I can relate to that. I've had some invoices come due and I'm like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do now? But I never quit. No way. Come on. I'm going to find a way to fight through that. And I'm gonna find a to pay that invoice. You know what I mean? There's been times in all of every entrepreneur's journey, you've had some difficulties, you face some trials, and you're just like, I don't know how I'm going to this, but I'm want to figure it out. And you refuse to quit. And it is It's frustrating, it's sad because we've given them all the tools that they need. Just do it, right? And then they quit so early when they're just a few inches away from their first deal.

Kevin:  So, Joe, when you are seeing on your end an uptick in acquisitions or distressed sellers, what do you attribute that to? Is it market? Is that economy? Like, what do…

Joe:  What do you think? This is so simple. This works in any market. Up, down, flat, cold, sideways, whatever, it works. Doesn't matter recession. Follow the money, follow the demand. If you wanna do deals like look at the entire US, I start with land watch, right? I say, all right, where's the most popular states right now? And you can see the top eight or 10 most popular states, then drill down into each one of those states on land watch and see, and I like going after cheap land, right, I like looking to see where is the land under $100,000 selling quickly. I'm not trying to get huge home runs. I'm trying to just get a bunch of base hits and I see okay Here are the most popular counties and there's a lot of software now that does this land stats land insights land portal There's a bunch so but you can do this with Zillow and Redfin and you see all right Of this of these three four five states What are the ten most popular? Counties where there's the most land being sold in the last 30 days 60 90 days, right? And then you drill down into the zip codes. All right of these counties right here What are the most active zip codes right now? I don't care if there's new home builds, infill lots. I don't care if it's five acre recreational land. Doesn't matter. I'm just following the money. This is what happened to me in 2000. I started doing real estate, no six. I saw, I remember in 2006, people complaining about the competition. Oh, there's so much competition. You can't walk down the street and trip over a Bandit sign. Like so many people are mailing the same list. It just, I've heard the same complaints that it doesn't work for 20 years now. People complaining about competition and there's too much people out there and this doesn't work anymore. All right, so fine, I just refuse to quit. Now, so I learned it back then and I was using, if you're familiar with list source, right, I'd go into list source and I would see what are the most active zip codes where absentee owners are buying houses in the last 90 days. And then I say, okay, well, there's people buying right now even during the crash in 07, 08, and 09, all the way to 2012. There were still people wholesaling deals. There were a lot of people wholesaling deals and buying deals. Of money who was made, yeah. Exactly, right? But that, if you would have listened to the naysayers back then who were complaining that it doesn't work, you would be, you'd be, you would've missed out on a huge, incredible opportunity. But I was smart enough, because I had coaches back then, who told me, never quit, right, go follow the money, follow the demand, see where the money's going. Wealth doesn't disappear, it transfers. And one of my best books I've ever read, thank God, while I was still in my corporate job, it's called, Who Moved My Cheese, or Who Moves the Cheese, or whatever like that. You know, it was all about the cheese moves, right. Need to look for where it's moving to. So maybe two years ago, properties were selling, you know, bigger subdivides and entitlements. You know, that was the big thing. But now it's different now, maybe different county, different states. So look in the recent past, and everybody that I know that's doing deals right now is doing the same thing. They're looking to see, all right, well, in these five zip codes, there's been hundreds of activities, hundreds of vacant lots being sold recently to whoever, whether they're home builders or investors or just retail buyers or future homebuilders, who cares? It doesn't matter. There's a lot of, so then they go and they find all the people who own land in those zip codes, okay? And you send them mail. Send them a postcard, send them a letter. I don't like blind offers, because like I said before, I just want as many calls as I can get. Send them mail consistently, right? And grow a pair. Like some people are so afraid to do direct mail because it costs money, I get it, right. But if you consistently do 500 or 1,000 postcards a week, you're going to get calls. And eventually you make enough offers, you're gonna get some accepted. And guess what? Now, when you get a deal under contract, you've got 50 people that you can call. Just get on the phone and call all those buyers, call all of those realtors and just flip, sell the deal. It always works when you go and see where the demand is. You go and sit like you're, it's like you are on a boat with a depth finder. I don't like to fish, but I've seen this. You can go out there and you can see where all the fish are down below, right? Well, then you can study and you Well, what kind of bait does that fish like to eat, right? They like little quarter acre infill lots in these zip codes that, you know, and this is what they want and this is what their buying them for. You can see what price they're paying for them. And then you just go in that market and you start offering 10 grand less and then you just sell it to those guys.

