EP 429 – The 3 Fs – Finding Assets

Capitalizing on the market of note investors can be really stressful especially if you do not have a solid blueprint on hand to execute your plans. Note investing all starts with deals. To be able to make an investment, you should be strategizing on finding assets. In the first part of this three-part series, Scott breaks down the different ways to locate assets and talks about online sources, trackers, and the tools for getting in touch with your list.

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The 3 Fs – Finding Assets

For those that don’t know, we do have our Fast Track Training that includes people coming in plus a partner or a spouse and spending three days with me in Austin. Spend time and doing a Vulcan mind meld with them going through where they’re at, but also put a business in place. Let’s take a lot of time and help you customize what you can accomplish in your business. Everybody is a little bit different. We spend a big chunk of time going through a lot of different ways for people to capitalize on the market as note investors. What I thought I would do on this episode is give a brief overview of a couple of things. The three Fs of note investing as I like to say: Find, Fund and Flip. There are different people out there that have all the flow and the fixing. I’m a big believer that finding the asset is the first thing. The thing that unites all of us together is we’re looking for deals. You can’t raise capital or the second F, Funding, without having deals first. You can’t have an exit strategy without buying a deal. You’re going to look and make bids all day long with the first F, but if you don’t fund anything, you’re not going to have any flipping or the exit strategies that go along with that.

This is the first part of this three-part series. It’s all about finding nonperforming notes. I know I’ve got people all across the country reading this. Hopefully, they’ll ask some questions. I highly encourage you to drop me an email me at Scott@WeCloseNotes.com. If you’d like to pull out your smartphone, text the word NOTES to the phone number 72000. It will send you a video link so you can watch about 40 hours of video training skills and most of what we’ve done with our coaching stuff. It’s been a while since we deep dived into the three Fs on the show, so I thought I’d spend a little bit time with you talking about the first F because it all starts with deals. It all starts with finding assets. I’ve already had a couple of phone calls from a couple of students who are working on a trade. We’ve got an unscrupulous asset manager trying to pin people against each other. When you have a network of things, it doesn’t work easily to have that happen. You’re going to have people that are communicating back and forth and you find out, “I found some stuff out.” Let’s take it back a step. Let’s talk about the basics.

The Best Source Of Assets

If you’re looking for assets, the first place that you’re going to go, and I’m a big believer in this because we have done it, is straight from the banks. There are basic sources of most assets that you’ll find where you can find deals regularly. The banks are the first thing. Different real estate hedge funds and investment companies are the second ones that you’re going to find deals for the most part. Let’s talk about banks because that’s honestly where all of this begins. Do not let anybody tell you that you can’t buy directly from banks. There are people and educators that have been doing this for a while saying, “You can’t buy it directly from banks at all.” That’s not the case. You can buy direct from many banks. What we focus on here is buying institutional debt, not buying owner financed debt, not buying second liens. We’re only buying the institutional first liens. It’s an important thing to keep in mind. The institution doesn’t necessarily have to be a bank. It could be a lending company, a large company you’re originating loans with their private funds and it’s all off the secondary market. Those are a couple of things.

Things To Keep In Mind When Reaching For Banks

You could have a fund that’s bought a portfolio and carved it up. Kept some for you and looking to sell some stuff off. There are a variety of places. If you’re going to be reaching out to banks regularly, there are a couple of different things you want to keep in mind when you’re doing that. First off, you’re not going to call the local banker. You’re not going to go down to the local Chase or Bank of America. We have a lot of new readers across our network so it’s a big thing to keep in mind. You’re going to be reaching out primarily to regional banks that are lending in a couple of states that have a footprint of a couple of states. You’re not going to be reaching out to one-off branches or the banks that have less than five branches. The reason for that is they take a lot of extra time in underwriting their assets and underwriting their loans to begin with.

They’re going to take a lot of time to make sure it’s a pay for lending. They’re not going to be doing a lot of the subprime or even the all-day stuff you see. The bigger they get, the more they’ll do. That doesn’t mean you can’t find individual deals. I’ve had students like, “I know the local bank president. He always calls me up when he’s got something.” My approach is different than reaching out to your local bank or your one-off local branch. If you have that relationship, you play golf, you went to college together or whatever, that’s great. What I’m talking about is mass marketing for real estate investors, not the one-off branch. I don’t want to do this business from where I’m located. That’s a great relationship to have with one person, but it’s not a business sustaining relationship for a lot of people. You want to have multiple resources, multiple deal flow. That’s why we like to use a couple of online sources to help identify assets.

