Today on the Listing Agent Lifestyle podcast we're talking with Josh Schoenly from Mechanicsburg PA.
Josh has been in the real estate community for more than a decade. He's been working with and training real estate agents and has built a nice community over the years.
He's been kind of getting the itch to be on the front lines and apply all the things he knows work. He's been listening to the Listing Agent Lifestyle podcast and has been inspired by seeing what's been happening with Diane here as we implement all of the programs and start to get results, so he jumped on board to start implementing.
He's really a disciplined executer with the ability to get things in action. He jumped right in with both feet in terms of starting a Getting Listings campaign, getting his Top 150 together, and getting his World's Most Interesting Postcard mailed out, so we had really great conversation about laying the foundation.
If you're at that point, ready to get started, then you're going to enjoy this conversation.
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Transcript: Listing Agent Lifestyle Ep070
Dean: Hello, Josh Schoenly.
Josh: Dean Jackson.
Dean: How are you?
Josh: I'm awesome. Listen, I was rocking out to some Rick Astley.
Dean: Yeah, of course you were. I'm Never Gonna Give You Up.
Josh: Never Gonna Give You Up baby.
Dean: So this is exciting. Welcome.
Josh: Thank you.
Dean: We're recording right now. We got the whole hour to hatch some evil schemes here. I'm interested to hear what's going on. We're kind of familiar with each other a little bit. We haven't really spent much time together, but I'm excited to hear what's brought us together here.
Josh: Yeah. I had actively been selling real estate in the mid to later 2000s, which is remarkably long time ago at this point.
Dean: Yeah, I know.
Josh: Yeah, exactly. I primarily worked with investors, but through that process realized really what I was most interested in was the marketing and specifically the digital marketing side of that. So I slowly transitioned towards training and coaching to that end and built up a company and sold it and have built another company, but I've been several times over the last 10 years have felt like a pull back to get into actively selling. I will say that I just I hit a tipping point where I was like this just makes sense for me. I have more clarity around how I could do it in a way that the downside is minimal, at least the downside as it relates to the lifestyle and the family that I have.
And you and even in particular Diane's story was also a big catalyst of doing the work and documenting the work for the audience. So I also have an audience and part of why I'm doing this and there are a number of reasons, but part of it is so I can say not just theoretically or even point to this person or this person, but say, "This is exactly what I'm doing and you can follow along." I love the way you go about things and just your theories about marketing, the way you approach things. So I dug in. I got started with GoGo clients or GoGoAgents, I don't know, a week ago at this point.
Dean: Yeah, right.
Josh: Maybe 10 days, but not long, and so far I've gotten Diane my initial Top 150 which man, it was a shot to the heart that I didn't even hit 100. That got me really-
Dean: I love that. That's what we said. My Top 150 list is currently 96 people deep. So yeah.
Josh: Oh man, it was like I'm making the list and I'm thinking, "Oh, 150, this is a breeze. I'm going to have like 175." and then the number, as I added them up, I was like man, did I miss a page? Anyway, so Diane's got that and that's almost ready to go out. So I'm excited about that. And then the next up is the Getting Listings systems. So that's probably or one of the things that I would love to talk through and get some clarity on.
Dean: Sure, absolutely.
Josh: But first if I can ask a tactical question as we're getting to The World's Most Interesting Postcard. On there Diane sent over the proof and on the back side above my name is that gray box for-
Dean: Yes, the title.
Josh: Right. And I'm like, I don't really have...
Dean: Here's a great way to think about that is you think about that as what you might say to somebody if you saw them at the grocery store and it's timely and topical of what you're actually looking for. So you might say in that situation whatever is going on right now, you might say, "Hey, I'm working with a couple who's looking for a 4-bedroom pool home. So if you hear someone looking for that, give me a call or who has that." Or something like that, that's a specific kind of shout out for what you're currently looking for, what you currently need. And that's all that is, it's just another sort of presencing thing.
I would say that people, like part of the thing that you want to have is you want to be prepared. I talk about the Top 150. Our qualifier for them is if you saw them at the grocery store, you'd recognize them by name and you'd stop and have a conversation. So I want people to be prepared that if you do see somebody at the grocery store and they do ask you, "How's things? How's business?" People most say, "Oh, it's going great." And they leave it at that. It's just kind of this thing that we say, but the whole thing is if you're prepared and thoughtful, like I don't think people would say, "Hey, it's going great." If it's just a reflex.
