827 » Doing Deals Remotely With Greg Helbeck

Joe: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast. Glad you’re here. We got a special treat today. We’re going to be talking about doing deals virtually and got a good guest on. His name is Greg Helbeck and so he had me on his podcast a few weeks ago, wasn’t it?

Greg: Yeah, it was about a month ago, actually got published today. So, it’s, it’s running as we speak.

Joe: So, we’re going to be talking about doing deals remotely and it’s kind of funny because I, I’m about 30 minutes late to this podcast and Greg was gracious enough not to care or maybe he did, but he’s pretty nice about it cause I was actually had to go to the UPS store, my mailing box address, to pick up a deed that a mobile notary had the seller sign on a deal that we’re doing way out in the middle of nowhere. Klamath County, Oregon, right? Klamath County… Have you ever heard of Klamath County, Oregon?

Greg: I’ve never, I didn’t even know that existed, Joe.

Joe: It’s a County right in the middle of Southern Oregon. And we flipped some vacant land out there and stuff and so, found a deal. We are buying it, I think for $2,300; we’ll sell it for probably$ 7,500. Make a nice little $5,000 profit, gross profit approximately and not bad. Right? And so we’re talking about on this podcast how to do deals remotely because Greg is doing a lot of that and this is something that we’re dealing a lot with now in these days because I got a lot of students that are in like San Francisco or they’re in Denver or they’re in Nashville and like this super competitive expensive markets. How do you do deals when you can’t do them in your backyard?

Greg: Yeah, I live in San Diego so I don’t…

Joe: Yeah, great. We were, well, remind me, I was, I’m going to tell you about a student who we have just signed up with us who lives in Escondido, which is near San Diego and we’re helping him do some deals virtually in Columbus, Georgia. You ever heard of Columbus, Georgia?

Greg: I think I have, because there was a minor league hockey team, the Columbus Cottonmouths that I think we’re playing out of there. So, I know Columbus, Georgia.

Joe: Alright, so real quick housekeeping items here really quick. This podcast is brought to you by my book, REI Secrets: Daily nuggets of real estate investing wisdom to get you more leads, close more deals. This book, you can get it for free REIsecrets.com. REIsecrets.com. I just pay a little bit shipping, handling, and I’ll send it out to you. I did each chapter as only a couple pages long, two to three pages max because I wanted it to be where you could sit down and read it real quick, get a little inspiration, get a little bit of wisdom, discover the secrets that I’ve been pulling together from doing podcasts like this. We’re almost nine years now talking to investors.

Joe: Guys like Greg. Hey, what’s going on? What’s working for you and your business? And I take these and I turn them into articles and emails and chapters in this book. So, you can get it. It’s thick too. I’m really proud of my book. It’s like, my last book was a quarter of an inch. This is almost a full inch, but it’s free. I’ll send it out to you for free, just pay a little bit of shipping and handling it. REIsecrets.com. Cool.

Joe: And this is a podcast on the Real Estate Investing Mastery show. If you’re listening to this on iTunes right now, or Stitcher or Spotify, wherever, please subscribe and let us know you like the show. Leave us a comment and stuff like that. If you’re watching this right now on YouTube or the Facebook or even Periscope, say hi, tell us hello. Tell us where you’re from. If you’ve got any questions that have to do with wholesaling and doing deals virtually, now’s the time to ask them cause we’ll get Greg on and we’ll answer your questions, but we’d love to say hi and interact and how do you say hi to us if you’re watching it on Facebook or YouTube? Well, you do it like Jeff Henley, Hensley, did right here. He’s watching it actually on the Periscopes. Go nation or go Joe nation… Okay, so this is a Carl Smith from the Facebook. What’s up fellas? Nice topic and Jim. Hey from Aurora, Illinois. So, if, and here’s Mike from YouTube, so what do you do? It’s really simple. If you’re watching this in YouTube or Periscope or Facebook, if you just type something in the comments, say, Hey, what’s going on? How are you doing?

Joe: We will see them here and if you’ve got a good question, I’ll bring it up and I’ll ask Greg your questions and you know, cool. You get to be famous or something. Maybe, maybe not. We’ll say, Greg, how are you man? I’m good. I’ll tell you what, Joe, I’ve been listening to your show for so long and to be a guest it’s, it’s incredible. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. I started in this business four years ago when I was 20. So, like you were like the first podcast I started listening to. I got Brilliant at the Basics in my old house. I’ve been a Joe McCall fan for a while, so this a, this is going to be fun. I’m looking forward to it. Brilliant. At the, I have it right over there. The yellow old house. I want to, I want to update it by the way. You’re a little off center. That’s better. Yeah. Cool. But okay. So, thanks man for listening to the show that long. It’s cool to hear. I can’t wait to be like the guy, you know, in 20 years I’ve been doing this podcast, like an old crusty old man for like 30 40 years and hearing stories like that or be around a long, long time. I have no intention of stopping anytime soon. Greg, where do you live now? You’re in San Diego.

Greg: So, I moved to San Diego about a year, about 14 months ago from New York. Born and raised on the East coast and I started, you know, obviously in this business in my own backyard, well my old backyard in New York, which is a little bit more of a challenging market I think especially for to get started in with attorneys and stuff like that. And after you know, doing the business for a couple of years, I had a little bit of success and I started to really get into the whole virtual at first wholesaling and now, which is full blown virtual investing. We’re doing more than one exit strategy now…

Joe: From New York or after you moved to San Diego?

Greg: So, once I moved to San Diego, obviously I had to, I was forced to do all my deals virtually because at the time I was in New York, I was buying in New York and then Dallas, Texas, and then once I moved from New York to San Diego, it was everything in Dallas and then New York from San Diego. So, I had to really get good at doing it remotely because I really like living in Southern California.

Joe: Yeah, I was just talking to somebody yesterday…. such a bad memory. And they’re, Oh yeah, yeah, he’s near a, he’s in LA. His name is Brad Costanzo interview podcast yesterday. Brad Costanzo.

Greg: Well yeah, bacon, the bacon guy. Right?

Joe: Business practice. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry Brad, if you’re listening and I doubt you are that, I forgot your name but I told him, I said, and I tell you I say this to everybody cause I’m from San Diego and yeah, we’re listening. I hope. I hope the weather is horrible. Miserable today and it’s super cold and it rains because I love the San Diego weather and it’s just a bad joke that I tell people to make me feel better. Cause it’s 29 degrees right now in St Louis. Oh man. Freezing. And you’re in San Diego. Well you know when I’m there too, I tell people, hey listen, the weather is here. I wish you were beautiful.

Joe: Right. But it’s a, it’s you, you like it there, it sounds like.

Greg: I do, I do. It’s a lot different from like upstate New York where I’m from. I’m not from Manhattan particularly. I’m from like an hour from there. So, yeah, I mean, I live in LA Jolla too, so I mean the LA Jolla area is just ridiculous. There’s so much around here. It’s so many, you know, heavy hitters and networking. It’s, it’s amazing. Other than all that, I had to really commit to doing this business virtually. And there’s been a lot of lessons I’ve learned from doing that.

