Today on the Listing Agent Lifestyle podcast we're talking with Ric Luis Araujo from Oahu, Hawaii and Ric has just started the Getting Listings program, mailing to an area he wants to dominate.
We identified a couple of tweaks that will fundamentally shift the way he thinks about the program, and I'm glad we had this conversation because we spent the entire hour talking about the structure and thought process behind why and how the Getting Listings program works the way it does.
I think even though Ric felt like he was alone in wondering if this approach will work for him, and if he was 'doing it right', I know a lot of people have similar questions. So this full hour is exactly about how do we evaluate the area you're choosing to mail, why we do what we do, and what you can expect when you start a Getting Listings mailing for your area.
PS: Our 2nd annual Listing Agent Lifestyle real estate mastermind event is coming up in Toronto next month.
We've got an amazing 2 days planned.
On day one we join up with the Archangel Summit and we have Seth Godin, Elisabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love) and Todd Herman (author of The Alter Ego effect) and lots of other great speakers...
On the 2nd day, we're doing a real estate only day to focus on the Future Of Real Estate as we enter the 2020's.
We're going to focus the best things we can do now to really capitalize on the opportunities we have right now while everyone in our industry is waiting for the "disruptors" to ruin everything :)
Would you like to join us?
You can check out the details here.
Links:
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Transcript: Listing Agent Lifestyle Ep092
Dean: Ric.
Ric: Yes. Hello.
Dean: Hey. There he is. Ric, how do I say your name?
Ric: My full name? You mean your last name?
Dean: Yes. It sounds like a power name. Your full name?
Ric: Thanks. Ric.
Dean: Araujo Ric, okay. You said. That's awesome.
Dean: It's a power name. It's awesome.
Ric: Thank you.
Dean: Welcome. I'm very excited that we've got the whole hour here to talk about the listing agent lifestyle. I'd love to hear where you're from and what you're up to and what we want to focus on today.
Ric: Okay. Well, move from California to Hawaii, Honolulu about three years ago. I was doing mortgage and now I'm in real estate, so newly licensed. Well, I found your program as part of my marketing research, the go-go clients.
Dean: Okay. Yeah.
Ric: Oh, Google agent, sorry.
Dean: Yeah.
Ric: It's been almost two months, I'd say in my first campaign about two weeks ago, which is ... I don't know if you have a sample of the only postcard I sent so far and there is another one that we are about to send, probably tomorrow [inaudible 00:03:17].
Dean: Awesome. Are you doing the getting listings program? That's what's you're sending out?
Ric: Yes. Correct.
Dean: Okay. Perfect. Well, tell me about the area like what you're focusing on, who chosen as a target market for yourself here?
Ric: One area in Oahu very well within Oahu. I don't know if you're familiar.
Dean: I've only been to Maui.
Ric: Oh, yeah. It's most popular for tourism. Well, there is an area called Kapolei that's where the office is called The Banker Office I belong to. I've been trying different neighborhoods in this surrounding area.
Dean: Okay.
Ric: If that was the question.
Dean: Yeah. Tell me about the neighborhood or the type of homes that you've chosen that you selected here.
Ric: Okay. For the postcard, I used the criteria of veterans only on these new re neighborhood called Ocean Point. It's a recently developed ... Well, I guess within the five years. I decided to use Ocean Point veterans only, so people that has VA long. I believe that was the only criteria.
Dean: Okay. How many homes was that? How many did that make up?
Ric: About 380, almost 400.
Dean: Okay. Let's walk through the idea there. Were they all within a particular neighborhood or a type of home or were they spread out? Is there a difference in the types of homes that they have?
Ric: That's a good question. I don't know if I even looked into that part of it. Only look…
Dean: The reason I was asking is that the idea behind the getting listings program is that you pick an area geographically that is all A, either named community, like a planned or named neighborhood where people can say, this is the Happy Valley or Happy Acres Country Club Area, whatever the name is so that people relate to it like a horoscope effect or a type of home where it's ocean front condos or townhouses or ocean front homes or golf course homes or something like that that we can then offer people the September report on winter Haven lakefront house prices.
When you mail the postcard that ... Where I'm questioning or where I'm wondering going down the path here is, why just VA? Why veteran home owners? I could see you're trying to attract veteran buyers because they can get VA loans and stuff like that, but what was the thought process for selecting them as a listing audience?
Ric: I believe the only reason or the only thing I had in mind was just to narrow it down, that way I can put something in the postcard like what I did, I put like these small banner with a flag and just typed proud to serve our military with their real estate needs. That way it cleans the horoscope effect. I was taking that idea from you. They feel like this, oh, is a directed to two veterans like you know I'm a veteran. Just throwing that out.