But if every time somebody asks you, "How's it going? How's business going?" If you were to push the pause button just kind of instantly behind the scenes and give yourself a second to think about what to actually say in that situation, you'd have a much better, more thoughtful kind of answer, just like, "Is there anything I can do for you?" We're reflexively conditioned to deflect that, "Oh, yeah, I'm great. Everything's great. Yeah, yeah. Oh, thanks, I'll let you know," or whatever. But if you're prepared for it, this is part of that opportunity of being a market maker.
So many of the things that make The World's Most Interesting Postcard and the psychology behind it work is the things that are going on in the background. So you're in for 10 days. I'm not sure have you been listening to the podcast or do you know-
Josh: Oh yeah. I mean, I've been listening to those for months probably.
Dean: Okay, great.
Josh: But I just got signed up for the trial.
Dean: I got you. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So you've probably heard me talk about how referrals happen, that they all happen as a result of conversation. What we say, the reason that we set up The World's Most Interesting Postcard the way it is, is so that we're furthering or increasing the opportunity that they will notice that a conversation is about real estate if you've kind of presenced it. Each month we highlight kind of a high probability conversation that somebody might hear. That's the format, just a quick note case you hear someone talking about and we insert a different high probability conversation every month.
So right now it might be about the spring market is in full swing. So you might hear if you hear somebody talking about putting their house on the market this spring, "Give me a call or text me and I'll get you a copy of our How to Sell Your House for Top Dollar, Faster book," to give them. That's kind of the presencing thing. As the baseline, that's what's going to form the foundation of your kind of referral program that we are looking at get The World's Most Interesting Postcard out as the baseline so that we're programming 150 people every month so that you're presencing with them, they're getting that kind of programming.
And then what we want to layer on top of that is you doing the same thing. So in order to orchestrate referrals, what is important is that you notice what's going on right now and you think about who is the person that is in the best position to maybe help with that and you introduce that opportunity to them. So that means that even in situations like being prepared that this week, whenever somebody asks me how's business or whenever somebody, I run into them and they say, "How's things or can I do anything for you?" Or anything like that, that you're fully prepared that you've got a better answer than, "Oh, it's going great." Because what it means, "Oh, I'm super busy."
That's the kind of thing where people say they want posture and kind of make people feel like everything is going well. Almost like deflecting, "I don't need any new business right now. Everything's going great. I'm super busy. We're just run off our feet," kind of thing. We never want that. What we want to do is use that opportunity to plant that referral seed for them. So we used to have a great dialogue with that where you'd even say, you can acknowledge that it's going well, which is a great way to say that. "How's business going?" "It's going well, with one exception, I'm working with a couple who's looking for this."
And when you're kind of presencing that kind of thing, you're getting people on that plane and asking them rather than do you know someone who's doing, this is asking them, "Who do you know or who's the next person you know that's going to be selling their house?" Which is a search language instead of a just being black or white question kind of thing.
Josh: Right. It takes it from yes or no to them actively thinking about.
Dean: Yes, they have to think, and that's what our minds are, a search engine. We can't even help it. That's what happens.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah, awesome.
Dean: So that's what we use that dialog box for, is kind of that sort of thinking.
Josh: Right, perfect.
Dean: This is very interesting then. How long has it been since you're back into actually selling real estate?
Josh: My license has been reactivated for two or three weeks.
Dean: Oh, perfect. Good for you. That's exciting.
Josh: Oh, for sure, yeah.
Dean: It's funny because if you've been working with agents for a number of years and I imagine that you go through the same kind of things that I do with the sort of I'll use frustration as a word, but like angst film frustration, not a frustration at them, but a frustration for them of seeing how difficult it is for people to get things done even when you're showing them what to do. So for you, thinking now that exactly what to do and you got the ability to actually do it, that there's something really authentic about that.
Josh: For sure. It's re-energized me in a lot of ways too and just made me look at things through a different lens. That's been great already to feel. So my target audience is the township that I live in. That's where I'm kind of focusing my energy, but it's too many homes right now anyway to go after all of them with the Getting Listings sort of approach. And the neighborhoods in the township, there are many of them and they're smaller generally speaking. Like the one I live in, which is one of the ones that I want to go after ASAP is about 150 homes.
