Joe:Hey, guys, welcome. This is the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast, and you're in the right place at the right time because we have a special guest, the one and only Chris Chico on the podcast today. You never know what to expect. But you know, when you have Chris Chico on the other line. So this will be entertaining if you have any kids. And I encourage you to, like, put them in another room and don't let them listen. Just kidding.

Cris: I even have props. This is or that. There you go. There you go. Right here. And guess what? You can see that maybe you could describe the head that I just put on.

Joe:If you're listening to an audio podcast. It's the what do you call that emergency? The poop emoji. Emoji. That's right. Yes. I need one. I wish I had one of those before you as a guest. Yes. All right. But first, I want to let you all know that this podcast is brought to you by my book Wholesaling Lease Options. You can get this do-hickey for free. That will teach you how I quit my job in '08, '09 when the economy was falling apart. Everybody thought I was crazy, but I was flipping lease options in '09 the year after the recession started and I was able to make what was making more money doing big deals than I was in my full time job. And we'll talk about this because I, Cris Chico was one of the guys I started to wholesaling from his course. I bought it in '08. I started wholesaling, making money. But I got frustrated with the leads I was throwing away. I was making money wholesaling. And I thought, well, why can't I wholesale lease options? I started to wholesaling lease options. And this book teaches you how to do flip lease option deals from beginning to end. This is a really timely book right now. And I think it's going to be important for you and it's free. Just got to pay a little bit of shipping handling and I'll send the book out to you. Go to WLOBook.com, WLOBook.com. Cris, how are you, man?

Cris: I'm doing great. Any day above ground is a great day today. Qualified. And right before the call, I told them I was doing great because with everything happening right now, if you listen to this podcast, with everything happening right now with the virus, I always like to do the most difficult things as best I can. And so I have integrated into my life both the Keto diet and the intermittent fasting, both at the same time simultaneously. And that way, when there is famine, everybody will fall. But I will stay alive because I eat like a bird right now.

Joe: I feel sorry for you. Number one, it's got to be depressing, only barely eating anything. But, you know, whatever floats your boat. Chris, great.

Cris: I'm eating. Testing. This is the extent upon which I'm doing this. I even bought a blood meter to test my blood. And I test it twice a day to see if I'm in a ketogenic state.

Joe: Are you seriously joking?

Cris: I'm dead serious. That's serious. I poke the finger and then I end up doing it the wrong spot and up like poking, having to poke three fingers just to get the blood out of me so I could do it. That's how I do it, all or nothing. Right now we are. It's war time. Nobody has told you that. You get the memo, Joe, because right now it is war time. That means that everything is off the table. OK.

Joe: Oh, man. I'm not going on any kind of diet right now, that's for sure. We have more important things to worry about. Hey, look, we got Rick again, mutual friend Chris and Joe. Go get it, guys. You guys, you're here. Nate Andre, do you know Nate up in Wisconsin?

Cris: Nate who? Nate Andre, it doesn't ring a bell, although maybe if I saw the Facebook profile, I might know who that is.

Joe: This guy, he's been actively doing deals for long. So a lot of people here are watching this right now on YouTube and Facebook. So just. Hello, what's up? How's it going? This is live. We'll be releasing this later as an audio podcast to the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast. So if you guys are watching live right now on Facebook or YouTube. Say hello. Tell us where you're from. And if you've got any questions here, this may be a good time to get them typed into YouTube or Facebook comments and we'll get to that. Well, I'll ask Chico with the questions and we'll be able to help you in any way we can. This is an important topic. Let me guys give you just a quick history of Chico. I've had him on my podcast many times. I remember when I was first getting started, still working a full time job in my cubic hell, as I affectionately call it. And I was hating life.

Joe:Cris Chico had a you know you know what? I didn't know this till later, but I was I had, of course, by Richard Rupe and Dan Duran. And I was listening to one of the live bootcamps that they did. And Cris has a unique voice. And I heard this funny looking guy sounding guy, and he was funny looking too, even though I couldn't see him. And on the bootcamp, he was asking Richard Rupe and Dan Duran, some questions about virtual wholesaling. And I remember so clearly they're like, nah, you can't do that. That's stupid. That act really cut him down.

Cris: Yes, I remember that. They understood it all. They told me I was a complete idiot and a buffoon.

Joe: They did. I mean, literally, there was not even like there trying to be polite about it. Now, I probably shouldn't talk bad about them without them giving a chance to rebut. But like they were thinking at the time, you can't do virtual wholesaling. It doesn't work. You have to go see the seller. You negotiate with them in person. Don't listen. These young littles whippersnappers, these guys that are coming out here telling you that you can do deals virtually doesn't work. So fast forward, though, year two. And Chris comes out with this class called absentee owner profits. And is that, was that what it was called at first?

Cris: That's what was called at first, absentee owner profits. And it basically what I what I took at the time I was doing deals and everything was, I'd done everything virtually. Back then, there was no like membership areas and stuff that I had a bunch of videos that I recorded for the people that were working for me that were kind of doing stuff behind the scenes. And basically, I just took that and upload it to a site and I gave people access. And that's, you know, Alex Youngblood, one of our friends. He was my first ever customer. Really? Yeah, he was every customer. I mean, I even called them because I thought, oh, my God, there's another human being. That bought my stuff. That must be really, really strange.

Joe: I must have been in the top 10 or 12, maybe. Yes. But I remember when I bought it. Exactly. All right. Rick says here, Cris, you're not in ketosis. I can see it in your eyes.

Cris: I'm not in ketosis. I am in ketosis. I feel it. I feel it in my veings. Oh, my God. I feel the euphoria. Plus the coffee in my system. I'm ready to go. And by the way, we're saying that we don't want to say we were talking about Rupe and Duran today. I'm still considered sometimes by many to be an imbecile and a moron. But hey, I was right about virtual wholesaling. So to their defense, just in case they call me a nincompoop.

Joe: Thank God you were. so you came out of this course called absentee owner profits. And I told the story 100 million times. If anybody's listen to this podcast, my back was against the wall that was hemorrhaging cash. And you know, I used to buy tons of courses. I was a professional student. I'd buy tons of other courses. And I said, dang it, that's enough. I need to start implementing what I learned. I'm going to buy one more course and I'm going to buy I've actually bought two. I bought Cris's absentee owner profits. You might have started calling it Virtual Wholesaling, but then I don't remember. And I bought Steve Cook's wholesaling for fast cash. Now, Steve taught was mainly he was mainly teaching, making, you know, 50 offers a day on the MLS, which worked. Cris is though his strategy was ugly yellow postcards to absentee owners. He had a one-page contract and he had simple scripts and all that. And so I remember thinking, oh, right, I was going to buy this. I'm going to buy this one more course. And I'm going to do what they say and I'm not going to change a thing. That was the first time in my life I made that decision. I'm going to do what Chris says. I'm not going to change anything. I didn't like the postcards. I thought they were stupid and ugly. I didn't like the contracts. It was a one-page contract. I thought, I'm sure it's full of holes. I didn't like his script. I didn't like his voice mails. But I'm just going to do it anyway.

Cris: I'm glad we just laying out all the skeletons right now. Everything. We just lay it all out.