Joe: Well, let’s talk about some of those. What, why, why can’t… Somebody going to ask. You know, why can’t you just do deals in California? You do deals in San Diego. What’s the big deal?

Greg: Yeah. So, here, the first thing about that is that I’m not saying you can’t do deals out here. I’m sure if I wanted to do it, I could certainly do that. It would be a new market. I have to learn new learning curve. You know, I think out in Southern California particularly, I do think it is a little bit more difficult to get a better return on your marketing at least initially because there’s, there’s just the cost per acquisition and I’m a big marketing guy, so like the cost per acquisition.

Greg: Like, on direct mail in California, it’s going to be a lot higher than in New York where my cost per deal is like $2,500 bucks. I think you’re going to have to be willing to spend more money in advertising longer and even be better on the phone because you can’t really make as many mistakes because the response rates are going to be low. I just, I wasn’t in a situation where I wanted to start spending $10k to $15k per acquisition in this market. And I think also it’s seems like the, the sellers out here are a little bit savvier. They know their properties are worth half a million, million bucks and I figured it was already working really well for me in my market where I understand, you know, the numbers and the exit strategies, it’s like… Why reinvents the wheel? I have a great team in New York, I have a lot of people I know there in Texas, the same thing, like why kind of reinvent the wheel and then just deviate from what’s already working. You know?

Joe: Totally true. I have friends that are spending anywhere from seven to… I don’t know if it’s the same as it was a year or two ago. I’m sure it is. But were spending $7,000 to $10,000 in marketing to do one deal. Now, they were making $25k-$30k per deal, so that’s a good ROI. But especially if you’re getting started, man, there’s, you have the entire United States in your backyard, right?

Greg: Literally. And it’s all really a mindset thing too. I mean, I remember before I started doing it virtually, I’m like, I could never do this remotely like… How do you buy a house over the phone? How do you, how do you never see a house? And it wasn’t until the first deal I did, which was like a huge wholesale deal we did where we made like a lot of money on it and I remember getting a wire in my bank and I was like, I never met the seller. I never saw the house. I probably have a total of an hour and a half of my time invested in this thing and then that’s when it just was like, alright, I’m going to really get good at this now. And that’s when it all started to get better for me.

Joe: This is cool. I’m so passionate about this topic because, you know, I was doing deals virtually in St Louis while I lived in St Louis. That’s how I got started. I got tired of going to the houses, I can just do these over the phone. I didn’t, it’s not that I didn’t want to, although I didn’t really want to, but I couldn’t. I had a full-time job, a family and little kids to take care of at home. I don’t want to spend all my free time driving around town looking at houses. So, then I thought, man, if I can do these deals virtually in St Louis, why can’t I do them from Prague in the Czech Republic? Why can I do that from anywhere in the world? And so, we actually about a year or two after I quit my job in 2009 so in like 2011, we went to Prague in the Czech Republic for almost three months, two and a half, and did deals from there. But isn’t that a cool feeling when you know like, holy smokes, all I need is a computer and a cell phone. Right. And I could do these deals anywhere in the world.

Greg: Yeah. It’s, it’s like liberating cause then you’re like, especially when like, you know, in the spreads we were making, like that was another thing I want to talk about. Like how to really get the most spread. The spreads we’re making were, were big. They were bigger than some of these deals I was doing in New York and I wasn’t even seeing these things. And I’m like, Oh my gosh. Like it’s literally like, it just comes down to like, I think five years ago really this wasn’t as common. I mean there were people doing it, but now it’s as it’s getting more popular and as people are seeing like, Hey, maybe their market isn’t the best to do like locally. It’s just so much more possible now.

Greg: There’s so much more information on how to do it and really it’s as cheesy as it sounds, it’s really a mindset thing because if it’s a team that you’re the boss of or you’re JVing with people, which I’m a big believer in the JV thing, I mean you literally just need to get good at a few different things and you can partner with other people, they can do the rest and now you know… I always say 50% of something’s better than a hundred percent of nothing. Especially if you’re, you don’t have to ever leave your house or you can do this when you’re traveling, you know, it’s a no brainer.

Joe: Do you know Chris Chico?

Greg: I do know Chris Chico. Yeah.

Joe: He’s trolling me here and he keeps on doing this for…

Greg: Tell Chico I got a deal on Facebook. I locked up a house off a Facebook ad that, Oh yeah, it was like two weeks ago. We’re still trying to sell it, but got the lead on Facebook with a contract so far. So.

Joe: Those of you listening to this, I just posted a comment from Chris Chico on Facebook. He keeps on trolling me. I think I need to unfriend him and block him. He says here, I’ve heard of this virtual thing. Tell me more. The reason why that’s funny is because Chris Chico looks like Richard Simmons and he acts like Richard Simmons. I’m just kidding. Today’s Halloween though, and I’ve seen a picture of Chris Chico. He dresses up as Richard Simmons with the hairdo, the bushy hairdo and the tight shorts and the tank top. It’s pretty scary. Anyway, so Chris Chico is a creator of something that is, not my first, but one of the… The first course that I bought back in ’08 where I did my first deal, it was called Virtual Wholesaling. It might’ve been called Absentee Owner Profits, but he later changed the name to Virtual Wholesaling. He kind of coined that phrase or he stole it from somebody else.

Joe: But anyway, it’s so cool that he’s here because it was super mind blowing to me. Like you mean like you can wholesale deals virtually and Chris Chico, when he created that course, I remember by the way, he has another comment here that says it does not work with Apple phones. Are you an Apple guy or an Android guy, Greg?

Greg: I’m an Apple guy. I don’t like Androids. Yeah, I’m on my Mac book and I got my iPhone downstairs. Yeah. I don’t, not a…. I know Chico… I was texting him. He has a droid. I wasn’t, I couldn’t iMessage him. So yeah, I don’t like when you…

Joe: When you text him, you get this ugly green.

Greg: Yeah, you get the green, you can’t see if he read it or any of that. You can’t see…

Joe: You know what the truth is. I’m just taking a little rabbit trail here cause I like to give Chris a hard time. I’ve heard that girls in high school and college, right? They will judge a guy by what color texts? Like when a guy’s texting them. Right. And if they get a blue text or a green text it, they will judge the guys saying, Oh he’s not good material, good dating quality or not a good, like, he’s cheap. He’s got a, he’s got an Android and he’s texting me on with the green text. Right. I’m acting like I know what I’m talking about.

Greg: That might be true because you know, especially every time I was texting someone and they had the green little bubble, I was just like, Ooh, can I, can I take this person? Can I trust this? Can I trust the person? Are they on a flip phone, potentially?