Jessey:  So I want to actually add to what you just mentioned there with the analogy. Like what Joe's talking about here is really doing the upfront work and understanding the market you're getting yourself into. So this is another common thing that we see is a lot of people just kind of come blindly into a market and don't really cater some of that messaging to that market. So if you're gonna send out a letter, a postcard, best now make sure you make yourself, you make it seem intentional that you're in that area. Whether it's an imagery, a line or something along those lines because when you're just kind of coming in with a slotted in template that really doesn't say anything to them, you're not going to get any bites. And it's the same thing, what kind of bait are you using? What kind of fishes are this? What depth are they at? This kind of upfront work will, you know, help you increase that response rate. And so that's also another thing that I've been really harping on with a lot of people that are coming in to make sure they do some that work.

Joe:  Well, you know, the mail is working best right now for us, too, is plain old, boring text letters and postcards. No graphics, no images, no headlines. It's just, hey, Jim, I see that you own this two-acre lot. It's really important that we talk to you. Give me a call. And I like to use voicemail. I say on their text or call, our 24-hour recorded voicemails. No one will answer. And that gets the most calls. They go to voicemail and then we call back all the hangups. We text all the Hangups. And then sometimes, you know, I'd say 50, 60% of the time, they will text us and or leave a voicemail with the reference ID from that letter, and then we can call them back. We can send them an offer, you now, so that sometimes the more boring and plain the marketing letters are, the better responses you get because it doesn't look like junk mail. My sons, my two boys and I, when I was first starting to do land, I wanted them to do real estate, but I didn't want them to get into, I didn't want them to do houses because it's just too complicated. And so we started sending out mail, generic letters, and then sending them to voicemail. Then my boys would send the offers and then only talk to them after they got our offers, right? I would have them print the letters. I didn't want them to use a mail house. I wanted them to actually do the work. So we just printed the letters at home. And then I got them a bunch of envelopes and they would hand address all the envelopes and put real stamps on it, right. And my two boys, over a period of two or three years, They did over $150,000 in profits doing this very part-time from the kitchen table. Now that was five, six years ago, okay? Maybe it was different then. I don't know. But one of my boys is getting back into it. They stopped doing it. Just busy with school and sports and jobs and stuff like that. But they're wanting to get back into. I'm doing the same thing. I help them come up with a letter that's 18-point font, Old Times New Roman font, all right? And it's just a with, you know, dear seller's name. If you want to sell your two acre lot near city in state, give me a call. I'd like to make you an offer and buy it. That's it, right? And then he's doing a window, not a window envelope, he's doing a regular envelope, handwritten. And I, he was going to the post office actually right now, a couple minutes ago he left, and I told him to go to the post office and buy a bunch of one-cent stamps, like the real stamps and the one-cents stamps. And then you just put both, you put two stamps on an envelope, it's way more likely to get opened. And so he's like, okay, Yeah, so it's those little things, but it's the consistency, right? Crazy stuff. Let me ask you guys, you have a lot of people in Pebble that are using Pebble now doing deals, and I wanna ask you some questions about what Pebble does and all that. What kind of mail are you seeing success on your side of things that people are using? Postcards.