Joe: You know, I send out these stupid postcards and sure enough, a lady called me. It wasn't even about her property. It was about another property. She owned way out in the sticks an hour and a half outside of St. Louis. There was a three family where there were no multi families. I couldn't get comps. There were no buyers out there. This was must have been two thousand seven or eight. When did you come out with the course, do you remember?

Cris: Right around 2000, 2007 was when I came out with the absentee owner profits. And then right toward the end of 2007 ish or 2008, January was when I actually had the name virtual wholesaling where I actually came up with that course.

Joe:So this is all has a point. Me telling you this story has a point because we're gonna be talking about how he transitioned into this because we're gonna talk about what was going on then. It parallels to what was going on here now and where the changes are coming. All right. So I said I'm going to do this. So the lady called me. I didn't wanna give her an offer. She literally Chris begged me to make her an offer.

Cris: I was going to joke and say that's kind of how you got married. No, no. Never mind, go on continue.

Joe: I pulled something out of my you know what? I came up with an offer that it listed before it had expired the year before for a hundred and forty grand. And I just said and I learned this from your course. It's called the. Well, never mind. I can't I can't give it a name because there's kids listening. When I told all the kids to leave, it's called the rectal extraction method. And I. I said, I'll offer you fifty thousand for it. Okay. And she said, OK. Fifty grand. Right. Just like that. I said, OK. And I said, what do I do now? So I pulled up your course. I looked at the contract. I was like, I don't want to use this. It's just a one-page contracts. I still went and I got the realtors contract and I added in a ton of addendums on there and contingencies. I had so many different contingencies. I'm sure they cancelled each other out. Right. And I spent hours poring over this contract. It was like perfect. I looked at all my other courses and added in all that that stuff. And like, I bring it to her. And I was nervous because she's elderly. So I made sure her son was with her. And I met her in a public place because I didn't want it, you know, to be. I wanted to be public. So I have witnesses or whatever. And I gave her the contract. She didn't even read it. She went to the signature page and just signed it. And I asked her son, is it. Are you OK with this? And he's like, yeah, dude, whatever. And I was like, oh, my gosh. Like, what do I do now? I stuck a sign in the yard, sold it. The next day, realtor called me and I said, I got to tell you something. The realtor said, I've got a cash buyer who wants this. I was advertising, I bought it for $50k, advertising over sixty. And so anyway, I said to the realtor, I hope this is OK. I hope I'm not breaking any laws, hiked this property under contract. I don't even own it yet and I haven't. Is this OK? He said, yeah. Relax, dude. All right. So I finally sold it. Right now that don't even have a title company. And the realtor said, we'll just use my buyer title company. It's not a big deal. So I called the title company and told them everything that was going on. I hope this is OK. I hope this isn't illegal. And the title company told me to chill out and relax. And so it burned after all my costs. I made like 13 grand on this deal, my first whole deal, thanks to this guy right here. Chris Chico. So that was a long introductory boring story.

Cris: Well, I appreciate I appreciate the opportunity here and always thankful and appreciate it to hear your story, because at the end of the day, you know, I always look at it. It's a blessing for me to be able to have an opportunity to have help you. And obviously, Joe is doing a, you know, bigger and better things. And he has things that he's doing that I don't even know how they work. Maybe I should take its course on a couple of things. But at the end of the day, I would say that I accept that and say thank you with grace, because at the end of the day, you know, it's the thing that keeps me going is the ability to be able to help and inspire others and, you know, and to help them. So I've always appreciated both of you telling the story.

Joe: And I've told you about four times before on this podcast, because I had you on three.

Cris: Ask me how many times I've been here.

Joe: Probably you're one of our most popular guests. One.

Cris: I want to be the most popular guest. So my intent is that at least for the next every quarter, I'm going to come up with something amazingly different and so groundbreaking that you're forced to bring me on. And I will be the number one guest on your podcast.

Joe: We'll see about that. Yes, that's right. OK. So I wanted to get you on. Chris, I appreciate your friendship and I appreciate your wisdom. You're always. You're just one of the guys out there in our industry that are always thinking ahead and looking at what's coming down the pipe, what's working now, what does what used to work then doesn't work now. But at the same time, we're coming into a time now where we're coming out of a seller's market into a buyer's market. And I remember I told the whole story of what we were talking about before, because like back then in '06, when you're probably at this boot camp, you know, things were on fire. Things were coming up. The real estate will never go down. Right. It was easy to do these deals. And all of a sudden you start realizing because you're in Miami. I want you to tell your story a little bit like a wholesale deals for you having some success, but you started seeing some things change and you started changing with the market.

Cris: You know, what happened is that actually the curiosity about doing things virtually came about before the crash. What happened is that there was a and I don't even know the names. There's a couple of people, you know, nowadays, you have a lot of people that are out there bringing people into markets like Ohio and St. Louis. Because they're looking to do cash flow properties, et cetera. And there was a group out of San Antonio, Texas, that was that was doing that. They were bringing in people to San Antonio and explaining how it's such a great market. And until the thought occurred to me that, well, I wonder if, you know, if I'm doing direct mail and I'm getting the list and back then, those difficult deals just to get over it for a reference. When I started, there was no Google Street View. So there was no way to look at properties that we have now. There was no really in terms of data. There weren't really any programs like they are right now and so many services available to get data. So it was very difficult. So, you know, when I, when we send out a thousand postcards, you know, if we didn't pick up three or four deal, we thought something was wrong. And, you know, and even to the extent we're back then with our systems, you know, our CRM was whenever we did a mailer, we then on a Monday or Tuesday the calls will start to come in. And we said that a thousand postcards. Then I have a guy that would sit there with a notebook and spend the next two hours transcribing by hand and listening to every single message.

Cris:So I had, you know, back then before even people got acquisitions, people I had just decided, you know what, I don't want to talk to sellers anymore. I don't like talking to these people anymore. I want to do the marketing. And I had two or three guys that were just doing everything, you know, talking with the sellers and putting the deals on the contract. So I had some extra time and that's the reason I mentioned that. So your resource this was a two thousand five, I think it was probably two thousand five ish. And it was two thousand and six states that I really started to look at. Hey, there's a group there that's doing deals. I wonder if we could do deals. I mean, because I could get the list. I could get the list. And so my first market was Jacksonville. And that's what I had the thought of. Well, you know, if we're looking at absentee owner and we're looking at absentee owner, that has owned the property for 20 years. And I can go and target those people, let's say in a market like Jacksonville. Cause that was one of the markets that they had looked at and they were doing deals in. And so I thought, well, you know, the only thing is the buyers are going to get the buyers. And then I just thought, well, if the sellers are the people that own the property, the oh, this well, the buyers are the people that own the profit newest.

Cris: And back then, you know, a lot of a lot of people now have the different software programs that help people, the buyers list. But, you know, for me, I figured that out manually. You know, maybe I should have thought about the software for doing that. But I just did it manually. And back then we were sending out a postcard with a Web site and we would send it out to all the cash buyers and they would just fill out the information. You can't do that now. It doesn't work out well. Yeah, but you know, for me it was me wanting to just kind of being a little bit bored. I had gone into Internet marketing and I wanted to see if I could do that. However, though, as the market down here started to shift, then it was a blessing in disguise because all of a sudden now you know whereas a market here started to decline. And then all of a sudden now, you know, you couldn't find deals. Then I was in a position where I was doing deals in other markets. And so we focused even more. We had the bust, there were other markets throughout the country that never had the big upswing in prices. And so they never had that big drop that we did.

