777 » What Is Driving For Dollars All About Anyway? Part 2 with David Lecko

Joe: All right. Hey everybody, how you doing? Joe McCall here. Welcome to the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast. Glad you’re here. And this is going to be a part two podcast that I did a couple three, four days ago with a friend of mine, David Lecko, from Deal Machine. And on this podcast, I’m actually going to demonstrate how you can send direct mail and pull up owner’s information using their app. So, I’m glad you guys are here and we’ve already got people saying, Hey, what’s up? So, this is the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast, but we’re also broadcasting this live right now on YouTube and on Facebook. So, if you want to just say hello, let us know that you’re here and type where you are from, where are you watching this at or listening to this at in the comments right now. All right, so without much further ado, and let me say this one thing too…

Joe: I appreciate all of you guys that left reviews; the last podcast I did you pushed me over that 500-review mark in iTunes. I appreciate, I really do appreciate y’all leaving reviews for the podcast in iTunes. And so please, uh, do that some more, right? If you’ve not left a review yet and if you like this podcast, let us know. Okay. And I’ve got Aiko here. Thank you, man. Glenn, how are you doing? Just talking about you. Uh, there’s Jeff from Asheville, North Carolina and Aiko is from Charlotte and Diana from Atlanta, Georgia. Damien from Kansas on the Periscope. Of course, Sean from Norfolk, Virginia. Real glad you guys are here. So, should we bring over our guest? What do you say? His name is David Lecko. I’m going to bring him on over here. David. How are you?

David: How you doing? I’m great. Glad to be here.

Joe: I’m glad you are here. I’ve got a lot of great feedback from our last podcast that we did together talking about driving for dollars the right way, right? Cause a lot of people, you know, trying to do it, but they’re doing it the wrong way. Some of our biggest deals have come from driving for dollars and it’s great when you get the system set up right and when you have a tool that can make it easier for you.

Joe: So just one more quick shout out to Hugh. He says he’s from Connecticut. Thanks. You appreciate it man. Okay. So, uh, just a quick summary. David used, started, Deal Machine… how many years ago?

David: I actually build it for myself in 2016 but I didn’t put it on the app store until 2017.

Joe: Okay. So about two years. And it’s just kind of exploded since then, hasn’t it?

David: Yes. Especially more recently.

Joe: Yes. And the testimonials that you’re getting are pretty amazing. Talk about, just give us a couple of examples of some deals that you’re hearing about your clients who ordered the software.

David: Absolutely. So, the testimony that comes to mind is just like, “Deal Machine took my lack of follow through off the table”, and that’s exactly the problem I was having is I would see a house and I would just drive right by it. And then when I finally started running it down, then I would forget to actually look up the owner when I got home. And so yeah, I mean, a couple of deals. I had a good friend Beau Hunter who was, um, he was working here full-time job and then he switched over to wholesaling and made $85,000 on, uh, on his, one of the first four deals that he did with the Deal Machine. And then the other three pushing over $100,000. So, I thought that was pretty life changing cause it’s like multiple years of salary and, in just a few deals.

Joe: Nice.

David: Yeah.

Joe: So here, this is what it does. The whole idea, guys, the concept is you go out there, either you or somebody from your team. When you go out there and you look for vacant houses, you go driving around your areas. Like, whenever you’re going to work or you’re going to school, going to the coffee shop, take different routes there, right? And you go look for vacant houses. You look for properties that look like they’re being rehabbed. You look for properties that have even just For Rent signs in front of them or the grass is growing, the windows are boarded up, it just looks like it’s a mess. Nobody’s taken care of the house. And from your smartphone… and we’re actually gonna demonstrate the smart phone right now, in just a minute. From your smartphone you can actually click a few buttons, get the owner’s information and actually send them a letter. Oh, look at this. This is from Jeff Hensley. I’m using—this was unsolicited—I’m using Prop Stream Joe and Deal Machine and crushing it. Thanks. Very cool. Any of you. And that’s on the Periscope! Jeff’s the man. People are still using Periscope. Can you believe that?

David: Wow. You have a Periscope account, right?

Joe: Yeah, I do. I do. So anyway guys, um, let’s see. Yeah. So, you can go around and you can from the app, and we’re going to show you how to do that here, you can actually send direct mail to these homeowners. I’m also going to show you how to do driving for dollars from your computer, from your home office like I’m doing right now. So, uh, David, is that okay if you kind of walk me through some of this stuff and show us all how to do it?

David: Absolutely. Do you want to share your screen?

Joe: Yeah. So, I’m going to share my screen. Hopefully I can get this set up right. And uh, let me go here and do share screen, share screen. Do this. All right. Can you see my screen?

David: Yep.