Joe: You know, you don’t know. They could be on a flip phone. Okay. So back to Chris. He’s giving me a hard time. You guys are brutal. Okay, so cool thing. Now Chris has a course on Facebook ads for real estate investors and it’s actually really, really good. Greg, you’ve gone through it.

Greg: Yeah. And we’re getting leads cheap. It’s, it’s really good. I mean, especially if you’re doing this remotely. I mean I’m doing this; these are all in New York and I’m, you know, the leads are coming in. They’re solid.

Joe: So, Chris, just cause I’ve given you a hard time… What is the website, the best website for people to go to, to get more information about you, Chris? Cause I mean, Chris is a good friend. I was just hanging out with him the other day and I owe a lot to him. I don’t like to tell him that. But he’s a cool, he’s one of the good guys and he’s got a great course on Facebook ads for real estate investors. I think it’s FlipAnywhere.com or just go to his YouTube channel. Do a search Chico on his YouTube channel.

Joe: But I was going to say this, I remember when I was listening, I had a, I had an old course from two guys and I won’t mention their names because they had this bootcamp and I remember hearing this guy, cause Chris has a Puerto Rican accent, right? And he was at the mic asking the guys on the stage on the bootcamp recordings, right. He was asking the guys on stage about virtual wholesaling and this must’ve been 2007. And I remember so clearly the guys, the speakers, the professional guys were like, nah, it doesn’t work. That’s so stupid. Like are you crazy? No.

Joe: And I remember hearing back at that day, because there were some forums out there where people were saying, no, you can’t do virtual wholesaling. You’ve got to see the house. You’ve got to talk to the seller in person. It doesn’t work. Don’t listen to these, these young scam teachers, whatever, that will tell you that you can do virtual wholesaling. And so that’s funny because then about a year later, I was watching a video from this Puerto Rican kid who was, who had a course called Absentee Owner Profits and on virtual wholesaling and it was Chico, it was the same voice that I had heard that had asked that question at that bootcamp. And they were giving him a hard time.

Joe: And by the way, those two guys are not even around anymore. One of them went to jail and the other one just kind of, I don’t know, but so I was going to say something about maybe Chris Chico is going to go to jail now, but like, no, he’s probably not. So anyway, I remember hearing about virtual wholesaling that like before I even quit my job back in 2007 and so, and I’m thinking that is so amazing that you can build a business with the right systems and the right people, the right marketing, that you can do these deals from anywhere in the world. Right?

Greg: Yeah, totally. And it was like I was the same way. I was like, does this work? I think once someone does their first virtual deal and they get the money in their bank account and they can see it like it’s almost like a newbie doing their first ever real estate deal. I remember I did my first deal; I was 21 at the time and I was still in college and I was like, oh my God, I just made money in real estate without having a job. This is crazy.

Greg: And then, you know, couple years later it was a remote deal and now I’m like, oh my God, this is, this feels almost better than my first ever deal. And I think once you get the feedback loop firing, you get some, you know, get some money in the bank. Then you’re like, okay, now I just got to keep rinse and repeating this. It’s the same thing, right? It’s the same thing except you’re not going to the house. It’s like people make it so complicated. It’s like you just to understand that is pretty much 95% of the same stuff except you’re not going to physically go to the property but someone else can go to the property. It’s just not you. You know, it’s like super simple.

Joe: Some of the, a lot of the deals we’re doing, especially in the lease option side, I have the owners send me the pictures. Yeah, I have the owner send me the pictures or I can find some… We found somebody in Jacksonville when we were doing deals there at one time to do pictures for us and bandit signs and he was actually a guy that did a hundred signs a day, Greg, he did… You know those, have you seen those bandit signs for expired diabetic strips?

Greg: Yeah, I’ve seen those all over the place.

Joe: Well this is one of those guys. He does that in Florida, does like a hundred a day and we hired him to do our bandit signs and we hired him to take pictures and show the houses for us and stuff like that. So, they’re easy to find, people to be your boots on the ground. If you need to, right?

Greg: It’s funny you say that because when I was, I used to do bandit signs a lot. That’s how I got started. But recently, I stopped doing them as of like six months ago. The person I hired for bandit signs, I never met him in person once, you know, everything was over Zoom. He got the signs, you know, there was no issues and I had never met the guy. I’m like, you know what? Yeah. And he wasn’t, he had no issue with that. I’m like, dude, I’ll pay you every week and you’ll have the signs. So, you know…

Joe: Did you, did you use something like Simple Crew to manage that?

Greg: No. I would have him send me a report of all the signs that were put out and then all of the signs that were taken out. And then I would just try to track, see how many were like staying, how many weren’t staying, and then he would send me a picture of every, like every time he was done, he would send me a picture of where the sign was and that’s how we did it from there. But the signs really helped me in my market.

Joe: There’s an app if anybody’s curious called Simple Crew, Simple Crew and it’s an app so that the person who does your signs takes a picture of the sign from the app and in geo locates the picture and puts it on a map so you can see all the pins where the picture was actually taken.

Greg: That’s pretty cool. I got to check that out if I ever want to go back to the bandit signs.

Joe: Yeah. Okay. So how many markets are you in now, Greg?

Greg: So, right now it was primarily New York and Dallas/Fort Worth. As of recently I’ve pulled out of Dallas a little bit just causes the marketing in there wasn’t working like it was in 2018 so primarily the New York Tristate area where I’m originally from. And the reason being there is because number one, I know that area like the back of my hand.

Greg: And number two, I have, you know, so many people I know there that I can either partner with or I can have go to those properties on my behalf to take care of. You know, a lot of the rehabs we’re doing, you know, we’re obviously a, you know, I’m closing on these properties with other people’s money so I need to make sure I have a solid team in place too.

Joe: I love that you’re picking New York state too because you probably don’t have as much competition there. Everybody thinks it’s hard. No investors in New York.

Greg: That’s why I love it because the marketing is so, I mean my, my cost per deal in New York on direct mail alone is around $2,200 to $2,500 bucks. My leads per contract is 35 so every 35 leads off direct mail, tried and true, is a deal. And I mean even the spreads in that market… I mean we’re, we’re doing wholesale deals where, you know, they’re $35k-$40k. We’ve had wholesale deals where we’re making $80k. I did a rehab, made over six figures net profits. So, like the spreads are big. There’s not as much competition.

Greg: But the issue is the sales cycle is very long cause there’s attorneys involved and you know, people in New York at least they have, they think they’re kind of getting scammed there a lot. People have their guard up a lot more in New York. They think everything’s… So, you really need to like know how to work with them. So, but besides that, it’s a great market, you know, if you’re willing to be patient.

Joe: A lot of people are asking some good questions here and I will get to them, I promise. New York City or New York state?

Greg: New York state, I don’t do anything in the actual city. I’m about 45 minutes outside of there. Yeah. The city is a whole other animal.

Joe: Somebody asks here, Edna, I work full time. Best advice to handle the time difference. Well, how are you handling the time difference… three hours?

