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Building An Online Community with Ryan Harper
I’m excited to be with you with our very special guest, our brother from another mother, the man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Ryan Harper joining us from DFW.
What’s going on?
For our audience, why don’t you tell them who you are and a little about yourself. We can discuss what Propelio is to the masses in Note Nation who don’t know what it is.
My name is Ryan Harper. My tagline on my email signature is, “Get shit done. My next business cards have already been approved to say, “Get shit done.” That’s my title. I like to say I’m good at Googling stuff. When you need to spin plates, when you’re here and you want to go there, but you don’t know how to do this, that’s me. There’s a good book out there called Traction. If you haven’t read it, it’s not necessarily real estate, but it’s a very good business book. I highly recommend your audience go get it.
To summarize your efforts of reading. You have two types of people. You have your innovators and you have your integrators. As entrepreneurs, we all feel like we’re the innovators. To me, a blow to my ego was I’m not an innovator. I’ve stepped out and tried to innovate and I failed miserably, but I’m good at spinning plates. Let’s put a Scott Carson in front of me and let me push that boy, not off the ledge, but let’s get them to light speed. That’s who I am. I’m an integrator. What I do here at Propelio is I spin plates and business development. We want to be over here, but we’re here, what’s all this? If you asked me what I do for a living, I don’t know. If you ask everybody at work with, “What does Ryan do?” They don’t know either. I get a paycheck and we are progressing.
If you look at what we’ve done here, I work with a good team: Daniel Moore, Nate Worcester, Travion Young, Tomás Rangel. Just people here in the office, it’s a team effort. I know I’m on the studio and I’m the face of it, but it’s a team effort. At Propelio, we are a tech-based software for real estate investors. As a real estate investor, your number one thing is what are the numbers? What are the comps? What are the rehabs? What’s worthy? What’s the meat of the house? If you’re just getting out in real estate, you need to either have your real estate license, so you can have MLS access or you have to have a buddy that’s a realtor agent that can give you the numbers. Eventually, your buddy is going to be after about twelve times pulling comps for you, one day they’re going to be like, “Scott, you’ve got to figure that on your own.” From there you either become a realtor or you sign up for a service like a Propelio for $89 a month. We give you access to MLS for true MLS comps. On top of that, it’s like, “Let’s give you this and keep giving.” We also provide you with off-market lead lists.
As a real estate investor, you need to know how much the house is worth. You have to have a lead on a house to even give a damn what that house is worth. We provide you with a probate leads, a pre-foreclosure leads, heirship affidavit leads. We also have a whole host of others. I don’t know if we’re still in beta testing or if we fully launched it, but we also do investor friendly websites. If you go out and buy yourself a domain like ScottCarsonIsTheMan.com, he can get along and can log in to Propelio and have an investor pre-built website. All he has to do if he has a logo throughout there, if he doesn’t, it’s cool is throw up his name. He can throw up his phone number, then he has his website within minutes. All that’s only $89 a month. That’s the core of our business, that’s who we are.
Online Communities: With mentors and coaches, if you can’t get a call back within a couple of days, you’re probably in a bad situation.
Our marketing plan is a little bit unique in the sense that we give a ton of education away for free. I don’t want to sound like I’m against paid mentorship, paid coaching. If you are paying for a coach or mentor and you don’t have direct access to that person, if you don’t have their cell phone, if you don’t have their email, if you can’t get a call back within a couple of days, you’re probably in a bad situation. I’m okay with having a mentor. I’m okay with having a coach, but you need to have access to that coach. The $30,000, $50,000 gurus I bet the only time you ever see the gurus are on the stage and you never see him again. That’s what we’re against. We do a lot of free education. We’re releasing the Propelio Academy. We’re trying to get everybody together. We want to give away the kitchen sink.
You talked about getting MLS access through Propelio. Is that across the country with specific markets?
I need to be clear because in lawyer’s speak, we are a broker’s website that gives you access through an IDX feed through a broker. We’re not MLS. We give you access to a broker’s website that gives you access to MLS. To answer your question because this is like, “We’re going to get sued,” we are in specific markets. We’re in all the major metroplexes of Texas. We’re also in Chicago, in St. Louis, in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and in Phoenix, Arizona. We do have plans to be national and that’s coming fairly soon. When you’re dealing with people stuff gets delayed.