Dean: Where are you?
Josh: Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Mechanicsburg area.
Dean: Okay. Yeah.
Josh: And the township that I live in is Hampden Township, which is kind of weird because half of the township is in one ZIP code, half of the township is in-
Dean: Yeah, I'm familiar with all that. That whole Pennsylvania, New Jersey. Yeah, it's like that.
Josh: So Hampden Township is Mechanicsburg 17025, 17050, but parts of those zip codes are also not... It's just anyway, but it's the township I live in. I'm very involved with coaching and on my little league board and so forth. So it just makes sense for me to go after that, and I already have some digital, some Facebook things going on to generate some opportunities and some business, but I am struggling a little bit with do I create a separate sort of campaign and system for each neighborhood or do I make them outbound marketing specific to the neighborhood, but the follow-up ongoing, like the ongoing report and so forth, just specific to the neighborhood or keep it to Hampden Township so that as it grows, I don't have like eight different reports or I don't know. That's kind something that I've been thinking through and maybe looking for some direction.
Dean: Yeah. Okay. So here's the great thing. If you look at it, what you want to think about it like is creating almost like this CAT scan perspective of all of Camden. Is it Camden or Hampden County?
Josh: Hampden.
Dean: Okay. So Hampden County or Township that you want to start looking at what are all of the flavors of this. If you kind of take this aerial view of it as the forest is what are the individual kinds of trees in here. So you've got anything that are named communities would be one distinction. That's a level of distinction that somebody would align with, so they can recognize that. I live in Valhalla or I live in Eloise Co, or whatever that neighborhood is.
So those can range from I live in a gated community with 50 homes and around me there's a corridor on Lake Eloise and Winterset and Ruby Lake that are by Cypress. What used to be Cypress Gardens, now Legoland, that those, that little area there's probably 18 or 20 gated individual communities like that, that make up all of the most expensive homes in Winter Haven. We did a digital campaign that we go around. We encompass that whole area. We're doing listing campaigns digitally for that whole area, but then postcards, the postcards that go to these areas are individually addressed and individually customized for the neighborhoods.
Because all we're trying to do it's like we're separating what I call the compelling from the convincing. And so what we're trying to do is get somebody to turn themselves from an invisible prospect into a visible prospect. I want to know everyone who's thinking about selling and so it's almost like the horoscope effect is the way we look at that. If Winter Haven, if you say the report on Winter Haven house prices, that's one level of awareness, but that's not going to feel like it's very specific for me. But if I saw an offer for the report on Southeast Winter Haven, that's getting closer and my ZIP code is closer, but what I'm most interested in is what are the houses in Valhalla selling for.
And same thing for everybody who lives in a specific named community and that's even more powerful when you're in a 200 or 150 to 400 home kind of area, where there's enough activity that you might not be familiar with everything. Where I live in Valhalla, there's a handful of sales each year. So you're like, everybody's aware of what the houses are kind of indoor in Valhalla, but when you get up into the 150 or 200 homes, it has value to people to know what's actually going on and then just like you mentioned about the report that you send every month can include those areas, but it can be the entire Southeast Winter Haven report. So that gives them the context for it.
Josh: That's perfect. So, yeah, the outbound. There's four or five like in the quadrant of the township that I live in, where they would be, even though, even if they weren't in the same neighborhood they would be comparable sales, but the outbound, I'll have it match them specifically to their neighborhood and then the ongoing report, yeah, that makes sense.
Dean: So perfect. We've been doing this with Diane in three different neighborhoods, but primarily it's in Lake Ashton and Cypress Wood, which are 800 to 1,000 homes kind of thing. And Lake Ashton now, we've kind of reached the point where she's got over 10% of the market has responded to our postcards and Facebook ads. So they're getting the Get Top Dollar newsletters and the reports every month. And then this week we just started a video campaign where now it's important to flip and start finding the buyers who are looking for homes in Lake Ashton.
