EP 490 – Cracking The REI Vault with Gary Boomershine

NCS 490 | Cracking The REI Vault

NCS 490 | Cracking The REI Vault

 

Cracking the REI vault in real estate can be fun and challenging because you can meet new people and learn from them at the same time. Scott Carson talks with Gary Boomershine from REIvault about what is working and not working with successful real estate investors across the country. Gathering from his own experiences along his entrepreneurial journey, Gary shares a tremendous amount of tools and books for all real estate and note investors to use in their businesses. Marketing works if you know how to maneuver your tools. In this episode, learn how to do old school cold calling and direct mails that could turn at least 20 to 45 leads into a deal.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Cracking The REI Vault with Gary Boomershine

We have a friend of mine who’s going to drop a ton of knowledge and nuggets with you. It’s our good friend, Gary Boomershine, joining us. Gary, it’s good to know that because usually we’re passing each other on the road most of the time or being in a mastermind.

Scott, I love the opportunity to be on your show and also being able to share some value to your loyal group of audience. I love this business and I love being able to possibly shorten somebody’s timeframe because you learn from making mistakes. I’ve made so many. I heard this term called OG, which is the Original Gangsters. If you’ve been around longer than the market turn, a lot of people have not seen the turn of a market. I started full-time in 2004 and I got this Original Gangster term.

That’s what we call the stuff on the side of our ears.

I cut my hair and my wife laughs. As soon as I start seeing the gray, I turned 50, so I started shaving it. She’s like, “It’s getting more and more. You can’t hide from it.”

It’s seasoning, it’s experience. It’s the deals that have gone wrong to give us the gray hair.

This is a great market. It’s definitely a different market than it was, but there are huge amounts of money to be made when done right. Also, in the downturn. When we see the market turn, there are huge shifts of wealth and I think all of us should be paying attention to that because it’s common. At some point, real estate has been a seven to eight-year cycle for over 100 years. We were in the euphoric stage when you got the barber, you’ve got the hairdresser and the nail salon gal or guy talking about real estate and you know that you’re in the back end-stage.

I could learn watching The Big Short and Steve Carell’s character in there in the strip club talking to the stripper with three or four homes. It’s a steel pole salary as we’d like to say. For those who don’t know who Gary Boomershine is, why don’t you talk about what you’ve done and what’s evolved? You’re great friends with our friend, George Antone, who we’ve had on here a couple of times. He’s a great guy. We were joking that you broke bread at Noteworthy in Vegas at the Tropicana, and then also at The Collective Genius Mastermind that Jason Medley runs. We’ve been members of that. Talk about your journey as an investor since 2004.

I grew up in an entrepreneurial family. My parents had a real estate brokerage. I live outside of San Francisco. I’m about 45 minutes from San Francisco Airport in an area called Danville. It’s where properties tear down in my neighborhood went for $1.3 million. It’s total insanity here. All of us kids were indoctrinated in the business. I had a real estate license when I turned eighteen. In 1987 all the way through 2005, I ended up getting rid of my license after I went full-time as an investor. My attorney said, “You’re not taking on listings. With the volume of deals you’re doing, you’re going to be held to a higher standard in California.”

What’s interesting is because of California, Silicon Valley, I ended up getting a Computer Engineering degree from UC Davis. I didn’t think I was going to go down the real estate route. I was going to be like one of those Silicon Valley dot-com-ers, which I lived all the way through it. I got recruited out of college to the largest technology consulting firm in the world. A management and technology consulting firm called Accenture. It used to be Arthur Andersen. I did that for a few years. It was a great experience, but it was 90-hour work weeks and being inside of buildings and never seeing the light of day, but I learned a massive amount. I decided it was time to go and change a little bit.

I became an enterprise sales guy selling high-ticket $500,000 to $5 million software. I did that and found my love for sales. A lot of people in the real estate niche know me as the “Marketing Guy” but it’s a sales background. My marketing experience was focused on how can I do the highest moneymaking activity in the business, which is making offers and closing deals. In order to do that, you’ve got to have a constant flow of leads. I started a direct mail company, an engine to get me in front of sellers and then that’s taken off. I’ve got a business called RealEstateInvestor.com. Most people know us as our flagship product called REIvault. I came up with that idea when I was at Collective Genius.

We’re the largest marketer in the real estate niche for agents and investors. We’ve done over 36 million pieces of direct mail. We’ve tracked every response rate and have every metric in terms of what’s working and in what market. We’ve also done over a million outbound seller cold calls because I offer a service. It’s an agency model that does marketing and sales for real estate agents around the country. We’ve got some of the largest people in our niche using our service. I got off the phone with a guy in Tampa. They’re in eight markets. They’ve been spending $74,000 a month on marketing and we’re in the process of onboarding them.