Joe: Well, let me just say first guys before I do that real quick, uh, if you want to check this out and you want to get this for yourself, go to DealMachineJoe.com, DealMachineJoe.com. Okay. All right, let me go share my screen. This is the website for Deal Machine. All right. And I’m going to log into it, but I’m also going to show you how, what it looks like on your phone. And we were testing this before. Oh look, there’s Mike, do you see that? Do you see that? Does it look good? Can you see, David?

David: Yeah, I can see it. It looks great.

Joe: Ah, beautiful. All right, so we’re going to walk through what it looks like on the app. Okay. And here from the browser. Okay. So, you guys can get a free 14-day trial at DealMachineJoe.com. If you just look at this website, the cool thing I like about it is now this is an app. Um, I remember back in the day you used to have to like write down the addresses and mark them on a map and if you were really techie you could go and put those addresses in kind of like the back office of Google Maps and you could get a bunch of pins.

Joe: But this just makes it so much easier. And as you’re driving around for dollars or as your team, David, is driving around for dollars, you guys can actually export this into CRMs, or like you can import stuff into it. It integrates, doesn’t it with other CRMs or outside tools?

David: Yeah, it does. And plus, we have a Zapier integration which integrates with thousands of other apps.

Joe: Nice, good, good. So, you can do automated owner lookup, you can do direct mail campaigns and you can actually do some real estate lead management with it. And a, you discover a property as you’re driving by it, you can pull up the owner’s information, you can get in touch with them with just a few clicks to the buttons. You can start your mailers out. And um, it’s pretty amazing. This works for wholesalers and house flippers, brokers and investment teams. A bunch of people are already using this, 58,000. You’ve done over 2 million postcards.

David: That’s… Wow. I didn’t even know that.

Joe: Hopefully that’s right. I think it would be right if it’s on your windows.

David: Yeah, those do update all the time. Yeah.

Joe: All right, so let’s just, let’s go into my account. I’m going to go into my dashboard account and a, this… I was playing with this a little bit earlier and we actually went to the Zillow. Instead of driving around for dollars, I actually went to Zillow and I found a property and I put it into the Deal Machine here from the browser. Okay. And, uh, let me just, you know, kind of show you what I’ve got here. If I go to a list view, this is a property and, I not approved anything yet, but I’m going to show you what this looks like and then we’re gonna go do it again for another property.

Joe: Okay. And I took the picture from Zillow and I uploaded it in here. I found the property really quickly. It tells me who the owner is. This is a corporate owner. And from here I could start my mailers if I wanted to and I could approve it here. And this is the mailer preview and we’ll show you some of this all in a second. So, can we, now you can go driving for dollars. And let me, um, let me show my, my phone here. Okay. And uh, show me a little bit about what you’ve got here. This is the driving route. How do you start a route?

David: So, go, go back to your map. It’s a, first of all, it’s not going to work cause you’re not moving, you’re in your house, but go ahead and click on deals. Yup. And Click on Matthew.

Joe: Oh, there we go. Start driving.

David: Yeah. So, you gotta press Start Driving.

Joe: So, if I click start driving and you’re tracking my route.

David: That’s right. So, take a few laps around the neighborhood and you’re going to have a green line that’s drawn behind you. You’ll notice it’s also tracking your time and miles, at the top right of that screen.

Joe: Nice. It’s tracking the miles there. And then this is, you can do satellite or, um, standard and you can also show your past driving routes. Look at that. Yeah, you can show your past driving routes. You need to upgrade to the team version here. Um, and then you can see where you’ve driven before. So, you’re not driving the, the, the same things. I just added it. Okay.

David: So really quick, I’ve got my screen popped up. Just so I can show you what that looks like.

Joe: Alright. Let me get your screen here. Okay. Oh, beautiful. Look at that.

David: Yeah. So, you can tell I’ve done a decent amount of driving and you can tell a certain neighborhood where I spent a little bit more time going inside. And then also on this driving routes panel you get a summary. So, if you guys are paying drivers to drive for you, if you’re paying per property or like per minute per, you know, per hour that they’ve driven, you can pay them accurately, make sure they’re in the right neighborhoods. And if you click one of these guys, they will actually show you the properties added on that specific route. Um, so it’s an easy way to find out what properties they actually added during that driving session.

Joe: So, you can see all of the properties that your, um, your team has put in there.

David: Yeah. So right now, it’s zoomed in on just this route from June 26th. So, you can take a look and see individualized, you know, reports of each time one of your drivers goes out.

Joe: Okay. Yeah. Very cool.

David: I’ll switch it back to you now, but I wanted to share that with you guys.

Joe: All right. So, I’m going to show you guys something pretty cool here. What I’ve just done is I went to Zillow and I just found a random property listed for rent. All right. And, uh, it’s is, I’m gonna show you where the map is here from Zillow. You can zoom in St Louis, you can see the satellite view, see the street view, that’s in an okay area, but it’s a good rental neighborhood. You could wholesale houses here all day long, right?