Online Sources To Help Identify Assets

The first and foremost one that we’re a big fan of is Distressedpro by Brecht Palombo. Distressedpro, the BankProspector, a phenomenal software that goes out and checks the FDIC. They’ve got quarterly reports of these banks they’re putting in, looks at the ratios and then identifies opportunities on banks that may be looking to sell or they build their reserves up to do the stuff off. Brecht does a great job with the software and a lot of stuff. We’d be able to use it for training. Brecht is a phenomenal guy and I’m proud to call him a buddy of mine. There is a cost to that. Let’s say there is a pothole. If you’re an over-analytical mind or you’re an engineer, a lot of people over analyze before they pull a trigger. It’s easy to do that with BankProspector because it gives you so much great information on specific banks. It’s also nice that it will also reach out and look at LinkedIn so they can’t track down somebody in special assets or secondary marketing departments for you to reach out to. That’s a great service to have. You have to realize that you keep diving down the rabbit’s hole on a specific asset. You may never call any banks.

I like using Distressedpro and BankProspector as my second favorite thing. A lot of people are using the first thing, which is great. My first favorite thing is using LaneGuide.com. They have great service and costs about $165 a year. Go to the website and get online access. You don’t need the CD. Online access attracts who’s bought who. Why would I buy something that attracts about what bank? A lot of times they give you the internal numbers to the special assets departments, the larger institutions and also the portfolio lenders. This also allows you to pull a list of banks that are lending in your state or banks that have offices in your state that you can reach out to. It’s got a different variety of search engines whether you’re looking for properties, residential, commercial or different lending types like we had Matt in here. He was like, “I want to buy an airplane.” I was like, “Jump on Lane Guide and let’s find banks in Florida that are financing aircraft loans.” He was like, “This is awesome.” It’s got some of that cool breakdown stuff. It’s relatively cheap. It also gives you a lot of other great interiors like pay off amount and second trust deeds.

If you’re looking for commercial notes, it’s a great way to look at as well too. I like to use it to build a list of emails, phone numbers and names and then I like to pull out my shotgun and blast the asset managers’ emails. It takes that list, sends an email blast out and I start looking at who is opening my emails. You can pull a list of roughly 700 to 800 names of your top five or ten states relatively quickly on Lane Guide. I liked to cross-reference that list with Distressedpro, especially when I send an email blast out to see who’s opened the email. Once you get someone who’s opened the email, then I’d like to take it to the second level like, “Let’s jump on Distressedpro and see who’s looking at what or see what the numbers are and the ratios as well.” I will jump over to LinkedIn with the asset manager’s name and information that I pulled from Lane Guide or even Distressedpro too and add a connection on LinkedIn.

Finding Assets: Do not let anybody tell you that you can’t buy directly from banks.

I add connections all the time. I reach out and try to find the person in charge, the vice president of secondary marketing, the vice president of special assets for that bank or that lending institution. I will also jump on LinkedIn to do a quick search for special assets or secondary marketing. I’ll look at thousands of people and I’ll start connecting with people. It’s great to add a little bit of a blip in there on what you’re looking for like, “Steve, I see that you’re the VP of Special Assets at East West Bank or whatever it is. I would love to talk to you and see if you’ve got anything on your books that I could take off your hands and buy from that portfolio.” It’s something simple. One of the things we have implemented that have worked a lot for us is including a short two-minute or less video. It’s a brief video introduction. It’s helpful because it adds a little bit more personality. It’s a little bit of a touch basis versus sending an invite and a quick message. The person gets to see who I am. They get to see WeCloseNotes.com. They see the logo behind me. They might entice in the links to click on my profile and then look and check out everything we have in our profile. That’s a nice thing to keep in mind too.