Jessey:  We've been looking into thatrecently postcards. I think there's a few reasons. I still keep mine on my desk here. This is my very first postcard back in 2018. Yeah, postcards are outperforming by quite a bit. Yeah. I have a theory about this and I think it really forces. I mean, first of all, there's no barrier. There's no sort of permission to read. It's just right there. And then it's quick. It is a quick read and people are going to be scanning stuff quicker. And so even something like you're mentioning, Joe, like having a simple statement on there or whatever, I mean, that's pretty odd. And I think that can catch eyes. But you can transfer information a lot quicker on a postcard versus a letter. There's a lot more steps. So you're adding barrier to that. And yeah, we're almost seeing like a 3x difference between postcards and letters, which is insane.

Joe:  And postcards are cheaper, which is great.

Jessey:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if we were to say what's working, I may give you a pretty blunt answer.

Joe:  Postcards. And what are you seeing on your end for people that are using Pebble, even in your own land investing business? What kind of properties are they doing? Infill lots, recreational lots, subdivides.

Jessey:  Yeah, we definitely don't sit behind the screen and know what kind of deals they're working on, but just from conversations, a lot of people are taking on properties that are just ickier that most people would not have taken. Whether there's some sort of complex ownership on that, or some weird chain of title on there, or probate properties, they want again to forcing appreciation on that with subdivisions. So we're seeing a lot of that. And, you know, that's one of the things that we're focused on inside of Pebble right now. You know, one of the, one, one or the newer features that we released here is when you're managing a deal, you're now able to have conversations and manage the projects that are going on for that. So if you're doing a subdivide, it's now a lot easier to do that project management right inside of the deal, inside of pebble. And those are the kind of things that we are focused on at least. Yeah, definitely more complex kind of properties that Pebbles or Pebble is sort That's when it happened, too.

Joe:  All right, well, let's talk about Pebble. I think it's a great tool and a lot of people love it. I get great feedback from my audience who use Pebble, so how is Pebble doing? How are things going over there?

Jessey:  Yeah, no, it's great. You know, I think one of the things that we really focus on is like, how do we make this accessible so that you actually use a platform and you can perform consistently on it? I mean, I just had, again, like another guest yesterday, we recorded, he's one of our top mailers again. You probably never heard of him, but I mean behind the show, he said, Hey, Jessey, I Just want to say since COVID time, I've been doing the same shit day in day out every day and like it's it works and people have to how simple this is and so that that really like I was like wow that that is a really cool statement I mean it kind of summarizes a lot of the philosophy that goes behind Pebble is like how do we keep this simple so you actually use it I mean there's only one thing you can really do about it or with it so Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing about Pebble. In terms of features, I don't know, there's a lot going on. And one of the great things is like, this isn't, you know, a skin-over, like an existing platform or anything like this. This is really built out of experience. I mean.

Kevin:  Yeah, we've built Pebble from the ground up as a land investing platform. And I know there are a lot of sort of generic CRMs that are marketed as land CRMs, but they're not… The people actually writing the code are not thinking about land all day long the way we are. So our core features are all based on what is going to serve the land investor the best. And there are some nuances around the way that this business model works that are just different than your typical sales cycle. And so if you get an off-the-shelf CRM that was not built from the ground up to be a land investing platform, you're just not going to have as seamless of an experience as something that's built for it.