Dean: Okay. What happens so far? You've mailed one time or?
Ric: Yeah, just one time, that one time and about two weeks ago. I didn't get any responses. I see that people go to the website, so I guess I can keep track, the page views of what I'm looking here, but nope. I didn't get anybody requests in the actual, the package [inaudible 00:08:48].
Dean: Right. What was the report that you were offering? Typically, as I mentioned, we would say that we're offering a report on Winter Haven lakefront house prices. What was the headline on your postcard?
Ric: Okay. I edited your sample a little bit. The title here I entered free September, 2018 Report on Ocean Point Home Prices.
Dean: Okay. That's great. Is Ocean Point a town or a neighborhood?
Ric: It's a neighborhood.
Dean: Okay. How many homes are in all of Ocean Point?
Ric: Under 2000, I would say. A bit over a thousand.
Dean: What's the price range of the homes in Ocean Point?
Ric: I would say 600 to 700.
Dean: Okay. 600,000 to 700,000. How many of them sold in the last 12 months?
Ric: Didn't look in to that though I got the report. Have team members send it to me.
Dean: Okay.
Ric: You want me to pull it out? [inaudible 00:10:23].
Dean: Well, just so I have a sense of when I helped you walk through how we evaluate and look at what this target market that you've chosen is. If we say that in Ocean Point there are 2000 homes and they range from 600,000 to 700,000, so they're all pretty similar homes. If there was a 5% turnover rate of all of those homes, that would mean there were a hundred sales in the last 12 months in Ocean Point. Does that sound about right or does it sounds way off, more or less?
Ric: What was your figure? How many?
Dean: A hundred. If there's 2000 homes in Ocean Point that if there was a 5% turnover rate, that would mean there was a hundred sales in Ocean Point.
Ric: Right.
Dean: Does that sound about right?
Ric: The one I got is from the last three months. That will be an interesting figure to compare as soon as I get that data, if you don't mind explaining to me well, what that figure will tell me.
Dean: Sure. When I look at ... This is how I look at it, that when you're choosing an area, we want to look at the total yield of what's happening in there. I think it would be reasonable to say that a 5% turnover rate is probably about right in most cases. That would put it at a hundred sales out of the 2000 homes. If they are in the 600 to $700,000 range, that it's somewhere in the $18,000 to $20,000 commission on the listing side of a transaction for you. Let's just say 15,000 to be conservative on that.
Ric: Okay.
Dean: What that means is that there are ... Just in the last 12 months on those 100 sales times 15,000, there were $1.5 million in listing commissions paid to somebody in your area there of all of the ... If somebody got all of the commissions, that's what we're talking about. That's just on the listing side, but there's ... That brings with it all those other opportunities and the opportunities that a lot of those people might sell that house and buy a bigger house somewhere in the same area, but we're just talking about the listing. I'm just evaluating the listing side opportunity here. To mail to those 2000 homes for all of the postcards there, let's say, might cost, $1200 or $1500 dollars to mail all of them.
We looked at that and you're saying that it's a $1,200 times 12 is $14,400 is what it would cost to mail the postcards for an entire year, every month to all of the homes in Ocean Points. That's how I look at the math of that. Now, I don't know whether you've seen the infographics that we just had with Tony. If you listen to the podcast or if you seen in the Go-go agent members' area, the six year case study that we've got going with Tony of what happens with all of the numbers here. The way we set up the getting listings program is as an opportunity to go in and then take over and area as the top listing agent in the whole area.
Tony's over that period of time become the number one agent in his entire MLS district for where he's mailing all of his getting listings postcards. There's some really interesting facts that are coming out as we look at all of the results of what happened. Over that six years, now Tony has spent over a $100,000 on mailing postcards and newsletters over that period of time and he's made almost $1.1 million, a million $80,000 in commissions from that. It was a 12 times return on investment for it. When I look at an area like Ocean Point, if I'm coming into it just from the beginning here, this is how I look at that math because I look at if we mail to the 2000 homes and let's say that there are a hundred sales over the course of the year, what percentage of these sales could you get?
One transaction is worth $18000 or $20,000 or $15,000 minimum kind of thing, and it costs $14,000 to mail all the postcards for the entire year. Let's say that you generated over a hundred or more responses to the postcard over that period time. Tony, in the first year of mailing generated 160 leads from the area that he was mailing it from September, 2013. September, 2014, there were 160 leaves that he generated from mailing the postcards and people saying, send me the report.
Ric: Oh, wow.