You do a show online every day regularly as well. Is it every day or is it Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday? When is it?
It’s Monday, Wednesday, Friday on Facebook and YouTube. We are going to take a pause until the release of the academy because we’re throwing everything and the kitchen sink to make this work. We’re also trying to revamp the studio a little bit. We literally did it for a year straight of two, three, four times a week of just video. This allowed us to grow quickly, largely in our community. That being said, you’ve got to keep your eye on the prize. The prize for us is being able to give away all that content and all that information with the academy. We want to make sure that all hands are on deck there to make sure that the release is good. I know you do these podcasts three times a day. I’m sure every once in a while, you’re like, “I would love to take at least two days off.”
I don’t do it three times a day. It may seem that way because we share it everywhere. We do it usually once a day, usually in the business days. We’re averaging about three to four times a week. You have been doing a great job over there with your live broadcast and building a community. Let’s talk about your community building. The question is a lot of people fail to realize they get the idea of, “It’s all about me,” when it should be about your tribe. When you’re sharing information, sharing it out to your audience, sharing it to the people who are following you or offering up stuff that if you don’t have a tribe, it helps build one.
The number one rule that we try to abide by here at Propelio is authenticity. Too often you meet people in the investor world, they’ve got their rental land. They’ve got their fluff, their air of, “I’m this, I’m successful. ” That’s cool. I don’t care that you’ve done 50 deals. There’s always a guy that’s been 51 deals. I don’t care that you’ve got $10 million in the bank. There’s always the guy that’s got $10 million and one in the bank. What we try to do is make sure we come off as authentic and make sure we provide value. People are tired, especially in the real estate investor community, douchepreneur exactly. There are too many douchepreneurs out there. We try to be as authentic as possible and we try to give you as much value as possible.
If you go to YouTube and type in real estate investing, most of the videos, if it’s a 45-minute video, it’s twenty, 30 minutes of fluff like, “Buy my stuff.” There’s maybe a hint of a nugget and then buy more stuff. Our live streams, I would say, we’re 70% value, nuggets and content and 30% of us just having a good time with whoever we’re talking to. That’s mainly because it is a live show and the people we communicate with, we genuinely like. When you were on, there is nuggets, but there’s always like, “My buddy, Scott, is in the studio.” You want it to be entertaining, but you also want to have fun yourself and be authentic, provide value. By doing that a lot of people have gravitated to that because they’re tired of the douchepreneurs. They’re tired of the fly by night gurus.
Online Communities: That abundant mentality says we could be competitive but sometimes we can work together. That’s where the community aspect comes up.
It’s all about the abundance mentality. The reality is as a real estate investor, we are real estate investors at heart. We do the tech stuff, the social media stuff. People have this scarcity mentality that, “I and Scott Carson are always competitive. There’s always that note. There’s always that deal. If I’m going for it, he’s going for it. One of us got to win.” Sometimes that’s true, but sometimes Scott wants to JV, Ryan wants to JV and maybe we can work together. If you have more of an abundant mentality of we could be competitive, but sometimes we can work together. That’s where the community aspect comes together.
You do Facebook Lives on a regular basis, gone all in on video with that other stuff. Is it growing your online community to about 4,000 followers on Facebook?
We’re about 1,520 away from 5,000. We’re getting close, but this time of year ago we were at 600, so we’ve grown 700, 800% in a year. The secret sauce to that of how to do that is engagement. Too often people are like, “Who can I hire to do my Facebook? What agency out of California can I give $5,000 a month to grow my online profile?” The answer to that is there’s a ton of them. The result of that is you’re going to get a little bit of a blip. You’re going to have zero engagement. You may have a lot of likes and no one’s going to know you. You’re not going to be in the community. We’re using that word community. If you message me, I’m probably going to message you back. If you messaged Daniel, depending on what that message is, he’s most likely going to message you back. As a family man, he’s got to filter himself. Me, on the other end, I’m game. The point I’m trying to make is we’re in the community. We’re in the Facebook groups.