Greg: Yeah, I get up at 4:50 in the morning and I’m pretty much getting after it. I mean, you know, that’s really eight o’clock, essentially five’s eight o’clock so I pretty much work from, you know, 5:30 AM till you know, like 2:30 you know, like in terms of like having to take phone calls from people and then after that, you know, I’ll still work. But you know, I’ll do a lot more stuff that doesn’t require the phone, replying emails or doing more. I love working on marketing stuff. Honestly, the marketing is my favorite part for sure, the direct response marketing. And certainly, happy to talk about what we’re doing right now and what’s working.

Joe: I want to talk about that. Can you talk about in New York state you have, it’s an attorney state. Buyer has to have an attorney and the seller has to have an attorney and those attorneys have to talk, right?

Greg: Yeah, so that, that is the one, I’m going to say challenge, you know with New York cause it’s good and bad. Right. So, that’s something that I don’t hear a lot of people talk about too. So, in New York, you know, you have to be both represented. So, the issue with that, and I’ll tell you why it can be problematic for people sometimes, is because when you get a deal accepted, you normally don’t just sign a contract on the spot because in New York it’s, it’s best practice to where you send the terms to their attorney, their attorney looks at it, they agree to it, and then they send it back to your attorney.

Greg: And I’m sure you know, attorneys, Joe, they’re very slow and they have a lot of things going on. So, sometimes we’ll get a deal accepted and it won’t go into contract for another three weeks because the attorney has to send us the contract and then we have to make changes and then we send it back and then we fight about the deposit. So, it’s, it’s just, you know, the sales cycle is a little bit longer. Right. And that’s the same thing when you’re selling. You know, we’ve rehab houses and we do wholesale and like, you know when we go deal with retail buyers, they have an attorney and there’s just a little bit more, you know, there’s more people involved. So, I think that is an opportunity where it prevents the market from getting really, really competitive because people, it scares a lot of people away, especially from virtually wholesaling in New York.

Greg: But at the same time the benefit to that is that when you go into contract in New York, it is almost impossible for someone to steal the deal out from under you because you have an attorney. It’s almost impossible. Like I’ve done so many deals in Texas and it’s like the wild West down there. Like we’ve had people’s trying to steal the contact, we put liens on properties and we’ve like sued the seller and it’s been crazy cause there, you know, you just sign a contract and then take it to some title company. So, those are some pros and cons about the market. But the main thing I like about New York is the spreads are big.

Joe: Spreads are big because you have to be more of a serious player to do deals there, right? You’ve got to have access to the money to close on it.

Greg: You need to be able to close. It’s almost mandatory because if you let, my issue I was making in the beginning of my career was I was a one trick pony and I could only wholesale and it was preventing me from, from really maximizing my leads because I didn’t have the ability to close and it was tough in New York because sometimes you can’t assign those contracts and we’re putting big deposits down. So, if you can’t deliver on that, it can be really problematic.

Joe: Chris Chico has a good question here. What are your, what’s your deposit on these deals? The issues he had when he was there was, they wanted a lot of money.

Greg: Yeah. Right. So, I have friends in long Island who put five to 10 grand down. I refuse to do that whatsoever. A lot of times we will get a contract back and they want five six, seven, 10 grand down and I always said, this is my trick. I said, listen, you know, I’m buying this house cash, I’m not getting a mortgage. You know I do five of these a month so I cannot put 10% of the contract down on five houses a month. I’d be out of business. I said, I put, you know, in between $500 and $2,000 down, you know, for this file in particular, Mr. Seller, I feel comfortable putting $1250 down and then eight out of 10 times their attorney’s not going to have an issue with that because my explanation is I’m not getting a traditional bank loan. I’m closing in 35 days, you know, this is how much I’m putting down.

Greg: And I just kind of put that like we just kind of push that over to their attorney and then they either say yes or no. I think the biggest one we put down recently, it was like two grand or something like that and we were fighting over it. But it’s a good enough deal to where I don’t really care, but that’s tough in the beginning. If you’re a newbie, you don’t have a lot of money. It’s an area where you.

Joe: How quickly or how often are you just wholesaling it like quickly buying it, turning around not doing anything and selling it to a cash buyer and what percent are you doing wholesaling where you’re maybe cleaning it up a little bit? Putting on the MLS?

Greg: Yeah, so it used to be mostly wholesaling and then we were starting to realize that the money, at least the money that our particular market, the money we were leaving on the table was, was substantial. And it was great. It was large enough to where like we’d justify buying and closing it. I would say right now we’re about 70/30, we’re closing and flipping and then you know, 70% wholesaling and then 30% assigning, double closing.

Greg: It really depends on a couple things. It’s, it’s what is my business like from a cash perspective, how liquid am I right now? You know how much money is on the street and other projects and then the second thing is, is like a deal perspective like, Hey, can we assign this and make 15 grand? You know, that that’s something we’ll look at. And then we say, well what if we just closed on this thing, cleaned it out, made a financeable and stuck it on the market. A lot of times if we can double what we would make wholesaling it and we can fall back… The key is if we can fall back as a rental, if it doesn’t sell because you need to have more than one exit strategy in New York as well. We will go ahead and close on it and we’ll take it down because if we can make $30K flipping it and opposed to $15K assigning it like I’m not a big high-volume guy. So, for me it’s, it’s worth it to just take that deal down and stick it right on the MLS.

Joe: So, the attorneys are okay with letting you double close or do an assignment, right?

Greg: Yeah, for the most part, the assignment they, they won’t care about. If you really know how to word it correctly, and the key in New York is you’ve got to have a good investor friendly attorney to represent you, right first and foremost. But if they do get a little, you know, finicky over the assignment in there, sometimes they don’t want their client having the buyer being able to assign it because it could affect the client. We just double close. You know, we do the traditional level close thing. It’s a little expensive in New York, but yeah, we have no problem doing that. We’ve wholesaled a ton of properties so far this year, and I’m pretty sure everyone we’ve wholesaled we’ve had no major issues. And sometimes we assign it. I mean, yeah, it’s pretty straightforward, if the attorney’s cool with it.

Joe: Chico is asking a lot of questions. I wish he would just be quiet, you know, let us talk. He says here, do you use your own contractor or the standard agreements that your attorneys…

Greg: Yeah, the typical New York state contracts. Can’t just use like a one pager. I wish you could, but they would not.

Joe: Chris is asking how painful is it to talk to Joe?

Greg: I like it because I’ve been listening to show for so long. So now that I’m a guest on here, it’s, it’s awesome. So…

Joe: And how long have you been watching Chris Chico’s YouTube videos?

Greg: I’ve been a Chico maniac for the last like probably four or five months.

Joe: And then how long have you been listening to my podcast?

Greg: Like four years.

Joe: Did you hear that Chico?