Dean: Yeah. Now, that didn't mean that everybody was going to list with him. In fact, he mailed for five months in a row before he got his first transaction, but when he got the first transaction, it was in an area of very similar, the prices are that 600,000 to 700,000 range. When you get one transaction, your at what we call escape velocity. Now, you've recaptured the money that you invested to get to that first transaction and you've made a profit on that. If we do the math, if we called it $1,200 a month times let's say five months that your mail out, that's 5,000 plus another 200, so $6,000 over the five months.
Ric: Right.
Dean: If you did one transaction, you'd get your $6,000 back, plus you got an additional $10,000 above that profit on that, and now it's self-sustaining. Now you've got all ... It's self-funding itself. That the money is continuing the mailing. As you see the infographic for Tony's there, you see that the commissions keep going up and up and up, the money that he's spending continues to go up each month because he's mailing, continuing to mail every month. What you end up with is this visual indication of the ROI on what you're doing.
What was fascinating about the sixth year of this was that we looked back on that first year and in 2000 ... The last year from 2018, September to September, 2019, he did transactions, listed homes and sold them with people who responded to his postcard every year since 2013. Just within that one year, he listed homes from people that responded in 2013, ‘14, ‘15, ‘16, ‘17, 18 and ‘19. When we went back, that prompted us to look at what happened with the 160 people who responded in the first year. 44 of them actually sold their homes so far.
He has sold 23 of the 44. He has over 50% market share of all of the people who responded to his postcard in year one so far over the next six years. Even though when you look at the results from year one, he was profitable and multiplied in year one, but that wasn't even the ... By far, the huge value of it has been over the next five years the people who responded then now selling their homes.
Ric: Oh, I see.
Dean: Does that make sense?
Ric: Yeah. It's very interesting.
Dean: Yeah. It's not about, let's mail a postcard and get a listing right now it's about choosing to completely dominate that Ocean Point area.
Ric: I see. I'm not sure of these areas [inaudible 00:22:50] oversaturated or I don't even know how to see if it's saturated. Regardless of, should I just stick with it? Is your suggestion to take over the entire Ocean Point instead of just narrow it down to veterans, basically?
Dean: Yeah. What's the alternative? Why do you just want to narrow it down to veterans, which really ... I mean, that's a benefit that you're a veteran, but it's not relative to Ocean Point or the value of their homes? What you're really saying is that in the postcard you're trying to convince people to list with you. You're saying choose me because I'm a veteran just like you.
Ric: Right.
Dean: At the heart of it, that's really what you're saying. What I'm saying, the reason that we don't brand the postcards, the reason that we don't ... In the sense that everybody thinks about branding is in terms of your slogan and getting your name out there and all of that stuff, is that all we're trying to do, I'm using the postcard to just compel the people who are thinking about selling their Ocean Point home to raise their hands to get information that they're definitely interested in if they're thinking about selling their house because what you don't know ... This is the dynamic here that's happening.
There are 2000 homes there and if we're right, plus or minus on that 5% turnover rate, that there are going to be a hundred people in Ocean Point who sell their home in the next 12 months. What that means is that 1990 or ... How many would that be? 1900 out of the 2000 people have no interest in selling their house this year. It's not even on their radar. The only people that we're speaking to are those 100. That's who we're trying to identify. If I could give you some magic glasses that we could fly over the Ocean Point neighborhood and all the homes that are going to sell in the next 12 months would light up with this green glow and we could write down all the addresses, that would be a valuable thing because then you could focus all of your attention on those 100 people.
That's the point that we said the postcard, the inexpensive, just frequent offering the same message to people just to get them to raise their hand. Then we send the get top dollar newsletter and the updates and the cover letters. We start branding you within the people who raised their hand and indicates that there are higher likely to sell their house than the general population.
Ric: I see. Should I still put in my on the postcard even though-
Dean: No. I would not, because it's not ... What you're trying to do and as I've said, with respect, I'm not saying that ... All I'm saying is that the reason that you're doing it ultimately is you're trying to use that as a convincing thing that somebody's going to say, "Oh yeah, he's a veteran. Let's choose him."
Ric: Okay.
Dean: That is not helping you identify all of the people who are going to sell their house. If there's 376 veterans who live in Ocean Point and we use that 5% turnover rate, that means there's only 15 of them who are going to sell their houses in the next 12 months.
Ric: Right. Okay. I think I'm realizing the mistake about branding just the way to say it.