So we did a micro-targeting people who are visiting, but don't live in Lake Ashton for a daily tour of homes. We ran the ad so now she's got people who are responding to come and look at the homes and like go on a tour of Lake Ashton. And we ran the ad even though that wasn't our intended audience. We ran the ad to people who live in Lake Ashton as well just to set up a context that Diane's doing this so that now we'll send a message, she's just scheduling the first tours now, so she'll send a market maker message to the 96 people that have responded and say, "I'm hosting daily tours of Lake Ashton and I've got people coming this week. I'm not sure what your plans are, but I thought I'd check in and see if I could tell them about your house as we're driving through the neighborhood."
Josh: That's great.
Dean: That's so much better than, "Hey Josh, just checking in. Are you getting the newsletters? Is everything okay? Is there anything I can do for you?" That's not what anybody's looking for. What they really want that feels like, "Wow, she might have a buyer for us."
Josh: Two things on that, showing it to the existing homeowners also. We have, just in our neighborhood, we have two or three friends that we're always trying to recruit to the neighborhood. But that's another great reason to show it to them and invite them in. Is that something that would be found on the client blog or the GoGo client blog? Or is that something that you're going to document?
Dean: Yes. So I just talked about it yesterday on our GoGoAgent call and I'll post to get on the GoGoAgent blog as well.
Josh: Great. Great. I didn't make yesterday's call, but I do want to check out the recordings.
Dean: Yeah. And that's kind of cool. So we do record all those calls so you don’t ever miss anything.
Josh: And that you're leveraging Facebook for that.
Dean: Yeah, we're leveraging everything. That's part of the thing is I look at Facebook as like the air campaign, that you're able to kind of get over the area. The best analogy is really like sending digital postcards. It's almost like a loosely not every door direct mail type of thing where you can get in somebody's digital mailbox, which is their news stream, and I treat the things that we do like postcard mailings. You've done enough Facebook stuff, I'm sure, to know that the correlation between reach and frequency and how all that plays out.
So I look at rather than running the same ad, just letting it run a long time. I look at it and we'll mail it. I say mail it, launch it to their things and I'll best results come when we just run something for maybe 24 or 30 hours and just watch that once we get past kind of 1.5 on the frequency, that you're not reaching new people, especially with micro-targeting kind of thing where sometimes the audiences are, you're talking about hundreds of people, not thousands. So if we've reached most of the people, it's a really good thing. That's how we're able to generate leads for under $2 most of the time.
Josh: I love that perspective of it, like treating it like a postcard mailing. That's a really cool way to think about it. So is the offer that she's making directly to the weekly or the daily tour or-
Dean: We're doing two things. It's an interesting thing that sometimes what you're doing is we're running something with the intention of the sellers actually seeing this and thinking something. We're running it so that she's doing a video and it's live from the gates of Lake Region basically saying, "Hey, this is Diane Lightsey reporting live from Lake Ashton and every day this week we're doing daily tours of Lake Ashton. If you've ever wondered the homes sell for in here, what's available, join us for a daily tour. We do them at 10 o'clock, 1 o'clock. We'll drive through all. I'll tour you around. I'll show you all the amenities. We'll look at some homes. It's a great way to kind of get to know the neighborhood. If you want to join us just click right there or visit me at," whatever that URL is. So the intention of that and it's we're building awareness of that because the cost per lead for it is higher because it's direct-
Josh: Right, that's where we're going.
Dean: People who are responding are saying, "I want to come and look at homes." So I think we've only gotten in the four days or something two people who've responded to it, but we also ran it to the people who live in Lake Ashton to set up this opportunity that you let's say if you're our audience in this, Josh, you live in Lake Ashton, you responded to the postcard three months ago, you've been getting the Get Top Dollar newsletters, you're seeing what's going on, you are thinking about selling your house, putting it on the market in the next 60 or 90 days. And so you're seeing oh, there's that Diane that's sending me the stuff and she's doing daily tours of the homes.
Even though the ad is not targeted at you, the ad is demonstrating that she's out there working to find you a buyer. So will she now next week sends you an email, saying, "Hey Josh, I'm doing daily tours of homes in Lake Ashton, and I've got people coming through to look. I'm not sure what your plans are, but I thought I'd check in and see if I could tell people about your house as we're driving through the neighborhood." That-
Josh: I love it. Even if the cost per lead is super-high, you're getting people that are saying, "I want to get in a car with you and look at homes in the area that you're working."
Dean: That's exactly right.
