Jason Medley:
Guys, the point of what Joe is doing here is we’re going to build through two or three of these. The point of what we’re doing here is trying to show you how to create and then maximize and capitalize on a “list” and how to market to that list.
You are here listening to this edition of The Secret Six Figure Society right now because I have information about you. I’ve emailed you. A lot of you gave me your cell phones so I could text message you to remind you about the call. Basically what Joe is doing is he’s harvesting sellers’ data in a very similar way that I’ve done with you. He’s getting their emails off of Craigslist, he’s getting their phone numbers. Then what he’s going to do is he’s going to use very similar tools that I’ve used to get you on here with me tonight to communicate with these sellers.
It’s super slick, and it’s not rocket science. It’s creative. It’s a super slick concept in regard to what he’s doing. The most intriguing thing about it for me is that he only ends up working with people who respond to him. They’re going to invite him to communicate. If people don’t respond, that’s a lead he’s not going to mess with. That’s the thing that I think is coolest about it. It’s kind of direct response marketing.
Joe McCall:
It is, and I’ll show you what I send to these people in my voicemails and text messages and emails. It’s really simple.
I go in and I look for 20 to 30 homes. I go through all of this until I find them.
This one doesn’t have a phone number in it, so my VA has instructions on sending this person an email. She just clicks on this and sends them an email.
You’re going to have 20 or 30 numbers in here and then you just check for duplicates. I have this formula in the spreadsheet I give to her and she can tell when she puts a phone number in here whether it’s somebody that we contacted a week ago, two weeks ago. We remove the ones we’ve contacted before. Every day we’re now only contacting the most unique sellers, homeowners, landlords, and things like that.
Now, if I were to show you the spreadsheet that we have, we have hundreds, maybe thousands of phone numbers and emails in there of landlords and sellers who have advertised homes before on Craigslist. Then what we do, and this is really cool and where I love systems is the first thing we do is we send them a text message.
We use Google Voice text messaging. It’s free. Just go to Voice.Google.com.
You click “text” and you take one of these numbers, you copy it, go here, you paste the number in here.
By the way, you can paste up to five numbers at one time.
If I have five numbers here, I would copy all five, and I would paste them into this “To” field and it will send an individual text message to each of those five people.This is what I say. My VA just copies and pastes this every time. “Hi, my name is Joe. I saw your house on Craigslist.” I only have 170-something characters available, but I’m at 103. “I was wondering if your house was available for…” and you can do whatever you want. Let’s say you’re just wanting to buy these houses and you’re targeting “For Rent” ads. You could say, “I was wondering if your house was for sale?” If you’re sending texts to FSBOs, for sale by owner, you could say, “I was wondering if your house was available for rent?” I like to say, “I was wondering if your house was available for lease purchase or rent to own?”
Jason Medley:
Joe, a quick question I have for you. I’m a little bit curious. I’m sitting here thinking five at a time and if you have a couple hundred of these it would be easier to use something like a club text or something. That obviously probably costs more. Am I thinking right when I would say that you’re having a VA do it this way manually, say five at a time, simply because their time is so cheap that it’s less expensive to do it this way?
Joe McCall:
Great question. I have four full time VAs right now. They work on my deal business and my teaching business, as well. If you look at the hourly wage when they’re doing this deal stuff for me, I pay them about $1.50 to $2.00 an hour. I pay them about $500.00 per month.
Jason Medley:
What country are they in?
Joe McCall:
The Philippines.
Jason Medley:
So listen to that, guys. You have English speaking, very educated VAs out of the Philippines who are working for basically $1.50 to $2.00 an hour, so $500.00 a month for 40 hours a week.
Joe McCall:
Actually if you break it down, if they really are working 40 hours a week, $500.00 divided by 40 hours a week divided by 4.33 weeks in a month, it’s $2.88 an hour.
Jason Medley:
The key point that I want everybody to understand is that is how you start to think about. We have such a global economy now. That’s what I want you to start thinking about. That’s one of the emails that I use to drive folks here. Instead of worrying about being fired and replaced by somebody who makes $3.00 an hour, you need to start thinking about how to use people who make $3.00 an hour to make your life easy.
Joe McCall:
One of my friends that I do a lot of business with had two full time jobs in California when he was there and he was hired by these companies to work for them. He just outsourced his jobs to VAs in the Philippines and he would surf. He was getting paid for two full time jobs and he outsourced everything to VAs.