Dean: Right. I think that that's okay. What's more important is that you focus on the things that are going to give you an advantage, which is ... It's okay if you choose 500 homes to start with that you mail to the 500 and then parlay that into mailing to everybody once you can. I mean, Tony's started out mailing to 2,500 homes, but then when he did his first transaction, then he jumped it up to 5,000 and then he went to 7,500 and now he's mailing to almost 20,000 homes. But it's all, he's mailing from profits, he's reinvesting so it's continued to be a profit center for him over all these years.
Ric: Right. He actually just scaled up.
Dean: Yeah. If you look forward, do you enjoy real estate or are you thinking that you're going to be in real estate for five years or more?
Ric: Yeah. Absolutely.
Dean: Is Ocean Point a popular area? What do you think is the prospects for Ocean Point over the next five years? Is it going to be a vibrant thriving area? Are people desirable? Are people going to be moving in and out of Ocean Point in the next five years?
Ric: I would say so. Not an expert, sorry if I don't address it as an experience realtor would.
Dean: No.
Ric: Because I only been in this for four months, three months.
Dean: No, I get it. But I'm saying, as a neighborhood, the reality is, how old are the homes in Ocean Point?
Ric: Relatively new. I would say, most of it ... Of course, they developed it in sections, but I believe most of it has being built within the last five years, which is really new considering [crosstalk 00:30:14].
Dean: Okay, great. I would bet that you may have a little bit even higher turnover rate than 5% potentially, but either way, that's a good safe number to go from guidance on. But if I were you looking into this, I would want to know that stuff about them. I would want to know what the lay of the land is there. If it's an area where houses come on the market and they sell in a reasonable amount of time and it's not that everybody's trying to sell their house, nobody wants to buy in Ocean Point or that ... Are they still developing new houses in Ocean Point?
Ric: There's a projection. I don't think that's happening anytime soon though.
Dean: Okay. Right now, they're not ... If a resale home comes on the market, they're not competing with brand new homes that the builder is selling.
Ric: No.
Dean: No? Okay. There's the thing. There's an established resale market for this, like homes come on the market and they sell, that's what I mean. Is there turnover within Ocean Point? I'm sure there is. That's all I look at now is that you're looking at taking almost like a buy and hold approach picking a stock or a mutual fund or collection kind of thing that you're saying, I'm quite sure that over the next five years that Ocean Point is going to continue to be a viable community and that people aren't going to want to live in Ocean Point and that homeowners are going to be able to sell their homes and they're going to continue to do it at a rate of about 5% sort of over each year. That would mean that about a hundred people a year are going to sell their house. Right?
Ric: Right.
Dean: Right. If you believe that, and then you also add into it that you're in an area where the average price is 600,00 to 700,000, that means that for every one that you do sell, that you get a minimum of $15,000 to $20,000 or more for listing that house. Now, that makes it that it's a very viable things that all you have to do is two transactions over the course of the 12 months and you've made a significant return on your money. Right?
Ric: Right.
Dean: That's the thing, but more importantly, that's just the ... Even that is taking an expense based approach to it. What I'm saying is that your investing, the money that you're spending on the postcards to generate leads, to generate people who raise their hands, is that what you've invested in is you are creating an asset of inside knowledge that these ... Let's say you get a hundred people to respond over the course of the year, that these 100 people have a high likelihood of selling their house. If I just stay in contact with them over the next one year, two years, three years, that each year that goes by there's a bigger and bigger chance that they're going to sell their house and list it with me.
That's what I'm saying about the first year. If Tony stopped mailing after the first year and just said the newsletters to the 160 people who have responded in that first year, he, over this next five years with them, has done 23 transaction.
Ric: Wow.
Dean: Right. That's what I'm saying is that the ROI on year one of what the mail is through the roof.
Ric: How long it took him till he got the first customer, his first subscription?
Dean: Five months.
Ric: Okay. That is done in an average, you say [crosstalk 00:35:49].
Dean: There is no average. The thing that happens is that we've had people who have done transactions in their first month. We've had people come in, done a mailing, gotten call, people listed their house and they got the sale before their free trial of Go-Go Agent had even ended. Then you've got people who mail for it could take five months, six months, even longer sometimes, but what ends up happening the very most is people come in and they mail three months in a row and they see that they're continuing to mail and they're seeing the first month you mail, you get the most response because they've never seen that postcard offer before.
Then when you mailed the next month, it's pretty common that you get less response than you've got the first month. The visual of it is that you're seeing that I spent $1,000 this month and I got X number of leads, I didn't get a listing though. I sent another thousand dollars the next month and I got fewer responses than I got the first month and I still didn't get a listing. Then I mail the third month and I got around the same or maybe even a little bit less than I got in month two. Now you start thinking, I picked the wrong area.
