Today on the Listing Agent Lifestyle Podcast, we're talking with Jamie Harnish from Toronto.
Jamie has picked a great midtown area of 5,400 condo's around Yonge and Eglinton that he's trying to dominate, and one of the challenges, of course, is that a lot of them are rental units.
The reality is, the way advertising mail works in Canada means there's always some unavoidable overspill as he has to deliver to some homes that aren't in his category, so we talked about a lot of the psychology of the long game.
He's making all the right moves for what he's trying to achieve, there are lots of great opportunities to split test the information he's sending. He started with a direct mail campaign in March, and digital ads in April, and we talked about the comparison and what actually happens next.
This is a great episode, really looking at strategically planning to dominate.
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Transcript: Listing Agent Lifestyle Ep112
Dean: Jamie.
Jamie: Hello, Mr. Dean.
Dean: How are you?
Jamie: I'm okay, how are you?
Dean: I am fantastic. We are safe and sound and quarantined.
Jamie: Good, good. Likewise. We're holed up. Yeah, we're doing fine.
Dean: That's awesome. Can you tell everybody where you are and what's the situation up there?
Jamie: Sure. I'm in Toronto, in Canada, and things have slowed down a lot. There are still transactions happening but obviously new listings are way down: like, in the 60 something percentage. Sales are down quite a bit as well. There's a been a bit of an uptick over the past couple of weeks, so there's a bit of slightly renewed optimism, I think, with the market. But certainly it is very slow and inventory has come down quite a bit and activity generally as well.
Dean: You know, it's an interesting thing doing a podcast like this where we're in something that's kind of got everybody's attention right now. We want to balance the short term along with the long term focus. How are you thinking about things right now? What's your... What were you hoping today that we could focus on?
Jamie: Yeah. I had to exchange a couple of emails with Diane and I had a bunch of questions and I identified information that... I do listen to all of your episodes, so I kind of know what the typical format is and the types of questions that you usually ask people when you're trying to get to the bottom of stuff, so I wanted to be certainly prepared for that. But I do have some questions. The other interesting thing is, for me, I just started doing the Getting Listings postcard in March. That was the first month that I did it. And then immediately -.
Yeah, exactly. So what I did was I switched to digital. I kind of put some feelers out there with some friends and family and some other realtors just about sending physical mail considering the circumstances and the general consensus was not to do it, but I didn't want to not keep up with the program. I wanted to be consistent so I switched to digital. So I have one month of in-person postcards and I have one month of digital Facebook ads. I wanted to talk about that a bit as well. It's almost like a mini case study. And then maybe address some of the questions that I had as well.
Dean: Okay, perfect. Let's go back to March. Tell me about the area that you chose and how many homes that is and -.
Jamie: It's a condo area. It's Yonge and Eglinton in midtown Toronto.
Dean: I love it, yeah.
Jamie: My wife and I own a condo at Yonge and Eg and we lived there... We're not living there now anymore but up until last year we were living there my wife since 2011 and myself since 2015. Very familiar with the neighborhood. I had started last year, in September, like a video series showcasing the small businesses in and around Yonge and Eglinton... like the restaurants, bars, and little kind of things... where I was interviewing the owners and the managers and stuff like that. So then I wanted to use the Getting Listings program to kind of like almost supplement it, so people are maybe seeing me on Facebook with the videos and then maybe getting their postcards in their mailboxes and those kind of things.
Dean: I love it. Taking the right approach, yeah. If we go through this... and I'll get you to share all the stuff that you're doing... part of the thing that we look at... One of my core principles is to choose a single target market and go into with the idea to plan to dominate. If you're going into Yonge and Eglinton condos as a place then the idea would be to... what would it take to be the number one agent in this market, because that alone has a premium to it. Just the fact of being the top agent in a market begets more opportunity. You get more opportunity just by being who you are at that stage. So it's about stair stepping your way to that status and... Yeah. It starts with selecting it and having that attention first thing. So we're, whatever, now 60 days or less into it right now and we're on our way. So tell me: what happened then with your first couple of months there?
