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  • (Audio) 775 » What is driving for dollars all about anyway? Part 1

Welcome to the podcast. Before we start, I have a special request. I am one review short of 500 on iTunes. So you know what to do. Search iTunes for real estate investing, find me and leave a review.

And please, leave only good reviews. We thrive on them.

I’m bringing on our guest, David Lecko. The Driving For Dollars theme will extend over 2 episodes. Today I’ll try to catch up on what he’s doing now. You’ll quickly see David’s connection to Driving For Dollars.

David is the person who developed Deal Machine software, a great tool for generating leads. The idea for Deal Machine came to him when he was looking for his very first rental house.

He’d photographed a few run-down homes/addresses. He went home and researched owner data online, wrote, printed and mailed postcards. Then he realized he’d have to do it again in a few weeks.

That hassle made him realize that Driving For Dollars needed an automated sidekick. Oh… we forgot to mention that David is a software developer and, at the time, had a full-time job as one.

He built the 1st iteration of Deal Machine for himself over a weekend. It was basic and he used it about 6 months. With that program, it took a day to get an address from a VA. Now it’s instant.

The driver or investor pins an address on Deal Machine. The app pulls up the owner’s name and can send a postcard to that owner. It can also be set to send a follow-up card in a time frame the investor chooses.

Or you can have the drivers simply add the properties they find to your account. Then someone gives the info a quick look and decides whether or not to pursue a purchase.

The driver or investor can take a picture of the property, too. David’s found that he gets a better response to mailings that use a picture. The owner can tell you’ve matched him to the right property.

David doesn’t only market to vacant properties he markets to any distressed property, and has even found some deals on houses that are owner-occupied.

Deal Machine lets you track hired drivers so you know what they’re doing for you. David and I talk about how to compensate drivers… an hourly wage, pay per lead or pay a commission when the deal closes.

Do you pay a postman the same rate you’d pay a college student home for the summer? If you use commission pay, it really needs to be to a friend or family member you know will stick around.

 

Listen and Learn:

What’s inside:

  • Deal Machine takes a close-up pic of a house, finds the owner and provides contact info.
  • If you hire drivers, Deal Machine can track their route; it can track you too, so you don’t repeat routes. 
  • You can add leads from Zillow, Redfin, etc. to your Deal Machine account. 
  • You can export info from Deal Machine any time you want.

Mentioned in this episode:

Transcription:

Download episode transcript in PDF format here…

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

Joe: What is up, everybody? How you doing, guys? Joe McCall here from the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast. Got a special show for you today, but I got a few announcements first before we bring on our guest. His name is David and you've heard of him before and you've heard of his software/app before and you're going to love this and we're going to break this podcast up into two parts. The first part, I'm just going to interview him, talk about his business, see what's going on, what he's doing, how he came up with this crazy, awesome idea, why it's working so well. I have students that are using this that are crushing it. But first a couple things, guys. I am one review shy of 500.I you go to iTunes, go search for real estate investing and you'll find mine right there. I have 499 reviews.

Joe: I, please, I want to ask you guys to leave a review if you like this podcast, even if you don't, leave me a review, I've got 457 five-star reviews. I do have 11 one-star reviews, but leave me a review. I'd really appreciate it. Like Mikael here left me a review. “Hey Joe, I've been following your podcast for a very long time and I remember I even remember Alex, I wish I would've just followed your advice a long time ago. I'd be far ahead by now, but I guess the second-best time to plant a tree is now.” Blackjack21, five Stars. “Thanks for fixing the podcasts. Keep the content coming.” I was having some problems a few weeks ago with that. Superstar: “I'm impressed with all the great info I get from your podcast. Thanks Joe.” “Joe, I love the (inaudible) from Sunday, guy. I love the new episodes and the real coaching students. I'd love to see some follow up episodes with them after some time has passed, kind of before and after, maybe.”

At Blackjack21 “The episodes look and sound really good on my end.” Really? One Star. Okay. So, Blackjack was the guy who left us one-star review. We were having some serious technical problems. Blackjack let us know. But like our true fan, uh, appreciate BlackJack coming back and revising and updating his podcast reviews.

So, listen, I got 499 so I just want to ask you guys a huge favor. If you like this podcast at all, go to iTunes right now. Subscribe and leave a review. I would really, really appreciate it. And uh, yeah, leave a review and I'll remind you again before this podcast is over to leave a review because you guys are so awesome. Awesome. And I really appreciate you guys, okay?