Josh: That almost becomes like the shrapnel is not the right word because shrapnel's not a good thing, but the-
Dean: The strategic by-product.
Josh: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's so good. I love that.
Dean: That's engineered. That's baked into it. That's why exactly we do it. It's like the whole I don't know if you've seen on the member blog, I've put up the Molson beer ads that whole mindset of being what they're looking for because what they're looking for and again, I'm only speaking to the five-star prospects, the ones who are thinking about selling their house in the next 60 to 90 days. That message is going to completely resonate with them. And if you're not thinking about selling your house right now and it's not going to be till next year, it doesn't matter.
Even if you don't respond, you don't get caught up in that somebody isn't responding right now, what is going to happen is that you're building this mounting physical evidence that you're acting on someone's behalf. It's definitely interesting what you said too about the reason that you kind of jumping on is kind of stimulated in part by hearing Diane and hearing what we're kind of documenting here with her, and you're not the only one.
We've had people who have been listening to the podcast for a year or more and in that year or more, we've jumped in. We had Diane start in August or so September and now she started implementing exactly the path that we lay out for people and she's got two listings from The World's Most Interesting Postcard. She's getting all of these leads for listings. She's getting these calls now to come out and list homes. And people listening to that think to themselves, "Well, that could have been me. I've been listening that long and I didn't jump on and implement it, but why am I not? Let me just jump on and get started here."
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. Man, I love it. I'll just check. As we're talking I got a text from one of the seller leads from the ads, similar style ads that you talk about, telling me what specific neighborhood they're in and that they're thinking about selling in the next two months.
Dean: Perfect.
Josh: Okay. So I think I have some more clarity on the Getting Listings portion. I love the daily tour idea as a starting place to start demonstrating that value. I've got leads that I want to start communicating with. Super Signature. I heard you talk about it a little bit.
Dean: All right. Do you have buyer leads or seller leads or?
Josh: A little of both. A little of both. About 15-20 seller leads, 20 or 30 buyer leads.
Dean: Okay. So the thing that we want to do, I'd like to have this if we go to straight down the Listing Agent Lifestyle elements, we'd start with Getting Listings, you've got that locked in and progressing. The next thing technically that we start with is multiplying your listings. Do you have any listings yet or not yet?
Josh: Not yet.
Dean: That's good. So then we jump right down to getting referrals and you're on track with The World's Most Interesting Postcard and getting your Top 150 together. And then the next thing is converting leads. So you're right at the right point here. So we've got your growing list of these buyer and seller leads and we're going to treat them slightly differently in that the buyer leads we're going to send a weekly market watch email, that's like a flagship every week with new updates of this is what's happened in the market.
It's very formulaic, Josh, in that it's very like it's the same sort of formatting each week where we have a little bit of what I call host chat, like where you're very conversational email writer, so you're not going to have a problem with this, but being able to just kind of talk about what you've been up to this last week and kind of just let people know, kind of documenting who you're working with, what you're looking at, what's going on in the market and then transition that to essentially saying almost like if you were saying conversationally you'd be talking about, "I was working with a couple, we were looking in this area and I really liked this one or this one just came on the market and I saw it on inspection or somebody in my office just listed this one."
And then you can almost verbally hear yourself saying, "Anyway, there were 55 new listings this week. Here's the link to all the new ones. Take a look at this one. That's really good one. And if you're looking for this, this one stood out to me as kind of the cream of the crop this week. Here they are." And then you mentioned then the Super Signature, which is our real purpose for delivering that flagship email, is to be in front of people at exactly the time where it becomes now. So you may have heard me talk about this idea of only focusing on two time frames, that's now or not now.
I never try and like worry about timing people's intentions. Because we're not making any outbound check-in calls or anything like that. We're just serving the people with the updated information every week and then the Super Signature is about presenting the next step for them. So if we look at it from a buyer perspective, the thing that's going to trigger them to taking the next step is that they may want to look at homes or there may be people who are cautious and they don't know the process yet so they want to kind of get educated about the process.
And then there might be people who, they just want to make sure that they get the money organized first, that some people, they want to make sure they know what they can afford, but most people, they want to jump right in and start looking at homes. So we start with always the words, "Plus whenever you're ready, here are three ways we can help you and then number one, join us for a daily tour of homes. We do daily tours at 10 o'clock and 1 o'clock." And the psychology behind that is that it sounds like it's completely normal. You're not imposing on me. You're not asking me to go out of my way. I'm doing the tour and you can just join on. It's 10 o'clock and 1 o'clock. We make those times available.