Jessey:  Yeah, you know found like even foundationally pebble is what we call property centric versus most platforms out there, you know, it's typically contact centric, you know, when you're looking at the life cycle of a property, you know, we're going to acquire that property, then we're maybe going to work on that. So there's some project management for that property and we're going to offload it to sellers, sorry, to buyers. And, you know, the common denominator through that entire cycle is the property. It's not the contact. I mean, once we acquire that product, we don't care about that owner. And so like everything gets tracked against the property record. That becomes your sort of centric object inside a Pebble. Now, obviously there's contacts that can be, you know, swapped in and out, which makes the platform very flexible. But that's really sort of a unique sort of build or base of what Pebble is. But yeah, I mean, as of recently, there's been a lot of interesting things that we're working on. And, you, know, even some people would say it's small or boring, but Kevin and I, we constantly look at ways of how do we continue to improve the process. So recently, I mean, this is going to be small and you're not going to really notice it for most people if you haven't used Pebble, but like bringing in our list was already so darn easy. Like I could get a 5,000 mailer out in five minutes of first coming into Pebble. Maybe less, right? If you didn't have a hard time finding your CSV file and nothing's wrong with your CSV that you're dropping in, that could have taken you, you know, a couple of minutes. We've once again streamlined that even more. Well, what if you did have structures and you didn't have the APN for that property? You know, we're really constantly thinking about these kind of things. You know another improvement for us, onboarding is really important. And so I know like adopting a new platform can just be so intense for some people, including myself, making an update, you know, how we're sort of delivering the onboarding, tasks and things that people need to do to get the aha moment inside of Pebble. These are kind of things we're thinking about. I mean, it's great. There are big features that we're thinking about and working on, whether it's related to AI or integrations or whatever it is. But I think there's just a lot of nuances that we continue to streamline. So it's just easy for somebody to be consistent and use the platform consistently.

Joe:  What are some of the things you feel like Pebble does better than everybody else?

Kevin:  Well, one of Pebble's core things is its mailing ability. You can go in there, you send out a mailing campaign, you can build a template for a postcard or a letter or whatever you want to do. We have some great pre-made templates, but you can also customize those to exactly what you want do. And then because Pebble is running that mailing campaign we can track everything about it. So we can know across all your campaigns what the response rates were, what the close rates were. What the ultimate ROI return was on that campaign. If you're using separate platforms to do your mailings versus your deal management and all that stuff, you sort of have to combine all those together somewhere, whereas Pebble can just do it all for you because we have all that information. There and that can be a huge win because nobody wants to be copy pasting data into Excel and managing all that because at some point it's going to break and yeah, it's nice to have everything in one place.

Jessey:  Another really sort of thing that we do very uniquely is that it becomes your database, right? So whether you're pulling your data from, you know, data tree to one of these other land specific platforms, Pebble is going to contain all that, right. OK, so that's great and all it, you know, it has all100,000 year property records you've ever marketed to. But because Pebble has all the data points that you've brought in about that property, whether it's the zoning, the legal description, the acreage and all this kind of stuff, you can now slice and dice your data and do what you'd like. So if I had 100,000 and I'd say, hey, give me the properties that are in this zip code between the acres of five and 10 that have not responded to me, spit it out to me so I wanna get it out so I can skip trace, or I wanna send them this specific mailer. You can do stuff like that. You have now, you've got all this data, now you have granular control over your data. And so you can certainly do a lot with that terms of remarketing, in terms of follow-up, in terms of automations. You know, again, you have control over that data. It's not just, you know, here's a blanket list. Okay, well, here's this county and this county. Well, no, I want to look at more detailed things. And it could be anything. Maybe you've done some due diligence on, I don't know, let's just say, every property with this zoning. And have I recorded that in or I've got that in information? Again, I can extract that information, remark it, communicate to them, and retarget them.

Kevin:  And the cool thing that we're seeing is that these land investors who do the business for a long time, that database just grows and grows and as a database gets bigger, it becomes more valuable. There's more things that you can tease out of the properties that you may have marketed tothree, four years ago. Well, now you've learned something new. You've learned that, hey, I get a better ROI on this specific type of property with This specific type of zoning, like Jessey said, well, now I've got a database of 100,000 records. I can go back in time and say, all right, pull me all of those properties that before I knew about this trick, now, I can pull those forward, market them. And because I have everything saved in one place, I have the ability to do that. And my database just gets more and more valuable as time goes on.

Joe:  Cool. Okay. I want to ask you some questions about phones, phone numbers, and getting phone numbers in the CRMs. I've been hearing this from different software providers that provide phone numbers across the board in all the industries just in the last month or so. It's gotten harder yet again to register your business and get a phone number, a virtual phone number that allows you to make and receive phone calls and send and receive text messages, right? Are you saying the same thing and can you explain that a little bit what's going on?