So I'm going to bring on my friend and guest. His name is David—David Lecko. How you doing, David?

David: Good. I just left you a review… while I was away,

Joe: Oh, you did. I got five hundred. That is so awesome. Appreciate it guys. This is David. How do you pronounce your last name? Is it Lecko?

David: Lecko.

Joe: Nice. Yep. Got It right.

David: Just like Gecko but with an L.

Joe: Nice. Okay, cool. David is the guy behind Deal Machine and Deal Machine is this software that over the last couple of years has kind of taken the industry by storm and a lot of people are using it. A lot of people are having a lot of success with it and I wanted to get David on the podcast to talk about it and if you guys are all interested before we go any further I just want to tell you guys you can get a 14 day trial at DealMachineJoe.com DealMachineJoe.com.

That is an affiliate link. I do get some commissions but I would be recommending this anyway. I asked him to be on my show before I even had uh, any kind of affiliate agreement with him. So DealMachineJoe.com and get a 14-day trial. And the cool thing about what this is is it's a lead generating machine and I'm going to ask David about it. On this part one episode I'm going to be interviewing David and part two, in a couple of days from now, we're going to be recording a new episode where he's actually going to be demonstrating how to use it. Um, so thanks for being here, David. How are you man?

David: I'm doing really well. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Joe: Glad you're here. So tell us a little bit about your story, your history real quick.

David: Sure. So Deal Machine was an idea that I had for myself originally and it wasn't really intended to be a business. And in 2016 I was reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and I was actually playing the cashflow game that goes along with those books. And the whole point is to use your income from your day job and then save as much as you can to reinvest it. And then eventually the cashflow coming off of your investment rental properties would exceed what you need to live off of. So you gain financial freedom and then you can choose to keep working or you can choose to go do something else. And so that was my goal is to kind of get to that point. So I went looking for my first rental property. Okay. And uh, the next thing I did was I realize all these properties that were listed that I could tell, it was like the price was too high, it wasn't going to cash flow.

And so I went looking for some more answers. I went into a real estate investment meetup and I heard about driving for dollars. So, so then I went driving for dollars and probably three weeks in a row I would spend a couple of nights after work taking photos of houses that looked rundown and then writing down their address. And then on that third week I actually noticed that one of my houses that I knew I had driven by was being renovated. So I looked it up and sure enough somebody bought that house and was renovating it. Meanwhile, I still have a piece of paper on my passenger seat of a bunch of addresses that I haven't looked up yet, so I wasn't following through. And so that was like a big moment for me. I went home, I stopped driving and I started looking up all of those owners and there was probably about 40 or 50 on my list and I had uh, watched Friends while I was looking at the owners and it took about three episodes of Friends.

So for those of you who don't know, that's about an hour and a half to look up like 40, 50 properties. And then I had to figure out how to send mail. So I looked online, all these real estate, you know, mail providers, they require like a minimum of 200 properties and I only had 40 or 50. So I got my computer out, I set it up to like print on these invitation style envelopes. And then I was also trying to put that picture of the property I took on the postcard. So you know, I was spending all that work so I wanted to make sure that it was going to have the best possible chance of getting a response. And so I did all that and then I realized I'm going to have to do this again in like three or four weeks because everyone keeps talking about how important follow-up is, you know, and I was new at the time, but like that's what they were talking about at the real estate investment meeting.

David: So I was like, Oh man, like there has to be a better way. And then that's when I had the Aha moment of actually creating an app for myself. So, I'm a software developer. I took off that whole next weekend and then I actually made this like really, really basic app that would have a map. I could pin the property. And then, um, at the time these like VAs would look up the address for me and type that in the app. So it would take like 24 hours. Now it's instant. But, um, and then once they did that, then it would send a piece of mail featuring that photo of the property. So I put that together for myself in about a weekend. Um, and then I used that for about six months before I ever realized like, Hey, Deal Machine might be a, a business on its own.

Joe: So had you built apps before?

David: Yeah, I was working as a software developer full time at the time. That was my nine to five job.

Joe: Okay. And, um, do you thought this would be easy? I mean like the, what's your thing does, did you envision back then that it would be is as big as it is today?

David: No, I, I originally just built it for myself so I didn't even plan on making it a publicly accessible app, you know, it was just like, I mean, you should see the first version of this. I, it's like, it looks terrible, you know, it's just like very just like developer task oriented. There's no design to it or anything. Yeah. But I didn't need to be, I just needed it to do what I needed it to do.