Joe:What were you seeing in Miami at the time? How did you know the market was changing?

Cris: Back in '06, '07, '08 I remember that it was because of a difference that the triggering point and I forgot which hurricane it was. It was during a hurricane that it happened during the summer. And we had you know, we had a hurricane that's passed through. And actually the hurricane came through here down here in South, nor that that was part of when everything just started to feel odd. And now the difference is a couple of differences, I think, for everybody. Keep in mind, between now, 2008 and now back in 2008, we had the big problem that we had is that we as investors knew there was a certain point in time that we knew that, oh, we got a problem here. However, it wasn't so apparent to the sellers. So the sellers did know that they heard there was a problem. So really from 2008, 2009, it was the most difficult time here because the sellers didn't realize that their dreams of getting a certain price were completely gone, but they were still holding on to that. And I think it was only around 2010 eleven, where all of a sudden now we had a situation where sellers knew that, OK, if I do want to sell, I have to come to the reality that there's a price here that I'm going to have to reduce.

Cris: So, you know, the difference between then and now is that, you know, sellers right now, everybody knows that we've got a problem. Now, the plus and minus of that is that unlike 2008, where it was a much more longer problem, I think that we are going to with what we have going on here, I think we are going to experience a slight dip. But it's not a situation where it's going to go on as long as 2008. But I think that the benefit that we have now dealing with the sellers now is that if somebody does raise your hands right now and says, yes, I want to sell my property, they have they know that we've got a problem. And if they reach out to you, then they're motivated because they're not going to wait on the sidelines. So I think that's what one of the key issues and the differences with two thousand eight and here is that that was a big problem because the sellers if you know that the market is decline and the seller was at $220 and now you've got to get it for 150, you know, a 140. And they're like, no, they're still hanging on to that dream. And so I think that's one of the key distinctions that take away from between now and that market.

Joe: I think is fascinating because people are worried. Just as worried back then, like, well, how am I going to do deals anymore? Like everything's falling apart. But there are always going to be an area around the country. Right. Would you say would you agree that where it's going to be easier to wholesale deals, these are always an area where I could I say it's a slight.

Cris: The answer is yes with an asterisk. And the way I look at it is, is if you look at the typical model, there's three models. I would say the first model, let's say, is local wholesaling, where you're at and you're going to do deals. Right. Then there is virtual wholesaling, which is a term that I came up with. And virtual wholesaling, you could operate in a virtual home setting way in your current market or you could decide to go to another markets. Right. But at the same time, with those two models, you are making a decision about the market. And then let's say if you're using the virtual wholesaling market, I'm going to go into Idaho. I've never been to Idaho. And I'm going to go ahead and now decide on marketing. I may. I'm going to do direct mail. I'm going to do cold calling. I'm going to do SMS. And then you're going to kind of go in a vertical fashion in order to penetrate that market. The way I look at it is kind of the new model for me is that we apply marketing that goes out to a much wider audience and we can get into the three different tiers of audiences that goes into a wider audience and the leads are going to come in. And then the markets and the specific localities where you're doing business is dictated by where the leads come from. So rather than picking one place, you're picking first the methodology which allow you to get needs to come in. And then where those needs fall in is where you're going to do deals.

Joe: Good. We'll talk about that in a minute. That's really important, especially what you're doing right now in Facebook ads. We've got a lot about a lot of people coming in and commenting. You got Marlyn from Kansas City. What's going on? Dimitri, listen to this. Did my first assignment out of Europe virtual in Florida after watching Chris on a one hour YouTube video.

Cris: Oh, wow. Very cool. Thank you, Dmitri, thank you for sharing that.

Joe: Alex Pardo. Just had him on a podcast a minute ago. He's from Miami, or as you'd say the land of milk, money and honey. That's right. Fun fact about Chico. He has over 50 black shirts. Closet. And they're all the same.

Cris: That's right. I always wear black and I never have to worry about, well, gee, I wonder what I wear in that last video. Why? Because it's always the same.

Joe: No. Mike Nelson. Yes. Right. Yeah. He's watching. What's up, Mike? How you doing?

Cris: I think Mike's doing some stuff, some cool stuff on YouTube, e-commerce and stuff.

Joe: Yeah. A very cool guy. Seth Williams, Chris Chieko is the man. A huge pioneer in the REI education space. I would say that's true. I mean, it was when you came out with that course, nobody else was really doing online virtual courses. I remember people again ridiculing that thinking why would somebody they have to have physical products, they have to have a DVD, they have to have the manuals. Nobody's gonna want just online education stuff.

Cris: Yeah. But back then, everything was. Nobody had a membership site. And so I just was too cheap and too scared that I was going to print all these books and tapes and DVD and nobody would buy it. So I was like, well, I just want to upload it to a site. And everybody I told said, that's crazy. People want books and tapes. And I'm like, they ain't getting any from me. I tell you that.

 

Joe: You know, what is the crazy thing today? What are the things that we're seeing today is that it's crazy that you didn’t know would happen? Right. Well, we're going to be talking about in ten, fifteen years, like. Wasn't that brilliant? Exactly. Exactly. Listen, Mike Nelson, you guys look like twins.

Cris: That's right. We go to that. Although I think I would have to say that Joel McCall is still clinging on to the last bit of hope. I haven't given up all hope.

Joe: As you can see, it's amazing even that I know Dimitri's here from Belgium and he's here right now. It is cold calling Europeans that own houses in Florida. It's interesting. That's interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, we got a lot of good people here commenting down below. So I think about this, too, like virtual wholesaling kind of now is just accepted. It's normal. It's in trend. Everybody's doing it. But you just brought up a really good point. It's not necessarily about picking a market, right. It's about maybe casting a wider net. Talk about what you're doing right now with your marketing and how you're getting these leads in these little small towns. And you're like getting them under contract and you're selling them. Talk about that a little bit.

Cris: Yeah. So it actually happened by you know, it's funny because it actually happened by accident, because one day what happened is that, you know, with with Facebook, you have targeting. Now, targeting is different now than it was maybe a year and a half ago. We used to be able to target by zip codes and that's how I started. But then Facebook took that away. And so now they require you to operate under a much larger area. And then what happened is just by accident, I was actually running a campaign. And then I turned on the campaign and known, behold, the leaves start to come in.

Cris: And I'm like and I'm having I'm like, oh, my God, this is amazing. And I'm looking at the lead causes a five or six dollars. And I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, this is like the honey pot. And then I realized that I forgot to put the targeting on that thing. So, I mean, it was pulling leads from everywhere. And then that's kind of what spurred the thought process, right? Oh, that's interesting. And so what will happen is that, you know, it was kind of forced upon because of Facebook. Facebook preferred a wider audience, a wider audience. And I'll illustrate this by a story that I had with one with a student is like he was in St. Lucie. He was doing deals in St. Lucie County. That's where he was doing deals and he was doing Facebook ads there. And his lead cost was OK. It was about 30 bucks a lead. If you consider that compared to PPC or some of these other, you know, these other fluff, these other ways of generating sellers, it's still a pretty good cost per lead. And so but, you know, he wanted to he was on a tight budget twice, and he combined the three counties, the three counties to go to the county north of it and the county south of it and put putting together. And he did that. And he had a little bit better results. And I said, look. And I told them to do the state. But he was really hesitating on doing it because I thought come up with how I'm going to sell it. And all these things come up and they just listen, trust me. Just run the whole state. Run the whole state. Obviously, he runs the whole state and he starts getting leads for like ten dollars a lead and really inexpensively and Florida, you know, we got like every other state. You got city concentrations and then you got these places out in the middle of nowhere that, you know, that are just, you know, just big pieces of land and a couple of houses here, there.