If somebody that we know is like, “I just got my first deal,” I bet money that myself or Daniel or somebody from Propelio is right in the comment section going, “Keep it up. Good job.” We’re happy because it’s abundance mentality. It’s keeping it within the community. The reality of it is we’re active on Facebook. We’re going back to paying an agency out $5,000 a month in whatever world. If likes are all that we’re going for sure we would probably be at 100,000 by now. If we would have just paid somebody to do that, but a lot of those likes are not going to be authentic. A lot of those likes are not going to be real humans. There may be some Singapore click farm phone Sim card thing where, “We get 20,000 likes.”
Every like on our page is connected to a human that hopefully is engaging with us and hopefully likes us. What people don’t talk about, they get focused on the likes, they get focused on the view counts, but none of that matters. What matters is the engagement of that. I would put our engagement on our Facebook up against any company, any Facebook group, anything head-to-head. We’re going by ratios because there are some companies that have 100,000 likes in their engagements, like 2,500. My 4,000 likes and I get 1,500. That’s less, but ratio wise I’m kicking your ass and that’s because our team is engaging. We’re genuinely proud, happy, excited for when people are doing deals. I got a DM where somebody was like, “I’m dropping X company. I’m also dropping Y company and I’m going to go with your company because I like you. I’m going to give you a try.” We offer websites, the comps and the leads and she was going to two companies. She’s dropping them both to go to one company, which is us, Propelio.
Online Communities: If you want to network or meet your next business partner, then find money, loan money, find a deal, and send a deal.
Let’s talk about your events.
Our events are an effort to combat the norm. If you’ve ever been to a real estate investor event, it’s like walking into a sales pitch where you’re like, “You’ve got the chairs and they don’t think about the lighting. They don’t think about the sound, food, the booze. How can I sell my product to you?” What we’ve done is we’ve taken a holistic approach of as an attendee, “What do I want? What is my goal here? As a vendor, what is my goal here, what do I want? As a speaker, what would I like?” From an attendee’s standpoint, A.) You want to learn something, B.) you want to network and meet the right people. C.) You want to have a good time. We’ve taken this three-prong approach of we’re one-third fun, one-third education and one-third networking. The coolest thing that you can get is I hear from people about our events is, “I sold the house at one of your events. I found my next deal at one of your events. I found money, I lent money, I’m doing deals.” That is the coolest thing ever. It’s always cool to hear some of these guys having a good time, but at a real estate investor event where you’re here, people are doing real estate investment deals, that’s even cooler.
At our events, we have an open bar. We’re doing more than just Keystone. We’ve got the Crown, Cheetos. We’ve got it all. Food-wise, we’re doing Chick-fil-A because everybody loves Chick-fil-A. It’s cheaper than going through a vendor that’s going to charge me $20,00 to have you a sausage on a stick. We’ve got full-on Chick-fil-A. We have music and the vendor room. Sometimes I have a DJ in the lobby. This time I have a live band because it’s absurd. Another thing that separates us from a lot of other events is we try to find theaters to do our events and therefore, there’s a stage. There’s a big screen versus the typical 10×10 PowerPoint thing. We’ve got full-on movies. I’m not going to say 75 feet, but it’s a giant screen where you can do presentations from. On top of that, we’re always thinking of ways to change it up. We’re always thinking of, “We did it this way, this time, let’s do it this way.” As far as the presentations go, the norm, the model is, “Let me get two to three presentations or speakers. One of those is going to be the event organizer and they’re going to sell you a ton of stuff. They’re going to try to make money off you.”
The other two are sometimes education, but mainly sales pitch. With us we’re like, “That’s boring.” Everybody loves TED Talks. If you’re not familiar with TED Talks. Go Google it. Go to YouTube. You can go down a deep rabbit hole of TED Talks have in this usually like these eight to fifteen-minute segments of speakers. I’ve taken that idea and said, “Let’s apply that to real estate.” Every event, you’re having at least eight different presentations. I have eight, ten-minute presentations. Then I have an hour-plus sit down with Will Crozier, who has nothing to sell, but just talk about in investing. That’s going to be Daniel and Will just sitting up on stage having a conversation. Mike Sinelli is doing the Q&A. We’ve never done that before and it’s something different.
The biggest thing is we try to give you as many different topics that you can learn from. Scott, you’ll learn this before you go live that I’m going to tell everybody it’s like, “If you start selling. I’m yanking you off the stage.” We want to make sure that the only sales pitch is, “I’m Ryan with Propelio. It’s nice to see you. Come, say hi.” That’s the only sales pitch on top of that to speak, you do not have to be a sponsor. To be a sponsor, you don’t necessarily get to speak. The way I vet our speakers are, “What’s your topic? Is it interesting?” That’s what the process is. Maybe that’s simplifying it too much. I want to know is your topic interesting and are people going to get drum roll please?