Joe: I remember when you did first come out with it, I was following you and I was looking at the app itself. And I thought this is pretty amazing. And then I started hearing other people start talking about it and promoting it. And then just, I'm, I'm not kidding. We had, I'm trying to remember who this was. One of our coaching clients came to one of our workshops here in St Louis and we were helping him set up some marketing and I, I don't believe you should have all your eggs in one basket. Right? Like you should have multiple different baskets holding your marketing. Right? And he was telling us about some of the deals that he'd done, blowing me away. We're doing deals right now in Alabama. You might know Melissa Dotson. Does that name ring a bell?

David: It kind of sounds familiar, but I don't know her… I don't know her well.

Joe: Gavin, my coaching business partner and her, they're doing a bunch of deals together down in Alabama and a few different other states. All right. And, uh, one of the things they did, and I wish I could remember all the details, Gavin, if he was here, he can tell you a lot better than I could, but they put an ad to hire somebody to. Actually Carey, Melissa's husband, put the ad in Craigslist looking to pay somebody to go driving for dollars and he didn't know, but he put on there 20 bucks an hour to drive for dollars and it wasn't even performance-based. Like, I'll pay you a certain number per house or I'll pay you, you know, whatever. But it was just like a pay $20 to go drive around. And so he got tons of people I think, which I think is the wrong thing to do because you have no idea like what they're doing while they're driving around.

Joe: But anyway, the first house, and they were using the Deal Machine app, the first house they got, they, I don't know, they wholesaled that thing and got like $20,000 in profit, did really, really well with it. So it's, I'm seeing my students starting to have success with it and starting to talk about it. And then, and I'm talking to guys like Tom Krol at Wholesaling Inc who's got a ton of students that are using it. Um, so it's, it's pretty amazing. Now talk about why driving for dollars, like why, you know, why not just pull a list of vacant houses or why not just mail all the properties in a certain zip code? Like why do you like driving for dollars?

David: Yeah. Well so when I was starting out, I did driving for dollars because that was their advice. They said it was the best list because no one else is going to have that unique list. You're going out and finding those properties yourself. And then the second thing was if I pulled the, if I pulled a list that I purchased that's going to require mailing a lot of properties to get a deal. And when it comes to driving for dollars, I was being told, you know, early on, you know, the, the list is unique. It's a niche. You're going to have to send a lot less mail. And do a lot less outreach because your, your list is smaller cause it's so focused, you know. If you notice that the house is physically run down, they've only got two options and that's, they sink a bunch of money into it or they sell it at a discount to you, you know.

David: So I was told very early on that that was what I should do. And I think, um, a lot of advanced investors move away from it because it doesn't, it hasn't been scalable, you know, because when, when you do a few $20,000 deals, your time is not best spent driving around. Your time is better spent, you know, developing a system and it becomes more worthwhile to just like spend a lot of money to go send out a lot of mail while you spend your time doing other things. You know, managing your team, going on seller appointments and whatnot. And so that's why I got into driving for dollars. But what's really neat is I've seen, we've seen a lot of more advanced investors go back to driving for dollars now with Deal Machine because it's more scalable. And we can, we can help them easily manage a team that's driving for them. And you don't, you don't have to pay $20 an hour.

Joe: There you go. So you just said the keyword, you can use Deal Machine to manage your team that's driving for you, right?

David: That's right. Yep.

Joe: So talk about what that does. Like what does the app do and how, can you have a team kind of do it for you?

David: Oh, absolutely. So very simply, the app will let you pin a property, tell you the owner immediately and then you can actually send a postcard immediately from the app and automatically schedule it to be resent. So, and when you're in front of the property, that can all happen in like seconds, 10 seconds. And um, if you have drivers under you, they can actually add properties and they go into your account.

So the drivers can't see any of the other properties. They can't send mail, they can't spend your money, but they have a very easy system to add those properties. And then you've got an easy system of approving them, having the mail sent out. And seeing which drivers are adding, you know, which properties.

Joe: Makes sense. Okay. And so you, do take a picture of the property or you just kind of mark it on a, on your map and then pick which house it actually is?

David: Yeah, well the picture is near and dear to my heart because that's where we started and we've actually revise it so you can actually pin the property first and add a picture if you want to. So we actually have a couple of mail options that don't feature a picture. For those of you that like to go a little bit quicker and you don't want to add the picture,

Joe: What, does it matter? Is there a preference of yours?