Jason Medley:
He had a job and then he was getting paid a salary or an hourly rate by a company and then all of his admin stuff and so forth he would just outsource. That’s cool, man.
Joe McCall:
These jobs were sales jobs, so he was getting a salary plus a commission and he was hiring the VAs to do all the marketing. He was training them how to do it and he would surf during the day.
One of his employers found out and got really ticked off, and then called the other employer and then he got fired. He lost both jobs. It was a good racket for six months or something.
You’ve heard the story of the four hour work week of the guy who was working in a big corporation. By the way, this friend of mine – I should say this just so you don’t think he’s a total dweeb. He was actually doing his job and doing very, very well. He made sure his VAs were doing what they were supposed to be doing and he was producing good results for the company. He wasn’t stealing from the company, they just didn’t appreciate that he wasn’t the one doing the work since they paid him to do it.
I won’t go into that story of the four hour work week. Just read it. There’s a story in there of a guy who was working in Asia and his employer never knew about it.
Okay, so we were in Google Voice. There is a website I use sometimes called CallFire.com. CallFire.com allows you to send out mass text messages. The only problem is it doesn’t let the people reply to your text messages.
I like Google Voice because you can see my inbox in here of different text messages. Most of these are voicemails. When a seller can reply to the text and it shows up like an email into Google Voice, then you can communicate to them through text message. Does that make sense, Jason?
Jason Medley:
Yeah, you can just open one of those and then just type and communicate back with them on your keyboard, like your computer keyboard is what you’re saying.
Joe McCall:
Yeah, absolutely.
Jason Medley:
One thing I have a question for you, because I use Google Voice for voicemails and stuff like that but I’ve never used this text format. One of the things that I don’t like about a CallFire or Club Texting is there are times when you want your text to look very real. If someone is giving you their phone number, at the end it will say, “To opt out, press X,” and then you can tell it’s not personalized. I would anticipate that on Google Voice they can’t even tell that it’s generated by the computer.
Joe McCall:
It comes from your Google Voice phone number, which is a local phone number. It’s right there, you can see it.
Jason Medley:
Yeah, and it doesn’t say anything as far as, “If you don’t want this message, opt out.” The power of what I’m saying here is that this really looks as if it came from Joe.
Joe McCall:
When I found this, I just fell in love with this technology because now I can have a VA send all these text messages for me. I would just come in every day and check to see if I got responses from them. If somebody responds, I can see their phone number from the response so I can call them up and see if they want to do a deal or not.
My message is real simple. “Hey, I saw your house on Craigslist. I was wondering if it was available for lease purchase or rent to own. If yes, call me.” I still put my phone number in there. I don’t have to because they can tell from the text message, but sometimes the phone number showing up in the text, they can just click on it and it will dial it. That’s why I leave it in there, and that’s it.
It sounds very personal. I’m not saying things like, “Hey, I can close in seven days. I can buy your house with cash. If you’re interested, call me.”
What you could do, and this is something I’m going to be starting to do soon here. This is something I’m real excited about. Right now I’m excluding all of the houses that are under three bedrooms and under $1,000.00 a month. There are a bunch of motivated landlords out there who want to sell their properties but can’t and they’re just advertising them for lease.
You could do a search for maximum rents of $800.00 and include everything and do a search. You might want to exclude apartments. I’ll do Map, Location, and I’m going to exclude apartments. Let’s do a search here.
I get a ton of them. Now I have 1,000. You can call all of these people up or send them text messages or voice blasts and say, “Hey, I saw your rental property on Craigslist. I’m an investor. I buy a bunch of homes. I was wondering if you would be interested in selling your property.” Just send them a text and ask them if they would be interested in selling their property.
Here’s one right here.
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Joe McCall:
You know they’re motivated because it’s empty and they’re advertising for tenants. You could send them messages asking if they want to sell their house. I’m targeting homes that are easy to wholesale real quickly, the cheaper properties.I was talking about Google Voice. Sometimes I’ll do voice blasting and I will use CallFire to do voice blasting. I’m not going to spend much time on this because it can be a little grey area. I’m just going to tell you to use it at your own risk. I don’t have a problem with it because on Craigslist these people are putting their phone numbers on Craigslist. They want you to call them if you’re interested in leasing or buying their house. The grey area becomes can you use robo-calling to do that or not? I’ll leave that up to you whether you are going to do that or not.
Jason Medley:
My favorite color is grey, Joe.