Online Communities: Be authentic, provide value, and make sure that the people are on the same page as you.
Are we being authentic and are we providing value? If we’ve got guys or gals up on stage selling their rears off that goes completely against everything of being authentic and providing value. That’s what we try to do is to be authentic, provide value, and make sure that the people that we align with through our speakers are on the same page. On top of that, as far as certain vendors, there are a couple of vendors out there that we don’t align with morally or ethically. They’re not vendor-servant. I’m not going to take your money. If you’re a vendor, then we’re okay with you. Going back to the community, providing value, being authentic.
Most people don’t realize that in this society, it’s more about community than anything else. You hit the nail on the head. People are tired of the pitch-a-thons. They’re tired of being get crammed down their throat that they don’t want to hear and don’t want to see. They want to come together in a community, in a safe environment, a non-pitchy environment to be able to network, talk with people and get a chance to meet them. Oftentimes, going to an event is often like a cattle call. You’ve heard it in, you’ve heard it out. You’ve heard it in the back of the room. That’s not the way your events are at all. That’s not who you are personally either.
I totally forgot about that aspect of our events. Most events that I have been to, several events, they have their agenda. They have their programming. They have their, “Let’s turn the lights off. The bar is closed. Go to this room over here to listen to this 90-minute pitch. Then maybe you can go back over there.” At our events, I don’t care where you are. A lot of people don’t realize. Maybe this is a fault of our event, but a lot of people enjoy it especially with the DFW event. You have a giant theater on one side that sits 430 people.
Right next to it, you have a big ballroom that has all our vendors, has our bar. Then connecting both of those is a pretty large lobby that people just mingle and there’s some cocktail tables. They’re like, “This is a great event, but where were the presentations?” I was like, “You didn’t realize there’s a giant 400-person theater next door?” They were like, “No.” I was like, “There were 300 people over there.” They had no clue. Maybe that’s my fault for not making that more known. I want you to come to the event and get what you want out of the event. I don’t want you to have fun if you are going there to just get half drinks and have a good time. By all means, come have drinks, have a good time. If you’re there to just network and go out for deals, come out and network and go out for deals.
It’s totally cool whatever path you want to go, whatever you’re trying to get from the event that’s what I want you to do. I love it for people to sit there and get value out of the speakers. People like yourself are coming out. You’re driving up to Austin to come to our event, which is cool. We want people to get that out of you. We want them to experience Scott Carson. At the same time, if somebody met you ten different times, maybe they don’t need to see your presentation this time. Maybe they need to go meet somebody in the room and maybe there’s a deal to be had. I honestly don’t care what value you get out of the event as long as there is value in it, as long as it helps bring actual items to your business. That’s another thing that we’re passionate about. I’m going to give you the fourth pillar of pillars. It was community, authenticity, interaction and engagement. I want you to get nuggets that you can take that actionable item, apply it to your business and your business will have a financial gain from that nugget. I can give you all the rah-rah in the world, but if that rah-rah doesn’t apply to your business to help you make money, what’s the point other than make you feel good for fifteen seconds?
Online Communities: It doesn’t matter what value you get out of an event as long as there is value in it and it helps bring actual items to your business.
I’m not speaking about notes. I’m speaking about a little simple tip to help people get a lot more done in a day. It’s a little small thing but worth the ten-minute discussion. I’m going to bring a few of my books to give out to the audience. Chris is there as well.
Chris lives about 30 minutes north of San Antonio. I know you do have a national audience. San Antonio is about four or five-hour drive from Dallas. He’s driven up events before at DFW, which is a four-hour drive from him. We have people who come up from Boston, Houston, San Antonio. When I’m promoting our event and I’m like, “If you’re in a three to five-hour drive of DFW, you need to come here because it is a cool event and it’s a good time. It’s something unique that most people have ever seen.” I’ve got people coming in from Tyler frequently. From an event standpoint, and I know Scott knows this, if you are an event organizer and it rains, you are scared because people hate rain. It doesn’t matter if they paid $50, $100 for the ticket, they won’t come because it’s raining. Our event is free and we still had 400 plus come. Going back to the community aspect, people want to be a part of it. They want to be at the event.