If you’re going to be contacting banks regularly, you need to make sure your LinkedIn profile is complete and up-to-date. If you’re working full-time at another job, that’s okay. Add a spot for your real estate stuff. Most of us that are buying houses or bought a house, that’s the biggest investment. I would put the date down that you’ve been a real estate investor since you’ve bought your first house. Some people will say, “That’s flipping.” For most people, it’s not. We’ve all got to start somewhere. You’ve got to realize that the asset manager who is many years in business had to have his day one as well. Utilizing LinkedIn is a great resource. It’s a free resource. You don’t need the paid version unless you want to and unless you want to start connecting with asset managers. Lane Guide for $165 a year roughly. There’s a discount if you use INVERSE as a discount code. Distressedpro is $700 to $1,000 a year. It’s a great training, great resource list and stuff like that too. You can go from the free to add in a little bit more focus and then be focused with that magnifying glass that BankProspector uses.

Who To Track When Finding Assets

Some of the other things that you want to keep in mind when finding assets are the places you can look at. I also like to track down the mortgage bankers. Why mortgage bankers? Why not mortgage brokers? Mortgage bankers often have a line of credit with larger lending institutions that are making loans off of. I’m a big believer and I’ve seen this in the past, not only in our company but other people I’ve worked for and people have learned along the way and had a good pleasure calling friends in the mortgage industry. If they have one asset, they have to take back. This has happened over the years. They make a loan and unfortunately the borrower goes in default the first month or the first six months or things like that. It’s a scratch and dent loan or it’s now a nonperforming loan for a variety of reasons. Either they’ve lost their job, the tax appraisal has come back and increased on a new bill so their taxes are a lot higher than they expected.

There are things you can keep in mind. I like to reach out to the mortgage bankers that have stuff on their warehouse lines that may be looking to get rid of. You can jump on the national mortgage the NMLS website. A lot of states use that to track your licensees. Here in Texas, we’re lucky that the Texas Department of Savings and Mortgage Lending will list in their front page for free. The top right-hand corner gives you an opportunity to click on a button to download the full list of licensees in the state of Texas. People licensed to do business in Texas. It doesn’t mean they’re all in Texas. A big chunk of them is outside of Texas that got a license with the State of Texas to lend here in the Lone Star State. It’s a pretty good list. You’re going to list for free. It’s going to have roughly a ton of connections on there. You’re going to have over 3,500 connections on there. You don’t need all those connections. Some are financial advisory firms or some are insurance companies or some are loan processors. You don’t need those.

What you need to keep on that list is deleted off, but keep your licensed mortgage brokers, licensed mortgage bankers and then also your licensed servicers department. Some people will say, “Scott, you said I don’t need mortgage brokers. Why are you keeping a big chunk on the list?” I keep that in that list and they get part of my marketing because often you’ll have people that are mortgage brokers, but they also have a different company. They’re dealing with a mortgage banker and going to be lending in other states. I keep that list in there that extra 1,000 plus people or whatever as part of that email database I’ve downloaded. When you download that list, it gives you the company name, their company address, phone number, fax number and also the email address of the principal or the person in charge of licensing for that institution and that company. That’s not the secondary marketing to managers and not the special assets marketing manager. At least you have a direct phone number and an email address you can reach out to say, “I’m trying to track down the person in charge of your special assets.” It’s a pretty good hit list.

If you get an email list, why won’t you send an email blast out to them? Let’s talk about this. We do a lot of this in our Virtual Workshops too. We will walk you through step-by-step in our Virtual Workshops. We do this with our Note Buying Blueprint training as well. How do you find these lists? It’s all about context. You don’t have to have a database of asset managers to be in this business, but when you get into it with our training and our coaches, here’s what we do. People sit there and tell you, “You’re not going to buy from banks.” You’re going to have some coaching. You’ve got to know what to say and what not to say. There’s a whole script aspect of what you’ve got to do and what you want to say and what you don’t want to say. When you’re talking directly to asset managers at banks, when you’ve got this list, the biggest benefit you can do is go ahead and schedule five to six months of emails. That may seem a lot of work like, “How long am I going to email them?” Once or twice a month. You log into your MailChimp account or into your Infusionsoft or whatever CRM tool you’re using so you can track who opened and who didn’t open and upload these lists.

If you’ve gotten on Lane Guide and you downloaded a thousand names, numbers and emails, that’s great. You might want to split that up a little bit. Maybe the Lane Guide taking your lists and split it up between two or three size list if you’ve got 1,000, 300 or 400 contacts into three different lists and sending the same email to all three of them. The reason you split the list up like this is if there is a larger number of bad emails or you get some unsubscribes, you’re not going to have your lists killed. Hopefully, you’ve been emailing out. You’ve got a CRM tool or email service provider that you’ve been using for a while. It seasoned it that they’re a little friendlier. If you upload a list, you can get a lot of slaps. If you’re starting a new MailChimp account and you send out these lists, MailChimp is not going to like you inputting a lot of big lists of stuff. They want you to upload some of your contacts and send some emails out back and forth.