David: Look at that mailman, we need to get him on your team.

Joe: Where did he go there? Oh yes, he is. Get that guy on your team. All right, so then, here’s the, here’s the property on 4078. And so, what I did is I’m going to show my phone here for a minute, okay, you see my phone here? So, let’s say I’m driving there and I see the address or it can tell me where I am and I can select the location or I can just start typing it in. So, this property is 4078, 4078 Merrimack and it starts bringing up, the address is there. So, I don’t, don’t have to start typing in the whole thing. You see what I’m saying? I can type it in there. There’s the house and I can open it up. It gives me the owner’s information.

Joe: Caleb Cheek.

Joe: So, what, what’s the first name? Is it Cheek or Caleb?

David: Um, well it usually sorts it out the right way, so I couldn’t tell you for sure. But I just thought it made sense to be Caleb Cheek, but yeah, it should be, it should be sorting it the right way for you.

Joe: Okay. So, I get some information about him. If I wanted to, I could search for, well here the…

David: Oh, add a photo.

Joe: Where do I do that at?

David: Top right, there’s a camera button.

Joe: Ah, look at this. Right up there in the upper right. Add photo. Yep. So that’s a picture of it.

David: You have a great smile, Joe.

Joe: Let me retake it. Okay, that’s better. So that would be the picture of the house. Right? Right. And I’m gonna show you another way to do it where you can actually get a picture of the house from Google Street view from the browser right here. Okay. And then what else can I do? Can I do it? Do I do use Enhanced Search?

David: Definitely do that.

Joe: All right. Doing Enhanced Search cost. 99 cents or one credit? I’ve got like 200 credits or something on here. Okay. So “enhanced search unsuccessful”. Is that because maybe the name was bad or something?

David: You know, skip tracing is never an exact science, so it didn’t, I couldn’t say exactly on this one without taking a closer look.

Joe: But I have the guy’s address. I have the mailing address right there. 5072 Mardell Avenue. So, you know, I, all I want is the owners name and the mailing address of that property. Okay. Now I can go in here and I can get sale information. It was last sold in January for $50k. If there’s mortgage information, I got it here. Looks like there is a mortgage for $40k.

David: Wow. That’s not a huge mortgage.

Joe: Well, he bought it for $50k. This house is probably worth…

David: I had a hard time trying to find a mortgage for one of my properties in that price range. That’s interesting.

Joe: Might be a private loan too, right?

David: Could be, yep.

Joe: Guild Mortgage. Okay. Anyway, you get school district property information, so it was built in 1910, doesn’t show the bedrooms. It’s probably a two-bedroom, one bath, 979 square footage. I could add some tags to it. If the skip tracing, uh, was available for this guy, it would’ve given me his phone numbers right there. Right? And his email address?

David: Yeah, it would’ve auto-populated those.

Joe: Okay. And then here I can add notes and stuff like that.

David: That’s right. You can also see when your mail is getting delivered because if you send mail, it’s bar coded mail, so it gets scanned at every post office setup and then sealed, track it. And then you can also get a notification that says you’ve got mail dropping today, so that way you know your phone might ring.

Joe: Okay, cool. Now you can see the preview of the mail right there.

David: Normally it’s a picture of a house.

Joe: Yeah. Normally it would be a picture of a house right here and it would say, Hey, is this your property? I’m interested in purchasing property at 4078 Merrimack. We’ll take it in any condition. Now you could change the format like, you could maybe even, you were talking about this, like you could take a picture, a selfie of you with their house in the background.

David: That’s right.

Joe: That’s pretty cool. So, uh, or I guess you, if you’re doing it from home, you could print a picture of their house and put a picture of their house next to your face and do a selfie. Right?

David: I guess you can do that. Might be less effective.

Joe: It would be kind of funny. All right. So anyway, um, I could send him a letter, postcard right now. There’s, now there’s templates that, um, are not, uh, don’t have pictures on them. And I have some here. Where is it? Well, I have them on the browser. I guess they’re not showing up right here yet, but this is interesting. So, you can set it up where you send repeating mail every 21 days, you can change that and you can repeat forever. Or if you change it off, you can say no, only send it, you know, eight times or what. Okay. All right. Change that number to eight, update mailing options and now it’ll send it to them eight times. All right, now name.

David: Oh, you have to select a template, Joe, that’s why it’s giving you the error about.

Joe: I don’t see the templates I created from my browser.

David: So just, sure you can create this new one.

Joe: Let me do this one right here. Okay. Create new template success.

David: And then save it again. Press update. There you go.

Joe: Nice. User error. So, like most of the time you get these errors, it’s its users, user errors. And we will see the preview here in just a second. And I’m going to show you how to do this again, I was playing with it with, from the browser. So, this is a handwritten postcard and all this text is customized, right? You can go…

David: Yeah, you can customize that for sure.