We spend a lot of money on this event and that’s why we have our sponsors help us because we’re not trying to make money on an event. We’re trying to provide a free event for people and through the help of our sponsors, like yourself, we come in and we’re able to provide a free event that has an open bar, free food. It’s a good time and we’re proud of it. It’s a unique thing to space in the real estate investing world. We don’t want to only be in Texas. We want it to be a national thing. When we went to revolutionize community, authenticity. We want to make sure we revolutionize the space. People get the value of it. The whole goal of that is to give people the opportunity to change their lives. If you’re from a background where you can’t afford a $30,000, $50,000 guru and you want to do it, but you’re going to have to mortgage your house to go to this, next thing you know, you’re putting all your money on trash. Our goal is to go after all those big programs. Your Tai Lopez, your Rich Dad Poor Dad, your FortuneBuilders, they’re just trying to make money.
At the same time at some point, are you ever going to practice what you’re preaching or you’re just going to sell stuff? If you follow me or Daniel, we’re real estate investors. Our folds are 100% at 20% of the time we’re Propelio. We were in Amarillo looking at apartment complex up there to possibly purchase. We did have our guns because it was one of those places and we did have to get the police. We are legit real estate investor types. We’re not as active as we were before Propelio, but we’re still doing deals. We still have daily communication with title companies. We’re much more limited in our capacity because we don’t ever want to be in direct competition with our users, so we don’t market. We have zero marketing that we do. The only deals we get is through the networking aspect of Scott Carson brings Ryan Harper deal or Sonya brings us a deal or whatever. That’s the only way for us to do real estate. A lot of people don’t realize that Ryan and Daniel and whoever, we do real estate deals. Even our videographer, Trevion, he’s trying to do stuff. He does classified ads. We try to be as authentic as possible in this real estate investor space. At the end of the day, we try not to be stupid. We try to be value-driven and whatever those other three were.
Our services are in Chicago. Our events are not quite there. I will be trying something for the first time at our event because we’ve had a lot of requests from people like Sonya. We’ve got a guy coming out in Virginia. We’ve had requests, “Can you live stream that?” We haven’t in the past just because with any kind of video, the quality needs to be good, but audio needs to be better. I hadn’t figured out how to give the best audio. I figured that out, so I will be trying to go live for my cell phone. I’m going to try to patch the house sound into the cellphone so it won’t be the craziest outside, but you’ll be able to see Scott, hopefully, on the live stream. Maybe 89% I can get it to work.
Do you need somebody helping you live stream?
No, just to get specifics. This goes back to my title of I Google is I have a phone, but then I have to patch the house sound and the house sound runs through an XLR cable, so how are you going to get an XLR cable into a phone? There are all those adapters involved up to get plugged into the phone and then go live. Then you can have it.
You’re making it more complicated. You just need to run a laptop and do it. Then run it live with a Logitech webcam into it and live stream it that way. You don’t have internet at the place?
None that’s good.
Then use your cell phone as a hotspot.
There is, it’s just slow. When you’re doing live streams, it needs to have a good quality. If you do have social anxiety, please reach out to me. I will put you with somebody who can help you meet people. If you’re shy, but you want to take the time to meet people, reach out to me and I’ll hook you up with somebody who I know will talk your ear off. I’ll introduce you to every single person. Also if you do have the social anxiety thing, there is a balcony. Those people don’t realize there is a balcony. The people that have that anxiety about being around a lot of people, go upstairs in the balcony and sit up there. Then you can have a little bit more space.
Online Communities: We try to be as authentic as possible in this real estate investor space and be value-driven.
At the end of the day, the reason most events suck is that they don’t put work into it. They’re just like, “Here’s the venue, here’s the program. Go.” They don’t try to advertise it. They don’t try to get people involved. We have a thousand people that are either interested in or going on Facebook. Most events on Facebook are like 27 interested, two going. We’re big on the social media aspect of this business. I’ve got 832 registered for our event, which is ridiculous, probably 400 to 500 will show up. You get your 50%. Scott can probably back me up on this, I expect 300. Therefore, if we do have 400 to 500, 600, that’s cool, but I expect 300 plus. If you’ve been in the real estate investor world and you’ve gone to these events, usually it’s 30 people, 50 people, maybe 70 people. If you want to meet people, if you’re wanting to network, if you’re wanting to meet your next business partner, find money, loan money, find a deal, send a deal our events are the place to be. We’re excited about that.