Joe: Allen is getting a kick out of this. He’s saying LOL. This is why I like Stream Yard by the way, Greg, you see what’ it’s doing, it’s cool. OK. So, you know, somebody who is new, is like, maybe they’re looking at New York state or they’re looking at Illinois where they hear wholesaling is illegal, immoral and fattening and they’re wanting to do deals in another state. How do you find that local guy to partner with to kind of be your boots on the ground, right? And does that local guy help you find the money as well to close on these deals?

Greg: Yeah. So let me, that’s a good question. And that, that was the biggest barrier that I had when I, you know, when I started doing virtually, so I’m gonna I’ll share with you how I found my initial boots on the ground partner in Texas. And then obviously, you know, they can kind of do the same thing in their market. So, when I was doing deals in New York, originally, I was running into challenges where the sales cycle being long and the attorneys were an issue. It was just affecting my marketing. So, I started generating leads. So, what I did was I didn’t like try to find like, Hey, who wants to partner with me? And then tell them, oh yeah, well I’m gonna get these leads. I’m in a mastermind called Investor Fuel. So, I was in Texas the week before. I literally started generating leads right off the get go no matter what.

Greg: And I can get into lead gen, you know, after this. And I said, all right, I’m gonna start, you know, getting these deals over the phone. Right. I’m gonna. And then once I have a deal, I’m going to go to someone who I met in Investor Fuel and I’m going to see if they want to partner with me cause I don’t want them to be like, Oh, I’m going to wait for Greg to call me and that like I want them to like when they get a call from me, like we’re making money right now.

Joe: That is so important. So important. Same with like if trying to work with realtors or you’re trying to work with investors and you gotta have like… Don’t just come to them and say, Hey, I’m going… Title companies and attorneys. Right? Yeah. You got to come with something ready like right now. Okay. Can you help me with this?

Greg: You lead with value. Yeah. You lead with value. I had a deal over the phone. The seller was super motivated. The house was, it was like a basically like a, like a shell in a really bad area of Dallas. I had it locked up. The only problem was that in order for her to sign, she didn’t own a computer. So, I’m like, Hmm, I need to get her to physically sign. So, I remember I met someone in the group, seemed like a real cool guy, trustworthy guy. And I said, hey man, we met at the meeting last week. I got this deal. Do you want to go over and sign a contract with a seller? We’re getting it for $18,000 and let’s wholesale this thing. We’ll probably make you know, $20k on this thing. And he’s like, of course, so we go to the house to sign the contract, make $20,000 wholesaling this thing right off the get go. He’s excited, I’m excited.

Greg: The next week I do the same exact thing. I love it. Literally the same thing. We made $30,000 on another deal. So, we made 50 grand in like three weeks together. And he was like, Oh my God. And I was like, Holy crud. Like we just, you know, this is all virtual. And then from there, you know, last year when I was heavy in Dallas, three, four or five deals a month, we’re locking them up. And the spreads were big cause we were getting them really deep or doing some really niche marketing stuff.

Greg: But the big takeaway is, get a deal first and then call an investor. Don’t say, Hey, I’m going to bring you deals next month. Say, Hey, I have a property, 123 Apple Street, it’s under contract. Do you want to JV with me? If someone did that to me, I would be, I’d be like, yeah, of course. Let me look at the deal. How can I help you? But they’re like, Hey, what if I give you some leads and dah, dah, dah? I’m like, yeah, well give me the leads, you know, so you’ve got to bring back or else people aren’t gonna take you seriously.

Joe: Really good point. Really good point. So, let’s talk about lead generation marketing. You’re a big student of marketing and I think that’s why we’re such good friends. Right? Cause like I love marketing as well. Right? What are you seeing working well today?

Greg: Yeah. So, there’s, there’s two things that I’ve done over the last two years that have been the most, I guess, productive for me for marketing and it’s, it’s number one as much as people hate it, direct mail to targeted niche lists consistently over time, that’s trackable. And like Dan Kennedy, I have the 10 Direct Response Marketing Rules on my wall right here. And like the last one is, there’s one of them, it’s like, you know, you will have, there’ll be, there’ll be tracking and measurement and accountability. So, like if you have a real direct mail system and you work that system every single week and track your results, that is like the best lead gen channel because it’s like a faucet. You just turn it on and turn it off.

Greg: So, what I’m doing for direct mail is we’re, we’re going after very niche lists. My most productive lists by far the tax delinquent list, homerun. But that list in my area is just very hard to get. I think that’s why it’s productive, but there’s a huge barrier to entry to get it. It’s not easy to like process. I have my VA; it took her a month. She just sent the report in today, a month to convert that 7,000-file list into like legitimate data that we can mail. And that list is a home run. That Kent Clothier Find Motivated Sellers Vacant House list, just absolute goldmine. That list is just, that’s where we got that huge deal off of. It was a house in Rockland County. The Unknown Equity list is crushing it for us. We’re getting deals off that list and I’m trying to think of another good list that we’re direct mailing right now that’s converting. There’s a prop stream list I pulled, it’s got like liens attached to it and we mailed that one; we’re picking up a duplex.

Greg: So, those are the four, the four main direct mail lists. I haven’t seen a big difference, at least in my market between postcards and letters. So, I’ve been consistently doing postcards, seeing about a 1% response rate in New York. And you know, like I said, I mean our leads to contract is about 35 right now over a 12-month trailing cycle. Cause I have all the reports like in my database.

Joe: That’s awesome. I hope you guys noticing how he knows his numbers, right? 35 leads to contract. You’re spending an average of $2,500 in marketing per deal. Is that what you said before?

Greg: Roughly. Yeah. The thing is that my direct mail, the problem with people with direct mail is they look at direct mail on like a 30 to 60 day cycle and it’s really like trailing like six to 12 month cycle and that’s when you can really look at your campaigns and see if they’re productive, you know? So, I started doing that and it all changed for me, Joe, and I learned a lot from you. Shameless plug.

Joe: Thank you. So cool. What’s your average profit per deal would you say?

Greg: It depends what we’re doing. If we’re wholesaling it’s, it’s in between $15k and $25k. If we’re wholesaling, it’s in between, you know, $25k and $45k and then if we’re rehabbing, you know it can be anywhere between $40k and over six figures. So, I mean six figures is going to be the high side, but you know, they’ve gotten that big in our market because we can go into areas, you know, in New York, near New York City where the median house price is like $400k- $500 grand. So, to make a hundred K on a spread like that… It’s possible cause there’s just so much, so much room there.

Joe: And direct mail is not dead. It’s not dead. It hasn’t been dead and it probably won’t be dead for a long time. In fact, I might say it’ll probably get more important in the coming years ahead simply because it gets harder and harder to do cold calling, ringless voicemail and some of the other online strategies, but we’re going to talk about Facebook ads here in a second. What kind of postcards are you sending? Do you mix them up?