Joe: Yeah. Hey, my name is Joe McCall and I have a cash offer ready to buy. I have cash ready to buy two more homes. Notice my disclaimer. I said, I wrote this earlier, even though I’m a licensed realtor with Keller Williams, I don’t want to list your house. I want to buy it. So sometimes you have to disclose that you’re an agent, but you know, put a little twist on it. Say something a little different. Okay, cool. So, when you’re driving around for dollars, you’re just going around and uh, you can zoom in and you can see the properties here. So, if I’m on Chippewa Street there…

David: That’s where Ted Drewes Ice Cream is.

Joe: That’s right! How do you know what that is?

David: I grew up in St Louis?

Joe: Oh, that’s right. Ted Drewes is the best. Uh, that’d be funny to send the guy who owns that, he’s still around, right? The guy who owns the restaurant and the ice cream thing. Send him a letter saying, Hey, do you want to sell your property?

David: Yeah, he might be, I bet he wouldn’t sell it, but he’ll sell you some ice cream.

Joe: Can you get the Google Street view, map view, street view of the house or is that not available?

David: No, but try the satellite mode. That really helps. Okay. It’s, yeah, there you go. Click the satellite.

Joe: Okay. Here we go. So, if I pick that house, 3947 Chippewa Street. Now what do I do?

David: Add the property.

Joe: Click the plus button.

David: That’s right.

Joe: Cool. It’s owned by Solarium LLC. Cool. Can I add a picture from the satellite view or street view?

David: Um, you can add any photo that’s on your phone. So…

Joe: Oh, so what if I went to, what’s the address of that house? 4078 Merrimack Street? No, it’s on Chippewa… Let me go onto here. That’s the owner’s address. 1365 Naichel, whatever. The address of the property is 3947. So, I could go to Google Maps, couldn’t I? 3947 Chippewa.

Joe: Okay. Ooh, look at this. I’m gonna turn my phone sideways. Do a screenshot. Okay. Okay. Go back here. Show me where I can upload the picture.

David: Top right.

Joe: Right there. Choose from library. So, let’s say I was driving by his house. There we go. Let me pick a mailer that has, oops, how do I pick the template options? Well there they are. The ones that I did before, they weren’t here earlier, but now they’re there. Good. Blocks is the one I think you liked, wasn’t it?

David: I do like the blocks one. Yeah.

Joe: Okay. Update mailing options. The previous is going to come up here in a second. Again, this is all from your phone, guys. So, while you’re sitting on your phone, you don’t have to have your laptop up on your screen, worried about batteries. And I’ll show you the preview of this. So, there’s a picture from the street. But now if I wanted to, I could go into my photos and I could crop that, couldn’t I? You know, I can crop it. Let me do a square. I could do something like this.

David: You could for sure.

Joe: That’s a little better picture maybe. Yeah. And I can upload that or move further on down the street to get a, you know, a better picture of it with the phone. I’m just doing this in a hurry. But um, and there, boom. So, you’ve got the picture of the house. You can change the text if you wanted to, um, even from your phone, right? Or did you have to change the text of the postcard from a browser?

David: No, you don’t need a browser. You can do it from your phone.

Joe: So, from your phone you can edit and modify these mail templates, right?

David: Yeah, it’s the same on the phone as it is on browser.

Joe: Oh, amazing. Alright. So, um, walk me through some of the things I, you should see here or take notice of.

David: Cool. Well, so I mean you kind of went over the, the biggest part, you know, you’re going to get the owner right there. You’re going to add a photo, you can start sending mail with that button if you want to.

Joe: Well, let me, let me pick another template here just to show people. Which is a good one, text on right?

David: Text on right is a great one.

Joe: Let’s show people what that looks like. And when you build a, when you build your team, um, you can set this up where there’s training videos that you have where they can watch and learn how to use this, right?

David: Yeah. So, we make it really easy to have a whole army driving for you. And so, uh, if you’re on the Enterprise plan, you get unlimited people that can drive for you on your team. They can add properties, but they can’t spend any of your money. And it comes with this landing page. It tells them all about working for your company as a driver and they can sign up, they’re going to get instructions on how to add themselves to your app under the, under your team. And then they’ll also get training videos on how to use the app and add properties. So, it makes it really easy.

Joe: Okay. Very cool. So, I refreshed the picture. We’ll see if it comes in here to the preview. Now when it comes to, oh, that’s a little better. Look at that. Yep. Okay. So, you sometimes too, it’s harder to do some skip tracing when the owner is an LLC or a corporation. Right?

David: Sometimes it’s harder to do that,

Joe: But you can still get some sale information. Last sold in 2012, school district property information. Again, I picked an area that doesn’t have good property information because these are older homes, but…

David: Oh, you’re good. Let’s talk about the tags. Yes, so click on that. If you’ve got drivers, it can be a really good idea that you click require them to click one of these tags because this is pretty much your criteria for properties. You’re going to tell them what area to go in and then they need to find any properties that meet one of these tags. So peeling paint, you know, missing siding, falling off gutter. Those are just some example ones.