Kevin:  Yeah. Yeah. So this is a thing that's not just specific to land or anything else. The carriers, the phone carriers, the Verizon's AT&Ts of the world, basically like 18 months ago, two years ago, they all got together and they said, we need to figure out a way to combat spam, whether it's spam calling or scam text messages, all that stuff. And so they put together this unified database of spam filtering. And so, they all share data amongst each other. So, when one sees a number that's making maybe lots of outbound calls or lots of outbound text messages, they will flag that in this central database. And so now, it's not just Verizon that's blocking you. It's AT&T or it's T-Mobile. They're all sort of sharing this. So this was this is a big revamp in the whole phone industry that happened 18 months ago it's called um well there's the a2p verification that you now have to do to register yourself as a business with a phone number but then there's a there's slew of different filtering that's going on in the industry. Unfortunately, we just sort of have to work within this new system. The same thing happened to email 20 years ago. It used to be easy to send spam email, and then all the email providers got together and they basically killed spam, and so that became much more difficult to do. We just have to operate within the rules. We have to know what those rules are. And a lot of that is just knowing that you, you can't just register a number and immediately start cold text messaging or cold calling. You have to find a way to get two-way interactions going on. Because as soon as the carrier see that people are texting you before you text them or calling you before you call them, that's an immediate, like, okay, everything's cool here. Like if you're getting inbound calls, that is, that there's a clear indication that you are a legitimate business that's servicing your customers. So you just have to find a way to be able to do that. Or you have to find a way to, you know, cycle through numbers and, and handle all that.

Joe:  What's the process called when you are, you have to register your business and then it goes through this verification process that you're an actual legit LLC.

Kevin:  Yep. So there's a thing called 10 DLC, which is a process of registering your business with a phone number. So that's that shared database that all the carriers have now. Basically says that when you buy a number, you have to submit that through this 10 DLC process that is going to tie that number to your legal entity. So your LLC or your corporation, and you're going to submit that number along with all of your information, that's going to go into that database. And then if there's ever any complaints against you, the carriers can come back and say, hey, you're not being legitimate here. So yeah.

Joe:  Has there been any changes within the last month or two of this whole process? Yes, because something's going on right now and it's just trying to be a bonker.

Kevin:  Yeah, yeah, this it's changing all the time. Yeah, there a month ago, I think on January 1st, there was a sort of next level of authentication required next level filtering that's going in place. So a lot of numbers are getting marked as spam. Or when you try to call out, you'll get that scam likely message on the receiver's phone. So yeah, this is just another sort of clamp down that the carriers are all doing. And again, we just sort of… The tricky part is that the carriers are not publishing what is making somebody flagged as spam. They specifically don't want to publish that because then the true scammers are going to know how to get around it. So you sort of have to play this game of trying to figure out why you're getting flagged and get around that in some way. And a lot of that just means try to make yourself look as legitimate as possible. If you have a legitimate company, you're getting legitimate calls in, and this is a great, a reason to mail is that when you send postcards with your number on there and you tell people, call me, you're gonna start getting a bunch of inbound calls. And again, that is a prime way to get, to look good in the eyes of the carriers. If you're giving inbounded calls, that will be the best way to avoid those spam.

Jessey:  Realistically, the way I see it is emails out a long time ago. Phone is pretty much on the chopping board right now. I mean, with the rise of more and more, I don't know if you heard this stuff coming out of like conversational AI and what not. This stuff is just going to get tighter and tighter. And maybe I'm biased here, but I think mail is going to stick around. Mail is just getting more expensive and less mailing out there. So I hate to say it, but I know this is, this is in regards to like cold outreach through the phone, texting or, you know, I can't comment on cold calling. It really depends on how you're going about cold calling, but especially like mass texting, you know, or ringless voicemail. These are things that are, you know, pretty, pretty grayhat right now.