This isn't working. Maybe I should switch to another area. They abandon it without even thinking about that they've generated a number of leads, right now, especially when people are doing it with the lower numbers. The only thing that's relevant is did the people who responded list their house have you locked out because they didn't choose you. If they haven't listed, you haven't lost anything yet.
Ric: Right.
Dean: Right. That's the whole thing is that you have to come into it with an investment mindset knowing that your strategy is going to play out, that it's going to be profitable, that only way to lose at it is to abandon it.
Ric: I see. It makes perfect sense when you put it that way. All I do is change the month and the title of the postcard and I send those postcards, in this case, to those 2000 homes and I just stopped sending to the ones that reply [crosstalk 00:39:00].
Dean: That's exactly right.
Ric: Okay.
Dean: The ones that reply, then we have a whole newsletter follow up system for them. The ones who reply, you send them the report, you send them all the listings that have been on the market and sold in the last six months in Ocean Point and you send them the get top dollar newsletter and I've already written cover letters that you said along with it. You don't have to do any of the creative work. You just fill the envelopes and mail them out and people will call you when they're ready to list their house.
Ric: Right.
Dean: It's that simple. It's magic.
Ric: I went over the entire package and it seems very interesting. I liked the book, especially.
Dean: How to sell your house for top dollar facts, right?
Ric: Yeah. If people edit in the cover of the book since-
Dean: Yeah. We have a version ... We can make a nice paperback book for you, a perfect bound that looks like a real paperback book or you could do just a desktop published, self-mailer saddle stitch book with staples.
Ric: Right.
Dean: But yes, you edit it to have your name and your contact information.
Ric: Yeah. I did that part. Basically I had the package ready. In case I will get somebody, I was ready to send out the mail, which I guess I'm going to use it. I mean, the other question I have, so all I have to do is look at how many homes or their homes that are being sold in the last 12 months or going year by year and that's where I get my turnover ratio to see if [crosstalk 00:41:13].
Dean: Yeah. We just divide it by ... If you looked at the last 10 ... You would just do that math that I've just went through, that you just look and see, okay, we know that there are 2000 homes. It reminds me of the Lakefront homes here in Winter Haven. There are 2100 Lakefront homes, but there's a 4% turnover and the average price would be $450,000 here for the Lakefront homes. They're the most expensive homes in the area, Winter Haven's an affordable area compared to Hawaii.
Ric: Yeah, I lived in Florida, Orlando.
Dean: Okay. So you know.
Ric: Parts of it.
Dean: Yeah. It's much less expensive than Hawaii. Now, the thing that really is the rocket fuel for this is that, while you've got that established, this is the ... Thing is you can literally put this on autopilot. When you pick that area you can literally get it so that every month the postcards go out and all you're doing is responding to the people who respond to the postcard. What you then want to do is focus your attention on finding buyers who want to buy homes in Ocean Point, even before you get listings.
Ric: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dean: Just start finding and building this inventory of buyer leads for Ocean Point.
Ric: What is your strategy for that?
Dean: Well, there's so many things. We have a whole program called Finding Buyers, but basically one of the tools that we use is doing the similar thing in Facebook ads or print ads or wherever people are looking for homes and offering the guide to Ocean Point house prices. The buyers now who are looking and considering ocean point, now they respond and you've got the same kind of thing. Here's everything that happens, but now you start offering daily tours of Ocean Point houses you don't offer updates on all the homes that come on the market in Ocean Point.
Now you've got buyers who are looking for Ocean Point homes and as soon as somebody wants to show one, now you've got all of this stuff like ... One of the things we do is we take a Google map of Ocean Point and drop a pin. Take your data of all of the people who've responded to your getting listings postcards and we drop a pin on the Google map to show where those people live. The ones who responded are all there. Now, if you get a buyer who wants to look at palms in Ocean Point and let's say I was mailing there and you responded to my postcard because you were thinking about maybe selling your house, I could send you an email and say, "Hey Ric, I am showing the homes to some buyers from Los Angeles who are looking for homes in Ocean Point."
We're going to be looking this weekend. I remember looking up your house online when I sent you the Ocean Point report. I'm not sure what your plans are, but I thought I'd check in and see if maybe I could tell them about your house and we may be able to match them up."
Ric: I see. Even if we don't know whether they're going to sell or not, as long as they requested our report, we actually send out communication.
Dean: Yes, exactly because now you're doing ... Imagine if you were, and this is often what happens is that people are thinking about selling, they're ready now and you're like a blessing to them. You're like, Oh, this is great. Of course. We were just thinking about it or wow, we weren't thinking for maybe a couple of months but maybe we should if this guys really like interested. Now what you have to be really careful to do is that you have to be 100% in integrity with that. That you only do it when you literally do have a buyer who's actually looking at homes in those things. A lot of times agents smuggle that into a situation and say to people, hey, I've got a buyer when they don't have a buyer.