This is why we tell people marketing is essential to be able to do this. You could start dialing for dollars, pull this list off at Lane Guide, pull this list off Texas Department of Savings and Mortgage Lending and dial for dollars. I don’t think that’s a bad idea. When I started over a decade ago, that’s what I was doing. I was dialing for hours every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday from 50 to 100 phone calls from 10:00 to 12:00 or 2:00 to 4:00 in the afternoons. I would do that two to three days a week. That’s what I had. I could pull a list and I dial for dollars. I can send an email out. I send one email, one phone call, one email. I went through my emails altogether, especially if I got people on the phone. I’m dialing for dollars. It’s a tedious chore, but if you know the rules and the ratios, you can use those ratios to help motivate you to be a better person.

Finding Assets: If you talk to somebody, keep a notepad next to you. If you’re dialing for dollars, talk to them.

Email, Phone Calls, And LinkedIn

Let’s talk about emails versus phone calls. The first thing you should be doing is if you pull this list together, you’ve got something you’ve been using to email out in your real estate marketing career already. Send an email out. I wouldn’t send an email on Monday and I would not send an email on Friday. I’d send an email on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday and pick a time. I like Tuesdays at 11:00 AM and then 48 hours later, I’ll send the same email to the list that didn’t open the first round of emails. Some people will say, “Scott, let’s not send the same email twice to the same people.” I’m like, “If you use a MailChimp or Infusionsoft account, you can see who did or did not open an email.” If they didn’t open it, you’re not hitting them the second time. They’re like, “I’ve got the same email twice.” You don’t send it to the same people that opened it. You send it to people that didn’t open it.

You click on the email and you send it 48 hours after the first time at least at a different timeframe. If you send it at 11:00 AM on Tuesday, you can go in on Thursday and send the same email. Replicate on either your MailChimp report or hit renew or go into your report and say, “I’m going to send this email to those that didn’t open it.” Send it out at 3:00 or 2:00 on a Thursday. It’s the opposite time. If you send it in the afternoon, send it in the morning. If you send it in the morning, send it in the afternoon, but give them 48 hours. If they don’t open the email for 48 hours, there were probably not going to see it because it’s going to either get buried in their stuff. You never want to send it from an email address that starts like, “Info or ContactUs.” I’ve had a few people reach out to me and say, “My email is Info@.” You need something that’s like Scott@WeCloseNotes.com. We have an Info@WeCloseNotes.com email, but we don’t use it. That’s the first sign when you send an email out and when you have spam filters and things like that.

These larger institutions are looking for stuff like that. It will go directly into their spam folder so it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help you at all to have Info@Whatever.com. Make it your first name and last name or something. Don’t put ContacUs@ or Support@. Those are the first identifiable emails that are spam so don’t use that. Send an email out on Tuesday and send an email out on Thursdays. If you send it out at 11:00 AM on Tuesday and you can go in the afternoon, you can see who’s opened your emails already. If you send it at 11:00, come back and start making dialing for dollars Tuesday afternoon from 2:00 to 5:00. Start calling the people that opened your email. You’re like, “Scott, isn’t that crazy? Are you serious or not?” How often do you get an email and suddenly follows with a phone call and you’re like, “This guy or gal is serious?” That’s the whole point. They’re serious about your business or you’re serious about your business. Henceforth, the asset manager is like, “They are serious.” This is what I like to do. If you can send an email and follow up with a phone call a couple of hours later, you can be running reports.

Hit one button in MailChimp to export your phone call list. Start dialing for dollars in that. If you make 50 phone calls, you’ll talk to a dozen to twenty people. It’s about somewhere between 20% and 4% success ratio of making phone calls. You’ll get ahold of several people that have stuff available and hopefully, they’ll send you a list. It’s all about dialing for dollars. With the numbers that we’re seeing with default rates being up across, banks are starting to look for people to buy. I guarantee you they’re starting to have those conversations as default rates are starting to inch up a little bit. They’re excited to have people go, “You’re a buyer. What are you looking for?” That’s the important thing to do. Know what you were looking for. If you send an email out to your database, you’re going to see the first-round batch somewhere between 16% and 20% or more open rate, which is good. Most real estate open rates are 17% to 18%. Send an email at 11:00. You’re making phone calls that day. Phone calls on Wednesday as well for morning and afternoons for those that have opened it.