Trevion’s doing a final polishing, touch it off touch-ups on our promo video for academy that will be airing for the first time. Daniel’s incredibly nervous about it. For your audience, I’ll give you some spoilers. I don’t want to use the word break in or broken. They nonchalantly went into an abandoned school in Dallas and shot B-roll in. They found this cool auditorium that has tagged its bullet holes, gun stuff has gone down in there and that’s where they filmed this. The whole point of it was the broken school system. It goes back to the whole point in the whole agenda. What we’ve got going on with the academy of wanting to help people out and give them the opportunities to succeed. There is a little bit of altruism in there, but at the end of the day, just to be fully transparent. At the end of the day, we’re a transaction-based company. If you’re a real estate investor and you do one transaction, you only need us once. You need us for one month. Then you cancel, then you move on.
We’re very much like a gym membership in the way. January 1, you get a gym membership and then you start working out, then you keep your membership. With us, if you log on with us, you subscribe with us and you’re actively doing deals, you’re actively marketing, you’re pulling comps, you stay as a member for a very long time. You love us, you stay as a subscriber. On the reverse side of that gym membership, you get your membership, you never go to the gym, chances are you’re going to cancel that membership. With us, you sign up for Propelio, you’re like, “I’m excited. I’m going to do this.” Then you never take action, you’ll never do a deal. Chances are you’re going to cancel that subscription. Therefore, if we can give you all the tools to learn this business and we can take out all the stops, all the excuses, all whatever’s holding you back from going out and doing business, chances are you’re going to continue using us.
A little transparency there is trying to be authentic and trying to let people know who we are. That being said, if you’re in Iowa and Propelio’s not in Iowa, you can still use our Academy to get a free education with zero benefits to us other than, “That’s cool that we were able to help you out.” I was going to wait, but what I want to do is get you scheduled because I know you’re booked up through the end of the year. I want to get you in ASAP to film stuff here in the studio. We’ll use what you’ve got for a placeholder, but I would love to get you in the first quarter if we can get on the calendar and see what you are just to call you out in public.
That’s okay. I was looking at making some room maybe for a day.
If you go to Facebook.com/PropelioApp, you’ll find the event there. We’re also on Eventbrite. DFW Real Estate Investor Meetup, you can find the details there. We’re on Meetup.com. If you just go to Facebook, Meetup or Eventbrite and search for DFW Real Estate Investor Meetup, you will find the details of it or you could find my name is Ryan S. Harper. I’m on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. All of them are @RyanSHarper. If you find me there, shoot me a DM or a connection request. I can hook you up however you need to be done. One of the craziest things ever, this I sent an email like, “I look forward to the event and so on and so forth.” Somebody called and I was like, “This is Ryan. How can I help you?” He was like, “Really?” He was so surprised that I would answer my phone. It’s that perception of everybody’s too busy.
We’re extremely busy so we don’t have time to chitchat. If you need help or whatever, reach out. We’ll see what we can do to put you in connection with somebody. To be clear, we’re not mentors. We’re not trying to do mentor service. If you’ve got a deal, I’ll mentor you. That’s everybody. We are anti-guru, but we’re not anti-mentorship. We’re not anti-coaches. If you don’t have a direct line of communication to whoever you’re paying for a service for coaching, for mentoring, you need to reanalyze that situation. I’m sure the people that work with you, they can get hold of you. You need to look closer at that relationship because it’s not a relationship, you’re just paying money.
What are the four pillars of Propelio?
These are the four pillars of Ryan’s Propelio: Community, authenticity, value and being able to provide actionable items. That’s not actual Propelio’s pillars. At the end of the day, we try to live by not being stupid. We’re good people. When Daniel does his pre-foreclosure class, he straight up says, “If you have a way to keep somebody inside their house and you don’t provide that to them, you’re just a screwed human being. There’s an opportunity for you to make money, but that doesn’t mean you’ve got to screw people over. You could be a good person and still make money in this business. You don’t have to be sleazy. You don’t have to be slimy, you don’t have to be a snake. If you live by the abundant mentality of where we all can do deals together and we can all make money, in the long run, you’ll be better off. One final nugget that people don’t quite realize, especially in the social media era, is real estate investors have only been using Facebook for about two years.