Ric: Okay.
Dean: You have to do it 100% in integrity when you're actually showing. You need to be able to follow through with what you promised so that you always are 100% in integrity that when Ric says something it happens. He means that he's not just trying to convince me to list my house with him.
Ric: Right. When it comes to those Facebook ads, I don't know if you are the one who play with those yourself, but I was trying to get an idea, how do you narrow down to targeting when it comes to finding buyers because they're obviously not homeowners yet? I know that's the criteria they use for instance to buy potential listings. What criteria as you used to narrow down and target potential buyers?
Dean: Well, if you've been following what's happening with Facebook now is a lot of the targeting and filtering that we used to do is no longer allowed on Facebook. You can only now target down to a 15 mile radius and you can't select out homeowners or renters or you're not allowed to do any of the things that could be viewed as discriminatory where you're filtering out people.
Ric: Exactly.
Dean: Right. We're establishing new savings where now it's just changed in that we're still able to go in the whole area, but we're depending on Facebook to algorithmically point the ad to the right people once they see who's actually engaging with this. The good news is that with Ocean Point, it sounds like it's close to the ocean. Is it ocean view?
Ric: Let's see. Not really, unless you are in a second floor [inaudible 00:49:03].
Dean: Okay.
Ric: Yeah, probably not, but there's a small ... There's like a big gap and there's an old neighborhood in between. No, I don't think so.
Dean: How far from the ocean would it be?
Ric: Oh, well, it's pretty close. I would say five minutes' drive. People would usually walk there. Those neighbors take walks around that area and they'll reach the beach.
Dean: Yes. I wonder what would be ... One of the things that we have as a loophole for a work around is that we have the opportunity to do a 50 mile radius, but drop the pin in the ocean and so do the shore line.
Ric: I think I know what you mean and then you do the same, but excluding certain areas.
Dean: You can't do any exclusion areas. That's what we used to do. We could literally squeeze down to an area of a thousand homes where we can only show ads to this neighborhood. That's what's been taken away.
Ric: When it comes to buyers, what will be the plants is we cannot really do it geographically or does that applied to [crosstalk 00:50:48].
Dean: Well, you can do it ... I would look at doing in a 15 mile radius. I would just run the ad for everybody and then you can select people who are visiting the area versus live in the area, which is a great one of the select that you can use. Is Ocean Point the kind of thing where permanent residents who live and live there or are there vacation homeowners there too?
Ric: No. Mostly of them are just single family first, primary homes.
Dean: Primary homes.
Ric: Yeah. There's a few investment homes or second homes usually. These veterans actually, VA.
Dean: Yeah. That's what I would do is get in front of using Facebook is do an ad, not for a particular house in Ocean Point, but as a neighborhood. You start showing and getting people ... Is Ocean Point a planned community? Do they have clubhouse and the pool and a recreation area, all that stuff or is it just stacked up homes? What is it? Describe what's going on in Ocean Point for me?
Ric: No, I don't think so. I know that they have an association, but no, I don't think they have.
Dean: No golf course.
Ric: No.
Dean: It's not like a golf course community or a country club type of community?
Ric: No, I don't think so. There's a big golf course right next to it, but I don't think it's necessarily part of it.
Dean: Okay.
Ric: I hope I'm not wrong.
Dean: No. But in general, what you're looking for is that you want to start finding buyers who want that category of home. If we're saying, if we're looking at different categories that might be is ocean front condos is a category, ocean view is a category, golf course homes is a category, townhouses is a category, villas is a category, adult communities, active adult communities would be a category. You're looking to find the buyers who are looking for that category of homes and so that they can almost have the teacher's edition of the algebra book so that they know what to expect, they know how much the prices should be or what they get for their money or what's available there.
Anybody researching with, I want to be in Hawaii on a golf course, that's what I'm looking for, if they're looking for homes, then all of a sudden here comes this Facebook ad showing the golf communities in Oahu that are ... It was a guide with an offer for the guide to Oahu golf communities, that's to be appealing to me in my research mode as I'm looking for homes. I'm willing to raise my hand for that, I'm willing to download that, to get that.
Ric: Would it be a good idea to target them based on income, if that's the case? [crosstalk 00:54:56].
Dean: Income is one of the things that we are not able to ... You can't use any of the selecting things that you're only want people who make $100,000 or anything like that. Right now, the pendulum has swung in the direction of real estate ads can only be shown to everybody in a 15 mile radius. There's no exclusionary selection available.