Kevin:  And it's, yeah, it's gonna be hard going forward. Yeah, so if you guys work and I applaud them, but it's going to keep getting harder.

Joe:  I've never been a fan of text blasting, right, for leads. There's just, you can get in big trouble, you get fined, and the people that are doing a lot of it, they know they're gonna get eventually sued, and they're okay with that. It's just like, it's a slap on the wrist, it is better to ask for forgiveness than for permission, their attitude has been kind of like that, so, you know, whatever, go for it. But I don't like it, I don't like getting those texts. When you get a phone call back from somebody, the positioning is so much better. The quality of the lead from direct mail is so better. Because they're calling you now you're calling them back and you're asking them that so when you start the conversation with them It's so much better instead of interruption marketing like a text or a cold call You know, you're in this position where you have to like sell something to them, right? But when they're called you and you are answering the phone or you're returning their call Hey, I got your voicemail. I'm returning your call. It's just so much easier

Kevin:  Yeah, yeah, it sets up the relationship on the on the right foot

Joe:  Oh, go ahead, Jessey. Yeah.

Jessey:  So yeah, specific for follow up, I'm kind of going on a tangent here because we're talking about texting and mailing and then there's like, hey, if you are mailing, this is sort of a side note, this kind of came from texting. Like you, and you want to follow up like don't rely on texting, don't rely on like voicemails, like follow up with the mail. Cause you've already proven that they looked at their mail. Like you could, I mean, it's really silly that so many people, the only way that they're following up is just like email text and that's considered follow-up. And that's one of the great things about Pebble. We can schedule direct mail to individuals and drip them out every four months, three months. Hey, are you still interested? Hey, are you still interested. You know they're reading your stuff and why are we not following up with that? Joe said it here. So glad you brought that up. Yeah. The gold is in the follow. I say the deals are nowadays. Okay. I always show this off here. Like I sent 500 of these out early, you know, back in 2019, I got three deals done out of 500 of this. There's, it's not like that anymore. Literally. Yes, you can get the call back, but the deals live in the follow up. So like if you're mailing and you're not mailing, following up, uh, figure out how to do that and, and do it at scale and automate that as best possible. And yeah, we'll can handle for something like that. No.

Joe:  I'm so glad you brought this up. I can't tell you how many deals I've done personally from follow where I send them an offer. They never call me back. Like they say they want to sell. We kind of agree on a price. I send him an offer in an email. I also always send the offer in the physical mail and then I just call them. They don't answer. They don't answer my texts. And so I, I send the offer then again. I'll send the same offer every 30 days for about three or four, three or four months. Okay. And then after that, I'm still sending them a postcard or a letter every 30 days. You know how many times they finally called me back on the fourth time I've sent them the offer and they say, okay I'm ready to sell now

Kevin:  Yeah. Yeah. It's just like people are busy. You know how it is. Life gets busy. It falls off a top of mind. But at some point, it's going to become top of mind again for them. That offer in the drawer, you're the one that they're going to call.

Joe:  I tell my coaching students, I wanna call all of your sellers in six months, and I wanna ask them, do you know who Kevin is? You know who Jessey is? And they better tell me, oh yeah, Jessey. Yes, he keeps on calling me, he keeps sending me letters, keeps on following up. They need to know who you are.

Jessey:  Yeah, it's, uh, we hear this story over and over.