Jamie: I identified... Part of the issue with condos is that through Canada Post you can't say, "I want to hit condos only and I only want to hit these buildings," so you have to do mail walks and the mail walk will include all of the apartment-style housing and that includes rental and -.
Dean: Yeah. You can do apartment-style housing. You can make that distinction. But like you said, some of them are rentals, some of them aren't.
Jamie: Yeah. And there are a number of rental buildings so I identified all the buildings that I wanted to hit and it ended up being about 5,400 different units between all the buildings, but in order to hit those buildings I had to do about 8,600 postcards. That was what I did. I ended up getting 22 leads from that first mail out and it cost me probably around 1,500 bucks once I included the postage and the cost for printing of the booklets and that stuff.
Dean: Right.
Jamie: So probably about 1,500 bucks, 22 leads, that's about 68 bucks a lead. Those are the March results.
Dean: Okay. The thing about the condos in that situation... What's the price range, by the way? What would be the median price of these condos, which you're...
Jamie: Yeah. Median price is 717. Average is about 750.
Dean: And what would that be commission, listing-side commission, for you?
Jamie: Probably about 17.
Dean: About 17,000, okay. So there's plenty in that. That's kind of the great thing. Now, of course, the thing about the 8,600 that you had to mail, the inefficiency of it in that you're mailing to 8,600 to get to 5,400 condo units and then of that 5,400 probably another 25% or 30% of them are rentals that you're...
Jamie: Totally, if not more. Actually, I think it's 40. Sorry to interrupt.
Dean: 40.
Jamie: Yeah. I looked at the stats on realtor.ca, because realtor.ca actually was some great demographic breakdowns. I was on it last night and it's about... No, I apologize. I've got it backwards. It's a 40% owned, 60% rental breakdown at least in the area that I was looking.
Dean: There you go. You're speaking to the people. But the good news is that you're... In Canada, the - that mail is one of the greatest bargains in the world for reaching people. You talk about your cost to reach them and I'm sure either with your company or with TREB, the Toronto Real Estate Board, you've got an even better deal with Canada Post than most.
Jamie: Yeah.
Dean: 10 cents, right? And then just the printing of the postcards. You're on your way. I always look at these things of... If you were to spent the 1,500 every month for 12 months you've got 18,000 dollars, which is just over what one transaction would be in that area. So there's a lot of... You've got a lot of margin there, which is great. Then what happens with the digital version that you did?
Jamie: I did Facebook ads and what I ended up doing, actually, was I came up with two graphics very much similar to the postcard as much as I could. I wanted to keep it yellow, but just had a couple of different ideas so I did some AB testing, but part of the problem with the AB is I can see which one of the two ads performed better, but what I don't know is once they got to the landing page which ones were the people that actually submitted their information. What I'll do for this month, actually, in the coming days is just use the better performing graphic and hope that it was also the one that gave me more results or will end up giving me more results.
Dean: What we've been doing on the Facebook ads is using the lead ads product so that they don't have to leave Facebook. You don't need the landing page.
Jamie: Oh, okay.
Dean: Yeah. You have it so that it's right there. All they do is click the button and just fill in the information right on a form in Facebook.
Jamie: Okay. I know how to do that.
Dean: That's a very efficient thing and that way you can split and know exactly which one is getting the leads. One of the graphics that I might... Remind me now: in Canada are you still allowed to micro-target?
Jamie: Yeah, you can. You can do a - code or you can go down to like a one kilometer radius.
Dean: Perfect. Literally, Yonge and Eglinton is such high density they're all sort of in a close proximity, so everything in that circle would largely be condos anyway, right?
Jamie: Yeah.
Dean: What I might do is test a graphic of a map with pins dropped on where the condo buildings are kind of thing.
Jamie: Okay.
Dean: Like, do that versus testing the same with a satellite view with the pins dropped: like, some graphic pin element. You know the ones... When I say dropping the pin, you know how they have the new modern thing for that is kind of like the teardrop. Looks like an exclamation mark pin drop: the modern pin drop. One of those: a colorful, modern pin drop on each of the buildings. How many buildings are you focused on?