Previously, everything was the email blast. Your email list was your currency. How big is your email list? Literally, that was a thing. It’s like I’ve got a 20,000-person list. It sounds silly, but if you think about it in this business, it’s all about being able to communicate with people and get your message out. Two years ago was when Facebook, social media and real estate investors started using it to find deals to vet contractors, to vet money partners, to go to a community. That being said, two years plus ago, if you screwed somebody over, your reputation is screwed. Not everybody knew that little circle, everybody had their little cliques.
Nowadays with social media, if you screw somebody over, you’re burned in that network, in that region. If you’re in DFW and you do something shady and you do it to the wrong person who’s very active on Facebook, they’re going to burn your house down metaphorically on Facebook. The likelihood of us being able to do business in that town, you’re going to get run out of town. Then you go to the next town. If somebody’s there is connected and they most likely are because social media and networking, your reputation is going to follow you. You need to be very sure that you are always doing the right thing. Staying above board and not being shady because your reputation in this business is everything. Can you do deals without a network? Can you do deals with a reputation? Absolutely, but if you want to scale it and take it to the next level, you need to be able to have partners, JV partners like Scott, Ryan, Daniel. If you burn people, they will burn you tenfold.
I would totally agree with that especially with the two-year stuff. A lot of people still aren’t using Facebook effectively in their real estate marketing stuff.
I started getting on that because they’ve got LinkedIn Video and LinkedIn is trying to push that. Nobody is on real estate investor wise. If you want to be an influencer that’s what I was passing nugget for people. Get on LinkedIn and be active.
Online Communities: It’s not a relationship if you are just paying money.
We’ve grown our LinkedIn database or LinkedIn connections from 6,000 to the 14,000 in the last six months by doing one thing for basically about three hours, six months ago. We went on there and typed in real estate investor into the title to look for a search and then it pulled up a ton of people. Then we said, “We only want to look at those whom we’re connected on a second-degree connection.” We’re not connected to you yet. I just started connecting with people going down and sending down a little, “I’m just looking to connect with real estate investors.” That has blossomed over the last few months. It was driving a lot of stuff. Do you know what you can do with LinkedIn that’s amazing? You can export your contacts too.
I didn’t know that.
You can export your connections, then it gives you a first name, last name, email address. Do you know what you can do to those email addresses?
Add them on Facebook?
Custom audience it on Facebook.
Another midget of nugget for the LinkedIn is Facebook is great for connections. It’s great for the community. It’s great to meet people and talk about stuff. This is all theoretical academic because I haven’t fully utilized LinkedIn just yet. What I’m hearing from people that are in the LinkedIn community, not in real estate in general, is the reason they love LinkedIn is because that’s where the money is. People on Facebook get money, but they’re not thinking about money when they’re on Facebook. They’re thinking about cat videos. They’re thinking of the little this, the little that. It is just everything.
On LinkedIn, they’re thinking about money. If they’re watching a video, if they’re connecting, they’re doing everything, LinkedIn is about is about money. I’m not sure how to fully utilize that yet to be the most effective to make money on it yet. I’m going to sure try. One thing I would tell your audience and tell you is go to LinkedIn and go #YourCityRealEstate. If you go #DallasRealEstate in LinkedIn and then click content, they’re going to see like three or four people, you’re going to see me, a couple agents and then another person. Literally, that’s because nobody is on it. If you type in Dallas real estate in Facebook, you’re going to be flooded with people you never have seen before. The opportunity to just control attention on LinkedIn is huge.
The biggest thing out there, the social media companies released a survey and found that CEOs, obviously those people that make money but don’t have time are spending their time on LinkedIn and Twitter. They’re not spending any time on Facebook. I love the fact that LinkedIn’s doing video. I love the fact that they’ve now added the Hashtag feature to help you identify discussions, identify people. Those are a couple of great nuggets to use in your marketing aspect when you’re out there. Add the hashtags, the time that the video to it. It’s a little bit about what I’m talking about.