David: I think it matters because when I send my postcards with the picture, a lot of the times, you know, every fifth caller says, hey, I called you because I got a bunch of these other postcards, but it looks like you took a lot of time to put yours together so I called you. And the thing they're seeing is the photo. Like they can tell I was actually out their house.

Joe: Okay. Um, what about street view, Google maps photos? Are you allowed to use those?

David: You actually haven't been allowed to use Google map street imagery on print materials until this past year. They actually removed that from their terms of service. So, um, I know those have always been around though. Nobody's really gotten in trouble for that, but we held off because of that and we wanted to make sure we were doing things the right way, but we're going to offer an option actually to use that in the app. And again, I think that people can tell, I think people can tell that that's, you know, an image from Google versus something that you take when you're physically in front of their house. But I think it's better than nothing, better than no picture.

Joe: Yeah. It used to be when that first kind of came out, the whole picture postcard thing, I don't know if I was the first one to talk about it, but I would start, I was doing that through Click2Mail probably about four years ago and showing people how to do that with Click2Mail. And I was taking the pictures from Zillow and if there wasn't a picture on Zillow, I would take it from Google Street View and then upload it. And I built this process where my VA's would actually do it for me. Right. And uh, so, but anyway, it works crazy. Well. And I started using it for, I would go send mail to rentals on Zillow, I'd find a rental property on Zillow and I would send them a letter with a picture from Zillow on there.

David: Okay.

Joe: And I was getting response rates, not kidding, on this direct mail for like 15 to 20%. Wow. But now a lot of people are doing it, so maybe it doesn't work as well as it used to, but it still works. Right. Um, all right. So you can, from this app, you get in your car, you go driving around, you're looking for vacant houses. The vacant house would be like overgrown grass, stuffed mailbox.

David: It doesn't even need to be vacant. I would use the word distress. Vacants are good, good property leads. But I think that, um, well three of the deals that I've done have actually been owner-occupied. Somebody who's actually in that house. And the postcard actually went to their house because they live there and they had like a tarp on the roof. In one case they had gutters falling off in another case. So it was just distressed. And then when it became time to sell, they called me because my postcard had, you know, arrived six or seven times.

Joe: And so that's another thing I want to talk about. Like you can set it up where it puts them on a schedule to get your mail multiple times, right?

David: Correct. Yeah. You can actually repeat this same postcard, which is, um, what I suggest when you're first getting started. If you want to get a little more sophisticated, we've got a campaigns feature, so you can actually send postcard A first, then send postcard B and then C and they can look totally different. They can say different things, but you don't need to do that whenever you first start out. So we got both of those options.

Joe: All right, so you're driving around, you're looking for houses that are boarded up or they're just kind of overgrown grass or maybe a tarp on the roof or it's just kind of messy. Like I was at a house the other day. it had a toilet in the front yard. Right. Like, they put it out there to throw it away, but like something's going on. Like what's wrong with that toilet? Why are they having to get a new one?

David: Yeah, all of the above of what you're saying. And I used to go to places where the entire street was rundown cause I was like, look at all these houses. But now I kind of prefer to go to like these B class neighborhoods and then look for the worst one on the street. So like some of the houses might be updated, they're built in the 60's, 70's. But you can easily identify the ones that obviously haven't been updated since that time. So I think a lot of those, you know, those occupants are probably aging as well. I mean, they probably like the old stuff because they, that's how they bought the house. Um, so I think those are really great leads and actually my preferred areas to target. So you kinda want a, not the diamond in the rough, but the rough in the diamond neighborhood.

Joe: That's good. That's good. All right. So then you see the house, you pull over. You don't do this while you're driving, right? You pull over, you find the house on the app.

David: Right.

Joe: And you can pin it or you can take a picture of it. Right? I'm just, I'm assuming you can zoom in and crop the image too, right? If you want to.

David: Yeah. When you're taking the photo you can definitely zoom in.

Joe: So then you can set it up where it'll give you the owner of the property. Right. And you can do a couple of things with it. You can, it can skip trace it does that, right?

David: Yeah. You can skip trace it to get the—we call it enhanced—search and it actually gives you the phone number, the email and the additional addresses that might be associated with that property owner. And the other option is to start a mail campaign.

Joe: Then you can start a mail campaign and it can be just a one off postcard or it could be a series of mail, maybe postcards or letters. Right?

David: That's right.