Jamie: That is a good question. I've got my spreadsheet up. I can count real fast here. It is 19.
Dean: I would look at that and have the pins drop and an image of the cover of your report, because when you're using the lead ads you have to kind of use that image and copy as the landing page essentially: both the postcard and the landing page. You take the copy from the postcard, you put it on the landing part on the ad, and then when they click download as the instruction that's the thing that they can do. That takes them to the lead page on Facebook where it's already pre-populated with their name and their email address, and then you would have fields for their mailing address so you know where they are.
Jamie: And can I design the... Admittedly, I haven't really worked with Facebook lead ads before. Can I design the graphic ones they click download, or is it the page before that? Like, the graphic is the only thing that I can actually design, right?
Dean: The graphic, and then you can have an image on the form page, but it's all very minimal. I would just transfer that image that you're using over there. Minimal. I mean, it's the cool thing.
Now, one of the things that we were doing with the digital was using it as like a postcard drop. When we were doing micro-targeting for neighborhoods then we would mail the postcards and we were using a video ad that we would... It would be interesting for you to be out in front of one of the buildings in Yonge and Eglinton kind of thing and saying, "This is Jamie reporting live from Yonge and Eglinton. You may have see this postcard arriving in your mailbox." We would get that as an amplifier for the postcard response.
Jamie: Now, would you say that that's maybe something that I should save for when we're, quote unquote, allowed to be out and about and out on the streets?
Dean: Well, let's talk about that. I mean, yeah, that'd be something. But the mail right now... You're at home? You guys are quarantined at home? You're not...
Jamie: I am. Yes.
Dean: What's the situation in Toronto right now? Is everybody on lockdown?
Jamie: I don't know that I would say lockdown. Obviously, people are still kind of going to and from the grocery stores and that kind of stuff. If it's a nice day and you go for a walk you see a lot of people out and about for a walk, but at the same time...
Dean: It's sparse, yeah.
Jamie: Yeah. I think for the most part people are still trying to make a very conscious effort to space themselves. So if you're walking down the street they're kind of going out into the road if they're coming the other way to kind of give a buffer of at least six feet. I'm just wondering if I did a video ad and I'm kind of out in front filming... I don't know. I'm wondering if that's something I would maybe want to wait until I'm - postcards.
Dean: Yeah, I think you would, absolutely. What I was going to ask you about the postcards is that we're finding, in other things, that direct mail is really working right now because going to the mailbox is like the highlight of the day for most people. It's one of the few novel things that are happening. You can only sit in front of the news for so long or surf the internet or watch Netflix or whatever. Something meaningful to do is, "I'm going to go out to the mailbox." That's your daily adventure. People are paying attention to the mail more than even in a normal situation, so I wouldn't discount that.
Jamie: Right, okay. Let's talk about that for a second because the April results in terms of what I spent and what I got from - that kind of stuff... because March cost me, like I said, around 1,500 bucks. I got 22 leads. April, when I did the AB testing, I spent, let's call it, 438 dollars and got 24 leads from it, which is about 18 and a bit per lead. The link clicks and reach that I got... because that can be measured... versus the... When I do the postcards, I just know how many I sent and that's it, but with the Facebook from that, let's call it, 440 dollar ad spend I got 955 link clinks and it had a reach of just a little over 28,000 people.
Dean: Yeah. You have to take that reach situation divided by the frequency, too, to give you a real sense of how much... What was the frequency on it?
Jamie: That's a good question. I did take the reach and not the impressions, because I think the impressions might be the thing that includes frequency but I could be wrong, because the impressions was much higher. I am just logging into my ads cam right now and I can tell you in a second. The reach, at least, was, like I said, about 28,000, but if you give me two seconds I can pull it up. There it is. April listings... Yeah, I think that...
Dean: So...
Jamie: Sorry, please go ahead.