Joe:  Man, I had a seller at Collix the other day. She had our letter, she kept it for three years and she called us and said, are you still interested? Unfortunately, I was testing blind offers and even three years ago, that offer was way too high. So we told her, well, yeah, we are interested, but not at that price, unfortunately, right? But like there's so much money in the follow-up. One time we looked back, my coaching business partner, Gavin and I looked back and we did 58 deals that year. Only four deals came from that first conversation with the seller, that first touch. If we would not have done any follow-up, we would have only done four deals that year. Of the 54 deals, the average follow- up time was seven to eight touches, three months. Three months, seven to 8 touches of follow-ups. And people don't like, you guys, listen, one of my favorite pieces of mail to follow up with an offer, I send the offer in the mail to the sellers. I always email it, text it if I can, and send it in physical mail. A legit real offer in mail, right? I follow it up automatically two weeks later with a handwritten postcard. Even if I do this every time because like I want them to send the postcards is hey I'm just following up Did you get the offer that we sent you in the mail and then every 30 days send the same offer again? I don't know why people don't do it

Kevin:  Well, it's nice when a platform like Pebble can do that all for you. Do it for you, yeah. It literally is, once you set it up, it is one click. You get that lead that comes in, you generate the offer, and you can enroll them in that follow-up plan in a click and have all those follow- up mail pieces, text messages, emails go out, and you don't even have to think about it. That's living the dream right there.

Joe:  Man, it's so frustrating because people are so afraid to spend the money on the marketing. But they'll go and spend 25 grand on a coaching program, right? They'll go spend five grand on course or program, like whatever mastermind, but they won't lose a thousand dollars on marketing, direct mail. Just one deal will pay for all of your follow-up mail for the entire year. Why can't you do it? You're just a sissy. You're, just stop, get some big boy pants on and do it. Unless you hate money. But don't do it if you hate money I can tell you can relate is what I'm… You're laughing.

Jessey:  Iget it. It's just sexy to take a course or throw down a huge cash on something and feel like you're doing something versus actually spending on things that'll make a difference. Yeah, I think there's a lot of human psychology here that I probably don't know enough or I'm not qualified to about but I'm sure it has something to do with that.

Joe:  Okay, so I wanted to ask you guys real quick, and we're running out of time. Where are you seeing AI working right now in practical ways in a land investing business? And are you incorporating any AI in Pebble right now or in the future?

Kevin:  Yeah, we sure are. You know, we've been following all the developments I mean, it's a pretty amazingtime feels like you know the internet in 1997 again. Yeah, we recently launched our AI Intake agent basically so cool. You can have a Virtual intake agent receive calls. So instead of sending them to voicemail you actually have a a legit AI that's going to answer the phone, get their information and try to probe them a little bit on if this is a legit person to contact you. Um, and then we'll, we'll create a deal and, and, uh, set that up for you if, if they determine. So yeah, getting a ton of success from that it is, uh it's pretty amazing to watch that happen and it gets better every day and then we are, we're using some AI for some other things. Jessey, maybe, maybe you have some.

Jessey:  Yeah, yeah, I know. Like Kevin said, we're following that. One of the things like about AI, it's like there was this sort of rush of like, okay, let's just slap AI on everything. It's like, okay, we are AI now. And like a lot of it isn't.

Joe:  Or what's funny, Jessey, is they'll call their CRM AI. Yeah.

Jessey:  Oh man, there are a few of those out there now powered by AI and literally nothing. Yeah, unfortunately. So the developments are happening so quick and we really want to be deliberate in what we sort of work on and make sure it's useful. Again, we could easily just flood the platform to do everything and anything, but you won't end up using that platform. So what is actually useful? I certainly think this isn't like an AI feature, but when you think about sort of, I've been playing with OpenClaw these last few weeks and you know, these sort of agents now that are coming out, like is your platform going to be able to be understood by an agent down the road here? Like we're getting very close. Kevin was just telling me Meta or I think I saw Meta and OpenAI are like bidding to try to acquire OpenClaw now. And it's like, once these things are more commonly, you know out there and accessible to most people. Your AI needs to understand how your platform works. So if you're trying to jive together all these things, man, trying to chain all these things, it takes so much time. I'm just trying to change a few things on OpenClaw right now. And it's like, I'm non-technical. I can't imagine what it'd be like for an investor. So we're really, again, how do we simplify Pebbles so we can understand? This is where your properties live. This is what your deals are. We're not saying, okay, well, use the contacts that's where you're going to make it as your property and try to like shove things into a generic CRM to make it work because it's just going to be very hard for an agent to really understand how to use a platform. So we're really thinking a lot about design and how are agents going to take over and help you do things on the browser eventually here. So not like AI feature but really thinking about that as well. But there are certainly things that we're going implement here. The big one here has been some updates with our intake agent. I think almost half of our users are now using that and using it with success too. So. Just continue to think about that.