Cris: And he ended up now ended up doing his first deal in an area called Citrus County in Florida. And he did it with a statewide campaign. And I asked him, I said, well, have you ever been to Citrus County before? And he's like, I didn't even know that county existed until the lead come in. I got no idea until I mean, I think it's a lot easier than it sounds. OK. However, it's more of the issue of getting past the mindset of all the mental roadblocks that you were putting your mind about, like, whoa, it's so far it don't know this. I don't know that. So I think that the best of the first step is just get, you know, shifting your mindset because everything else is just an iteration of what we're already doing. And now there's more tools and everything online and it becomes much, much more easier now. So our methodology and I don't know, it's also our methodology and I don't know I have any questions about that, but I can kind of go just a brief overview kind of how we're doing it. And then, you know, I'm more than happy to answer any questions or if you see the questions that are being answered there.

Cris:So my methodology is going back to what I said. Most investors do is they're going to go in and pick a market. Right. So let's say you're going to do your local market or maybe you're to do an outside market. And then if you're going to do an outside market, you start to tend to try to do research. And none of us are researchers. And what I have found the even though the I might pull market research from here, market research from there, at the end of the day, it almost feels like at the end of the day, it's just throwing a dart because you saw that this guy on Facebook is doing deals and you're like, you know what, I'm going to try it. And so then once you pick a market, then you go vertically down to that market, you do direct mail, you cold calling, text blast, RBMs driving for dollars. So you're just focusing in on that market. And so that's the main part. The first part is just instead of doing that, you take a much wider area. And so I look at it in terms of either beginner intermediate in advance. So a beginner and a beginner, then I would ask you to select your entire state. So you're going to go ahead and select your entire state. That's a beginner. Intermediate, and I'll explain to you why those are bracketed that way. Intermediate is that you would then combine two or three states together. And advance would be that you would target the entire country.

Joe: No, hold on here. I thought you were going to go the other way around. I thought you were going to say, start with the state, then go down to the county, then go down to the city. You're saying go bigger.

Cris: Correct. You're going to go bigger. The main. So you're going to happen. Is that like, for example, the same student that I was talking about and a few. Otherwise, we got a lead from students because I'm in here in Broward County. And the same thing with me. I'll advertise in the whole state of Florida. And I'll get leads in my local county. I'll get leads in other counties as well. And so you get leads from everywhere. And so the reason I say beginner stick with one state is and I'm looking at it from the perspective of a combination of things. Number one, the ease of doing deals cost per lead as well. So if you're brand new, it's very difficult. If your cost per lead is, say, $150 dollars, man every lead is like you're taking the lead and you bring it to they're bringing it to you in a little nice soft pillow because you don't want anything to happen to it. And so there's a lot of risk involved, because if you do anything wrong, if you mess up, you don't know how to talk to sellers, then, you know, those leads are very expensive. So as a beginner, my thing is, how do you get that low cost as low as possible, but still have good quality leads? And so if you target the entire state, that's going to give you great cost per lead. So I would say an average $10 per lead. All right. So number one and number two is the reason why as a beginner, you would target just that particular state is because if you are targeting more than one state, then every state has particular nuances of doing business. Right. And so that means that then if I'm in Florida, but if I'm wanting to do deals in St. Louis, I may you know, I don't know how if I'm brand new, you've never done a deal. Now I have to contend with understanding the nuances of two states or three states that potentially and how they work at it. Are they attorney states, escrow states where the laws regarding and all that other stuff. So really, you stick to one state because now you're going to understand how the whole state works and you're going to focus on that.

Cris: Then intermediate would be that then you would group two or three states together, right? Because now you're creating a bigger footprint. It could be that two or three states, because you've done deals or know people in other states, et cetera. And then finally, you could do the entire country. But even with the entire country, if you think about it, we don't talk about just saying I'm going to do a deal as an entire United States of America. You were what you would do is you would if you look at this, the top 20 states, you know, you would go in, for example, if I was in Florida. I might say, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and do Virginia. I'm going to do Florida and I'm going to do Texas, because I know people in Texas, because I have people in Virginia, and I'm familiar with it because I've done deals before in Texas. And so for me, those might be those three markets that I can buy together. So there's some methodology. But even at a country level, you're only going to target the whole country and you might eliminate certain states. You're not going to do California, maybe because that's a tougher state. New York is an attorney state, much more difficult to work with. You know, so you're just picking out the NSAs where you know there's going to be activity. And those are the ones you're going to target. And so really the first step is kind of doing just changing your perception about what is your market and now. And I've had students that have done deals in markets that were ten thousand population size, five thousand population size.

Cris: And so then now. So now the challenge is that then how do we do that? Because let's say if you were doing cold calling, if you were doing cold calling, and I said or and I'm not. When I say these examples, I'm not saying any one of these methodologies are bad. I'm not saying cold calling is bad. I'm not saying text message is bad or any of that stuff. What I'm trying to explain is that those methodologies are not methodologies you can implement on this model, because if you're only doing cold calling and and you're going to go ahead and target the state. It's very, very difficult to do that because of the fact that the costs involved in buying data, the total number of you that the number of dollars you have to make, it's really that possible.

Cris:So what happens is just that this particular strategy lends itself well to online advertising, because when you do an online advertising, I can target the entire state. And then again, those leads will come in without having to put up a lot of money, because even if you're doing direct mail, even if you're doing direct mail in your own area. You have to send out a thousand or two thousand postcards to get some relevant data. Whereas with this, you know, if I want to start running ads in Dallas, Texas, I could put together a campaign for twenty or thirty dollars a day and start getting leads and start making adjustments right there on the fly. But you know, the strategy here, the only way really that you can implement this strategy is by doing some sort of online marketing, online advertising, because if you're going to do it with conventional methods, it's just really not…. Once you let's say that I'm in Florida and I find that, you know what, I'm getting good deals.

Cris: I've just sold a deal in Melbourne, that looks like a good area. I drummed up a few buyers. Now, at that point, you might be you might consider let me inject maybe one of the other marketing channels that I'm used to. Maybe. Let me get a tax delinquent list and let me text message them, because now I see that this is that a small pot of opportunity for me and I gonna take advantage of that. But you allow the marketing and you allow the initial success of that marketing to kind of dictate where potentially you might dig, versus making that decision initially upfront. Does that make sense?

Joe: Yeah. You can also even start doing direct mail. Yeah. You see, we're starting to see two to 4 percent response rates on our postcards again. Sean Terry saying the same thing the other day. Can you talk a little bit about Facebook ads compared to Google PPC?

Cris: Well, you know, and actually we're just in the process of I know, I know PPC, but I didn't implement PPC initially because of the fact that it was I'll give some differences. I think PPC works also within this model. OK. We're just rolling out some campaigns now that we're gonna be rolling into our materials that we're getting great, that we're getting great success with. And the PPC also is a great way to implement this because PPC, the reason I don't get it to PPC when I first started and I decided with Facebook is because if you look at PPC and you're looking at going ahead and implementing it on a very hyper-local method meeting, you're targeting the county or targeting group zip codes that your cost per lead is very high. It's $150 per lead. Whereas with when you start targeting it in a wide audience, then what you're doing is I was having a conversation with Youngblood the other day. And what you're tapping into is you’re tapping into excess inventory. You know, if you think about it, all these platforms are an auction.