One of the things I can share maybe for any investor, I call them real estate business operators, anybody that’s wholesaling, fix and flip, what’s working. There’s a lot of pressure specifically going after off-market deals, going direct to the seller, not on the MLS. Everybody is catching on and everybody’s doing direct mail. Everybody’s doing cold-calling, so it does it still work. A lot of people are saying it’s dead. There’s pressure, but you got to have your processes tight specifically around sales and follow up. I can talk about that and what’s working. I will tell you, just backing up, given your audience of note buyers and lenders. My favorite passion is private lending. What I do more in this business because it’s so ridiculously easy is I love being the bank. I love lending. I’m funding a lot of deals, mostly California, but very specific types of product. I’m doing the first position, super low loan to value.

I funded an $800,000 deal right by Facebook. A father and son bought a house. They put $1 million down. Imagine I funded $800,000 loan, getting 9.5% interest and I don’t care. There could be the biggest earthquake and downturn. I also do flipping, I do wholesale in a couple of markets because it’s so easy to do if you can drive deal flow and I do some creative deals. Every once in a while, a seller loves to carry back, they like a higher price and they don’t want to pay the immediate capital gains, so I’ll get a long-term zero interest or low-interest loan that’s free money. That’s my backstory. I’m not a high-volume guy on the real estate side though. There are a lot of people that do hundreds of deals a year. I don’t need to. One of the things is I think it’s easy in this business. You and I, we’re talking about this, it’s so easy to get stuck and be a workaholic in this business and turn it into a terrible job. Lifestyle and time off, that’s an important thing for me.

NCS 490 | Cracking The REI Vault

Cracking The REI Vault: It’s so easy to get stuck and be a workaholic in the real estate business and turn it into a terrible job.

 

I finally cracked the code. It’s easy to be an entrepreneur and then all of a sudden, you’re making money, but work-life balance gets totally out of sync. If anybody wants to see my story, follow me on Instagram. I have my morning minute. I have what I call 5:10:3. That’s wake up at 5:00 in the morning. Push your day out and not start working until 10:00, and then do three hours of work as a CEO. You can work more, but what are the most important things to move the marker in your business? I come to my whiteboard every day. It’s always clear in those five hours I work out, hang out with the family and do the dishes and some of the other stuff to make the family happy. I write my one thing on the board. What’s the one thing that I’m going to do? It’s usually a relationship. It is maybe calling an investor to raise some more money or meet them for lunch. That’s changed my trajectory big time.

I love that, Gary, because it’s completely 180 degrees from what used to happen. I think we all struggle with that. If we’re good at this business and we get excited about the education and teaching and getting out and putting in the real road warrior stuff to reach our audience. I was talking to an attorney, a friend of mine. As we get older, we want to focus on those sweet spots. We obviously want to keep a happy wife, happy life. Keep the people in our family happy and plugged into that because it’s easy to get away from that being a road warrior. Finding those niches and finding the ideal things that we enjoy doing that we’re good at. I’ve found that a lot of times less is actually more to what we’re doing.

There are probably a lot of people that follow you that they are a true real estate investor and it’s very passive. I want to go on that. I was at Warren Buffett’s Shareholder Meeting. There were 35,000 other people there, so it wasn’t like I’m one of our cool groups of people. I was in the nosebleed seats with some good friends of mine who are the top team for Berkshire Hathaway. Warren was sitting there and he said, “A true real estate investor is somebody that has money and they buy a property or a building and then they hold it for the long haul.” They take all the benefits of real estate. They’re taking the passive income. They are getting appreciation, they’re getting depreciation. They’re getting all the tax benefits and paying down the note using somebody else’s money. Somebody that’s fixing and flipping or a wholesaler, a rehabber, it’s onetime quick money. It’s a job. It’s a business. You’re a real estate business operator, which is great. I do that but you need to recognize it because every business needs a CEO. If you’re a CEO and you’re doing $10 an hour work, you’re going to have a $10 bank account. I think that’s so important because the money comes. A lot of us do the wrong stuff. We’re super cheap but you’ve got to run it like a business.

You need to know what is the value of your time and you need to understand the value of leverage and leverage is not just money. It’s also leveraging people. Most businesses, if not every business in America, the profitable ones leverage other people’s time, other people’s experiences, other people’s resources and nurturing that team. It wasn’t until I cracked the code on it that I got freedom. Hopefully, that resonates to a lot of us because I did not crack the code. It actually took some heavy hitter CEO coaches for me to beat me over the head. Any of you are out there and you’re struggling with a workaholic, not having the type of bank account that you should. I would say get a good CEO coach, like Scott Carlson. I’ve four different coaches and including a personal trainer. I was out and he’s holding me accountable and saying, “How did you do on the IPAs? The beer?” I’m like, “I didn’t do so well.”