Joe: So, you could add some too like…

David: You can create your own like, For Sale by Owner. Great one to add.

Joe: Yep. I’m going to do a new one.

David: Now, once you’ve got all your properties tagged, you can go and filter your list by everything that’s for rent or everything that has a fallen off gutter or whatever it is you want to filter it by and then give them like a custom template message. Uh, so you know, or if, yeah, if you’re, if you have properties that are for rent, if you’re going to say something different to those than something that’s just regular distress, that’s what those allow you to do.

Joe: Cool. Okay. So, let’s say this is good. I want to mail the guy a letter or start mailers, right?

David: Yeah, that’s it.

Joe: Cool. Let me just look at the mailer one more time before I send it to him. By the way, that phone number there at the bottom I got from REI Simple. So that phone number, when they call that number, it gets automatically added to my mail campaign. Cool. Okay, so let’s do it. I’m going to bam, start mailers. Okay.

Joe: Okay. The mail is on the way. It’s going to send a letter or postcard every 21 days for however long I set it up to do it. Now, once they call you and they say, I don’t want to sell it or stop mailing me or whatever, I can go in here and I can stop the mail for that postcard. Right?

David: Yeah. So, if you see how it says with marketing, click that real quick. And if somebody calls you and said they’re not interested, there’s actually like a status for that. So, you can scroll down and you could click not interested, that’s automatically going to stop your mail.

Joe: Okay, cool. Or return to sender. That’ll stop sending mail also, right?

David: Yeah, it does. But actually, Deal Machine knows because everything’s first-class barcode scanned mail. So, if it gets returned to sender, Deal Machine will automatically kick it to that status of return to sender. And so that way you don’t have to do it yourself.

Joe: All right. Now if your team is doing this too, they won’t just send mail until you approve it, right?

David: Yeah. So, your team, your team’s deals, you’ll have to go in there and send the mail.

Joe: Yeah. So, you can’t, you know, if you hire somebody off the street and he’s driving for dollars, don’t expect him to send like a thousand postcards for you. You get to approve the postcards, right?

David: Yeah, correct. So, if you’ve got a bigger team, that’s fine. You can definitely, uh, have a higher level of team member. But for all those, all those deal finders out there, they cannot spend any of your money.

Joe: Cool. So, I just did this from my phone, right? Let’s do it right now from the browser. Is that cool? Can we do that?

David: Definitely. Cool.

Joe: All right, so let’s say… Y’all can see me, you can see my screen, right? Yeah. So, I’m here in St Louis, Missouri and I want to, one of my favorite lists to mail to are actually rentals on Zillow. And I like to do lease options. So, I’m looking for nicer homes. I’m doing homes over a $1,000, under $2000 a month, three plus bedrooms. And I typically only like single family houses. Right? Okay. And so, here’s 585 properties in this entire area.

Joe: Now, the cool thing about this too guys, if you zoom out, you get as many properties as you want. Like let’s say I wanted to go into Columbia, which is a great market cause its college town and there’s not a lot of other investors there and if I might want to do maybe 800. Now, if you’re just a wholesaler, right? You can do two bedrooms and you might want to do condos and town homes and you can send mail to these folks saying, Hey, you want to sell your house? Now let’s just do this really quick. I’m going to go to $1000 to $2000, three plus bedrooms. Let’s just do houses and townhomes and one of my favorite areas is over here. Let me zoom out a little bit.

Joe: All right. This is a, one of my favorite areas and this is a nice house here on Americana Place Court. Now, cool thing about this property is right now it’s listed with a property manager, but check this out. One of the reasons why, again, I liked it. If you see these houses, what do they all have in common? Most of them they’re vacant. This is just staging. All right, these houses are vacant. Um, and if, let me just show you what I mean.

Joe: Let me go to this one right here. Guess what? There’s nothing in there. These are all vacant houses and chances are these are landlords that have been renting this house out. The tenant just moved out. They haven’t collected any rent for the last couple, three months during the eviction process or they had to go in and spend a couple of grand to clean it up and make it look nice again. So, the, you’re catching these owners at a good time when they’re like super motivated. And these houses in these areas, these are the cash flowing rentals that most wholesalers are trying to target. But these are great lease option candidates.

Joe: So, I love sending mail to these now before I used to have my virtual assistants go through and do it manually, one at a time through Click2Mail, which is kind of an expensive, arduous process. But I thought, well, let’s just do one of, let’s do a letter to this homeowner, about their house. Now I’m going to take a quick little picture of their property. I’m just going to, I’m using a thing called, um, oh, what do you call this? Droplr? You heard of Droplr? No. Okay. It’s a screen capturing app for the Mac. And I’m gonna save this here under a house two.