Cris:So if I say I want leads only in Broward County, then I'm going to have to up my price and pay as much as I can. But I'm doing statewide and I'm just telling Google, hey, whenever you have someone that is a prospect that's searching Sell my house fast, and nobody else wants that person because they haven't bid on it or whatever, I'll take it. Send it to me. So it's almost like you're getting all this with the analogy I had. It's like shopping at Marshalls. That's the analogy that I would think it's this way. If you go to Marshalls it. I know that a gentleman such as yourself who is always high into fashion, you might go to Marshalls and see yourself a Hugo Boss shirt. Right. But tomorrow, the next week, you might go and you might find an Armani shirt.

Cris: And it really you know, you like them both ways. But it doesn't matter to you. This week, you buy Hugo Boss shirt. Next week you buy an Armani shirt. But you'll take them because they're good shirts. Right. But if you said to me, Chico, I want to buy a Hugo Boss shirt today. Today, I don't care. I want it today because I'm going to a special event. I'm going to have dinner with my friend Chris Chico. And I always want to look my best because he always looks his best. Then what are you going to do? You're going to go to Nordstrom and you're going to buy the Hugo Boss shirt. But what are you going to do when you buy the Hugo Boss shirt? You're going to pay money or you to pay full retail value for that shirt. That's what I'm trying to say here, that you're going to Marshalls when you do state wide, when you do a national campaign to the wide audience. You want local you're going to go to Nordstrom and you gonna pay the price for it. How was that for you? I think that's a good analogy.

Joe: That's a great analogy. Good for you. Yeah. All right. Can you can you hear it's a crash course on Facebook ads in five seconds and the argument.

Cris: OK. So Facebook ads. So let's say that and again just thinking off the top of my head. Number one is I recommend and this is my advice. I'm going to start off. I'm going to get to that. But I'll say one thing. I'm a firm believer that everyone here should learn three things to be able to thrive in this economy. Put yourself in the position to be able to do well, even not during these times. One of them you are already doing. And that is that I firmly believe that everyone should learn how to buy and sell a property that is not their own principal residence. Now, some of you are here doing it as a business. You're doing multiple deals per month. Some of you may doing here because you have a job. But if you do two or three deals a year, you're golden, you love it. But everybody should learn how to do that because the art and the science of finding a property that is below market is a skill that will serve you for the rest of your life. Number two, everybody should learn how to be a great communicator, how to sell. You know how I learned how to, I think I'm an okay salesperson. I'm better at selling, you know, by writing stuff. And that's how you know, by doing stuff on the Web. Whatever the modality is that you that you choose. But you learn how, you have to. Selling is how to communicate your point across to someone so that then now they see your point of view. OK. That's really what selling is. And you have to get good at that. And the last thing is that everyone, I believe, should learn how to do online marketing and online advertising. Now, the best, you know, keep in mind. I think the easiest platform to learn is Facebook. Once you learn one platform, they all copy each other. So every other platform, now you learn the language. It's as if like if you, there's a great example with what you're doing. If you understand what a real estate contract is, how it works and the mechanics and the structure of that contract, and if I teach you wholesaling. But now you're going to go implement Joe McCall's materials that even though his strategy is different now you understand the language to be able to then execute on that strategy effectively. So learning how to do online advertising is learning the language of advertising. And doing stuff online. And regardless if maybe at a future you get somebody else to do it, then that's better. Because now if somebody is giving you a bunch of B.S. and you're like, look, I know what's going on. And you ain't cutting the mustard? So you're out of here, buddy, because I've got to find somebody who knows what they're doing. You know, it's not going to help you.

Cris:So I say all those things because those are the three things that I believe in. And I believe that Facebook is the easiest platform to learn with. But so what I recommend the easiest way to do it. I'm going to give you guys here on this podcast a strategy that you could potentially implement. And you don't even need to buy anything from me. OK, so here's the deal. Well, you're going to do and you guys can have a YouTube channel, the video series just on Facebook ads. But you can look at those. First step is you're going to go ahead and create a business page. A business page is like a Web site on Facebook property. And you're going to call it. You're gonna make that page personal. It's going to be Chris Buys Houses. It's going to have my picture on it. It's going to come across personal in nature. Don't do like X, Y, Z properties and put a little picture of a house avatar. And it's very light. Then it looks like a machine. Like a robot. You want to be a human being. That's number one. Number two. And you can watch some of our videos and you can actually grab one of my one of my ads because I think I show it on one of my videos. Now, then, what you're going to do is all you're gonna do is simply create a campaign inside of Facebook. So people get stuck on the targeting like, oh, what kind of targeting am I going to have and everything else. Just don't even put any targeting on. You know, obviously it works better if you if there's three different strategies are on targeting.

Cris: But at the base level, I would say that it's all you need to think of it this way to decrease the barrier to entry for yourself. Don't think of it as, oh, man, I've got to put an ad campaign in place and I'm going to spend a thousand dollars and then maybe I'm going to find a deal. Don't worry about all that stuff. If all you did was focus on creating your business page and putting an ad campaign up on Facebook and spending $20, that's it. That's all. Because, you know, you're through the process of putting that together. Then you're gonna get at least in the stadium, you can't win the game if you're not in the stadium, OK? And that's the first thing. So number one is I recommend a business page that is personal in nature. Number two, the easiest way to get started is using lead forms. Some guys out there pooh-pooh the lead forms like all, they're not the best in this and that blah, blah, blah. You got to get the train station out of the gate. And using a lead form is the easiest way to do that. For somebody who doesn't know any form is rather than when you click on an ad. And I'm sure you guys have had this experience is basically saying Joe McCall's ads. You click on the link and then it takes you to a place outside of Facebook. Sometimes there are dark alleys, sometimes there wonderful places like Joe's stuff. Right. But regardless, you don't jump off of Facebook. Facebook doesn't like that. So they created these forums that you can create inside of Facebook requires no technical skill. And what you do is basically you click on, they click on the button to your ad and the form pops up right there on Facebook. They fill out their information. Click this image button and then they go back to Facebook scrolling their cat videos and all that other stuff they like to do.

Cris: Facebook is happy because it kept them on the platform. They can show them more of Joe McCall's ads. And most importantly, though, you've got to lead, but you've got to leave without having to deal with all the technical issues of getting a Web site or putting a landing page together and all that other stuff. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't have a Web site. And I'll give you guys a tip. You should have a Web site and whatever the Web vendor, do you have a link that you recommend for people to go to for a Web site.

Joe: Joe likes carrots. Yeah.

Cris: Joe like carrots or with a plural over it without a plural.

Joe: Joelikescarrots.com. OK.