I think every successful person out there has coaches, whether it’s in your fitness, it’s in your business, it’s in relationships. I think it’s one of the most powerful, impactful things that had helped me grow and has helped you grow tremendously because we’re part of different groups like that. It’s the ability to be honest with yourself and share that with somebody who is either been down the path that where you’re at or is in a place where you want to get to. The most successful people are sometimes the most open and willing to share because they don’t want to see you make the same mistakes. If they’re true God-given and willing to share their time and help you overcome something. If they’re a true coach, they want you to overcome those hurdles. You got to be able to reach out to somebody because we only know what we know. A lot of times, it becomes a job. It becomes a workaholic, which is not what everybody wants to be. You’re banging your head doing what you only know. You need somebody to grab you by the collar, reach back, help you see the forest and maybe see a different way of doing your business to help leverage people and resources to find an easier way to skin that cat.

There’s not a professional athlete or a professional musician or even heavy hitter CEOs. Google is a perfect example that doesn’t have a coach. Somebody that’s holding them accountable. It’s a proven model. It’s also why most companies have a board of directors, the accountability component. There’s a great video. The former CEO of Google was Eric Schmidt. He ran Novell. He ran a multibillion-dollar company and there’s a great video on Eric Schmidt and Google regarding coaching. He runs ABC, which is their bigger company behind Google. When he was early on and brought into Google, he was recommended to get a coach, the coach for Silicon Valley. He passed away. His name was Bill Campbell. Eric said, “Why would I need a coach? I’ve run some of the multibillion-dollar company.”

Eric said that was the best decision. Google wouldn’t be what it was because a coach is somebody that holds you accountable and also knows you better than you know yourself. There are a lot of stocks for us right through life and the journey that we’re all on. That’s been a game-changer for me. My coach is a guy by the name of Willie Hooks, a retired guy. He was a heavy hitter in Silicon Valley. We call him Yoda. Also, I’m a huge Traction fan, especially real estate investors. The business operators, if you’re running a business and you feel like you don’t have the team that is accountable and not giving you the freedom and your business isn’t growing, this is an awesome book.

Gino Wickman, I’m trying to get him on my podcast, but Traction is another life-changer for me. We’re a big traction company. That’s the other thing. We’ve implemented the traction model. What it did for me for the first time ever was I took a six-week Sabbatical from my businesses. I completely checked out. Me, my wife and the kids got back from Europe. We did three weeks in Europe and all I did over there was I recorded some videos while I was on the beach. I took almost the entire month off. The reason we implemented traction. I’ve got an integrator that runs my businesses. That’s been an improvement.

I think Traction is one of the best books. It’s a top ten must-read as entrepreneurs out there who are putting teams together and trying to bring things together versus trying to do it all themselves or they’re not finding the right people in the right place. One of the big things is identifying those core things that make you successful and focusing on those traction. One of the things that we do a lot of, and that’s one of the things I wanted to get into here with you, is we talk a lot about marketing. I think this whole business is all about sales, but it’s all about marketing. Finding seller leads with us, it’s finding bank leads or finding note leads or finding investors to fund your deals. It all comes down to doing those things well and also tweaking your message so that you’re finding the right ratio and right form of what works. I’d love for you to share what you see working out there with a lot of the direct mail pieces and a lot of the other stuff that you’re doing. The call centers and stuff like that because I think that’s some valuable tools for some of those investors that are reading can either take advantage of or learn from Gary’s experience. Because if you guys are doing so much for so many people, you know what’s working and what’s not working out there.

I’ll start on peeling the big onion picture. Marketing and sales go hand-in-hand. You could have the best marketing in the world. If you don’t actually manage and work the leads properly, you’re never closing and making money. I think of it as epoxy glue. I shared this on stage. I literally have the picture of epoxy glue. Most of us, especially in the real estate side know epoxy. You’ve got two types of glue but by themselves, they do nothing. They have to have a bonding agent. When you mix them together, it becomes strong. It’s just like traffic and conversion. If you’re doing online marketing, you’ve got to generate the traffic, then you’ve got to convert the traffic and it’s similar to marketing and sales. This is market, especially finding deal flow. I’m going to talk specifically around single-family, but it also works for land. Going after apartments, direct mail is not what I would consider the best source. It’s interesting why. That’s because the property manager who’s the gatekeeper throws all the marketing away because they’ll lose their job. There’s a funnel. When I say a funnel, it’s basically marketing and sales funnel. It’s on our website. You can go out to REIVault.com. This is going after sellers. It’s like what is the formula to get sellers to call you right or go to your website and then go through the process.