I’ll give you one more nugget and this is a nugget for your work, for your social media presence, for your marketing, anything that you can apply it to. Whatever your goals are, you need to be consistent in whatever your efforts are. An example, I went to this event for LinkedIn. It was this woman named Goldie Chan and it was their 365th video on LinkedIn. For the past year, every single day she’s posted a video. In that year she went from nobody knowing who she is to she’s The Oprah of LinkedIn. She’s been featured in ten-plus business article type magazines. She’s gotten a ton of consulting deals, a ton of speaker deals. She’s getting paid because she’s being consistent in that forum.
I’m not saying everybody needs to go on LinkedIn and be consistent. If you’re going to do marketing, be consistent with it. If you’re going to read, I don’t know if you do tapes that much anymore just because I know the hedge funds have come in and bought all that stuff up. You need to be consistent in reading those tapes. You need to be consistent in anything you do. If you’re going to be on social media, you need to be consistent in posting every single day. The nugget there is whatever effort you’re trying to do to get your goal, be consistent with it and be patient.
What’s the website for anybody to go to Propelio.com?
For our services, if you’re looking for comps, you’re looking for websites, you’re looking for lead lists, go to Propelio.com. If you’re interested in everything else, we’ve got going on. Our Facebook page is Facebook.com/PropelioApp. The only reason it’s not Propelio is that there’s a woman out of China who her name is Propelio and she hasn’t logged on in three years. It’s infuriating because that should be our Facebook page. Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, we’re @Propelio, but Facebook we’re @PropelioApp. We’re highly active and we love to build our community. We love people to come out.
If somebody were to bring you or Daniel a favorite libation, what’s your favorite libation because you’re buying drinks for everybody else? What if someone wants to buy you a drink?
If I’m at an event, I like to get very Cherry Vodka Sour. It’s froufrou, but that’s me. I like a lot of syrup, a lot of cherries and a little bit of vodka and it works. Daniel, he’s not a big drinker. As far as liquor goes, I’m up for anything. I’m more of a coffee fan. If you showed up with a triple venti nonfat vanilla latte from Starbucks, I’d be super happy. If you showed up a bottle of whatever, I’d be super happy. I want people to have a good time. I just wanted to say thank you to you, We Close Notes, all your audience. If they didn’t know me before, hopefully, you know a little bit about me.
I am this goofy. I am this loud. If you haven’t heard of us before and you liked my personality, please like us on Facebook. Please give us a follow. Reach out to our community, to Marcus. He’s doing pretty good in this real estate game so far. If you’ve known as some of the people, going back to the community, and not to pat me on the back. We know these people because they watch the live streams. We engage with them, they engage with us. Your community, they’re more welcome to our community. We love to grow. Scott, thank you so much for having me on.
Thanks for being on here. Guys, go out and make something happen. Be consistent in your message. Be consistent in your actions and you’ll find a lot of success, not only in the short-term but also long run as well. We’ll see you all at the top.
Important Links
- Ryan Harper
- Traction
- Propelio
- Propelio Academy
- Rich Dad Poor Dad
- Facebook.com/PropelioApp
- Eventbrite
- DFW Real Estate Investor Meetup
- Meetup.com
- Ryan Harper on Instagram
- Ryan Harper on Facebook
- Ryan Harper on LinkedIn
- @RyanSHarper on LinkedIn
- Goldie Chan
- Propelio.com
- Propelio on Instagram
- Propelio on LinkedIn
- @Propelio on Twitter
About Ryan Harper
As President of the REI Expo, I was completely responsible for the success or failure of the events. My duties included but not limited to; Strategic planning, Authorize and maintain budget, Design and execution of marketing campaigns, Establishing and negotiating venue rental space at both hotels and convention centers, Design event floor plans, Coordinate with caterer to fulfill both event and F/B needs, Cultivate vendor and sponsorship relationships, Vendor and sponsorship sales, Program design and sales, A-La-Cart Sponsorship creation – sales and fulfillment, Attendee ticketing, Speaker scheduling, Web development, and Master of Ceremonies. The largest and most successful event was in January 2014 at the Gaylord Texan, in which we had over 125 vendors/sponsors, 50 speakers, and 1600 attendees. After the success of the Gaylord event the REI Expo was sold and became Think Realty (www.thinkrealty.com) Worked directly with CEO and Owners of company.