Joe: All right. And I’ve got the, I’m just going to copy the address right here. Copy. I’m going to go to my Deal Machine. And let me go back here. Uh, okay. Now walk me through what to do. I want to add a new deal to send some mail to.

David: Yeah. So, click on deals, click on the maps, map view, and then type it in up there. I wonder if that O Fallon is throwing it off.

Joe: Let’s do this because if you’re writing it in, it’ll start looking for it, right? Right. So, if I’m writing Americana, there it is right there. So sometimes when you copy and paste, I seen this in a lot of other programs. You kind of have to start typing it and then it searches for it here and then you can find it. So, there it is. There it is. Great house on an end of a cul-de-sac. You can go look at satellite view right here. You could go in and where’s the zoom button?

David: Well, if you’re on your computer, you want to pinch you’re a little track pad. And it will zoom in for you.

Joe: You just moved the house though.

Joe: I can’t zoom in for some reason, it won’t zoom in on my track. But anyway, regardless. So, it’s a nice cul-de-sac house. Right? If you wanted to get into other views, you could just go with Google maps. Now here’s the property. Um, I click the plus. Yes. Cool. It’s searching property records. It’s found the owners, Teresa Schneider.

David: So now, yeah, click on that guy. And then let’s add a photo.

Joe: Ooh, check this out. This is one of the things I love about this strategy. There’s a property address, there’s the mailing address. So, this is not an absentee owner yet. She really is. She’s advertising the property for rent. But she, how much mail do you think she’s getting for this property?

David: None, she’s not getting any mail.

Joe: No, because she’s not, I mean absentee owners are the most popular lists that people get mailed to and she’s not getting any. So, okay. Now I want to maybe get some more enhanced search on her. Can we try that?

David: Let’s try it for sure.

Joe: Enhanced search. Now again, it doesn’t always work just because of what’s available in public records and what’s not. Okay. In this case it didn’t work because, why? What are some of the reasons when it doesn’t work?

David: I couldn’t tell you why that one didn’t work to be honest.

Joe: Okay. But we have her name, it’s still under pending approval. It’s using this template default and I can change that template if I wanted to. Okay. Clicking this, go into here. Let’s do a, let’s do blocks. I don’t want to do it forever. Let’s just do 12 mailers. Sure. Cool. And I want to add a picture of the house. I’m going to click this do hickey right here. Upload. Okay. That house I just did, picture right there. That’s a good picture of the house. Reload previews.

Joe: Now let’s get back to the skip tracing here. Um, usually when we just skip tracing through, um, Need2Skip or even sometimes I use PeopleLooker, um, sometimes you only get 65%-75% of the properties back. Yeah. Uh, for results.

David: I some I can show you if you want.

Joe: Yeah, well, after this let’s look at your screen and you can show us what it looks like. Sure. So, um, here he is and I just used the default text. You can go in here and change it. “Is this your property at 15 American Place Court? I’m interested in purchasing. I would take it in any condition. I can close quickly and with cash. And if you are interested, please call or text me. Have a great day. Sincerely, Joe McCall.” All right.

Joe: And I can mail this and get some information. That was last sold in 2002 I got the mortgage information so it still gets information from the county. What we were having problems with is like the, the skip tracing for the phone number in the email. Yeah, it was built in 2000, three bedrooms, three bath, 1300 square foot. I can add some tags here if you wanted. So, I could do for rent and I’m gonna actually do a new tag. I’m going to call it Zillow for rent. So, I kind of know that it came from there. Yeah. Okay. And a…

David: Create property tag. Go down. I don’t think you saved it.

Joe: Oh really? Where did I go? I’m in settings. I did. It’s right there.

David: Oh, you said you did save it. Okay, cool. My bad.

Joe: Alright. And I want to uh, let me refresh. Yeah, there it is right there. There’s a Zillow for rent tag. Okay, cool. And by the way, if you wanted to, you know, sometimes I use PeopleLooker, I have any affiliate relationship with them, but they’re pretty good skip tracing company. You could put the address in there and um, get some information on the seller and then you could put it here into this if you wanted to. And get their phone number and email address. Cool. Now what next? If I want to start sending mail to her, I just click the start mailers. Where’s that at? Uh, so this, I changed the approval.

David: Pending approval. So, uh, yeah, try that.

Joe: Click the check mark. Your mail is on the way. Just like that. I did a campaign. All right. So, show me where I can see all of my deals and, and kind of what’s going on with stuff here.

David: Yeah. So, under deals you can click on a list view. There you go. Those are the four deals you’ve added so far.

Joe: Cool. And I can see there some of these are pending. And I can delete these, some of these too, if I wanted to, right? Oh, you can filter them here, by tags and by, so I could say, all right. Show me all the ones that are Zillow for rent.