Dean: Part of this whole thing is that you want to look at all of it. I think when you're planning to dominate here that it's all of it. It's the multi that's going to do it. The digital is certainly our friend because it's fast to do and it's less expensive, but you go to a little broader area. But the fact that the postcards are... Either you have to go to all those extra homes... that's adding some expense to it. What I would look at for you as well is to experiment with... because if we're going to plan to dominate this area, what I would also look at is to get the list of the owners of those, like where they're... to the tax address for the owner and experiment with sending... If you're saying out of 5,400 units there are...
Jamie: Yep.
Dean: Out of 5,400 units, if 2,500 of them are rentals there's a good... I would experiment with mailing a thousand postcards by address to the tax address of the people, so it's right to the owner: an addressed mail piece. Because that would be... we're finding those things... Going above and beyond makes a big difference. Example: Kenny McCarthy in Cape Ann north of Boston. One of the thing success stories was a gentleman in Florida who... his brother owned a couple of beach houses and Kenny was doing oceanfront homes on Cape Ann. Instead of just mailing to the home address there, he was mailing to the tax records, which meant that this went to the gentleman in Florida here. That makes a big difference when you are... especially in a transition period like this. No matter what happens when we come out of this, this is going to be, for some people, a reset. There's a good chance that something is going to happen with some of these units here.
Jamie: Yep. Now, how would I get the addresses of the owners? I mean, I can go through GeoWarehouse and kind of look up the building, I guess, one at a time. That would only give me the owner's name associated with the unit but not necessarily whether they live there or not.
Dean: It's a been a while now since I've done anything like this in Canada because here I know the privacy rules and things are different where you can't probably do it in bulk, but is there a way to do it one at a time? Like, is there a way for you to find out the owner, the tax address, or whatever... the record... of a specific owner?
Jamie: I don't know. I'd have to look into that.
Dean: Okay. That's the thing. Even if it's one at a time it's still something that you can have somebody do. These are the things that... Joe - and I did an I Love Marketing Podcast episode with this guy, Richard -, in Virginia. Richard Vigory is a legend in the political fundraising world. This is one of my most inspirational episodes of the podcast that we did because Richard, in 1962 when they passed the law that required all political donations over 100 dollars to be recorded... So you had to be registered that you donated that money to a political candidate. Under the Freedom of Information Act, that information is all... was available to everybody. Either you could get it, you could to the records office in Washington and look at the... at the time... book of all of the contributions.
So he went in with... a group of six ladies went in with him and they hand wrote the addresses of 12,000 people who had donated 100 dollars to the political candidate. That started his... He had the only, and first, conservative contributor list in the country, and he built an entire empire on that seed: of that amount of effort to go in and individually get those things. So if you look at it that that kind of attention to detail is what dominating is about, right... Most people are not going to go through the effort to do that, but because you're working with this fixed pool it's just a fact that 2,500 people at least who own these condos don't live there because they're rented out, and if you knew who they were and you could send them a postcard with the Yonge and Eglinton - report they would find that valuable.
Jamie: Right. That makes sense.
Dean: So it's worth it.
Jamie: For sure. Okay. A couple of questions that I had... I don't know what order to go in here. I think I know the answer to this one but I'm going to ask it anyway. Doing 8,600 postcards, getting 22 leads, should I be concerned about the response rate or what are your thoughts on that?
Dean: No. What I look at is I'm all about the total yield. That's what I look at. I don't get caught up in trying to... I look at those kind of things paying attention to the short term stats like trying to pick the market: like, be a day trader. But what I'm doing is I'm looking that... I know, because I've been doing this for so long, that at the 12 month mark it's not going to matter. But that's really the thing. And the longer that it goes, the asset is more and more valuable. So I don't worry about it. I look at it as dollar cost averaging: investing in the same stock over a long period of time.
Jamie: Okay.
Dean: condos are a growth: that it's going to grow. It's popular. There's going to be a market for them, so I look at that as... That's the way I look at it, is I don't look at it as an expense. I look at it as a capital investment.
Jamie: Of course. I mean, I look at the total number of sales in 2019. There were 281 between all the buildings that I'm trying to identify. It's about a 5% turnover rate. So I think that's really what I'm hoping... Even if I could capture 5% of those 281 sales, which is a gross underestimation but, then I'm doing just fine. That's an additional 14 sales to add to my -.