We were at Collective Genius and Kent Clothier and Sean Terry were sitting there at a table. Sean Terry is one of the best trainers around real estate investing. The guy is awesome in terms of wholesaling. He drew this on a napkin and I just took the napkin and I got my graphics guy and drew it up. Marketing and sales, it’s an art and science. The science part is a numbers game. I say that because you’re going to spend a certain amount of money on marketing and that’s going to generate a certain number of leads. Those leads, there’s going to be a bunch of them because you’re going to get the good, the bad and the ugly, and then you’ve got to get on the phone and work them.

Most of the magic is going actually to be in follow-up. Only 3% of deals come off of the first interaction with a seller. 3% is a national average. That’s no different in real estate as it is in a car dealership, insurance or anything else, so you’re nurturing them. Typically, what I’m finding is somewhere between 20 and 45 leads result in a deal. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing direct mail, Facebook. If you’re generating seller leads off of Facebook, it’s the same thing. Cold-calling leads, the same thing. If you’re generating a warm lead, they still have to be nurtured. There are multiple components of getting marketing to work and some of this stuff is $10 an hour work. Some are $100 an hour work. Some are $1,000 an hour work.

NCS 490 | Cracking The REI Vault

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business

To find off-market deals, there are three best ways that most of the big guys that have seven and eight-figure businesses are doing. There’s direct mail, cold-calling, believe it or not, old school cold-calling off of a list of names and phone numbers, and then RVM, which is Ringless Voicemail, bypassing the phone and going right to their voicemail. The reason those three are the best, there are 100 other ways to do it. There’s door-knocking and there are bandit signs and there are posted notes and all kinds of stuff. There’s dialing for dollars, driving for dollars. Those three are proven. It’s repeatable, scalable and you can get a measurable ROI, which means you spend $1, you make $5. You spend $1, you make $10. Most of these business operators don’t get it because it’s all around an ROI on your spend.

You need to know what is the cost per deal, “How much do I have to spend to get the deal and how much am I going to make on the deal and what’s the ROI?” Let’s say you make your wholesaler. I talked to a guy in Dallas. I coach him and I help him on some of his deals. He spent $17,000 on marketing in Dallas. He had closed and made $159,000. His average profit per deal was $17,000. That’s almost a 900% ROI when I know most people in that market are probably doing spend $1 and make $3. This is why a lot of people all about like, “How do I get a better mailing list?” They’re chasing rainbows. There is no better mailing list. There are our lists, there’s Chris Richter’s list. If you don’t have one of those, then get SMART, which is Kent Clothier’s list, find motivated sellers, vacant and mail it. They’re trying to get the perfect postcard and there is no perfect postcard. There’s stuff that does better and gets a better response.

In most markets, you’re going to probably spend an average of $2,000 to $2,500, maybe $3,000 in marketing to get enough leads to close a deal. We’ve got a guy in Indianapolis. He did $2.3 million in wholesale flips, a super sharp guy. $1.3 million off of our direct mail alone that his average cost per deal was $622. He’s $622 to make a $15,000 profit. I think they did 105 deals off of direct mail, so it’s a numbers game. The first thing you have to do is you’ve got to get the list and then you have to have the right copy of what are the right words to that list. You’ve got to find the fulfillment house that’s going to do it consistently every single week.

You’ve got to have the system, the mousetrap, which is typically CRM. It could be InvestorFuse, Podio. My favorite tool out there besides Podio is InvestorPO, Robert Syfert. I think that’s the best CRM out there in this market. The mousetrap where the leads come in and then there’s a follow-up, working the leads, text messaging. There’s the phone system and then you have to have somebody that answers the call live. You could put them into a prerecorded message, but you got to have the right system to do that. Somebody is answering the phone calls and then you need a text message and follow-up. That’s huge. A lot of the leads that will come in are not ready. I’ll give you an example. About 20% of most leads are going to be sellers saying they’re not interested. Those leads are an absolute gold mine. They are some of our best leads, but they take a few months before you can start working them again. 99% of real estate investors skip those, they never touch them again. What REIvault does is we take all the minutiae of all this stuff that you’ve got to do and for less than $10 an hour, you’re hiring us for one resource. It’s the equivalent of a team of 40 for the cost of one resource. We’ll do all of that, plus we’ll also do all the phone talking. All the screening, calling the seller, asking them about bedrooms and bathrooms and converting those into an appointment. At the end of the day, you as a real estate business owner or your team can get in front of sellers that are screened and ready to go versus having to do all the other work.

