Hey, what's up everybody? Joe McCall, REI In Your Car.

I got a cool little episode here for you. I just want to talk about a couple things. First, most important, this podcast is brought to you by my new book, REISecrets.com. REI Secrets, it's a book I just came out with just, I've been talking about it for about a month or two. We finally just opened the page where you can order it, which I'm just excited about. It's free, absolutely free. Just pay shipping and handling, which is like seven or eight bucks.

It actually costs me about $10 or $11 to print and ship the book because this stinking thing is about an inch thick. It's not a stinking thing. It's, I'm really happy about it. I'm happy the way it turned out. It's a great book and it's all about daily nuggets of real estate investing wisdom to help you get more leads and close more deals, and I wrote each chapter like a couple, three pages long so you can read it in one sitting. Just read one chapter a day, get some ideas, get some inspiration, get some motivation to just get out there and make it happen. And a lot of it is just reminding you guys of the simple basic things.

You know, this is the first volume, probably two or three, and I've been taking some of these REI in Your Car podcast and turning them into blog posts and emails and book chapters now. And so, you can get it all in this book, REI Secrets. It's free. Go to REISecrets.com and get it. Cool.

Alright, so I'm going to talk to you about something that I've been talking a lot about lately too with clients, coaching clients, which by the way, I'm on my way right now to go have lunch with a coaching client. He's actually driving through town and he messaged me and asked if we could have lunch.

So, I'm meeting him at my favorite place lately to have lunch, which is St Louis Bread Company or you might know it better as Panera. They've got like healthy food. It's pretty cool. So anyway, I've been talking a lot about this and it's about just, okay, let me give some context.

I remember when I was first getting started, you know, I get a lead coming in and the last thing I'd want to do is like actually pick up the phone and call the seller. Maybe they visited my website. I used to get a lot of leads from what was the House Buyer Network, HBN, or Home Buyer Network or one of those two. And I would pay a couple, three, four, wow… $500 a month to get a bunch of leads from them. And they were good leads. Somebody went to the Google, did a search for “sell my house fast” and House Buyer Network would come up and I would get the leads in my area.

And so, I'd get the lead in the inbox and I'd be excited. And then I would, that excitement would turn into fear and dread like, oh no, I actually have to call this seller now. Like, I don't want to do that. Let me do some research first. You know, let me look up the house on Zillow. Let me look at Google maps. Let me look at the satellite view. Let me look at the street view. Let me look at it on Bing maps.

Bing at the time had, it's called bird's eye view. Right? And I could look at it in different angles. So, I would look at it from North, South, East and West. And I just, it was ridiculous. I would do everything I could except call the seller. I would go to different comps. You know, I'd have to look on Zillow and on Redfin and realtor.com and I had access to the MLS. So, I would look at the MLS and just go, I'd spend 30 minutes, sometimes more just researching this property before I'd call the seller.

And you know, I just realized this is such a stupid waste of time because I don't even know how motivated the seller is… we may be like worlds apart. But I felt like I had to, you know, be prepared and be ready for this call. And I felt like I had to know exactly what was going on as much as I could. I had to know the comps and what properties are listed for and selling for and, okay. So yeah, there's maybe, maybe a place for that, right? But like if you're going to do any research at all, and if you have the address in advance, maybe look it up on Google maps. All right. Maybe just Zillow like really quick so you can see the neighborhood.

But you know what, I'm here. Here I am, I'm trying to give you some good advice. Like don't even do any research. Just call the seller and then I'm saying, well, maybe you can go to Google maps or Zillow and look it up really quick, but here, you know what? I want to rewind and say, don't even do that. Just call the seller, call them. It's not a big deal, right? It's really just call them and talk to them. So, it's easy. You think you're being productive; you know, you think you're getting some something done when, and we all do this. It's not, I'm not coming down hard on any of you guys, cause it's like I still find myself doing this some times and I used to do it a lot more than I do it now.

But you know, we all face that where, you know, we've got, we're looking at our list of things to do and we have something on there that we don't want to do. It's like, oh, it's hard, it's stressful. It's like painful. I don't want to do that. So, I'm going to do all these other little things first. I'm going to do what other things and then at the end of the day you're like frustrated because you didn't get the most important things done.

So, a good little productivity hack is you just look at the stuff you got to do and do the hardest thing first. Just get it out of the way. My 16-year-old son is really good at this. Like, I wish I had this more in me, but he looks at all the homework or schoolwork he's got to do for the day and he's like, he just gets the hardest one, the most difficult one, the hardest, the thing he wants to do least, he gets that done first. Just gets it out of the way. And he's like, he's always on his brothers and sisters. Like, why don't you just do the hard thing first?

I remember one time he was in trouble for something. I forget what it was exactly. And we gave him two choices. Do you want to, for punishment, you know, and I forget what the choices were, but he wanted the, it wasn't even, he didn't even think about it. He's like, I want the one that just gets it over with first. And he picked that. And sure enough, I forget what it was. Maybe a spanking or something. But yeah, he just wanted it done and over with like, give it to me now. And I remember being proud of him for wanting that. I think that's pretty cool.