Kevin:  I love it. It's going to be a crazy world. I think in the next six months, we are going to see some wild stuff. Basically, the way I see it going is AI is going to take the place of a virtual assistant and they're just going to use a browser the way that a virtual system would use a browser. They're going to log into your CRM. They're gonna be uploading lists. They're to activate your mailing campaigns. They're are going bereceiving leads and following up with people and they are going do that all just through the tools that you have set up today.

Joe:  We spent a lot of time on comping properties and you've seen the algorithms and it's frustrating because they can't tell whether a property is landlocked or floodplains or something like that. Hopefully you guys can hear me all right. So do you see AI anytime soon comping property intelligently where they're actually going to Zillow and Redfin and they're looking at similar properties nearby, things like that.

Kevin:  Yes. I think that you can do that today with something like OpenClaw. You know, it's still sort of early enough that it's not easy. It's going to take some time to sort of train something to do that. But I think six months from now, absolutely, just the way you would train a VA to go to Zillow, look at the map, find if it's landlocked, check the neighboring properties for comps. Like if you can list out all the things that your comping process is, and you can train a VA to do that, you will be able to train an AI to do that, and it's going to do just as good of a job, if not better.

Joe:  OK, so. Explain the details of that because sites like Zillow and Redfin they don't let you just go in and crawl and scrape their data, right? So how do you what's the way around that?

Kevin:  Well, it's not gonna be able to do like a full crawl of everything, but if you… Just for example, you get a lead-in, right? You send out a postcard, person calls you back, I'm interested in getting an offer. You need to go through a comping process or a due diligence process. That may involve calling the county to double-check the back taxes. That may be, you know, going to Zillow and finding if it's landlocked. That other comps around here. All of those are very specific and like a human is just going to go one side to the other to do that. An AI can do that and it's from Zillow's perspective, it just looks like your VA is doing that, but it just happens to be an agent.

Jessey: I definitely think it's going to sort of be something very generalized where I'm going to be able to learn how to use the browser and zoom in and look at it. I mean, it's a pretty defined task, what we're doing. I certainly think that'll be accomplishable through some sort of an agent.

Kevin:  And then, yeah, what we're going to see is it'll pop back into your, into your Pebble or whatever you're using, and it's going to fill out all that information. Soit's,gonna give you the comps. It's gonnagive, you an estimated value. It's going, to say, I confirm the back taxes, just like, just like your VA would do. It's, going to, it, it is going to be able to do that by, by an AI. And we're using this internally, just from a, from like a back-office perspective, we're building Pebble now with AI tools. And just seeing the productivity gain that we're getting is pretty remarkable. Some days, I'll have it do something for me that I am just like, oh my gosh, this would have taken me days of coding, and it just did it in 10 minutes.

Joe:  How do people get ahold of you guys? Talk about your show. Talk about Pebble. Where do they go?

Jessey:  Sure, yeah. You can head over to pebblerei.com. You can find us there. If you go to the demo, book a demo, you'll hop on a call with me literally and we can talk about your mailers. I'll talk to you about some of the things that we're seeing in terms of stats and copy and formats. I talked with you guys about postcards are outperforming at almost 3x the rate of other letters. I'm happy to talk to you guys about that. So find us at pebblerei.com. And then if you want to check out the podcast. We've got a lot of pebblers or pebble users there, just land operators. That is the land investing business secrets podcast. So make sure you guys check it out.

Joe:  Thank you guys so much. I think I'm still on audio. Appreciate you, Jessey. Thank you, Kevin. I will see you guys later. Take care.