There’s no way you’re going to knock out 500 phone calls in a 24 to 48-hour period. You’re going to knock out 100 phone calls a day. It’s the best that you can do. If you talk to somebody, keep a notepad there next to you. If you’re dialing for dollars, talk to them. Send them an email at the end of the day or the end of the call if you’re calling for two hours. In the last few minutes, send an email out to those that you talked to. Send a nice little touch like, “Steve, it’s great talking to you. Rosie, it was great talking to you. Stephanie, it was great talking to you. I appreciate you for forwarding me to the right person. I appreciate you. Here’s my personal contact information in case anything comes across your books.” I would jump on LinkedIn. Send them an invite to connect with them as well. It’s the same thing like, “It was great talking to you. I look forward to connecting with you.” If you touch them first with an email, you touch them secondly with a phone call or a voicemail and always leave a voicemail. Leave your phone number twice. Some people are like, “I called them and it won’t leave a voice message.” Why not? You wasted your time. They don’t know that you’d call them. Always leave an impression because 80% of sales come after the fifth contact.

Most of you aren’t even getting to the second or third touch point before you give up. Send an email, phone call, follow up, maybe a personal email with the people you talked to and then a LinkedIn connection. Connect on there. That’s four touches within your first 72 hours. Are you going to be able to do this for your whole list? No, because not your whole list is going to open it. In all the years that we’ve been doing this is there has been a little crossover. There are a few people that are buying from the same sources or same contact another day. It happens but it’s a lot less than a wholesale dealer or a distressed postcard list that people send out postcards or the pre-foreclosure list. It’s not like it is. The beautiful thing at finding a deal is, you’re going to get some deals. That whole idea with this is if you do this heavily for a little while, you will eventually have enough sources that are sending you stuff regularly. You don’t have to go out prospecting it heavily. You don’t have to put so much work into it. If you do this for a couple of months or for 90 to 120 days, you’ll have enough connections and enough contacts that you’ll start having a hot list. That’s the thing I want to get to.

I’ve talked to people that are like, “I narrowed the list down to 100. I’m only going to contact 100 banks in my local market.” I’m like, “You can’t do that because that’s only 100. There are thousands of lending institutions that are lending in your area besides the people that are in your neck of the woods. You’re like, “I know those 100 people good.” I’m like, “That’s great, but if they’re not sending us stuff regularly, expand it out.” That’s the whole point. We can send an email blast out to our database. We’ve been doing this for a while and people send us lists. My friend wants to get an email like, “Can you please quit stalking me?” I’ll even send an email out every once in a while like, “You’re the right person I need to stalk to track down.” It’s funny because a lot of people are like, “You need to call this person.” In my emails, I ask, “If you’re not the right person, can you please direct me to the right department for this email and copy me on that as well?” Try to help them get stuff off their books. It’s funny that way, but that’s the truth.

Who do I need to stalk to get on your buyer’s list? People will crack up about that a little bit. I have people contact me regularly like, “I’ve seen your emails. I finally have something I can send to you.” That’s the thing. That’s why I was like, “It doesn’t hurt to follow up with it as well.” Let’s take this back a little bit. Send your first email on Tuesday at 11:00, second email on 2:00 PM or 3:00 PM on a Thursday. I send them one final email that falls on Tuesday to the third list of those that still have yet to open my email. I get somewhere in between 12% and 20% open rate the first time. I get somewhere between 6% and 10% on that second email of open rates. The third email is going to be somewhere between 2% and 5%. That should roughly give you somewhere between 20% and 30% open rates of people who have opened your email. That’s a hot list.

Finding Assets: The beautiful thing about finding a deal is you’re going to get some deals.