Josh: Right. The cookie, the cookie analogy.
Dean: That's exactly it, the cookie analogy. It's like rather than expecting your clients to say, "Hey, would you bake me some cookies?" We're going ahead and baking the cookies that we know that they're going to want and that we're presenting them to them on a tray each week when we send out the market watch. So we use the daily tour of homes. We use the join us for a home buyer workshop. We do our home buyer workshops at the library on the first Thursday of the month or the first and third Thursdays or however often you want to do it, but it steers people towards an opportunity for them to get more information, or get a free home loan report.
And we use home loan report as a different type of language to a pre-approval, in that where we look at the pre-approval language as being sort of confrontational and sounds like if I'm the banker I'm going to sit you on the other side of the desk and approve of you or judge you. Whereas a home loan report where we say to people, "Listen, we monitor hundreds of different loan programs to find the best zero down loans, low-interest loans, lowest monthly payment loans, lowest total cost loans." And you see what I'm doing there is there's so many ways to finance the same home depending on what somebody's priority is.
You could take the same house and if somebody really wants to do zero down, there are options for that. If somebody wants to have the lowest monthly payment, they're going to have maybe a variable with a longer amortization. Or if they want to have the lowest total cost for it, meaning over the life of the loan, that they're going to put 20% down and they're going to get a 15 year mortgage and they might make some prepayments around that. So whatever, we got something for everybody on that spectrum.
But what it more importantly does is it signals that I'm going to come over on the same side of the desk as you and we're going to turn around, we're going to look at all of these loans and we're going to approve of a loan for you. So all of these things make it super easy that people can take that next step that's going to be the thing that is most important to them.
Josh: Yeah, I love it. The now and not now thing, just going back to that, that really struck me because I feel like that is something that so many of our community struggle with and it made me think of the analogy of, and I'll mess this up, the one about not trying to make the pig fly because they can't and you'll just annoy the pig.
Dean: I know, right, exactly.
Josh: You're going to end up frustrated and so is the pig.
Dean: Yes, exactly.
Josh: I feel like so many people, I experienced this, we can often repel client because we're trying to push them to now when they're not now and by doing that, but then they're going to be not ever with us.
Dean: Right. You're absolutely right.
Josh: So cool. All right, I love that. So we have the monthly or the weekly update that flagships email to the buyers. What about to the sellers? What is that? I mean, obviously they get the mailed monthly report. Is there anything else that would be the best practice with that?
Dean: Yeah. So with the sellers the baseline of it is that every month they're getting the Get Top Dollar newsletter, I've already written all of these things so it's really easy. Cover letter, the Get Top Dollar newsletter and the activity that's happened in their neighborhood or in the township or a county, however you report kind of thing, that's going to give them all of that information. And then we have a Super Signature in there as well that is offering people sellers the next step.
So we say, "Plus whenever you're ready here's three ways we can help you. We have a pinpoint price analysis to find out exactly what your home would sell for. We have a room-by-room review and we've got a whole booklet with checklist and everything to walk people through the home to prepare it for sale." Or we say, "We may be able to sell your house as little as 24 hours without even putting it on the market with our silent market." Those three things are addressing the three kinds of states of sellers.
So you might have a seller, this is all based on the psychology of thinking, what's the conversation that's going on in their mind right now? They've identified themselves as somebody who's thinking about selling because that's the genesis thought of it, is how much is my house worth no matter what your plan is. So to see this report available you're going to identify that that's your mindset, but the report is not going to tell you specifically what your house is worth. So you've opened that opportunity for them if they really want to know what their house is worth, we've got the pinpoint price analysis.
Those are powerful words too, this pinpoint price analysis gives you a specific idea of what your house would sell for. Then the room by room review is addressing the people who may be delaying because they think, "Oh, I got to get everything ready before we put the house on the market." So this is to help them get all their ducks in a row. And people like that. You've dealt with enough sellers to know that there are people who fit that description exactly. They just want to make sure that everything is right and over prepare for it.