Greg: It’s just doesn’t, it doesn’t even matter. Right. I’ve tried a lot of stuff. Testing. My best performing postcard by far is the doodle postcard. I’m not sure if you’re seeing that.

Joe: I’ve seen the doodle.

Greg: The doodle one is the best for us, like tried and true, we’ll have like a year’s worth of data to back that. The urgent postcards worked okay for us. You know, and I don’t, I haven’t mailed it enough to really like get some good sample sizes but that’s been alright for us. Another one we did, this didn’t perform that well, but I basically wrote sales letter on a postcard and I did that just to really see if I can get fewer leads but better-quality leads and that one just kind of tanked. So, I’ve really just been sticking to the doodle postcard.

Joe: Have you tried the third notice postcard?

Greg: No, I have not, no, not never. I’ve stuck to my doodle or the sales copy one.

Joe: Yeah, speaking to Chico again. He just will not shut up and leave me alone. He says he’s got a couple more questions here and he’s saying this here. I’m asking questions because Joe is a horrible interviewer. I’m trying to help. Here we go. His other question was, so your split is 50/50 with that boots on the ground, right? But do you get reimbursed your marketing expense?

Greg: So, in New York what I was doing, this is a little confusing, Chico and Joe, so basically in New York what I was doing last year at least is I was doing direct marketing campaigns specifically with somebody and I said, Hey, we’re going to partner on this marketing for the next year. Any deal that comes from this marketing, you know, obviously we’re going to split these properties 50/50, everything’s tracked through Call Rail and I have the right to do my own deals. He has the right to do his own deals as long as it’s not coming from our direct mail because he lives in New York. I live in California, in Texas. What I was doing, so we were splitting those deals 50/50 if it was coming from our direct marketing together.

Greg: If it wasn’t, I could either do it by myself or I could bring him on as a JV partner if I wanted to, if he wanted to fund it and manage the rehabs or etcetera. In Texas, what I was doing, and this’ll kind of transition right into the other marketing that I do that really works extremely well, if it is really a pain and neck. It was in Texas; I was doing no direct mail. I was doing all vacant house basically cold calling. So, going in, basically we were taking lists and, on every list, you can flag those lists for vacants right? So, like, every list you buy, there’s a way you can literally filter it to get all the vacant addresses and then stick them, you know, do some things with them.

Greg: So, I was having a VA basically just take them, flagged down, all the vacant properties… We were going after niche lists, mainly tax delinquent lists, flagging all the vacant down. And then the VA was making the phone call. I was making some targeted phone calls and we were locking deals up that way without any direct mail expense whatsoever. The only overhead we really had was a little bit of a VA and then Call Rail, you know, and stuff like, and then some of my time, but these were so targeted, like I didn’t have to call that many people to get a deal. Right. I think our average was like one out of like 15 leads I think was a deal because we were super targeted. So, we were doing a lot of that like real niche, vacant house marketing, you know, I think people call it nowadays, like list stacking. We were doing a lot, right?

Greg: So, that was working really well in Texas at least. And in that situation, what I was doing with the JV guy is I was just saying, hey listen, I’m going to do my own marketing here. When I get my deals, when I get these deals locked up, I’m going to partner with you on a case by case basis. So I can do deals on my own if I want to, but if I want to do a deal with you, I’ll bring you the deal first and then you just sell it or we take it down together and then we split it on the backend and my marketing cost wasn’t substantial so I didn’t really do any reimbursements for marketing cause it was like a couple hundred bucks. So, to me it didn’t really matter.

Joe: Some people are going to wonder, why don’t you just hire an acquisitions manager? Why don’t, because I like your method. I’ve done that in at least six different markets, right? Yeah. Why not hire an acquisitions manager?

Greg: To be honest with you, I didn’t want to do it because the person I was partnering with, and I’m still doing deals with them to this day and not as many as I was last year. He knows the area. He already has a buyers list. He’s an experienced investor. He’s extremely incentivized to be productive. And for me, I’m like, if I gotta hire an acquisitions manager, train them, then it got to the get a dispositions manager. By the time I’m done paying everyone and managing people, it’s like I’ll probably make a little bit more money, but how much more time am I going to be involved with? Like when I’m partnering with this, this gentleman, I’m really not involved that much. I’m getting the lead, locking it up. And then basically that’s it. Right?

Joe: So, I would argue, I would argue you make more money by partnering somebody on the ground because real simple reason they can go to the seller, meet them in person, belly to belly, get a bigger discount than you probably could over the phone. Right. They also have the connections with the title company, with the attorney. They have access to the money, they have access to the buyers so they can, they can get a lower price, sell it at a higher price, close quicker and do more of them. Right? And so even though you’re splitting the pie, it’s a bigger pie and you have more of them. So, you’re going to make more money by doing this.

Greg: I couldn’t agree more. And it was like, I’d rather do that than have to, you know, manage a team from afar. I think a mutual friend of ours Haim go; he had a full-blown team out in Memphis and he was managing the team and then he actually eventually shifted his whole business model to where he didn’t want to do that anymore. Now he’s doing deals in San Francisco, you know, and because I just didn’t want to really manage a team from afar. You know, I’d rather partner with someone. And the key is like, both of our interests are, both of our interests are aligned. Like he wants to make money. He’s a principal in the transaction. I’m principle in the transaction. He knows the market. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. And it allows me to focus on doing what I do best, which is marketing and get, you know, talking to people, getting, getting deals over the telephone.

Joe: Nice. I was just responding to a green text from somebody. Look, we’re getting some really cool cats here responding to these messages. First of all, Chris Chico asks another stupid question. What’s your direct mail budget per month?

Greg: It’s around five ish thousand, five to seven thousand, depending on what’s going on. But you know, in New York, not as much competition so I can spend less. So, it’s like five to seven grand, I would say, you know, any given month and I’m not going after high volume. Actually it’s funny, a lot of the deals that we’re doing now are from like leads that we got like a year and a half ago on the follow-up and that was like from a direct mail campaign two years ago and now that that’s coming all the way around and we’re getting them two years later and there’s no competition because we’re the only ones who’ve been calling them for two years now.

Joe: Janet Jackson here asks a question. I know John, Janet Jackson says here, so glad Chris Chico was dropping solid gold questions. Solid gold, Chris. Corey Bure, right? Love doing deals with Greg.

Greg: Oh my gosh, I did a with Corey… we did a deal in Texas. We actually, yeah, we did a little wholesale deal. It was off a PPC ad. Never met the seller, never went to the house. And yeah, of course that was a couple months ago. What’s up, Corey?

Joe: Why does Joe look like a serial killer? That’s funny. All right, Chris Chico’s got another awesome question here. So, you put them in touch with your person and they are the ones that will put them under contract unless you just do it over the phone.