Those that have opened my email, I’ll save those in a separate content list of asset manager opens. Those that haven’t opened, then I’ll do the same thing every month for those that haven’t opened like, “What do you have on your books?” Trying to touch base and you’ll squeeze another 5% over time. Some people are off and they do not see it and it’s okay. Those that are clicking on your emails, those who’ve opened your emails, those are the ones you’re going to spend the next couple of weeks dialing for dollars and banging their phones. You’re going to have the best amount of luck with this because if they’ve opened it, they’re going to get the extra touch. The second month, it’s the same thing. You’re sending an email out to your asset managers that opened or your asset managers that haven’t opened. A lot of people still send an email out to the whole list, which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with that too. There’s nothing wrong with that as well. With a lot of those that have opened the email the first time around, you may be able to put some little more like, “Last month I reached out to you and told you I was focused on this.”

You have two lists, the opened and unopened. The unopened are not going to be a high hit rate. You’re going to want to pull it out of your email database. If you have 5,000 or 6,000 asset managers and you narrow that down to 1,000 or 2,000 people, that’s still a ton of contacts, especially if you’re reaching out to them and then you’re connecting on LinkedIn. Not everybody has got a LinkedIn profile, not everybody is going to answer, and you’re going to leave a lot of voice messages. This is what the 1% is doing. Most people that want to get into real estate do the bare minimum like, “What’s the bare minimum I’ve got to do?” I’m like, “You shouldn’t ask. That’s the wrong question.” It’s not what’s the bare minimum, it’s what’s the max I can do to set myself apart? That’s what’s helped us set ourselves apart with WCN and me becoming The Note Guy across the country in the last decade plus. It’s our dog determination following up. I’ve got several months of emails already prewritten that I spent a couple of hours to go through it and write the emails.

I’m like, “This is going out in January. What’s going on in January? Happy New Year. What’s going on in February? It’s Valentine’s Day. What’s going on in March? Spring break.” Hopefully, we have a St. Patrick’s Day. At April, we have Easter or April Fools. It’s a good one to follow up with the first year like, “Don’t be an April Fools and get stuff off your pool.” At May, we have a Memorial Day weekend at the end of the month. Kids get out of school. At June, what do we have going on in June? What I’m trying to get at is there is a holiday every month that you can dive into. You’ve got 4th of July, you got going back to school August, you got Patriots’ Day, September 11th, Labor Day, October is Halloween, November is Thanksgiving and December is Christmas. If you base your marketing off the holidays, that’s something more than what most people are doing. If you sat and rewrote an email, that is twelve touches. That’s over a dozen touches with people if you’re doing what I tell you to do with reaching out and contacting people.

Why would you want to send a LinkedIn connection to an asset manager? One of the things is to see some stuff. You want him to because that’s the beautiful thing about LinkedIn. If you have the free version, you can see who some people click on, whether they look at your profile. If you decide to upgrade for the premium version, you can see everybody that looked at your profile. You can see everybody who’s clicked on and looked at things. You’ll see people that you’re connected to that are special asset managers, secondary marketing managers. Why would you not want to reach back out to them? We’ve covered a lot already on this episode. Finding is the most critical key to this business. Some people will sit here and argue with me and say, “I’m not going to start contacting and ask managers to start to raise capital.” Your funding sources want to see something solid. They want to see that you have something of substance. The theory is great, but it all comes down to finding deals and good deals will find capital if you know how to market.

Where To Upload Your Email List

This whole aspect of reaching out emails, phone calls, post on LinkedIn or connect on LinkedIn and stuff like that. That’s marketing 101. It still works. The nice thing you could do a little more advanced is you take your list of asset managers, mortgage brokers, mortgage bankers as you start building a bigger database and people are reaching. You may want to upload that list to Facebook and create a custom audience and see if they’re on Facebook. I have looked at our database. If you take the email list or the phone number list and uploading that into Facebook as a custom audience, Facebook will look at that email and see if they’re out there with a Facebook profile that has attached to it. If that is, now it will tell you, “You’ve got to discuss them on as you upload 6,000 people but only 2,400 on there.” You can market to those 2,400. How do you do that? That’s where learning marketing helps in a tremendously advantageous thing because not only will Facebook allow you to post photos or market videos to those people.