Cris: You should register. Joelikescarrots.com Yeah. So I like I'm the man of covering all bases. So what you do is go to Joe likes carrots, dot com. Get yourself a Web site. Get yourself a seller of Web site. That's 50 bucks. And then select a domain that makes sense to a human being. I see a lot of times the investors, you get a domain that says Cancesfour houses, houses by four houses that you know. And like you talk to the seller and they're like, what? What is that? What is that? You don't want that. You want a site. This is an old domain that I used to have was Sell Your Florida home today dot com. So if you call a seller and I say, Hey, Joe, this is Chris from a Sell your Florida home today dot com, and you just pause and then their mind, they're like, yes, I understand. Like in one sentence, what you've done is you've told them, I have a Web site, I'm legitimate. And I like to buy houses. Right. Streamlines the whole thing. So get yourself a domain that an actual human being can understand. Don't use numbers, don't use all kinds of weird characters. But you need it. You need that Web site, because whenever you get a Web site from Carrot. It's from Joe likes carrots. I feel like I'm your sponsor now. All right. So where you go, you're going to need the privacy policy page as a link and then you just grab it from your Web site and do it there. And then here's another tip I'm going to give you guys. Here's another tip. The mode of communication is different. OK. Joe and I, we talk all the time because we like each other. You know, every so often. Right. But if you think about even though him and I communicate, the majority of the conversation is always by text message. OK. The majority of the people that you're communicating with is right now by text messaging. If you look at all your friends. How many people you're calling? If I call my wife, she says, what's wrong? Why you call me? Why didn't you text me? Right. And she's married to me. Right. But the reason I say that is about her.

Joe: What I text you even when you're in the house. On the other side.

Cris: Yes. Yes. She'll text you. Yes. Yes. Thanks. Me? Actually, my wife gets annoyed because then she asked me for something. She's I can't remember to do this. And I say, could you send me an email about that? You don't do that. Yeah, I think that is the truth. She gets very annoyed, but she's used to it because if it's not intimate, if you don't send me an e-mail, you can't expect me to remember. Like if you tell me something? And, you know, send me an email. It's like I'm just holding it for like a split second in my random access memory and then I'm throwing it away. OK. That's great. Great advice. But the thing is, is this. I've had so many students that have told me that the initial conversation with a seller has started by text. They going back and forth, gathered some initial information. Finally, when it came down to the hard negotiation meeting that they might ask the seller, hey, what were you thinking of asking? The seller would tell them a price. But when they got to that core negotiation. Now they get on the phone with him and they say, hey, do you mind if I give you a call just so that way I can we can discuss it might be easier over the phone. But guess what? They've been going back and forth on their phone. You're like in there with their friends. You're not a you know, not yet. If you think about it, how many calls do I get a day that now AT&T says families, the default, the default for me, when I get a call that I don't know who it is, is to put it because it's either a guy from Pakistan or India telling me that the IRS is going to arrest me any moment now and I need to pay them some money. So.

Cris: So if you think about it that way, then and then going back to the example of my students, they've done a deal where the only the majority of the conversation with a seller on the phone has only been through a very small window where they negotiated the price and everything before and everything after was then done. OK. Or doing it by text. And I say that by the fact that you have to understand that, you know, like if somebody is calling you direct mail and they call you and leave you a voice message, then granted either there might be one to call them. Right. But if somebody is submitting it for decrease the resistance by text messaging them and then and then having a conversation. Not having a conversation like, oh, this is Chris from Chris buys houses and with properties with cash, blah, blah, blah. Love to chat with you about your property. Now you sound like, you know, like a buffoon. Right. So you don't want to do that. You just want to you want to come across as if you're talking to another friend of yours. You might have mistakes intentionally with your capitalization and you miss a date or whatever. Doesn't matter. You want to get the conversation going until what the biggest mistake I find is people like you, a Texas seller, and the seller responds back. And what do you do? You call them right away. It's like they didn't invite you to call them yet. Like you're like, you know. You know, it's like it's like going out on a date and then like you like, I want to see your mom. I want to know, like, could we go to your house and then can I see your underwear drawer because I want to know if you could clean underwear. Like what, listen. We just having a cup of coffee right now.

Cris: So that's what I'm saying, is that I understand that that centers are communicating with you differently and be flexible with that. You know, many times when the call went out, when a you know what message or text message most of them respond by text message. Some of them do not respond by text message. Some of them will have a back and forth with us by email. So if you think about it, if you're going into the online world, then you have to start maybe shifting your approach with sellers to be able to communicate in a way that they want to communicate. And this story I'll leave you with this. A story I always tell is this. This was about a year ago. My wife was looking to get our health insurance and she went on the Web site. She input her information, the minute she did that, her phone blew up. Everybody's calling. Everybody's calling because they want to talk to her because I want to sell our health insurance. One person, one guy, messaged her and says, hey, look, I know you're getting a lot of calls and everything about this. And I just want to say I'm here if you're interested. You can give me some information right here by text and I can do some research, et cetera. And what do you do? He did exactly what I'm telling you guys to do. The entire stream of conversation for a week was back and forth by text. Eventually he said, hey, it be great if we got on the phone. And guess what? He was the one that got the policy because everybody else is calling and he was the only one that texted. So that's a thing also that I want to say that I want to make sure everybody understands.

Joe: Do you ever do Facebook Messenger with them?

Cris: Well, if they if they communicate on the page, if they like, when you're running ads, people will leave messages on the page. And so you communicate them with text, with Facebook Messenger. And if that's the mode that they want to go on, then you just keep it going that way. You know, that's the thing that I think investors struggle with. Like, if you're used to getting direct mail and your leads are going through the phone, going through the funnel and then getting into your CRM, and then now you're used to operating that way, like, you know, you're going to call other people, your CRM, you pick up the phone. And so what happens is a lot of times people miss opportunities because nowadays they're everywhere. The prospects are texting you. They're calling you. They're sending you emails. Maybe they're on messenger and you got to be flexible and adapt to where you're at, where they feel most comfortable interacting with you and go with that. Because at the end, it's going to help you.

Joe: Yeah. All right. So what are your ads say? What kind of image do you use? What is a main text of your message?

Cris: Well, the ads I'll see. Maybe I can put an ad here while I'm here with you. OK. So in terms of the images we used to use, you know, when I first started, I was a pioneer in the digital bandit sign where it's a little sign and it had the zip code and then when the zip codes went away. I just put it said we buy houses with a really yellow, obnoxious sign and some people still use that. However, Facebook does frown upon that now because they see that as being disruptive in their platform. And so what I would do when what we do is use houses that represent the type of house you're looking for. Like, for example. So a good image, an example of an image is if you go on Google and I'm telling you what, I do not what I do, because, you know, when you go on Google, you type the images. You know, those images may or may not be copyrighted. So the attorney in Chico has to tell you that. I want to know what kind of images search. If you if you type in an image like, say, ugly house or code violation house or type in dirty house and you get a picture of a real dirty house, use images like that where. Number one. Number two, put some pop into the image. And by that, I mean that you can Google this or go on YouTube University, increase the saturation and increase the contrast of the image so that it pops. Sometimes if you go to Google Street View, sometimes you see an image and you see that the sky was was not as blue and everything looks dull. But if you put in a picture like that, it's just not going to pop. And so what we do with all of our images, we increase the saturation, increase the contrast. It makes the images more vibrant. And it catches the attention, because what you're doing is you're looking to catch the attention.

Joe: Does Facebook allow you to put big red borders on your images anymore?

Cris: Yeah, that's really I haven't heard that before. I mean, they used to. People used to do that a long time ago. But that's really old Joe. I mean, I mean. That's right. That's many years ago. It worked.

Joe: It worked really well. But I think Facebook said no more. You can't do that.