Greg: Yeah. So, if I do it over the phone, then obviously we just take the transaction from there. We’ll go ahead and either wholesale. A lot of times we’re actually going to buy that house instead of wholesale it just because we can make more money a lot of times. If they’re going to go to the property and like negotiate with the seller, I’m going to make sure that it’s, they’re pretty much ready to go. Like maybe we’re off a little bit in price or they can’t sign remotely. But like if I’m going to send somebody out to the property, I’m going to make sure it’s not a waste of their time. I’m not just going to like, you know, treat them as a regular acquisitions person where you just, you know, go on whatever like there, if they’re going to the house it’s high chance they’re going to get that deal like very high chance, 80% or greater, I’d say.

Joe: You know, I did a course called Automated Wholesaling and I used to sell it for five grand and I took it off the market a couple of years ago and this is the same stuff I taught. Guess what though guys? Pay attention cause in the next few months I’m going to give away that whole course for free. I used to sell it for five grand teaching the same exact stuff we’re talking about here, but I’m going to be doing it where I’m releasing one of 10 modules a day for free. So, it’s only going to be up for 24 hours and I’m taking it down each module.

Joe: So, if any of you are interested in learning more about this, stay tuned because I’m going to be, I’m going to be releasing that. Real quick… Brian Johnson is asking, doodle postcard… What’s that? You can find that on any of the big printing companies, right?

Greg: Yeah. It’s like a, it’s like, Hey, I want to buy your house with like an arrow. It’s, it’s kind of like an ugly cheesy postcard. I personally would never call myself, but you know, you are not your customer.

Joe: We were talking about the third notice postcard, so can remind me, remind me afterwards this will, you’ll get triple the calls. But they will be, especially from New Yorkers, these New Yorkers, there’ll be, there’ll be really upset, but you will get deals out of it. And Chico has a couple, three of them that he’s done and I don’t think he’ll have a problem with me sending them to you. I think, I don’t know if you do Chris, let me know. But they’re obnoxious and so you gotta test them. Especially New York. This would be hilarious. What you need to do is like save all of your angry voicemails. Okay. And release it as a video on YouTube or Instagram or something. It’s pretty hilarious. Maybe don’t put, maybe get a different phone number that’s like hidden behind like a virtual number and use a different name and different company or something. Yes. But you will get deals out of it. You will get deals out of it. Okay.

Joe: So, let’s talk about active marketing. What’s the other source of marketing that you’d like to do?

Greg: It was the targeted vacant house strategy where we’re taking priority mail and we’re peeling all the vacant houses off of them and we’re just sticking them in a database and pulling their phone numbers and calling them. And that is a strategy that, you know, a lot of people now are talking about mass cold calling, mass texting. I’ve personally never done the mass texting, mass cold calling stuff. I’ve never, I’m not saying it doesn’t work, it was never attractive to me because I’m like if I got a call, 50,000 people to get like 20 leads. Like I’d rather just whittle this thing down.

Greg: And the way I started doing this like niche marketing stuff is I took the best deals that I did at the time and I said, what were the common denominators for all these properties? And there was like the same three things. They were vacant, every house was vacant, they had some sort of back tax or mortgage delinquency. And a lot of the times these were like deceased owners and like they were never in probate or anything. Like it was like title issue… it was basically an empty house sitting going into default, whether it’s tax default or mortgage default.

Greg: And then I was like, well what if I could just reverse engineer lists like this? So, I would take the tax list, pull the vacants out or the foreclosure list, pull the vacants, skip trace them. A lot of these owners were deceased. And then right there, that’s essentially a probate dealer and inherited property. But no one’s even targeting them because on paper they look like they’re alive until you skip trace and you find out they’re deceased. That’s why the loans in default and that’s why it’s vacant. So, like, and the good thing about those is the spreads are massive.

Greg: A lot of the stuff I actually learned from Larry Higgins of Skip Genie, who’s good friends with Chris Chico if you’re still watching. Larry taught me a lot of stuff, but those deals are, what’s it called? Were the fattest deals we were doing like, and these were like the highest profit margins. The drawback were title issues, like these title problems. I did… Actually, funny story, I did one deal in Austin. The only deal I ever did in that city, 21 heirs on this property. So, there were I think 18 heirship affidavits. It took a whole year that we rehabbed, we rehabbed the title, we ended up wholesaling the house, we rehabbed the title, but there were 21 heirs involved in a property that was vacant with taxes. It was insane. But like just completing that transaction was like, wow, if I can go through a property with as many title issues, like, you know, it gave me a lot of confidence.

Greg: So, there was, there’s not a lot of investors going after those either because no one wants to do that at work. But I mean the spreads you can make on these deals are incredible. Half the people don’t even know they own the house. I did a deal last year where I called the lady out of the blue. I said, Hey, are you related to, you know, XYZ seller? They’re like, yeah. I said, well you still own this property. You know, they’re, they’ve passed away but this thing is empty. And just sitting here collecting dust essentially, do you want to sell it? You could put some money in your pocket. She’s like, yeah, sure. How much can I get and what do you want? She’s like, I take 15 grand over whatever’s owed. So, we’ve got this house and like you know, flipped it and made like 50 grand but she wouldn’t, she didn’t even, there was like found money for her. She didn’t even know she was going to get like, yeah. So, like those, those properties are, are really fun too.

Joe: Chris Chico saying, send those obnoxious postcards and I will send them to you, Greg, after we’re done here. Claude Diamond in the house. What’s a postcard? Claude is funny. He does mostly social media marketing. He doesn’t like direct mail, although he does, he just doesn’t know it. Corey is saying here, smart equals polygon type list. I’m not sure what you mean Corey.

Greg: Poly means five… five maybe distress points. Is that what he means by that? Polygon… Is that polygon?

Joe: Polygon is like, you’d take a map and you draw a polygon around an area maybe. Okay. Here we go. This is the best interview you’ve ever done. You’ve mentioned my name so many times. I’m going to listen again just to hear my name again. All right, so I got to get going. Greg, let’s have you on a real show. My YouTube channel. You should reach out to Chris, Chris’s YouTube show.

Greg: That would be awesome, I watch your YouTube channel lot. I’d be happy to be a guest man. You know what his cell phone number, I got it right here. Let me tell you his cell phone number is, and then you can just, you can just call him. It is… I’m just kidding.

Joe: I got his number. Okay, so we’ve got some questions here about PropStream. What is the list you pulled through PropStream? By the way, I love PropStream. The list that Greg was talking about is the… You just look up a zip code or a County link and pull all of the leads. It’s just on the drop down. Go to propstreamjoe.com, propstreamjoe.com. Look at that, baby. Propstreamjoe.com I use it all the time. You can get high equity, low equity, vacants, liens, judgments, bankruptcies, divorces, and you can search for absentee owners, owner occupants. It’s fantastic. You get to, if you use my link though, you get, you get to download more on a daily basis, so make sure… A lot of people sell it, but if you use my link, you get more downloads. You go to propstreamjoe.com, it’s 97 bucks a month. You can download up to, I think it’s 10,000 a month, but if you go through the buy it the normal way, you only can download like I think 500 a day. You can do a few thousand or 5,000 a day, I think, with mine. Propstreamjoe.com. Cool.