Dean: That's five million dollars just in listing-side commissions, right? And not that's not including when you start... Because you're in our world, you're not going to be satisfied with just that listing-side commission. You're going to start looking at your listing multiplier index, and if you get a listing multiplier index of every time you get a listing it's worth three transactions, now instead of 17,000 it's 50,000.
Jamie: That's right. That makes a lot of sense. One thing I struggled with, I guess, over these past two months is being a solo agent and wearing essentially all of the hats that are in the business. I've now got this list of 47 people, I guess, now... 46, 47 people... that I have to kind of fire the reports off to.
Dean: You should not be doing that. You shouldn't be doing that. Why would you do that? This is part of the thing here. You need to get to a point right now where you start to realize, "Is what I'm doing something that could possibly be done by somebody else?" You've already figured that out. Setting up and making sure that that mailing goes out is... You've got a lot of... There's some shuffling or background noise there. I don't know what that .
Jamie: Oh, I'm sorry.
Dean: You're getting something setup and getting it in place. You've got your postcards figured out. You've got your where you get them printed. You've got all of that stuff done. You know the area. You've already got the... You know the postal routes. You know all of that stuff. You've figured it out one time. You should never be doing twice. Now somebody else could do that for you and that's what you need to really start thinking about here, is... This is where we get into the lifestyle elements of the listing agent lifestyle... we want to guard that abundant time. What you get when you start removing things from your plate is... You're leveraging that way, that these things are happening. We need to a point where the postcards are going out, the reports are going out, the everything about maintaining this system is in orbit now and your only involvement is when people respond and say, "Hey, I want to get a pinpoint price analysis," or, "I want to get a room by room review."
Jamie: Yep. Okay. So being condo-focused, whether I'm doing it or whether I end up hiring out and that kind of stuff, there still is kind of a method that needs to be figured out in terms of what's the best way to look at the approach. What I have done over the past two months is that if somebody has responded and their mailing address is a condo building that I have supplied with a report just for information on that building, versus for the whole area. Doing it for the building is, on one hand, good information for them because I think it's the most relevant information, but at the same it's more... whether it be me or somebody else... time-consuming because they information for that building is only good another time if I have another respondent from that building. So I've got 19 different buildings, then potentially I've got 19 different reports to generate to each market, so to speak.
Is that the right approach: to look at just the building specific? Or should I be just doing a report for the whole area in general?
Dean: Well, because Yonge and Eglinton... these condos... are going to be affected by the proximity of other choices, that effects the value of it. The Yonge and Eglinton condo report is going... that information is going to be valuable. I might be inclined to look at having the overall report be about all the Yonge and Eglinton condos showing all the recent sales, everything: the activity and charts and graphs and all that kind of stuff. A nice report that you could put together, and then keep the individual ones as part of your pinpoint price analysis where we give you specifically for your unit style in your building: to give people that idea so that now that's an option for them to request.
Jamie: Okay. So keep it general at first and then in any kind of followup if they're looking for something more specific then I've got that?
Dean: Yeah.
Jamie: Okay. All right. Until I have the ability to hire somebody on and farm that stuff out, that certainly will save me a ton of time because it's so easy to generate a report just for the area in general versus for each building.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Jamie: Okay, good to know. You obviously... We're able to sign up for your program on Go Go Agent. You provide a lot of the materials. Being a condo guy, I was kind of finding that the materials that were provided were very house-centric. For example, the first initial book that people get, How to Sell Your Homes.
Dean: Yeah, How to Sell Your -.
Jamie: It's got a lot of curb appeal stuff and those kind of things that aren't relevant. So what I did is I made my own book. I took some of your information, certainly, because some of it is universal, but when a newsletter comes out... because you update the newsletters every month... if a newsletter comes out and it's fairly house-centric, should I send it anyway? Should I not send it? Should I come up with my own? What are your thoughts on that?