You can also do a lookalike audience like 1% within 1% of that. That’s a smart thing to do. That will help you find another two million people across the country that have the same type of features that you can market to. You never know where you’ll find other deals that way too. Another thing you can also do is taking that list of emails and you can go into LinkedIn and upload that list into LinkedIn and they’ll go out and see if they can’t find those people on LinkedIn for you. That’s a smart thing to do. You’re doing a one-off look taking the list and uploading it. I blew somebody’s mind. Somewhere somebody went, “That’s brilliant.” Taking that list and connecting with people or connecting with asset managers and going from there. That’s the thing that’s valuable to go out and connect with people. LinkedIn is a staple in what we’re doing. It’s the professional Facebook. You need to be posting things on there regularly whether it’s an interesting article, maybe you’re using DSNews or HousingWire.com or ATTOM Data Solutions or CoreLogic.

Those are three to four different places that you can find great articles to share on not just your Facebook, but I’d be sharing those on LinkedIn. What you want are asset managers. You want people who are potential funding sources. If they’re going to send you deals, they look on LinkedIn for you. You want to make sure that they see like, “He does have something. She does have something. They are posting regularly.” If you’ve got a new profile, don’t worry about some of your connections. You’ll build those connections if you worked through and connect your email accounts and things like that. That’s an easy thing to do, but you have to show proof that you know what you’re talking about. Even if it’s sharing an RSS feed, that still looks more valuable than what 99% of people aren’t doing anything. If you want to share little videos or little things on assets and things like that, that’s a powerful tool on LinkedIn as well.

One of the things we like to do is share our podcast episodes and the little blogs here in my office creates off of what Podetize does for us. It’s our podcasting production company that does most of the heavy lifting for the podcast for us. They take it and then repurpose it. That’s one of the things too. It’s always the biggest surprise when people come into Austin for our Fast Track Training. It’s like, “I wish that your office is a lot bigger.” We’re streamlined. We do a lot of stuff online. We’ve got smart people that work remotely for us. We can take one piece of content and it gets uploaded to audio and it goes out there and works our magic in the iTunes and social media aspect of things like Stitcher and Spotify and all those. It goes across the airwaves with our sixteen AM/FM radio channels across the country from Tampa to LA. When that’s done, we take that audio and the video and transcribe it. We run the video on YouTube and Vimeo and Facebook Live. It’s taking that blog and creating little blogs off of it and then sharing those blogs to LinkedIn.

Finding Assets: You don’t have to make note investing a full 40 hours a week or 50 hours a week thing as some people do. You can leverage yourself.

A lot of people click on our LinkedIn articles. We see a lot of asset managers clicking on our profile and reading what we’re sharing about. At least phone calls and emails or direct messages from people that may have something available we’re willing to take a look at for. It’s a valuable tool in helping us find assets. You can go to LinkedIn and type in special assets or secondary marketing manager. Look for people who give a whole list of people you can connect with them and send them an invite. I’ve done that for years. If you have a full-time gig and you’re working and you’ve only got the weekends or the evenings and it’s hard to make phone calls, I would jump on LinkedIn and send them direct messages like that. It’s a great thing that you can do at the weekend or evening activities. Send in messages. You can pre-write your emails to go out. If you’re working a full-time job and you’re having a harder time making phone calls, that’s okay. Leverage the time that you have and spend an hour on the weekend or an hour at night getting the word out to what you’re doing.

Share what you’re doing. Maybe do a video or two to help you with finding assets. Talk about deals you’re looking for. That becomes a valuable short video that you could upload to YouTube and share that link. Turn it into the private link and share it to the asset managers that you email out to or the asset managers that you reach out to on LinkedIn. The whole point here is I want you to think smart. Part of the reason you upload lists and part of the reason you send an email out is you do one activity to hit a massive amount of people, which then turns leads into the one-on-one conversation. The days of old where you’re going to make one phone call at first to talk to one person before you send an email is not smart. It’s the old way of doing business. You don’t want to do that. You want to make sure you’re making some money and working smartly and making sure your ideas and things you’re doing are kicking butt and taking names and you could maximize your time.

You don’t have to make note investing a full 40-hour a week or 50-hour a week thing as some people do. You can leverage yourself and we were lucky and fortunate to have a lot of our students that are still working full-time. They’re doing this, but they’re also maximizing time once they do become full-time to do what they want to do. Maybe they’re only making phone calls for the first month because they make enough relationships along the way or they do it once or twice a month to doing that. In 2018, we were wrapping up our Banking Blitzkrieg where we had 25 people who came in and started dialing for dollars. I would give them lists off of Lane Guide. I would give those lists off of the Texas Department of Savings and Mortgage Lending. We then provide their call logs back to us. We can bind them together. It’s a powerful tool that they went through and completed it to four weeks. They got that list. Those that flaked off didn’t get anything. Those that got the list have hopefully been using it to make some things happen. I am planning a few my emails into that Banking Blitzkrieg list to see those are going to use it if they were using it.