Cris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anything that's in your tool, in your face, you've got to keep that in mind. Anything to in your face because you were Facebook doesn't want Facebook wants people to feel good when they're on their platform. Facebook doesn't want somebody be like, oh, man. There goes that yellow, you know, the house with that obnoxious yellow sign. I hate these things. And they click on the little button that says report, report, report, next thing you know, you've got a problem. So, you know, you have to gauge it. So I right now don't recommend using that. The bandit signs. But again, so people are using it. If you use if you see something, somebody's using something on Facebook, it means that, you know, there's so many millions of accounts. It means that maybe nobody has gotten around and nobody has complained. So, you know, Facebook is all about testing. The other thing when it comes to ad copy, what I found is one of the things that I always had success with postcards and the reason why I had why I was able to break out of the mold and have really great success because…. I bought a bunch of courses before I started to do my own postcards, but a bunch of courses, I implemented them and I wasn't getting anywhere.

Cris: And the courses had the typical we buy houses, you know, big that's the big bold promise. And then what I ended up doing with my postcards is I ended up taking those postcards and using that type of copy. When I when I got into postcards, I use more personalized copy. I use more story-based copy. And so then, for example, you could say instead of saying instead of buying an ad right now that says we buy houses, cash, blah, blah, blah. You can say, hey, my name is Chris. And despite everything going on right now, I still need a few houses to buy this month because, you know, I've got my lenders still gave me the money. And he says, go spend it. And I'm looking for houses that need work and a little fixing up. So what am I doing? I'm telling them a story because at the end of the day, what you want them to do is you want them to. If somebody is going through Facebook, nobody's going on Facebook to look for an advertisement. You know, the minute they smell something that that is like a Blaine advertising or the other or they're going to do is scroll. Your objective is to engage them and at least stop the scroll. So if you come across in a personal way, you have a good image. And the ad, it comes across in a very conversational way and that begins to grease the wheels for them. If that's a good prospect that they might say, you know what? Maybe I might. So let me go ahead and submit my information. Let me see what this guy has to offer.

Joe:So you keep it real, personal.

Cris: Keep it real. Not professional, right? Well, I will say keep it. Keep it real. Keep it professional, but don't yell through a megaphone. That's the best way I can describe it. Most of these guys are yelling through a megaphone. You know that the prospects are walking around with their ears, I guess, because everybody else is yelling with a megaphone.

Joe: Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Talk a little bit. I know you mentioned it briefly, but the audiences like targeting. What kind of basic targeting? You do that?

Cris: One targeting is one targeting is no targeting at all. OK. Because if you think about it, Facebook will crawl your ad if you are talking about real estate, which, by the way, just to make sure when you're advertising in real estate, you have to select the housing category. You can't get away from that. People say that, you know, hey, maybe you can do though, if you don't say like that, you can have your account at risk. Also, number two is don't run ads from your personal ad account. Make sure you create a business manager. You go to business.Facebook.com, create a business manager and run your ads from there. I wanted to mention that. Now, what was he? What was the question you asked me? You're targeting one target. Targeting is no targeting. No, no targeting at all because of the fact that Facebook can crawl your, they'll crawl. They know that the picture is a picture of a house. They know that. They can read your copy. They will crawl your privacy policy all the way through your Web site and they will know what your Web site is about. So even before you launch your campaign, Facebook has an idea of who your prospects are.

Cris: The other type of targeting is like, for example, and you could do this if you go into targeting, like, for example, another targeting group is you or you can sell like Zillow Homes, dot com and Trulia. Those are three different targets. So you could, you'll put those in a different ad set. So the way the campaign structure works is you have one main campaign and underneath there you have the ad set, which is like this sub of the campaigns. And each ad set is where the targeting happens. So you might have an ad set with no targeting. You have an ad set with like homes, homes dot com. Trulia. Zillow. Then you have another ad set with maybe you look for interest that are loan related, refinance, home loan, home modification and then you group those together and then you do another one where you take all of the interest that you gathered and then you just dump them all in there. And then what you're doing is you're giving Facebook different looks in order to try to find the right audience for you. And that's how we either with the all we structure campaigns in that particular way. But big picture is that you don't let that targeting, you know, hang you up. You're giving Facebook enough to get it going and Facebook will find the right prospect for you.

Joe: Really good. All right. I know we're come up to an hour here. And I want to make sure we're valuing your time. You do these deals virtually in other markets start. Are you worried about finding buyers? Are you worried about selling them?

Cris: No, we're not. We're not. I mean, the best when it comes to when it comes to buyers, number one, is when you're looking at a deal. Let's say number one is making sure that a deal is at least has legs. So, for example, most recently that I had just look, that was it was one in and Melbourne where that particular property. I've never been to Melbourne. I look at it in Florida. You know, everybody likes concrete block houses because we have hurricanes and frame houses are not that really great. And so then I look at this house on a Google Street view. It's a block house. I look around the neighborhood. I'm like, this is the type of neighborhood that we would normally buy, even though I don't know that town. I know that's the type of neighborhood. However, I might get a lead of a property that is a little house. There is nothing else around it. There's like I go out and the map I go on Zillow and I look to see what active properties there are. And I'm like, well, there's hardly anything active. I don't think there's anything going on there. So from a perspective, I'm going to go after the one on Melbourne and not go after that one, because that's going to be just a scratch lead. You know, now on those leads, you could if you're starting up a new call them have a conversation with them. Use them as practice, you know. But to a certain extent, you're number one is making sure that you have the right targets because you are going to be you have to be okay with the fact that some leads are going to come in. And they're not going to be great. Then the second thing to do, and I think I heard you talk about this with Pardo is agents.

Cris: Look, right now there's a couple of things I think. I personally believe that it will make your life easier if you find a good set of agents to work with. Number one. Number one, big picture, big picture. Everybody here in the real estate industry should be focused on continuing to generate revenue and continuing to push, help push revenue toward everybody else in their industry. If you get a real estate agent involved, then guess what? They're going to make money. How do companies that make money. So you keep the flow going? So one of things those are the mention is I think right now there's a couple of things I want to talk about spreads. I want to go back to spreads. But I want to touch on spreads for a second. But the easiest way for you to have for you to be able to get these deals done is through agents because of the fact that, you know, if you think about it, if you want 100 buyers, you have to go out and find 100 buyers, but you can find 10 agents that have each of them, 10 buyers. Now you got your hundred buyers. You also have a boots on the ground. You also have somebody who's not going to try to go around your back. That's the biggest concern that people have. The biggest concern that people have is somebody is going to go round my back and take the deal away from me, you have an agent. Knows what the doing that knows that, hey, I want to continue doing business with you. They're going to be your asset. Now, you could argue that I'm going to give up money. But you know what? It's OK. It's an insurance policy. So to me, I prefer to go in agents like, for example, we had a deal where we went and we saw like, for example, here's a quick example. Let's say I have a property in that in Melbourne. And so I'm going to go look at all the active property. They say the property is worth 130, so I'm going to do a Zillow search for anything in that higher bracket of price. Point one twenty-five, one 30, 40, 50. When you're looking at those Zillow listings, you're going to find houses that, you know, clearly evident that they're rehabbed.