Joe: So then you, you, you put it in there and you drive off. Now it's all not just on the phone, it's on the browser. So when you are at home or a new, when you're at your computer, you can pull up all these properties and you know, kind of see, um, all the properties that you've mailed to and what's going on. The other cool thing is you can give this to a team, right? So you can hire people to go do this for you and they can go looking for vacant houses. The cool thing about it too, right, is you can't, you don't let people do the same house twice. Right. So like if someone else drives and sees that vacant house, they can't send it, add it that to the database so that you're not paying people for two, two people for the same house. Right?

David: Right. So if they're within your team, yes, you're account will prevent duplicates but it doesn't prevent somebody else in your city from adding that house. And um, I noticed one thing with the team, which is so important I think to really scaling this is you're saying like, um, don't pay, I think, $20 an hour you said because you don't know what they're doing during that time. We actually just launched a feature that lets you see what they're doing during that time.

Joe: Oh, you did?

David: Yeah, we did.

Joe: So what does that do? Show us. Tell us.

David: Sure. Yeah. So it actually, it's going to track their route. So when they press Start Driving, it's going to start a clock. And then it's going to draw a green line behind where they've driven. And then it's going to also just keep doing that until they click stop driving. And then you actually get a summary and it says they drove for this amount of time, they went on this exact route and they added this many deals. And so you can click that, easily see the deals they added and then that can be useful for sending, you know, the payment that you owe them, no matter what your payment structure is.

Joe: That's pretty sweet. So do you have, what are most people doing now? Like how are they paying team members? What are you seeing best practices?

David: So there's three structures. I actually prefer the hourly method, but I don't pay, I don't think you need to pay $20 an hour. So the fee that I paid is $15 and they pay for their gas. And um, basically I just kind of tell her where to go and she, she goes; the other payment method is like per deal. So a lot of people will, you know, pay like a dollar per lead or something like that. That payment structure… you know, you might have trouble with that on Craigslist because they're like, they don't see how much they can make… that's like just kind of a weird payment structure and like really, um, I've noticed that that's an issue. But I think it works really well if you've got like a mailman or like a plumber, somebody you have an existing relationship with that's going to be more trusting that you're going to pay them accordingly.

David: And I would pay three to five per deal because if it's a mailman or a plumber, they're in neighborhoods most people aren't driving in, plus they're busy. So you want to make it worth their time. And those deals are probably going to be the better deals because they're like in these like back corners of neighborhoods where a lot of people aren't going. And then the final, the third payment structure is like your mom or your friend and you pay them on a commission. So again, it doesn't work well in craigslist because they want money up front. But if somebody, you know, then I think that a lot of people find success like sharing some of the profits of the deal or like $500 or $1,000 when they close, which we know, you know, that can take a month or two. So I mean people fizzle out unless they really already know you. So, and also the commission thing gets a little bit weird with realtor laws and stuff like, you know, so that's definitely why we only, um, really see that for like real close friends or family doing that commission base.

Joe: Nice. So with, if you're paying them hourly, you can see where they've driven, you see what they're actually doing.

David: Yeah, absolutely. So we have the, it's called the route tracking feature in Deal Machine. And if you turn that on and you have them click the Start Driving button, that's gonna log their time and deals and then location when they're driving.

Joe: When you're doing it yourself, does it track where you've been?

David: Yeah. If you use the route tracking feature, you can do that and they can actually see where other team members on your team have driven. So that way they avoid driving the same areas twice.

Joe: Oh that's great.

David: Yeah. And then as time passes, the routes turn yellow and then finally red after a full year and then they'll finally disappear because those give you indicators like, hey, it might be worth driving that again to see if anything's changed, you know, see if a tree fell, you know, and it hasn't been cleaned up in that amount of time and whatnot.

Joe: Could you, um, could you use Deal Machine… This is one of the things I want to demo in the couple of days when we do a part two. Okay. I want to demonstrate showing some mail and not driving for dollars but using the Deal Machine app to send mail for example from Zillow. Like one of the best sources of vacant houses are right underneath our noses on Zillow. And if you look at all the rentals on Zillow, nine out of 10 of them are, what do they have all in common? They are vacant, right? The vacant list is like the gold best list you could get. Right? And there's a ton of them on Zillow. And so one of the things I want to show you all and is how to do that. So you can do this from your browser, right? You don't have to actually use your phone. You could add properties to your list from the browser, right?