Joe: Greg, I don’t know the last time I had so many comments on a podcast. I think just people, they like you or they like talking about closing deals remotely. Ron is saying, where do I hear it again? Well, this will be replayed on YouTube and Facebook. You can also go to RealEstateInvestingMastery.com to get the show notes, to watch the video, to get the audio, to get the transcription. If you go to RealEstateInvestingMastery.com.

Greg: Oh, you get transcriptions, that’s, that’s awesome.

Joe: Oh yeah. Oh, sure do. Pretty fancy with that. Okay, good. Greg, any final tips here that you want to share with folks?

Greg: Track your numbers. Especially if you’re going to do this remotely, like people are like, Oh, I’m not going to see the house. Like if you can just understand the marketing numbers and like, like I just know the numbers for mail and for vacants. Like if you know the numbers and the numbers are, you know, if you track them and you see over time, they’re accurate, like one out of four… I’m a big law of averages guy, so one out of 35 for mail, one out of like 15 for the targeted stuff. If you just track your numbers and look at your data, like you can make decisions on what works and what doesn’t work. Like if I run a campaign and I know my normal response rate is 1% and I get a half percent now there’s an issue there and I can look, use the data to make a decision instead of being like, Oh, direct mail sucks.

Greg: So, just track your numbers. If you do track your numbers consistently, it’s going to allow you to be able to do more deals and do it remotely. Because if I know in one market my KPIs are X, Y, and Z, I can go test another market with a bunch of data that I’m using in one market and see if there’s a Delta there or not. So, the better you track your numbers, it’s just easier to do many different things even when we close now because we’re, you know, not always wholesale, we’re flipping and there’s a lot more, you know, capital involved. So, the main thing is tracking your numbers, especially when it comes to marketing.

Joe: What CRM are you using to track your numbers?

Greg: I’m using Podio for my CRM and then know I also, I’m a very simple person too so on top of Podio I do have Google spreadsheets where I have like the high level KPIs, you know, like leads, offers, contracts, closings, private lenders, stuff like, like the critical things that matter. So, between Podio and then a Google sheets, you know, that’s how we’re doing it.

Joe: Very cool. I’m doing some direct mail right now with my boys for vacant land. And you want to see something pretty cool here? This is in Oregon and Kern County, California and Los Angeles.

Greg: Near Bakersfield, over there? Don’t they call that the armpit of Bakersfield?

Joe: The armpit. Yes, they did. I’m going to show, I’m going to share my screen with you here. Do you see this? Yeah. I’m using Freedom Soft. I white labeled it, called REI Simple and customized it for lease options and for land. And my boys are doing this, right? So, I’ve got 59 deals. They’re waiting for me to review offers. We’ve sent 24 so we just started this about a month ago, right? I’ve got 24 new leads in here right now, but look at our response rates.

Greg: Oh, my goodness. Are you mailing these folks?

Joe: Yeah. Letters. Just plain old boring typed letters.

Greg: I want to buy land in Bakersfield.

Joe: No, out in the sticks. The middle of nowhere. I was at a 9% response rate.

Greg: That’s incredible.

Joe: Yeah. So those are, those are numbers and you can associate, so I have a local phone number, right. When somebody calls that number, it automatically puts that lead into here. It’s pretty amazing. Anyway, I’m a big, big fan of REI Simple and Freedom Soft because especially with direct mail, when you get your local phone number from inside, it handles everything. You don’t need CallRail anymore and you can make the outbound calls from inside of REI Simple.

Greg: Yeah, that’s key. Especially if you’re going to be doing direct, I mean especially direct mail. If you’re going to do direct mail, number one needs to be in it for at least six months, like minimum. And number two, you need to track your mail. Like I track my direct mail on a weekly basis. Sundays I look at the marketing report and I see what happened. The good, the bad, the ugly and allows me to make so I can come on the show and tell you the numbers and not be like, oh well I’ve got gotta go look. I just know them cause I, you know, look at them every week. You know?

Joe: It’s super important. They call it key performance indicators and they’re key. There’s, somebody told me in a mastermind similar to Investor Fuel, it was called Collective Genius. Somebody said, yeah, if you don’t know your numbers, you don’t have a real business and that is…

Greg: I agree with that. Yeah. Cause then you don’t know what works and what doesn’t work. Right?

Joe: Yep. Greg, how can people get ahold of you? I’ve seen you on Instagram, you do cool stuff there. How can people reach you?

Greg: Yeah. Yeah, so, you could follow me on Instagram at Grego, G R E G O, Grego_37 and you can check me out on Facebook and if you want to check out the real estate business, you can go to a VelocityHouseBuyers.com, that’s our home buying company and yeah, shoot me a message. Happy to connect.

Joe: Got a lot of good people here at complementing this podcast. Claude even says excellent interview. Thank you, Joe and Greg. John is asking, can I J V with you on a deal in New York?

Greg: If you bring me a deal first, I would look at it and number one, I’d tell you if it’s a deal. Number two, if it is a deal, I’d be happy to partner with you, but I’d rather have you bring me a deal first.

Joe: Excellent. Just get it under contract. at least.

Greg: Get it under contract. Yeah.

Joe: Good. All right Greg, this has been a great interview. One of my funniest, most fun, funner podcasts that I’ve ever done, man.

Greg: Thanks, man. It’s been great to be on your show, man.

Joe: You have a podcast too, right? Or a YouTube channel?

Greg: I do. Yeah. I got a Pave the Way podcast. We put out two shows a week. I got, Joe was, actually his show went live today so people are probably loving it. I got to go look at the dashboard, but yeah, Pave the Way podcast, if you want to check it out, you get to hear cool guests like Joe and a lot of other mutual friends have been on the show. So yeah, it’s been fun so far doing that.

Joe: Pay attention to Greg guys. He’s going places, he’s going places. He might be, just, I’m just telling ya, follow him. Pay attention to what he’s saying. He’s a good dude. All right guys. We’ll see ya later. Thanks a lot. Thanks again, Greg. Bye-Bye later, man.

Joe: Oh, hey, wait, one guys, don’t forget sorry. You can get the show notes. I didn’t think I already said this, but you can get the show notes, the transcripts, and all the links that we just gave at RealEstateInvestingMastery.com. If I can pull it up here. There we go. Real Estate Investing Mastery the name of the podcast, right? So, get the show notes, the transcripts, the audio, the video, all the links, show notes, everything, all that stuff at RealEstateInvestingMastery.com. And if you like this show, give us a thumbs up right now in this video, or like in Facebook. Thumbs up, share it and subscribe to it in iTunes. Leave us a review on iTunes. I’d really, really appreciate it. And that’s all I have to say. Alright, I’m out of here. Thanks. See you, Greg. Bye. Bye.