Most people are cheap. They don’t want to hire somebody. As I always tell people, if you want to go from zero to six figures, the first thing you need to do is hire an assistant first and foremost. Somebody’s going to do those low-dollar prices. You guys provide that for people to get rock and rolling and do stuff. You guys aren’t looking for somebody who’s brand new in the business or who’s straight out of a class or a workshop.

REIvault, not everybody for sure is a candidate. In fact, most people probably aren’t. It’s for people that actually are making money already. They have experience. They don’t have to have a ton of experience. Most of our people do, but they’re ready to scale. They’re looking for scale and value marketing and leveraging other people. They’ll apply to become a member. We’ll go through a fit assessment together. There’s no sales cycle at all. It’s like, “We’re going to make sure that we’re a fit for you but also likewise, we want to make sure you’re a good fit for us.” There’s no follow-up of like, “We’re going to hammer you over the head.” We want to make sure it’s a good fit because it’s about a long-term relationship. There are a lot of people that come to us and we send them away and say, “You’re just not ready yet.” If they’re not ready, it’s like, “Here’s where you should go for training. If you need more training, go here. This is who we recommend. This is the recommendation.”

Number two, if you need a good mailing list to do on your own, go sign up with Kent Clothier. He has a system called SMART and you can sign up. The mail house is a company called Graphic Connections of Jeff Charlton. There are a lot of mail houses out there. Jeff might be a little bit more expensive by a penny than some of these other guys, but you’re going to get better quality. He’s going to tell you what the right mail piece is, and you know that it’s going actually to get done. Where some of the other guys I’ve heard some crazy stories. They charge a lot less, but some of this stuff goes into the garbage or it doesn’t print right.

We’ll send people down that path and say, “Go make some money. Prove it out, then come back and we’d love to help you scale.” We take about fifteen people a month. Our stuff is also exclusive. We don’t want people competing with one another because we have a private membership behind the scenes. There’s a private Facebook group and people are sharing what’s working. They’re sharing deals. We’ve got a couple of people. I know Clay, the guy I mentioned in Indianapolis. We’ve got a couple of other people and Clay’s flipping deals and Steve Richards is one of the guys buying them and a couple of other people. That’s a big deal for us. I don’t know if that helps.

For those people that are fairly new, they’re not ready for REIvault. There’s also a seller script, the perfect words. It’s the same script. Our team has time tested on what to say to the seller when you get on the phone with them. I’ll actually give it out to everybody, REIVault.com/VIP. You’ll learn about REIvault as well, but there are some tools in there and some free stuff. I’m constantly adding to it as well, but there’s a script that you can get access to. It’s called our Sales Ninja Script. What do you say to the seller? The icebreaker, what are the perfect words? If you’re cold-calling them, what are the perfect words? That was developed by most of our top guys using our service. We all came together.

You’ve hit something extremely on the head there. Most people don’t follow up. You outlined in that session there, talking about some of the different ways you guys follow up, phone call, ringless voicemail, text message. That’s where we find over half of our deals is follow up 30 days later with a seller, especially that you’ve motivated sellers. They’re answering a mail piece. It may take five or six months before they get ready. It’s like Inception. You’re the Leonardo DiCaprio planting that seed that they think about you as they get rock and rolling. Sometimes it takes time for that deal to grow, that seller to go, “I’m going to sell this. I’m going to move this asset.” As long as you’re following up, you’re the person that gets the phone call or the email afterward.

I’ve had so many people comment on this over and over again as a thank you. This was a mindset change. When you are marketing and you’re generating leads, you should have the philosophy that all leads suck. All direct mail leads suck. All cold call leads suck. All Facebook leads suck. SEO and pay-per-click leads, they all suck. The reason is it’s not until you get on the phone and start interacting and uncovering some of the problems and doing the follow-up where the money is made. Most people do some direct mail, they’ll do some cold-calling, they’re three feet from gold and they don’t even know it. Then they say, “It doesn’t work,” and they’re off to the other rabbit hole. They’re chasing something else.