So anyway, you're sitting here, you've got these leads or seller calls you, they respond to your texts or they respond to your postcard, and they say, yeah, awesome, I might sell my rental property. Maybe, yeah, man, I don't know. And so, I've run this across this a lot with coaching clients who were just getting started and students, you know, was just like, yeah, what should I do with this deal, Joe? I got this lead. What should I do with it?

I'm not kidding, I get this at least a couple, three times a week. Have you called them yet? Have you, have you talked to them yet? Oh, no, no. I was just trying to do a little research first to see what I should say to them. I don't want to sound, I don't want to be flat footed. I don't want to be caught with my pants down you know, I don't want to, I want to sound halfway intelligent, like, I know what I'm doing. But have you called him yet? No, I'm just, I'm waiting to see what I should say to them. I don't know what to say. I don't want to call…

They're not saying that, but it's like you don't want to call them. I get it. So, I had, one of my friends in Atlanta had a bunch of people in his call center, you know, who would answer the phones and he firmly believed, he hated voicemail. Like he firmly believed you have to answer the phones live, but sometimes you know, the calls, he couldn't answer the phones live and the calls would go to voicemail, but he would train his guys to never even listen to the voicemail. If a call came in, it didn't matter if it was a hang-up or a voicemail, call the seller back. And I loved this. If they called, call them back.

And he was actually using at the time the third notice postcard, which is a really obnoxious postcard. And I stopped using it because I got so many angry people and letters and complaints about it. And even got letters from the Better Business Bureau. I got letters, we were doing this postcard in about three or four different states, and I got letters, probably about two or three different letters from the secretary of state or the attorney general in those States because whenever they get a complaint, they have to respond to it.

And I always respond back, not defensively, but just, you know, Hey, I'm sorry we got this information from public records of absentee owners or whatever, and we will take them off our mailing list and we will not mail them again. And that was fine. That was the end of it. I'd never heard anything more after that. That's all they want to hear. They want to know how you got their information.

And then number two, you'll stop sending these stupid annoying postcards to people. So, but anyway, anytime, and this friend of mine was using this in Atlanta and he trained his sales guys, you know, even if they call and hang up, even if they don't listen to the voicemail, whether they listen to the voicemail or not, it's a phone number of a landlord that we sent a postcard to. All right. Just call them back. In fact, he even instructed his team, even if they leave a voicemail, don't listen to the voicemail, just call them back as soon as possible. And I love that. Right? And so, here's the advantage to that.

When a seller calls you or you get a text message from them back or something back where you're ready now to call them, they're a seller that wants to sell their house or they own a house right? They're a seller with equity, or they're a seller with some motivation. They're an absentee owner. Just call him and say something simple like, Hey, I saw that you called earlier. Do you have a house that you need to sell? That's it. You don't have to sell you. Say, well, what if they say, yeah, did you listen to my voicemail? Oh yeah. You know what? I'm sorry. I'm just so busy. We got like 30 people that have called us recently on this campaign, and I'm just going through this and I'm calling everybody, I'm sorry I didn't listen to your voicemail yet, I will, tell me, do you have a house? Do you want to sell or something like that? Right?

I'm not going to be getting too much into what to say actually, but bottom line is call them. Don't over-analyze the deal. You think you're being productive, but you're not. You think you really, you're just avoiding the pain, but you're also avoiding the payday. You're avoiding the money; you're avoiding getting paid and it's time to stop doing that. Okay. When you call sellers, you know what? The less you know the better because it allows you to ask questions. It allows you to ask more questions. Like, tell me about the house. Tell me, what's your situation? What would you like to see happen here? You know, why do you want to sell the house? Sounds like a nice house.

Why would you want to sell it or why haven't you sold it yet? It's listed with the realtor. Oh, okay. Sounds like a nice house and it hasn't sold yet. What's going on? I mean, is it, you think its priced right? What do you think? Why do you think it hasn't sold yet? Right. If it's not listed, you should ask the question. Well why don't you list it with a realtor?

You should, you know? Tell me about the house. Is that a fair price for this crazy market that we're in? Right? Is it a nice home? It's a nice area. Tell me about the schools. What's it like? Yeah. What's, what's the in the neighborhood like what do you do? You have anything in the backyard, you know, that they need to be concerned about? How are the neighbors? Nice? Whatever.

So, the less you know, here's my point, the less you know upfront the better cause it allows you to ask more questions and you can approach the seller with just like, Hey, I'm interested in this property. I'm looking for a nice home in the area. Do you mind if I ask you some questions to see if this would even be something I would be interested in? So, whoever asks the questions controls the conversation.

I did a cold call with Claude Diamond, and you can find, if you just go to YouTube and do a search for “cold call Joe McCall, Claude Diamond”, you'll find it. It's about a five-minute-long call that he did. And all Claude wanted was the phone number because that allowed him to ask more questions. And if you listen to that five-minute call, he asked about 22 or 23 questions. So, something to think about.

I got to go. I'm here at my place and hopefully my client's here yet. He was going to be a little late. This book, guys, I talk about little secrets like this, things like how to talk to sellers and why it's important to, you know, get on the phone and this one I'm looking at right now, it's talking about don't panic. Everything's gonna be all right. So anyway, right? Go get it. REISecrets.com. REISecrets.com. We'll see you guys. Bye. Bye.