Dean: Most of the things are, like... - you're talking about kitchens and baths and all the showing appeal things and spend a little, give a lot. Those are all general real estate stuff. But there's stuff that you can... and it's because it's all editable... customize to fit specifically for your situation, go for it. I think that's what the intention was for people, is to get you 80% of the way there. You could do it exactly the way it is but it's not going to affect anything, but the fact that you have the ability to then add your touch to it is a good thing. Absolutely.
Jamie: Okay. Now, getting back to the reports that I'm sending... so just hearing what you're saying about don't be afraid to start off with just a general report on the area... what I've done so far to put the report together... I've got a graphic for the cover and then I take a bunch of different PDFs that I can generate right off, like, TREB, directly. Then I basically stitch all the PDFs together so that it comes almost like a little ebook.
Dean: That's what you want, yeah.
Jamie: Yeah, but it's not really a ton of charts and graphs necessarily. I just wanted to maybe touch on what you think would look great.
Dean: I mean, if you have stats that show, month after month, the number of sales and the sales that... price compared... you showed them moving this month versus last month versus the month before, so you showed the number of units each month. You can see a trend, whether that's up and down or compared to the year before, so you've got a line chart that shows that. That's all very simple Excel stuff that you can do, or compared to maybe... Each MLS has different overall market charts, which you may be able to include in that in terms of the overall Toronto market or just things that make it more informative, you know?
Jamie: Sure. I mean, what I do right now is... Well, what I have done over the past couple of months has always been building-specific if somebody responded and had an address from a condo building. I've just basically assumed that they are an owner and that might not necessary be the case, but that's just been my assumption. Then the report starts off with the sales that happened in the previous month in their building with a listing page for each sale, because it's not necessarily a huge number in a building. It might be three or four. Then at the end is like a stats page that summarizes those sales, so average days on market, average price, median price on those sales, etc. And then the next part of the report would be the listing pages for each individual current active listing followed by a stats page at the end.
Dean: I like that, yeah.
Jamie: The charts that you're mentioning, like the line graphs with the changes year over year and that kind of stuff, I can get those through TREB but they don't typically update them until, let's say, the fifth or the sixth at the beginning of the month. Does that matter?
Dean: I think you can put whatever the most recent one is. Yeah.
Jamie: Okay. In terms of respondents, again, if somebody comes in and their address is in a condo building I do a quick GeoWarehouse search to see if they're tied with that unit, and if it is if there's an owner and if it's not, okay, there may be a renter in that unit and they are potentially looking to buy in that building. In terms of what I follow up with them afterwards, if I know that they are not necessarily the owner of that unit in particular, should I be sending them something different? Should I be sending them the same thing that I send people who are clearly from a rental building? Because I have a number of respondents who their address is a rental building -.
Dean: What you've got right there is you've got the classic market maker opportunity here, where you've got... In addition to all the work that you're doing to find people who want to sell, the very best thing that you can start doing is find people who want to buy condos at Yonge and Eglinton. That's the catalyst for all of it, right? Now you start doing the same sort of Facebook ads to an audience of people who maybe don't live there but are passing through there that that's another... Like, when you're doing your Facebook ads I'm assuming that you're targeting people who live in this radius.
Jamie: Correct.
Dean: You can target people who live there, people who have visited there, or people who are there from afar kind of thing. We just want... I think on the buyer potential side, you might look at people who are visiting there: not the ones from afar, but the ones who pass through that area, which might mean that they work there or work close there or get on their way there, and start looking for buyers for these condos as well. You may have seen on the Go Go Agent blog the South Beach... the condo guide that we did for South Beach.
Jamie: I haven't, actually.
Dean: Okay. If you, on the member blog in Go Go Agent, do a search for, say, dominating South Beach, you'll see this whole both sides of it: the condo guide and the buyer side of it. But now you've got the opportunity that you start looking for people who want to live there, who want to buy condos there. Now you've got this really valuable list and now you're starting to do a weekly market watch email for buyers of the condos. So every week you're sending an email with the updates of all the new condos that are for sale in Yonge and Eglinton.
Jamie: Okay.