In reality, here’s what we’re finding consistently. These leads, you’re going to get a small percentage of them that will close right away of the first phone call. It’s a numbers game. I was talking to Larry Goins. He did one in twenty, which is pretty consistent. There’s a certain number of what we call bluebirds. All of a sudden, he happened to have the perfect deal. That doesn’t happen. Most of the deals, 97% are going to take interaction. The formula is 80% of the profits come between the 5th and the 12th interaction. You’ve got to stay at it. The way marketing works is typically you spend some money. Realistically, it’s going to be about 90 to 120 days before you start seeing the return on investment. You spend $1 in 90 to 120 days is about what the return is. It takes some interaction. Ideally, you have what we call them a Sales Ninja. It’s somebody that’s dialing for dollars and that’s all they do. We do that for less than $500 a month. Our team will actually take all those leads and relentlessly call them all day long.

Typically, when you call a seller, we’re finding 100 dials. We’ll get twelve sellers on a call. One hundred dials to get twelve sellers and we’re turning one-and-a-half appointments. About 10% are turning into appointments. We’ll just call them again and again over a year because that’s how it works. Think of a real estate person, one of us being as busy as we are, having to dial 100 numbers. It’s like $1 an hour work. If you’re doing that, you’re not going to have any time to be raising money, being in masterminds and focusing on bigger opportunities, building a team. The way this all came together, Scott, you were probably there. We were in CG and everybody was talking about how direct mail was crushing it. We had 110 of us and Joe McCall started talking about Podio. The Podio is this cool CRM tool, and CallRail was the phone system. My good friend, Brad Chandler, had the cool postcard and Chris Chico had the magic postcard in this particular mailing list. Everybody is going off and having to implement and I said, “There are 110 of us. Why don’t we build one team? Keep it to ourselves and share massively.” That’s how I came up with REIvault. That’s how the design came out.

That’s a true mastermind that works working together to help everybody implement because they’re all different markets. Brad’s in the Washington, DC area. Sean Terry’s in Phoenix. Joe McCall out of St. Louis. Different parts of the country and all going together and sharing it. That’s one of the most valuable things about having a mastermind and get together. You are sharing those nuggets that are working. Instead of you doing it all and try to figure it out yourself, you’ve got 150, 30 people, whatever your mastermind is. It’s coming together to share that stuff and you can decrease the cost when you’re working together like that and overhead to make things happen.

NCS 490 | Cracking The REI Vault

Cracking The REI Vault: As part of your sales skills, you have to learn how to make multiple offers and be a problem solver.

 

There’s a famous statement, it’s actually biblical. King Solomon said, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” There is nothing new in real estate at all. The wholesaling, a lot of us think that this guy is the one that created it. No, that’s been around for hundreds of years. However, where we are in the cycle, there are certain things that work better. What you need to do is you need to find the expert like you. You are the absolute expert in what you teach. That’s why you got such a great following. You go and find that person and you learn it and replicate what they do. You get some coaching. A lot of people think they need real estate coaching. A lot of it is one-on-one help from the master and then down the road, you become the master and give it back. The masterminds, being around like-minded people. It was a guy, Randy, who is a Traction Coach, came and spent four hours and said, “Here’s the model.” I ran to the back of the room. He wasn’t selling anything and I said, “Randy, can I hire you?” That’s who our Traction Coach is that I would not have a business. I would probably not even be married for being a workaholic without implementing that.

We’ve talked with Gary Harper who’s also at Traction if you’re familiar with him and hanging out with Gary. That’s a big thing. Everybody gets so bogged down trying to do all themselves. They’ve got to take the time and to understate. Talk with people, share things, share the resources. There are plenty of resources out there to help everybody that makes life simpler. The numbers you gave is almost exactly the same numbers we see on the note side if we’re reaching out or people making phone calls direct to banks for asset managers. It’s almost the exact same number. 80% of sales made after that fifth contact. You’ve got to embrace the suck and realize you’ve got to do these five things. Even get in the ballgame to get rocking and rolling. Many people don’t have the patience. They wanted to make one phone call and make $1 million on that one first deal and we all know that doesn’t happen.

I’ll give a couple of other things that are some more advanced tips from what I’m seeing that the people that are crushing it. One is it’s a numbers game. They know their numbers. 20 to 45 leads in order to get a deal and an average of five to twenty interactions with the seller and being able to track that. If you do that number one, your chances of success are going to be skyrocketing. We’re talking massive numbers. If people knew what the return is from every time they pick up the phone and dial, it’s crazy whether the seller answers or not if you run the math. I have a tool. It’s one of the free tools. You can calculate all this. The second thing is I think the days of making the low-ball cash offer are pretty much over. This is not an order taker market, especially in most of the markets, especially the hotter ones, Dallas, Denver, California, and Phoenix. Almost everywhere in the country, Atlanta. A lot of people were seller calls, they’d make a crappy offer and they’d get the deal closed. The sellers are watching. They know how hot real estate is. There’s a little bit more finesse, that’s called sales skills.