Some people use it, but it’s a small marginal aspect of people using it regularly. It’s such a valuable tool. We use it regularly and that’s part of the reason we see different deals from different people in different parts of the country regularly. Finding deals is not as difficult as you would make it to be. People will say, “You need $5 million to get started. Bankers won’t talk to you because you’re brand new.” That is not the case. This kid was dialing for dollars at 30 years old and knocked out 50 phone calls a day in two hours. Don’t get discouraged. Please don’t be one of these people like, “I called banks and nobody wants to talk to me.” I’m like, “When did you call them? If you called them late in the evening or you call them on a Friday, please don’t call them on Monday or Friday. Monday is the busiest and at Friday, they’re probably gone half of the time or they’re trying to get ready for reports.” The only time I would call outside of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, either 10:00 to 12:00 or 2:00 to 5:00. I would call Thursday nights, maybe the third Thursday of the month at 5:00 their time.

Often, they might be staying around the office a little later to work on their quarterly reports or the monthly reports and send it to the board or whatever. Maybe they’re the gatekeeper or their assistant may be gone for the evening at 5:00. You’ve caught them when the phone rings. You pick up, get on the phone with them briefly and go from there. This is not a difficult business. It’s doing a lot of the same thing over and over again, but it’s cheaper. The only thing that I’ve talked about so far that will cost you anything would be Lane Guide for $165 a year and if you ended up buying Distressedpro, that’s going to be a little bit bigger investment. Even if you don’t have that money for that, you can download and use Lane Guide or jump on LinkedIn and start pulling those connections. Jump on the Texas Department of Savings and Mortgage Lending website. Go to FDIC.gov, website yourself and start looking at core reports you want to dive into. That’s a little bit more complicated. If you do not have anything else to do, those are some easy activities that you can do to help maximize your time to get it. Pull off that shotgun and shotgun them all with an email blast and then start following up with phone calls to those who are opening your email and you’d be surprised.

Doing it consistently is the biggest thing you have to realize. It’s taking you five to ten weeks of consistent activity and you’ll be set up for the rest of the twelve months. You won’t be fighting with other investors for low-hanging fruit. You won’t have to go and try to track down people that are overbidding and overpaying or hedge fund guys putting bidders against bidders. Shenanigans are going on in the industry. You’ve got to make sure that you’re dealing directly. The most valuable tools that you can have is to make that stuff happen and move on to the next one. Not every asset manager is going to have 1,000 assets for you to take a look at, but if they have one, two, three every month and you’re the only person they’re sending lists to, that’s a nice place to be. That’s a great way to find deals direct from banks. The banks that have these assets are going to be cleaner paper. It’s going to be cleaner assets versus dealing with stuff that’s been sold and sat around for a while.

I encourage you all to go out and take that type of action, to go out and reach out to banks directly. You hold your success in your own hands and nobody else does this. Within the note business, it all comes down to finding assets. If you want to be like the majority of the investors out there that are waiting for the low-hanging fruit and then complain about why they don’t find anything, that’s fine. You can be that. You should do something else though. There’s still a ton of distressed debt out there. There’s still a ton of things that are available out there and we didn’t even get into the whole new subprime niches and things like that. You can jump on Scotsman Guide and take a look at it. We didn’t get into pulling up default rates or going to be the assessor’s websites of the county clerk and see assignments of mortgages that have been filed in different counties and see who’s buying and selling mortgages.

There are whole other advanced tactics that we do as well to help us find buyers and help us find sellers of assets as well. I wish you all good luck. It all starts with the first F and find is not a bad four-letter word. It’s a good four-letter word and you’ll be dancing if you’re reaching out and you start seeing feedback happen. Sometimes people send emails out and they get immediate contact back. Other times, it takes building a little bit of this. Do yourself a favor. Don’t overthink it. KISS: Keep It Simple Silly. Pull your list, email, follow up with a phone call or LinkedIn. Those are three basic staples that will usually help you find more deals than your competition. Go out and make something happen. That’s the first F. With that, we’ll see all at the top.

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