Cris: They're like completely done. What do you do? The agent who's there, they have access to that person investor who just bought that house and rehab the whole thing. So just call them up and work out a deal with them. You could do percentage, you know, depending on the size of the deal, you could do three to four to five percent. Offer them a little bit more than the typical 3 percent. If it's a low-end deal, offer them a flat fee so they at least are making money off of the deal. And if they understand your business, then they're going to be great and they're gonna be able to help you and make sure that that deal doesn't fall apart. So I think that agents, honestly are the best people to work with initially. And you don't have to worry about the loosey goosey buyers and people going around you and all the flakiness. And also the agents sometimes could be the glue that holds the deal together. Because now if your buyer's flakey, the agent could come in there and be the one that is holding that whole deal transaction because they want to get paid. Another thing I want to mention about spreads and this is a side comment, is that when you're going out there right now especially and you're putting in you're looking for sellers, motivated sellers, you've got to give a discount off of the ARV whatever you see ARV out there, it buyers that are out there right now that are buying properties, they're going to want to discount. They're not going to be like, oh yes, I'm still buying and I'll buy ar full retail value in the West three weeks ago that those are dumb buyers, OK? They're going to be like, I'll buy, but I want a good discount. So that means we are going negotiate with sellers right now. You got to get a great discount on that property, 10 to 20 percent off, whatever the market value is.

Joe: That's where you start from, not the ARV. You're starting at 90 percent of the ARV, is that what you're saying?

Cris: Yeah. Like if I look at the property and then let's say last month, I can show that that property is worth two K. I’m thinking it ain't worth two hundred K today it's worth 180. Okay. And that's what we're starting from. Yeah. You got to offer a much better deal to the buyer to get them off of the block and then say you know what? I'll come out. I'll take my money because this is a good deal. Number one. Number two is. I know. And listen, I've had some amazingly huge assignment fees. An old friend of mine always told me, you know, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And so we have to be mindful of that right now. Whatever you did before has changed. Now, obviously, you want to be as aggressive as you can because you always want to make as much money as possible.

Cris:But I would say that would be OK, be OK. This is more of a public service announcement. Be OK with transacting, even though it may not be your target wholesale fee. Because all your number one is listen, at the end of the day, if I had 10 deals pending to close, I'd rather have 10 be deals pending to close half of them fall apart and I get five versus one or two deals that are big assignments. That one goes through the crap and then now I've lost the second part of the income. And I think everybody right now should be building up their pipeline with that in mind that you're going to put deals together that may not sell, that may not come through. So you need to put enough of them together. But, you know, at the end of the day, if you're doing transaction, let's say that you're doing a deal and you're only gonna make 3k. And 3K is not a whole lot of money for some of you. It might be a lot of money. I'm just saying in a relative. Right. Joe, I think I'm going to get a Lamborghini or something. Right. Just kidding. He's not going to get it. I got one already in the parking lot. Yeah. But, you know, keep in mind, is this. If you do a transaction for three thousand dollars and let's say you have an agent involved as an example, you make three, they make two of the day. You're helping all of us out because you're putting money in the pockets of agents. You're putting money in the pockets of the title company and everybody else in the whole stream. Because at the end of the day, you know, my public service announcement is that that you we all have to contribute to keeping the wheels of real estate moving forward and to keep transactions happening. My Cambrai posted a post on his investor field that I belong to and where he like, last week there were X number of transactions, X number pending X number of deals happening. So there's deals happening right now. You just gotta put yourself in there. So that's my comment about the spread.

Joe: That's really good. I think working with realtors also helps with the whole licensing and brokering, wholesaling without a license thing. Yeah, exactly. Now you're working with realtors and that they're going to do a lot of work, that it's going to be too hard for you to do if the deals are virtual. I use lease options a lot for lease options as well. Chris, man, I appreciate your time. I know you're super busy and you've been with us already over an hour. How can people get a hold of you? How can they, what's your YouTube channel? And what's really the place to go find your course? You have a very comprehensive course, the Facebook ads is just one component of that. Yeah, but it's one of the best courses on the market today for wholesaling and online marketing, things like that.

Cris: Yeah, I'll tell you that. And we're just updating it because one of the commitments that I have for the student is always the materials is updated. We're just moving. I don't I told you about I'm moving over to kajabi. Moving over the entire membership platform just like today, as soon as we're done on recording more videos, because my commitment is to keep everything as fresh. I'm like the public's produce department. Everything has to be fresh. But a few things that you could Google my name Chris Chico. Without an H is a fancy Chris. So though H on an end. You can Google me and you can find my website and also you can also check out my YouTube channel if you want more information about my training. You can go to virtual wholesaling dot com. Go there and then you'll be able to go from there and find every everywhere else that I may exist. You know, I would say that when I first started this business. Right, I had to. And I still do. I registered a domain with Cris Chico with with H. So when people typed that in right, then they would be like, oh, I'm sorry, you spell my name with an H, but it's OK. We could still be friends, but go here instead. And so then now I know that I have arrived. When then people start again typing in Chris Chico, with an H. And Google said, Oh, did you meet Cris Chico? Now I knew that I was somebody.

Joe: I was gonna say a stupid joke about what I search for and then what? Where you show up, I show up.

Cris: Depends. Are you searching in the dark? Are you searching? Are you still searching in the dark web? A call.

Joe: All right. Virtual wholesaling dot com. I like that domain, man. Yes, I love that concept. And this has been really, really good. Informative podcast. Cris has a really good YouTube channel, guys. I recommend you go search for Cris Chico, his YouTube channel. He's constantly coming out with good information. Make sure you subscribe and subscribe to YouTube. Yeah, it's really, really good. Virtual wholesaling dot com. Let me just say again about his YouTube video. It's it's one of the best YouTube videos on real estate right now. I really believe that. And he's got a lot of really good tutorials on there on doing the Facebook ads that we talked about. Talking about provocative comments on topics. And it's I recommend you check it out. Joe Patterson here's says thanks to both of you. A lot of info. Very good. Chris Bruce, you know Chris.

Cris: Hey, Chris. Long time no speak. I've been there. Funny you've been on my mind. We should connect soon.

Joe: Somebody posted here, Nick. Now we are all hidden now. Look at that. Rodney is. What is this? This is Nick. He says, thank you to Cris for his short term memory issue. He mentioned a bit ago Ronnie White has a black belt memory course for free during this pandemic. That's only 200 usually, anyhow. I thought I'd mentioned because I know it helps that lot of that. A lot of that. Jim Quick, also, just. All right. Sorry.

Cris: Oh, interesting. Yeah, I know. Jim Quick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had my two choices. Caffeine. Mike Hambright. He is a nerd that Mike Hambright. A podcast called flipping nerd. Nerd. That guy is. It's an inside joke. We've got a podcast called Flip Nerd. That's right. That's right. That's where I do podcasts. He was pumping out podcasts like a machine gunner. That's at one point. Like, he was just like, I could just kid.

Joe: I'm giving him. I'm like, what are you talking about? Yes, I do. Yes. Hahaha. Yeah, that's right. Flip nerd. All right. Appreciate it, Cris.

Cris:Thanks. Thank you. And figured you will. Thank everybody. And I appreciate the time here together and luck to help you guys. Check out my channel, go to virtualwholesaling dot com. And again, my quest for being the most the most frequent guest on Joe's podcast still continues.

Joe: Let's do it. Well, we'll have you on again, I'm sure. Thanks, Chris. All right. Bye bye, everybody.