David: Yeah, absolutely. So you're going to demo this Zillow thing now?

Joe: No, when we do part two.

David: Okay, cool.

Joe: When we do part two, so let's demonstrate it next time we do this podcast. Awesome. So cool. What do you find, like are you having seen some success with the skip tracing, people finding these vacant houses? Uh, then instead of sending a mail, maybe in addition to sending the mail, they're also calling them. What, what do you see for best practices there?

David: Yeah, so I think that if you're going to do, if you're exclusively cold calling, you should use Deal Machine to build an army of people that build your driving for dollars list and then export it and send it to your bulk skip trace provider. But if you're driving for dollars using mail and then you see this one house and you're like, I have to have this house, that's when our skip trace comes in really handy and it's a, it's instant. So it's actually going to give you their mobile phone number, their home phone number, their email and those other addresses. And so I would recommend doing that. But if you're like a cold caller that is calling like hundreds of people every day, the bulk skip trace riders are actually cheaper. So just wanting to be transparent about that. Um, but ours is instant and it gives you a lot of rich information to get in touch immediately when you're right in front of the house.

Joe: Nice. All right. So what else do you recommend? What do you seeing some good practices, best practices for people that are using this a lot?

David: Absolutely. Yeah, so best practices off the top of my head, um, I would say know that it takes at least 200 properties. So I'm telling this because we've had a lot of success stories come in. Um, and then we've also had a lot of people say like, Oh this, this didn't work for me, but when we talk to those individuals and really dig in, they've added like 20 properties. So I want you guys to like kind of know ahead of time before you drive for dollars with or without Deal Machine that I think is probably good to add it to least 200 properties to your lists and then make sure you follow up with all of them at least three times.

Joe: I was going to add that. Yeah, because if you're not doing follow-up, listen, don't waste your money. Don't even sign up. Like just go do something else, go get a job. But like you have… If you're not doing follow-up, you're wasting your money. You're wasting your time. That's how this all works. Like we did 58 deals last year. This last time we looked at the numbers of 2018, we did 58 deals. Most of them in Alabama. Of those 58, 54 came from the follow-up. Only four came from that first phone call.

David: Yeah, exactly. I think it's just all about timing. You see a distressed house and you know that there's something wrong there. But I mean the house has been distressed for a while. You know, it was distressed before you saw it. So I think it's just a matter of time and you want to be their solution when the time is right, which is probably coming soon, but just not right that second.

Joe: So follow up, not just in terms of, um, when you, when they call you, like not just in terms of sending mail over and over again to them, that's important. But also if they do call you or you reach them, you follow up with them over and over again with phone calls, text messages, emails, more mail, stuff like that. That's what we're talking about. Cool.

David: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's like a subtlety that… Some people's voicemail boxes are full. Definitely make sure yours isn't. And then if you can answer your phone, if, I mean, if you're sending out direct mail, like you want to answer every call that you don't know who's calling you because it could be a lead. And I think a lot of people will move on to the next postcard if they don't get a response from you right away.

Joe: Yeah, makes sense. A, I know a lot of guys that are crushing and I remember I interviewed one student who wasn't using Deal Machine, but he was doing driving for dollars. He's an 18-year-old kid who's bagging groceries and he gets, his dad was an investor and he got sick and tired of seeing his dad with these big checks on his desk. And the dad would let these checks sit there for one to two weeks before depositing them. And the kid was like, what are you doing? Well find out later the Dad did that intentionally because he knew his kid was watching. But you know, the kid got interested in real estate and what he started doing, he didn't have any money. His Dad didn't give him any money. He gave him some education but didn't give any money. So, the kid just started getting in his car on his way to school or wrestling practice or after on his way to the bagging groceries at the grocery store. He always took a different route home or to work. And he started driving for dollars and looking for vacant houses and started just calling them. He would go to Google and uh, because he didn't have the money to buy, would go to Google and just do a search until he found some phone numbers and would just call a bunch of people. He also started doing bandit signs and he would just put his cell phone number on the bandit sign cause he couldn't afford the virtual phone numbers that you can get and started getting phone calls.

Joe: He didn't care about the police, like what are the police gonna do to a kid? Right. And he started within a few months, he did like 50 something thousand dollars from just driving for dollars and bandit signs,in high school, didn't have any money… In southern Florida in a really, really competitive market where there's a lot of investors out there. Right.

David: Wow, that's awesome. Awesome story.