Dean: That's really a fun thing because then you can offer things like... Then on that buyer side you can start offering things like a daily tour of Yonge and Eglinton condos. So you say, "Join us. We do tours of Yonge and Eglinton condos every day at 10:00 and 1:00."
Jamie: Right.
Dean: Now that's a great way for someone who's looking for a condo to start the process.
Jamie: Yeah, totally. Sorry, I'm just taking some notes here, so - set up daily tours so that I can reach out and just invite people -.
Dean: Because that's the thing, it's an easy way for people to get started, is if you make it totally easy that they've got the opportunity to join you for a daily tour. That's easy.
Jamie: Yeah, and it's a way to get face-to-face with people as well, right?
Dean: That's exactly right.
Jamie: Okay. Now, when somebody whose address is clearly a rental building, I have not been sending them How To Sell Your Condo For Top Dollar because they're in a rental building and I've treated them like a buyer. I'm in the process of writing a guide for like…- guide is something to the effect of how to find value in an expensive market. Is it fair to make an assumption that they could be a buyer and sending them buyer-related material instead, or...
Dean: Absolutely. It totally makes sense, and that's going to happen. That's going to happen for sure. When you look at that South Beach guide, you may want to model that because now what you need for the buyers is a guide that shows all of the... Did you say there's 12 or 13 buildings in there?
Jamie: I'm identifying 19. There are more than that, but the 19 are on my mail walk list.
Dean: That's the same thing. So there's 22 oceanfront condo buildings in South Beach from north down to the tip. It's the same model. If you were to look at that, you say, Yonge and Eglinton condos and then you have one little profile for each of those 19 buildings that shows the name of the building, the address, the number of units, the price range, the type of model that they have in there, something that would give people a reference tool to use when they're looking at all of the different condo options there.
Jamie: Okay. Interesting. I'm kind of chuckling to myself because the reason that I know about you and your podcast from years ago is a colleague of mine at Bogley Real Estate. Her name is Devel Morrison.
Dean: I know Devel very well.
Jamie: She, I believe, created... this would've been a couple of years ago... a really beautiful guide to midtown…- midtown condos but I think Yongen and Davidsville, because she lives in this similar neighborhood as well.
Dean: That's where she is. Right.
Jamie: Exactly. She's got this beautiful guide. I'm going to have to approach her and ask her how much it's going to take to get that guide off her hands and rebrand it myself.
Jamie: She's not going to go for it, which I wouldn't blame her either, but no, I could create something like that for sure.
Dean: Yes. That's the whole thing. That's what you really want to do, is just kind of use the model. We've got some trainings in Go Go Agent on that if you look under the Finding Buyers section that's all about creating those guides.
Jamie: Okay. I don't know how much time we have for this call. I had some questions about the top 150, but let me know if you - time for that
Dean: Sure. No, absolutely. We've got about 10 or 15 minutes.
Jamie: Okay. The top 150 is, admittedly, not something that I've been doing yet. I spoke with Tony Kelsey. He was probably the first person that I reached out to last year after hearing him a number of times on your podcast. He just said, "Yeah, the top 150 is a no-brainer. That's the first thing that you need to be doing." For some reason I haven't done it yet. I use this phone call as the impetus to start putting together my list.
Dean: There you go.
Jamie: I've got 127 people on it.
Dean: I love it.
Jamie: Now, I'm not from Toronto originally. I've live kind of all over southern Ontario. A number of people in my top 150 are not necessarily in the Toronto market. Would you say that I would send it to those people anyway?
Dean: Well, you have to kind of make a judgment of, "Are these people likely to know somebody who's going to buy property downtown or do they have any relationships downtown?" That's what we're looking for, is that you're kind of feeding the population of the area where you're working with people who know you, like you, trust you, and are paying attention and listening for the conversations around them of other people that are talking about buying or selling condos in... I'm sure you cover more than just Yonge and Eglinton, but I mean that in the downtown area. That's what I would look at initially, is look for, strategically, the people who you want to basically... I mean, the metaphor we use is, "Imagine if you could plant a chip in the ears of your top 150, and as you listen in on their conversations you get alerted when somebody is in a conversation about real estate." Who are the ones that are likely to be in those conversations? You want the best 150 of those in your marketplace kind of thing.