Ric: Oh wow.
Dean: It's like running a newspaper ad. It's the same thing, exactly. It's like you can't do any selection in a newspaper ad. You just have to know that within the pool of people who are reading this newspaper, some of these people are going to be interested in whatever you're advertising. It's the same thing here. We can show an ad to all of the people within a 15 mile radius of Ocean Point and just know that some of the people who are interested in Ocean Point live in that area and they'll see your ads.
Ric: I see.
Dean: That makes sense?
Ric: Yeah. That makes it very difficult for Hawaiians to finding buyer for it.
Dean: Yeah, it's not that it makes it difficult, it just makes more. It's less than what Nirvana that it was. I kept telling people, if they weren't doing a Facebook advertising to get in, not everything doesn't stay the same. Now, you adapt and you look for what's the best practices for this now is you start to imagine it's just like a newspaper that's going to distributed to everybody within this 15 mile radius. That's all.
Ric: Right. I know there are some big demand for second homes, investment homes from Canadians. If I want put an hour trying to find Canadian buyers, I wouldn't necessarily even focused on a city or a state. I will like to send that out throughout their whole Canada. According to the new rule, that that is no possible or how are you guys using that?
Dean: No. You could run the ads in Canada offering information about Hawaii for sure. That's no problem.
Ric: On Facebook. [crosstalk 00:57:46]
Dean: On Facebook and that's just a smart thing. People are coming from Vancouver, that's probably from British Columbia, in Canada where people would come into Hawaii, you could run ads to all the areas in Vancouver offering information about Oahu real estate prices. You could do a reality show, basically you could do every week say to people, Aloha from Hawaii. This is Ric and here we are today. It's a beautiful day. As soon as it starts to get wintery weather in in Canada, here you are with these beautiful Hawaiian thing.
You're showing people, getting them to know all about a wahoo, like come to Oahu, it's such a beautiful area. We've got golf courses and here we are today at the Ocean Reef Golf Course and this is what it's got. The homes here sell for $600,000 to up over $3 million. It's got whatever you want. If you'd like to get ... I've got a booklet or guide or report on all the golf course homes in Oahu. Just click right here to get it. Now you're getting people who live in Vancouver who want to move to Hawaii, who are attracted to your offer of the guide. Now you're their man in Oahu. They don't have anybody that they know, but here's this guy shows up in my newsfeed all the time.
Ric: The 15 mile ratio rule applies to this as well, so basically-
Dean: Yeah. Any real estate ad can only be shown within a 15 mile radius.
Ric: Okay. To work this basically, what you just mentioned, I'll have to ... For instance, again, taking Vancouver as an example, it's just like basically take 50 mile ratios randomly, basically.
Dean: Yeah. You know that that's a hotbed. There's a pipeline of people coming from Vancouver to Hawaii and now when you say at all Western Canada that you could go probably Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver, all of that going that way and you could do the same thing in San Francisco and Los Angeles and San Diego.
Ric: I see. Okay. Sorry, if I'm searching a little bit there. I was looking at my post story here. Another thing I included, I was able to come up with a team that way we can talk about expertise since that's something I don't have. I teamed that with some experts and that way I can use and emphasize those words.
Dean: You put that on the postcard?
Ric: No, not on the postcard, but it's on the report, on the package and some of those letters and-
Dean: Okay. Inside the package, that's fine, all of that, but we don't want to put that on the postcard. The only thing that should be on the postcard is we keep their eyes on just the offer of the information.
Ric: ... I don't know if it's a rule or maybe it's just that the way that AP want it. I was still supposed to put my name, right, so the response?
Dean: Of course, but there in the return address portion of the-
Ric: I don't understand.
Dean: ... Postcard. Whatever's legally required in most states. That means you've got to have your name, your designation, the company that you work with and your phone number or address. You have to be identified as the real estate. I'm not talking about sending blind ads or blind postcards. We're doing that, but there's a difference between that and saying, with your picture and logo and slogan and serving the community for this or that kind of stuff is convincing language.
Ric: Oh okay.
Dean: We're not trying to convince them to list with you. We're just compelling them that it's safe to get this information.
Ric: Right. That applies to my picture as well.
Dean: Yeah.
Ric: Should I still put in my picture or my team logo and all of that stuff?
Dean: I would. That's the point. That's the thing. The reason that this works so well is that it feels like everything is arm's length. It's different than an offer for, let me come over and tell you how much your house is worth, which sounds like I'm going to have to wrestle with a real estate agent who's trying to get me to list my house to tell me what it's worth versus here's this report on the data of the Ocean Point house prices from the last 12 months. That sounds like the objective market data that I want and need. That sounds like I can just lure you in on that. That's not a subjective opinion of a real estate agent trying to get me to list my house with them.