David: Yeah, that’s right.

Joe: And it would only bring up that one.

David: That’s right. Yep. So, if you want to delete some deals, click those little three dots in the top right. Yeah. And press select deals. There you go. Now you can click on any of those. Correct.

Joe: Then do what? Edit. Selected.

David: Yeah. And then you take any bulk actions such as delete deals.

Joe: And where’s that at?

David: Um, let’s see. Go to edit deal status and then choose. Yep. In there should be like a trash, in trash. Okay. Put in the trash.

Joe: Cool. All right, let me refresh the screen. Oops. List view. Boom, they’re gone. One of the cool things about this map view too is you could see all your properties. How do you zoom out?

David: So yeah, just work the gestures on your, uh, your track pad.

Joe: Yes. Sorry about that.

David: No, you’re good. All right. Yeah. So, it’s not going to show you the pins when you’re super zoomed out. It’s just going to be when you’re zoomed in a little bit closer, so. Okay. Yeah.

Joe: Um, so, um, show me again though here in the list view, where do you see the status or the, like a report for analytics or is this a good place to go? Right here?

David: Yup. Analytics. So yeah, this is getting updated soon, but basically you can tell you added two deals because you just deleted two, so now, now there’s only two there that you’ve added and you did one enhanced search. And, you sent no mail so far. I think you had two in the sending queue. So, once those send out…

Joe: And as I add people to my team, I’ll see them listed below here. And I can see my driving routes would show up here and maybe it’d be better if you showed us your screen here in a minute. I just wanted to show them again, you can add your templates here and modify them. You can just show, this shows you your team and that’s where you can see account activity. You can even get free leads by inviting people. Yep. And you can see your account activity here and what’s been going on. Let’s do this. Why don’t you show us your screen so you can show us some of the things that I couldn’t show because this is a new account.

David: Sure. All right, here it goes. Okay.

Joe: By the way guys, if you are interested in this, again, go to DealMachineJoe.com. All right, so show us your screen there and um, show us what you’re going to… Go ahead.

David: Yeah, of course. All right, so here’s a property I added and then I did enhanced search while you were doing yours, just to make sure everything is working okay. And then, so I can tell this property is owned by Krista Edwards, 52-year-old female and she’s getting this new mail piece that we got. Uh, let me reload that real quick.

Joe: Now is this a letter or a postcard?

David: This is a letter actually.

Joe: And you’re rolling this across system-wide soon, right?

David: Right. Yeah. So, this is going to have an actual stamp. It’s going to be in an envelope and then it’s going to have this, uh, the, the, the ballpoint pen is writing like the texts on the envelope. So that’s actually going to be a pen, so not an inkjet printer, if that makes sense. Um, and then so this is the main mailing address, which is owner occupied cause the same as the property address. And then if you scroll over it’s got some additional addresses that she’s uh, either registered her utilities at. So, it looks like she’s like moved around quite a bit. So, if this was vacant and I could tell nobody lived here, I’d probably send mail to this South Bend, Dallas and Georgia address because she’s probably one of those places. Okay. And it also brought back a couple phone numbers. So, two mobile phone numbers are associated with her. And then what happens when you click the phone number their a, well, you can edit it. If you’re on your mobile phone, you can actually call it. Okay. On a computer it’s not going to call it.

David: Oh. And then, uh, something that’s pretty neat is it also actually shows you, um, if you have a Zapier integration set up, I hope it says updated already, it’ll send out emails for you automatically.

Joe: Okay. And who will it send the emails to?

David: The owner? These ads, these emails that came back through the enhanced search is who it will actually send the emails to.

Joe: Through the Zapier integration you have.

David: Yes. Let’s see. Trying to show you an example of that. There we go. All right. So, this is like what the email would look like. It’s basically liked the same thing as your postcard. You can change the text if you want to. Um, but this is how my emails go out so that those will send out in probably 15 minutes or less. Yeah. Um, it’s cool because sometimes they’ll respond before I even get home and, uh, it’s just fun to have the immediate results. And I wanted to show you on the right here, you can actually see when I started sending mail and then the mail was delivered and um, it says three times there. I’m not sure why, but as you send more mail, it’ll actually keep updating you.

Joe: Oh, it sent mail to the three different addresses.

David: Oh, you’re right. That’s exactly what it was.

Joe: Because there were different addresses for the property owner.

David: Yup. Yup. That’s right.

Joe: Very cool. Very cool. So, and again, everything you’re doing on the browser, it can be done on the phone. They’re just exact same.

David: Yeah, that’s right.

Joe: Nice. Cool. All right, so, um, I thought that was a pretty good demo. The thing I like about it is you can, you, it’s best if you’re actually driving for dollars looking for vacant houses. But if you’re lazy like me and you just want to send it to rentals on Zillow, what if you sent it to properties that have been listed a long time on Redfin? What if you went to, let me share my screen with you one more time here?