And then there are other people who they're just kind of, they're not super motivated, they're not in a hurry, but if you had a buyer that may speed up their timeline or they may be motivated that way. So those are addressing the three kinds of conversations that are going on for the sellers.
Josh: Sure. Sure.
Dean: All those things are really about the just being there when it becomes now. I'm not trying to turn somebody into a five-star prospect. I'm just looking to discover the five-star prospects.
Josh: Give them an easy way to indicate to you that they are a five-star prospect.
Dean: Yeah, and we start with they're willing to engage in the dialogue. And so we make it super easy rather than trying to convince them to list their house with us.
Josh: Right. Yeah.
Dean: Then the sellers-
Josh: Oh, boy.
Dean: We layer the sellers. We layer that with now whenever there is new activity, you just have to kind of pay attention that if the house across the street or down the street comes on the market, that you send them a quick note, if you're on my list, like you're getting my newsletter, I may send you an email saying, "Hey, Josh, the house down the street just got on the market. It's listed at $4.99," or whatever.
Josh: Do you have anyone that would set those folks up on like an auto alert based upon that? So for example-
Dean: No, what we do is set yourself up on the auto alerts. That's part of the thing, you're paying attention to those neighborhoods anyway. One of the things that we do is we set up a map layer, like a Google map where you export the data and drop a pin on it. So if you're looking at what's the name of one of these neighborhoods that you're talking about?
Josh: I'll use the one this woman just told me, which is Country Club Park I think.
Dean: Okay. So in Country Club Park, how many homes are in there?
Josh: That one would probably be between 3 and 300. I'm not super familiar with that particular neighborhood. It's kind of on the other side of-
Dean: Yeah, perfect. So that's a good size. If you're sending postcards into Country Club Park and you start generating a list that now you've got 20 people from Country Club Park have responded and you could look at Country Club Park on the map there and see where the people, your friendly ones, your secret inventory is, that you pay attention and when a new house comes up in Country Club Park you're able to put it out to the people most likely there.
Josh: Yeah, I like that.
Dean: It's pretty cool. And then the final thing is that starting to find buyers for Country Club Park before. If you've got now the way to find the buyers and that's why I'm such a big fan of categories, like something that there's equally meaningful to a buyer and the seller. So if it's a townhouse or you start looking as what are the attributes that buyers and sellers share. So, a named community is one thing, the type of home, whether it's condos or townhomes or golf course homes or lakefront homes or whatever.
And sometimes even attributes that are not that easy to find, like if we've talked about this with things that are subtle like view homes. If you're in an area where people have or are attracted to a home with a view, that's a good list to create even if it takes effort to create it.
Josh: Yeah. Here's one that I haven't heard you mention that I got an idea I heard recently was walkable.
Dean: Yes, walkable score. Yeah.
Josh: Yeah, which I had never, haven't even crossed my mind as being a category, but that's actually a category as well.
Dean: Yeah, and those are great. Whatever you can think about, like non-algorithmic kind of searches, those things that are right qualitative things that people would be interested in. That can be things like homes with pools, which is algorithmic, you can find that, but even when you start making lists of things like the 10 best backyard oasis on the market right now or the things like the workshops, with home workshops or the best home office setups on the market right now or the homes that have in-law suites or income available. Those are the things that-
Josh: Yeah, and you would use those to build segmented buyer-
Dean: Buyer, yes.
Josh: So making those as separate offers-
Dean: That's right.
Josh: Yeah, to have different buyers segments.
Dean: Yeah. That's what Facebook is really great for. Because I mean, one of the underused things and we're just going to start experimenting these things is the carousel ads are one of them underused things.
Josh: Oh, doing a carousel with each of them.
Dean: Yeah.
Josh: Yeah, I like that.
Dean: Aha.
Josh: Yeah. Evil scheme, it's a bound.
Dean: Well, this is great. I mean, I'm super excited that you're part of the community here. It's a real, if you get a chance to kind of look around in the blog and I don't know whether you've been in the forum yet, but lots of stuff going on in there.
Josh: I didn't even know there was a forum.
Dean: Oh, there you go. When you log in. You've been to the blog?
Josh: Yeah.