Joe: Yeah, I love it. And this is one of the best things that you can do to get started if you don't have a huge direct mail budget, if you don't have, you know, tens of thousands of dollars to spend a month on marketing, which you need if you want to have a big business. So driving for dollars is a great way, especially if you're getting started, to find a good deals.

Joe: One more question, Dave, and we got to get going in about three minutes here. Um, what, uh, what do you recommend? Like how do you find people to drive for dollars for you? What are some of the best practices with that?

David: Yeah, I've had a lot of luck actually posting a job on Indeed. If you're looking for really somebody who's going to be almost like a full time, like a consistent person. If you want somebody who's more part time Craigslist and uh, we've, we've actually got some sample job postings I could share. I'm not really sure the best way to share those on this software, but those are the two main methods. And of course, if you're in an Uber, you can chat with an Uber driver. A lot of those guys found Uber through Craigslist in the first place. So, if you post there, I think you're hitting the same audience.

Joe: Okay, good. Now what does Deal Machine cost?

David: Deal Machine costs $49 a month after the free trial if you guys decided to join, that's what the fee is. And then you, the bigger plan, Enterprise, is $199 a month. The biggest difference there is the Basic plan let's you have three deal finders, which are team members. And then the Enterprise plan gives you unlimited team members to truly build an army of people out there driving for you. And we also give you a webpage to have them learn about driving for you and they can sign up and easily…

Joe: That's awesome. So you give a website where people can get more information and sign up on your website.

David: Yeah, exactly. So that way your ads for Craigslist can actually be directed to that website. So you don't have to field all the questions and do a bunch of interviews. You can actually just have them sign right up.

Joe: Okay, good. And then what is the cost for the skip tracing or the direct mail?

David: Yes. So everything else on the Basic plan is a dollar. So the, uh, the skip trace is a dollar, the postcard is a dollar. And on the Enterprise plan it's all 80 cents. So you get a 20% reduction there. So if you're doing volume, that makes a lot of sense too. But, um, that's just like totally done for you postcard with the picture of the house on the front and back. Um, and then that, that detailed skip trace that I'd mentioned earlier.

Joe: You know guys, if you were to do the postcards yourself, you're going to be spending that easily when you consider the time that, your time into doing that. If you were to get a VA to do it, you're gonna pay more than that. If you pay somebody to do the… Cause, like if you go to these big mail houses, yeah you can pay 40 cents a postcard, right? But you have to order like 5,000 at a time or something. But if you're going to do these, you know, maybe 20 a day onesy twosies here and there, you can't beat the price.

David: You can always export from Deal Machine anytime too. So like we don't have by any means like try to restrict you at all, um, and or force you to use the mail at all. But like you're saying, the things you can do in the app is for the convenience factor and it's pretty cost-effective cause the list is not so big like one that you would buy and blast out a bunch of mail to you.

Joe: You know that at the premium level, the $199 a month, is that what you said? You get a 20% discount on the direct mail there. Is that right?

David: Yeah, that's right.

Joe: That's about what you would pay on on a Click2Mail. Might even be a little cheaper on the one-off postcards. Cool. So this link here is my affiliate link DealMachineJoe.com. I highly recommend it, guys. My students are using it. They're doing really, really well with it. If you're having problems with that link, try again later because we were, I just signed up for that link a little bit ago. So DealMachineJoe.com. David, I want to thank you for being on the podcast. Thanks for leaving a review.

David: Oh, you're so welcome. I've heard the podcast a lot, so I was just like, I got a, I got to leave this review since you're so close.

Joe: Thank you.

David: You're welcome.

Joe: Okay, cool. All right guys, again, this is the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast. Thank you for being here. Go to DealMachineJoe.com. We're going to do a part two podcast in a couple of days where David's actually going to be demonstrating Deal Machine on the computer. You're going to see it right here live and we're going to be doing it to some of the properties that I'm marketing to live here as we go. Okay. So thanks again Dave. Appreciate you being on the show, man.

David: Appreciate it.

Joe: Hey guys, don't forget too, if you go to RealEstateInvestingMastery.com, you can get the show notes and the transcriptions of this podcast, look at all the other shows that we've done. And the podcast that I did with this kid who got these deals from driving for dollars, his name is, well the podcast episode was called From Bags To Riches. From Bags To Riches.

All right, guys. We're out of here. I gotta go take my son to basketball. Thanks for being on the show. Thanks, David. We'll see you guys later.

David: Thanks. Joe. Bye now.

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