The second thing is learning how to make multiple offers. Coming in and being a problem solver. You think of a car dealer. There’s a formula, the same formula that works in real estate and frankly every other business. There’s not just one car at a dealership. They have a model and then they have the low grade with the old wind up windows to the seat warmers, etc. When you’re interacting with the seller, just coming in with the one simple offer, your close rate’s going to go down. You want a high close rate, you need to be able to come in, interact with the seller. Be able to work with them, find out what works best for them and give them a couple of offers like, “Here’s a cash offer. If you’d be a little flexible, we could probably get you this price or somewhere in between. What works for you, Mr. Seller?” That multiple offer approach is crushing it. Why this is so important is that most markets, Opendoor, Offerpad, iBuyer, there’s a lot of competition that is coming in fighting for that same lead. That’s super important.

In terms of the magic mailing list like Chris Richter, his list is expensive. It’s for the larger guys, but his list has always been good. We have two proprietary mailing lists that we provide our members. One is called an invisible list, the other one is shipwrecked. In reality, the invisible is mostly an inherited property. What we’re finding is an absentee inherited free and clear property. It’s a gold mine. There’s actually eighteen million of them in the US out of the 125 million single-family available on the public record. Getting the eighteen million takes a little bit of finesse and that’s why we’ve cracked the code on that. Code violations and recently divorced, the economically distressed, we call that the shipwreck list. There’s a product called ReboGateway that has great data to do that. Those are a couple of giveaways. With REIvault, we do this all for you. We build a plan with a budget based on what you want to do and then we execute that and we pull all the mailing lists or you may have some mailing lists and you give them to us and we do the best of the best.

What’s the typical size of a call list that your guys will look at and run with it for somebody? We’re not talking 100 people. We’re talking what 5,000 or 1,000.

This is based on the fact that we started seeing people having massive success. Why is cold-calling so hot? Nobody does it. If everybody does it, it’s not going to be as effective. Cold-calling done. Here are the numbers. One full-time person can ring about 5,000 numbers a month. What we do is we’ll go build a list of 15,000 names and phone numbers, typically with seven to eight phone numbers and load those into an autodialer. We use Five9, that’s Ferrari. Mojo would be what most people would use. Five9 is what the big credit card companies use. If they’re cell phone numbers to be compliant and not get nailed by the FCC, I think Mojo does this, but cell phone numbers get handled a little differently in the autodialer. You’ve got to be careful cold-calling. What we did is we charge $1,500 a month plus the list. You either give us the list or we’ll actually pull the list using our list and then what’s called data stack. It skipped tracings. We’ll go out. We use three different data providers to pull the numbers. For $1,500 a month, if somebody that’s calling for you full-time, Monday through Saturday.

We started doing it on top of marketing for our members. We offer it as a standalone service. The follow-up that should be done on every lead text message and ringless voicemail, we do that. Depending upon the type of lead. Let’s say it’s a hang-up which has a lot of leads. A lot of people never actually talk to you live. They’ll go on a hang-up campaign and they’ll be followed up for a few years. Its text message, “We just missed a call from you. We’re calling about a property that you wanted to sell. Call me.” It will immediately get pushed into the autodialer for the follow-up team to call immediately. Our team knows it’s a hang-up. They call with a very specific hang-up script and typically we try to get on the phone within fifteen minutes and follow up with them. The removed from the list, the real angry callers are some of the best leads, believe it or not. My biggest deals on the single-family side have come from the angriest of callers. I’m actually living in a house in California that came off of a letter where the lady called to be removed from the list. I called her back. We ended up putting her on a follow-up campaign that we do for everybody. It’s a handwritten follow-up letter that gets the highest results of anything we do. She called a few months later saying, “Are you still interested in buying my house?”

What I have found because we deal with a lot of borrowers getting angry when they get letters. It comes from a fear factor for the most part. Their biggest fears when they realize, “Somebody’s trying to buy my house or I’m facing eviction, or I’m facing foreclosure.” It takes a little time for the emotions to get out of the way that you finally get them on the phone and have an intelligent conversation and tell them, “I’m trying to help you out as best as I can.”

Scott, we need to come together and mastermind together on an agency like a done-for-you program for your people.

I will get my gears spinning here.

We can turn up private lenders that are looking for cash buyers. I’ve got the letter already. That’s proven. For hard money lenders or private lenders that want to lend more money, the list is cash buyers. It’s investors that are buying that basically use hard money. The letter is pretty simple, “Are you looking for any more of it?”