Dean: Okay. So at the top of the blog there's a link that says forum and you go in there and there's all kinds of great conversations and people sharing stuff in there, but we're definitely creating this culture of field reports and field tests and things that are going on. I know you've got that kind of scientific mindset too. So cool to have you part of the community.
Josh: Awesome. It's great to be a part of it. And this was extremely helpful in getting some clarity around just some of those finer points which for whatever reason that's the way my brain works, sometimes I get the little things here or there.
Dean: What's your takeaway? What's your summary of what we talked about?
Josh: It was great. It was great to give me clarity around how to approach the Getting Listings postcards. My afternoon is going to be spent finalizing the first three or four of these that I'm going to start with.
Dean: And the great news is once you only have to set that up one time. That's the good news, is that you only have to set it up because once you get the postcard template set up then it's really just one mailing. You can do one mailing with all of the stuff we can just click, because we use the digital variable printing.
Josh: Oh, yeah. That's beautiful. That's beautiful.
Dean: It's just one mailing. You don't have to 20 different mailings. We do it all with one, but it's already divided up into these addresses get this one and all customized.
Josh: Yeah, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. So getting that up and going, getting with the leads that I currently have, adding some of that stuff just to give people as I'm mailing easy ways to connect, that's a high priority. And then I really like the idea of the daily tour. That'll be on my to-do list for early next week and start creating some marketing and communication around that.
Dean: Yes. That's awesome.
Josh: Yeah.
Dean: So it's just you're just layering and layering and layering, but those are the five elements that we're looking for and you got all the baseline things is the first step, get it all kind of layered and then there's things that you can start to do to really sort of polish it out and make a difference.
Josh: Yeah. Yeah. Well, awesome.
Dean: So cool. All right. Well, I will watch with great excitement the evolution and see things happening here and stay connected. I'm super excited to have you a part of it.
Josh: Me too. Me too. I had to follow up with Diane now to get my Most Interesting Postcard out and then next up will be the Getting Listings campaign.
Dean: Awesome. Thanks, Josh.
Josh: Thanks Dean. Appreciate it.
Dean: Talk to you soon. Bye.
Josh: All right. Bye-bye.
Dean: And there we have it. That was a really great episode. Josh the very thoughtful, understands and gets the psychology of what's going on along with the context, which is so important anytime you're going to start implementing anything that if you really have an understanding of why something is being implemented the way it is, you get it and you just go with it. I'm excited to watch what's going to happen. I'm sure we'll check in with Josh over the coming months as everything starts to develop and document everything that's happening from him.
But I think there's a great lesson here that if you're in a situation where you would love to start implementing all of these things, you've been listening to the podcast, you've been seeing what's happening here, just jump in with us. We've got all of the pieces figured out. It's such a shortcut for you to not have to figure out any of the creative work. We've already got all of the elements of it. I prepare and write a new World's Most Interesting Postcard for you every month. There alone you don't have to do anything. Once you get your Top 150 together, we can mail and print and do everything with that. So all you have to do is get your Top 150 together.
We've got all of the tools that you need for implementing the Getting Listings program. We've got the postcards, the landing pages, the newsletter, the cover letters, the ongoing follow-up, everything that you need to run a Getting Listings campaign completely to the point where people just call you up to come and list their homes. And when you get those listings, all of the listing multiplier things that we have in place. We've got the instant open house landing pages, we've got the autoresponders and the whole email follow-up campaigns, the property PDF formats that we use for fulfilling what people are asking for when they come to the instant open house, including the infobox flyers and the just listed cards and the Facebook ads, all of the stuff that you need to multiply your listings.
We talked about converting leads and sending your market watch email. We've got the autoresponder broadcaster that you need so you can have thousands of buyers and send one newsletter that's automatically distributed to all of those thousands of people, you can broadcast specific messages to them, and be part of a community of people who are all doing the same thing. So I encourage you, come on over to GoGoAgent.com and join us. You get a free trial 30 days, no credit card required.
You can come on in, take a look around, see what we've got. And then if you like what you see, you can choose to join us, but it's free to look and free to jump in and have a conversation with us for see how we can help you implement all the ideas in the Listing Agent Lifestyle podcast. And if you'd like to be a guest on the show, just go to ListingAgentLifestyle.com and click on the be a guest link and we'll be able to hatch some evil schemes for you. That's it for this week. Have a great week. I will talk to you next time. Bye.