Ric: I see. Okay. That definitely clarified idea better.
Dean: Yeah.
Ric: Wow.
Dean: This is great. It sounds like you've got the right area, you've got the right longevity view, you're going to be there for five years, you look at it and it's a proven system that gets you listings in an area.
Ric: Right. I see. Well, that's very interesting. That changes a little bit. I'm considering canceling the right campaign for it tomorrow because I was following something similar to what I was doing here, especially cost-wise because I tried to make it look nicer, I put a lot of color.
Dean: No, that's the thing. We try and make it look neutral. That's what you really want is you want it to look neutral. We want it to look like just information like we're not trying to convince them to ask for this information. We want them to feel like, there's some valuable information. I was just wondering. Everybody who's thinking about selling their house, the first thought that they're going to have is, well, how much is my house worth?
Ric: Right. Not necessarily related to this, but on another meeting, somebody brought up the idea that, well, is really wants to know the value of their houses, they just go to like Zillow and apparently it's giving ... I know it gives people an estimate and I know it's not necessarily accurate, but that people buy the idea. How do we-?
Dean: Yeah, at a cost of ... That's like saying if people wanted a pizza, they could just go to the store, get some dough, put it together, do that ... But they [crosstalk 01:06:13] every day. People could do any number of things and it's absolutely right, but everybody ... There's not a single person who's probably happy with those estimates or that they might not have that thing it would be good to have more information. It's good to have more perspectives on it. Right?
Ric: I agree. I would definitely do it if I was a homeowner out there. I think that's very interesting.
Dean: Well, this has been ... It went by fast, but I think we made a lot of progress though. Right? What's your take on what we've talked about?
Ric: Well, even though I thought I knew was it program was about, I'm so glad I got on this call with you. It came as surprise yesterday. By the way, it's 4:00 in the morning here.
Dean: Oh, wow.
Ric: Unfortunately I've got to sleep. Sorry if I sound a little bit-
Dean: That's okay.
Ric: ... Ready for bed.
Dean: Awesome.
Ric: But I really appreciate the way you explained the whole concept, even though I read the ... I went over the entire guide a couple of times, still there's one little thing I wasn't getting right and counting with the fact that I have to send this every single month and cost wise and the approach itself, the way you describe it, definitely a game changer. Sounds awesome.
Dean: well, I'm glad because that's the thing that everybody gets a chance to listen to this has probably had the same thoughts. It's good that we clarify for us. Even though I'm having this conversation with you, it's going to be very helpful to a lot of people who are going through it.
Ric: Yeah. I agree. For sure. Yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you for actually time for having me.
Dean: Thank you so much.
Ric: It's all your material. I went over a few of the podcasts, all of the episodes as well, and I was able to garage some ideas for a similar components of it. Well, I can't believe I got the chance to talk to you.
Dean: Awesome.
Ric: You're basically my mentor now.
Dean: Ah, that's so great. That's it. You're in the right community now. This is good because you'll see there's a whole community of people who are doing the same thing and we'll get you involved in the Go-Go Agent communities.
Ric: Very nice. Well thanks a lot.
Dean: Thanks so much Ric. You have a great day. Get some sleep.
Ric: Yeah, I will. I'll definitely will.
Dean: Okay. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
Ric: Thanks a lot Dean. You take care. Bye-bye.
Dean: There we have it. What a great conversation. I mean, it's so important to really understand the psychology of what's going on. I kept saying to Ric that this is a key distinction that we're never trying to convince people to list their house with us on the strength of the postcard. We're not using the postcard to get people to list with us. We're using the postcard to get the people, as many of the people who are thinking about selling their house, to raise their hand and let us know that they're thinking about selling their house so that then we can use all of our efforts to convince them to list with us. We're going to do it just at the right time, right.
It's no good to scare them off in the beginning by just trying to get them to list their house with us when it's far more valuable for us to know who among the 2000 home owners in Ocean Point are the ones who are going to sell their house. That's an important thing to keep in mind. I hope that this added a lot of clarity to you. If you want to take a look at everything we're doing with the getting listings program, come on over to Go-Go agent.com and you can come in, be part of our community, download the entire getting listings program, everything is available for you. It's a completely free trial for 30 days, no credit card required.
Then if you'd like to continue and be part of the community, we're happy to have you. I would love to see more and more and more success stories of people completely dominating neighborhoods and areas, one area at a time. That's it for this week. Have a great week and I'll talk to you next time.