One of the things that I do is we pull a lot of lists of people who have IRAs. We’re getting their name, their emails, their phone numbers and a big chunk of them. That’s turned out to be very fruitful reaching out to those people. They may not know it. It leads a lot for our self-directed IRA like Quest Trust Company is a sponsor. Leads of them moving money into them. It’s a new account and they’re getting assets under management. Also, it leads to great sources for deals for us to fund deals at lower interest rates and your hard money guys.

NCS 490 | Cracking The REI Vault

Cracking The REI Vault: The real angry callers are some of the best leads.

 

I’ve been looking for that list for a while. That would be very good for putting in place for your students, and I would love to do that. Calling the lienholder, that’s easy. It’s the same stuff, just a twist on the message.

Gary, what’s the best way for people to reach out to you? To see if they qualify or to touch base with you and see if REIvault’s a fit for them. You have given so many great nuggets and great software and tools for people already here.

REIVault.com/VIP is probably the best place I’d send everybody on this, any of your students or the show. There are special tools in there. We’re featured on Fox Business News. It explains exactly what we do for REIvault. If you’re interested and you want to become a member possibly, check us out. You can go through the “See If I’m Qualified.” There’s an application you’ll fill out the brief and then you’ll schedule a live call and it’s going to be with Julia or Joan. They’re super sharp. They know our business. Julia flipped probably 200 or 300 houses herself. You’ll love her. They’ll be a fit assessment, answer questions. You can be relaxed. It’s not a sales cycle at all. You will not be sold by us. It will probably be more if we want to make sure that this is a good fit.

I launched Instagram, it’s @GaryBoomershine. I’m on Facebook. I have a podcast that I launched where I’m interviewing all kinds of cool people. It’s called Real Estate Investor Huddle. You can always hit me up on Facebook, Messenger or Instagram. I’m pretty responsive. Until I get completely overloaded, sometimes I’ll disappear for a while. I love this niche. I love talking to other people and sharing value. I’ve gotten a ton of value and little nuggets and tips and tricks. Larry Goins shared something with me on not working in the MSAs. He’s working a couple of counties out and I’m in a mastermind. What is the value of that? That one nugget. A lot of people struggling, working in the center part of Atlanta. Go out a few counties. There’s a massive amount of money. I love sharing it with people that are likeminded and not haters. Sometimes you’ll get a hate message of like, “This is a BS message and smoke and mirrors.” There are always the haters.

You can’t make everybody happy. I learned that a long time ago. Gary, I want to say thank you for joining me here. It’s been a very good pleasure. I’m going to reach back out to you. We’re going to schedule a time and pick each other’s brain on a couple of things that we’re working on. I think it would be easy to set that up for everybody in our neck of the woods and vice versa for some of your clients as well too for you. Thanks for being a value add and dropping so much knowledge.

Thank you. It was a pleasure to be with you and your loyal audience.

Go check out his podcast. Gary does a great job, a lot of great guests on there as well. Go to REIVault.com/VIP to see if you’re a fit. Download those things that Gary was talking about that add value right there for you. Go out and make something happen. We look forward to seeing you at the top.

 

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About Gary Boomershine

NCS 490 | Cracking The REI VaultGary Boomershine founded RealEstateInvestor.com in 2005 out of the need to scale and grow his own real estate investing and home buying business. With a family legacy in the real estate niche, and a long successful career in enterprise and emerging technology markets, Gary saw the vision for RealEstateInvestor.com. He noticed the glaring opportunity to leverage people, processes and technology to gain a leg up in a changing and competitive marketplace.  As he worked to develop and use the initial product and service, he saw his real estate business flourish by allowing him to work smarter – not harder and focusing on the one thing that makes money – talking to sellers and making offers. That’s when RealEstateInvestor.com began offering its flagship product, REIvault, to the savvy investor market.

According to Gary, “Most small real estate enterprises limit their growth and many times fail because they lack real marketing and sales expertise along with the infrastructure to scale their business.  Instead of being able to focus on closing deals and maximizing profits, they hit a wall trying to build and do everything themselves; and they simply can’t do it!”

REIvault caters to top producing agents, investors and smaller hedge funds who are looking for a competitive advantage in their local markets. Under the leadership of Gary Boomershine, this service has launched a “technology revolution” within the real estate niche; offering an alternative to the MLS by bringing pre-screened motivated sellers and buyers face to face at the right time.

Gary currently resides in Northern California with his wife and two daughters where he continues to manage a global team for RealEstateInvestor.com.  He is actively involved in real estate investing and private lending. In his free time, he enjoys fly fishing, skiing, hiking, mountain biking and traveling with family.

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