Joe: What if you guys went to Redfin and you went to your city? Yeah, St Louis, Missouri. and you did “remove outline”. You zoomed out, you went to filters, you did house, you want at least three bedrooms, time on Redfin, more than 180 days. Apply filters. Here’s 872 homes that have been on the market for over six months. Oh and what if you just went through these houses now, and I could go in if I wanted to and sometimes there’s new construction here so I could say, you know, they were built at least before 2018 now there’s 444 what if you just started going through these houses and sending them from here? Now these are licensed. I mean these are properties that are listed with a realtor. So, if you’re a realtor yourself, you can’t necessarily do that, but you can open up this property here and you could take a quick little snapshot of their house like that through a thing. And then you can upload that and have a VA can do this for you. A VA can do this and send the homeowner a letter or postcard. Sometimes these properties, yeah, this one looks like it’s staged, so it’s probably vacant. I’m just guessing. Maybe not. Yeah, there’s nothing in there.

Joe: So, you could just do this where you’re going through all 445 of these homes and then sort it by time on Redfin. And then just do the newest ones that have hit the 180 days and anywhere where there’s Redfin, you can go in and find the older listings and send them a letter. We had a VA at one time that was just going in and was looking for homes that have been on the market for more than 45 days. And we did two bedrooms. We did apply filters. So, these are, these are properties that have been on the market over 45 days. We sorted this by price and looked at all the cheapest properties.

Joe: You’d be surprised in St Louis, you’ll find some of these houses for $10K and they’re not selling, right? So that may be way below what you want, but you could say, um, well you can’t even have a minimum price below $50k. But then what we did is we would go in and we would find these properties and we would get information on who the realtor was and send the realtor an email and say, hey, we saw this property. Uh, we’re interested in maybe making an offer. We were just wondering, um, why do you think it’s not sold yet? Or we would say, is it still available? Try to get this, the realtor to tell us why it hasn’t sold yet. We would say, you know, may be able to buy it, but would they consider something maybe you know, like 500 bucks? You can go here, let me go to other views. So, here’s some properties that are right now listed for sale for under $20k. Can you believe that? And obviously they haven’t sold yet. Say it again.

David: I said I bought a house for $4,000.

Joe: What did you do with it?

David: I renovated it and now it’s rented out for $1800 a month.

Joe: Wow. Sweet. So, there’s a lot of these junky homes, but you can contact the realtor and say, would they consider something, um, you know, maybe like $5,000, buy it for cheap at a huge discount and sell it with financing. You might have to put in a little bit of work in it to make it halfway livable and sell it with owner financing. But the whole idea is you have a lot of properties. The whole point I’m trying to make is there’s a lot of properties online through Zillow, Redfin, Craigslist, maybe even Facebook Marketplace. What if you just went to check this out? Facebook Marketplace, went into your area, I was last in Charlotte. Here, go to rentals, two plus bedrooms, rental type house and just started sending letters to these homeowners. You look at these, look at the pictures, guess what, they’re vacant and when you can offer something like creative, like a lease option…

Joe: If you were to just go right here and contact them, this would go to the realtor or the property manager. But you can, you know this house is vacant. You can send, have your VA come in here every day and look for the new properties and send them a postcard for sure. And you can get the pictures of the property from right here.

David: Well we actually have a Google image auto upload feature coming.

Joe: Oh, the good. So pretty soon if, if you don’t have a picture, you can see if you like the one that comes from Google street view.

David: For sure.

Joe: Nice. All right, so those of you watching right now, do you have any questions about what we’ve been doing? We’ll go ahead and end this if we don’t. And um, I appreciate you being here on the, on the, on the podcast, David.

David: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

Joe: So yeah, it’s been fun. Uh, I just said, David, let’s get on the podcast. Let’s show this to people and show them how to use it. And if you guys are interested in getting, I strongly encourage you to check it out. DealMachineJoe.com. Try It for free for 14 days. Is that right?

David: That’s right. Plus $40 of credits.

Joe: That’s 40 postcards.

David: That’s right.

Joe: That’s a lot.

David: It is. You can get a deal.

Joe: Yeah. Very good. Alright. Hey David, thanks again. Um, appreciate it. If people want to contact your office, how do they get ahold of you guys?

David: Yeah, so actually in the app there’s a help and support thing. And you can get in touch with us immediately on that. We respond within five minutes.

Joe: Very cool. All right. Hey guys, thanks for listening and watching. Appreciate you all. If you have any questions, type them in the comments down below. Meredith did say great demo. Thanks. Thanks Meredith. Appreciate it. Um, so again, if you want to get this right now, go to DealMachineJoe.com. We’ll see you guys later. Take care. Thanks David.

David: See you next time. Thanks, Joe.

Joe: See Ya. Bye.