Joe McCall:
Here’s the problem, though. If they call you and ask you what you’re doing and if you don’t explain it just right, I’m not talking about lying but they’ll jump all over you. CallFire can get in trouble with the FTC if they’re knowingly letting people abuse their system.
Enough of that. This is another cool website that I like, and this has been around for a long time. It’s called Sly Dial. The cool thing about this, most of these numbers in Craigslist that you see here are most likely cell phones. What Sly Dial does is you dial this phone number first right here, you listen to a short little advertisement, this is completely free, and then if it’s a cell phone it takes you directly to their voicemail. It won’t make the phone ring or anything.
Again, because you don’t want to do cold calls. Cold calls only work if somebody else is doing them, but even then still I would rather have my VAs do Sly Dial. I only want to talk to people who want to talk to me.
Jason Medley:
This is slick. Guys, before we got on the call I didn’t have all the details. Joe and I had a conversation about what he was doing, I got some of the nitty-gritty, but I’m seeing a lot of this at the same time as you are.
What you’re doing is you’re getting the phone numbers out of Craigslist, your VAs are dialing 267-SLYDIAL and then they’re actually entering the number of the person they’re trying to call. When they leave a voicemail, it goes directly to their voicemail and their phone never actually rings?
Joe McCall:
Correct.
Jason Medley:
That’s cool, dude. Again, that’s where when we talk about it’s always better to be the hunted than the hunter, you’re only going to work with somebody who wants to call you back. That’s what I love about how Joe has structured things.
Joe McCall:
Obviously, you have to have a VA who has decent English to do this. At the same time, I’ve had VAs do this for me that you can tell have an accent. It’s really not that big of a deal. I don’t even know if it has hurt my business. If a seller is motivated, they don’t care. I do hire VAs who have very, very good English. You cannot tell they’re from the Philippines. It’s amazing. That’s who I hire. You can find those guys, they’re out there.
The message they leave is real simple. They call them up and say, “Hey, my name is Joe. I saw your house on Craigslist. I was just wondering if it was available for lease purchase or rent to own. If it is, call me at,” and I give them my phone number, and then they repeat the phone number. That’s it.
It goes to their voicemail. If the seller is interested in what I have to offer in lease purchasing or whatever, then they’ll call me back. They could also say the same thing if it’s a two bedroom house that’s listed for rent. My VA could call and say, “Hey, my name is Joe. I’m an investor and I buy and lease properties. I saw your house on Craigslist and I was just wondering if you have any interest in selling it.”
Or, they could call FSBO ads. You could call FSBO ads and say something like, “Hey, my name is Joe. I’m an investor. I saw your house on Craigslist. It looks like a house I’d be really interested in. I was wondering how negotiable you were with your price. If your price is at all negotiable, call me at,” and it’s a very friendly message.
The cool thing about voice blasting is I actually record the voicemail myself. I record the voicemail myself. My VA, every day they go into Craigslist and they copy these 20 to 30 phone numbers.
They just paste them right into CallFire, they upload them into the spreadsheet, they click a few buttons and they start to campaign. The system will automatically within like five seconds dial all 30 phone numbers. CallFire doesn’t have a system where it goes right to their voicemail, but what it will do is if they pick up the phone and answer it live, it will play one message. If it goes to their voicemail it will play another message.
You can actually go in and pre record these messages with your own voice and then just give your VA your username and password to your CallFire account and they can login, upload the phone numbers, send out the voice blasts, and within a matter of minutes 50 people just got a call from you saying, “Hey, I saw your house on Craigslist. I was wondering if your price is at all negotiable. I’m an investor and I buy a bunch of…” and you can say whatever you say. Make it as personal as possible.
Depending on your strategy and how you’re trying to get these houses, this is amazing. This is technology that you can do all of this stuff, your VA can do all of this stuff for you and it looks like it’s coming from you.
Jason Medley:
The cool thing Joe is that I’m aware of all of this technology. I haven’t seen Sly Dial before, but I’m aware of everything else that you’ve shown as far as CallFire and that kind of stuff and Google Voice. Sometimes it’s the way in which you’re using it that is revolutionary. This is some really cool stuff. I have a buddy of mine who buys cheap mobile homes for cash and he turns around and resells them and carries the paper for people. Maybe he buys it for $3,000.00 and turns around and sells it for $8,000.00 and he takes $1,000.00 down and he carries the remaining $7,000.00 that’s due on the property and holds a note.
He just focuses on cash. I’m just sitting here thinking the strategy that you have shown me tonight, he could very easily use to sift and immediately pick out the mobile homes on Craigslist. He could use this technology to get the people calling him. My point in saying that gang is that no matter what kind of real estate you do, it doesn’t have to be lease options, it doesn’t have to be mobile homes. What Joe is showing you could be applicable to a lot of different types of niches on Craigslist. This is really cool stuff.
Joe McCall:
You know what you could do? I was reading some forum the other day and they were asking, “Can you buy cars subject to the existing car loan?” I was thinking about that.
If you wanted to, you could go into Craigslist, have your VA go into cars and trucks and do a search by owner only and do a search for all BMWs. There are 223 in here. You could have your VA go in and just copy and paste all these phone numbers. Then, send them voice blasts or Sly Dials or something and say, “Hey, I saw your car on Craigslist. I was wondering if you had a car you’re trying to sell? I saw your Beemer. I was wondering if you would be open to selling it by letting me take over your loan payments,” or something like that.
You could somehow phrase it where you can take over their car loan payments, if you had really bad credit for some reason and you wanted to buy this car right here. Certainly, you could just harvest these phone numbers, send them text messages and voice blasts and get a nice BMW without having to get your own loan or use your own credit. There are a lot of people out here wanting to sell their cars who would be glad to just let somebody take over their loan.
Jason Medley:
I have a few quick questions here, Joe. I have some folks, there’s obviously somebody who’s new on the line asking what a VA is. VA stands for virtual assistant. A virtual assistant basically means that’s somebody who does not work in your office who is not your employee who is typically more often than not in a foreign country and they’re English speaking but they work extremely cheap, typically for $1.00 to $3.00, $4.00, $5.00 an hour, all the way up to $50.00 an hour.
There are certainly some highly educated VAs who have probably been to school in America and have gone back home. They probably have degrees from some amazing universities. For what we’re talking about tonight, VA stands for virtual assistant and it’s typically someone who you can hire to do, for lack of a better term, mundane tasks that you don’t want to do because, again, you want to have control of your life and have freedom. That means being in control of your time.
One other question that somebody is asking is how do you know when you pull these numbers if they’re landlines? If they’re landlines, you won’t get to reach the people. Gang, whoever sent that message, please don’t take this the wrong way because I’m not in any way trying to be ugly. Thinking like that is one of the ways that inhibits people sometimes from making progress or from growing. It’s just a numbers game.
If you pull 100 numbers and most people put their cell phone in, hardly anybody uses a land line anymore, and 20 of them are land lines, only 80% of your text blasts were successful. Let it ride. It is what it is. Don’t think about things that are little road blocks like that. Only focus on what’s working rather than what’s not working. That 20% is just not worth trying to figure that out.
Joe McCall:
Yeah, good point.
One other thing – I use Google Docs a lot. Now it’s called Google Drive. The great thing about Google Docs is it’s not like you upload a spreadsheet to some cloud server and then your VA downloads it and works on it and then re-uploads it so you can get the most current version that way. What Google Docs does is it lets you create spreadsheets that your VAs can update real time and you can see the results.
My VAs right now are researching different HUD properties in California and Missouri. Also, there’s a website in Missouri where you can actually go in and get probate lists and evictions and divorces and things like that. Every day she goes in and looks in the court records and pulls up information in here from probates.
Many times there are addresses in here of the heirs or the executors of the estates. I have hundreds in here.
Every day she goes into the evictions. She can find out the names of landlords who have evicted tenants recently. Right here I can look up the name of the landlord, and then she pulls up the addresses of those landlords and their offices. I can send them letters and postcards asking if they have any properties they want to sell.
She does that all in Google Docs and then takes it from there. It’s pretty amazing. Google Docs is another tool I use a lot of.
Here, by the way, is a spreadsheet. I have been updating this with one of my buddies in Phoenix since June of 2011. There are a gazillion number of leads in here. All it is, is the date, here’s the phone number, we paste the phone numbers. My VAs make sure the format of the phone number is exactly the same every time.
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These two blue columns will check to see if there are duplicates and they’ll also keep track of the ads. They keep track of the CallFire status if it’s an answering machine or leave a message. They also will keep track of whether they sent them a CallFire, a text message, or an email. They’ll keep track of all this stuff.
It’s pretty amazing. This is all updated in real time.
Jason Medley:
Joe, quick question. What company do you go through to get your VAs?
Joe McCall:I have a slide for that.