Jamie: Okay. I was wondering if there might be an opportunity for potential referral work outside of-
Dean: Of course.
Jamie: I would never go to my best friend in the world that's in-, and I don't know that market at all. He and his wife, four years ago, bought and sold three different properties and I just helped connect them with agents and that kind of stuff, but he came to me first. But if I mail to those people, is there an opportunity for them to connect me with people in their marketplace and then I can connect them with a realtor? So I didn't know if it would make sense to do that.
Dean: There is. Absolutely. The fact is that it's always... Anybody who's... You can definitely connect people or help people and you want to stay in touch with people, so it's definitely there. I was just sharing that where you're likely to have the highest probability here.
Jamie: Yep, okay. Now, on a similar topic, I've got some people in my top 150 who are friends and I know the whole premise of the top 150 is if you run into them in the grocery store would you be friendly and stop and have a conversation. Many of these people are not necessarily the people that I've marketed to, so to speak. These are- buddies. And I also don't... Sorry, I didn't want to interrupt.
Dean: That's the best thing. Because you don't... and I use air quotes when I'm saying marketing to them. They're often the most heartbreaking situations where they're sort of like you know them well and you're friends with them and then you find out that they went and they bought a condo with somebody else, or they had... Then they realize, "I forgot that you were in real estate," or, "I didn't even connect the dots that you were in real estate." That's where if you're in front of them and then they're like, "There's Jamie and Jamie is connecting it and Jamie is in real estate," and then they're more likely that if they hear someone else talking about buying a condo at Yonge and Eglinton that they can call you can you'll give them the guide with all the info on the things. That's how it works.
Jamie: Okay. Now, what if - those people are... like, I don't have their mailing addresses? I can probably get them some way, but I tend to overthink things, so where my brain is going is that they've never ever received anything in the mail from me before and I don't really have a reason to have their mailing address and then all of a sudden they get a postcard from me that's somewhat real estate marketing related. Is that strange or odd or off-putting.
Dean: Part of it is you definitely want to be - what you do all the time just so that everybody knows. That's really the thing.
Jamie: Okay. Those were all the questions that I had written down. I don't know if there was anything else you wanted.
Dean: great. What's your takeaway here?
Jamie: Admittedly, I kind of liked how... Well, I don't like that we're all under lockdown with this virus thing, but it was kind of neat for me to do one month of mailbox postcards and one month of digital. I'm curious to do another month of digital, which again will be in the next couple of days, test out your graphic suggestions, and see what the results look like for that, and also trying the Facebook lead ads as opposed to I was sending to the landing page that I already had set up. So it was kind of taking them off Facebook. I'm curious to see if the results are-.
Dean: That may be a bump for you, is keeping it on Facebook.
Jamie: Yeah, maybe.
Dean: You should find a bump in the response.
Jamie: That would be great. And then at the same time I'm looking forward to kind of... I mean, we're all looking forward to getting back to normal life... supplementing the mailbox postcards with a video ad, doing some filming of me in front of one of the buildings and just saying, "Did you see this postcard?" And -. I'm curious to supplement that with that. And then I've just given myself a little bit of homework, just kind of how I can go about getting the addresses of the owners of those 60% of those units and then taking a look at the South Beach stuff in Go Go Agent.
Dean: That's awesome. This is great. You're very thoughtful, very methodical, you get stuff done. I think it's going to be a good ending for this story for you.
Jamie: Thank you. I hope so too.
Dean: That's so good.
Jamie: Listen, thank you for your time, Dean. I really appreciate it. I appreciate you inviting me on to be on the show and I do enjoy listening to the podcast and will continue to do so, for sure.
Dean: Awesome. Thanks Jamie.
Jamie: Thank you Dean. Take care.
Dean: I'll talk to you soon. Buh-bye.
Jamie: Okay. Buh-bye.
Dean: And there we have it. Another great episode. If you'd like to continue the conversation you can go to listingagentlifestyle.com. You can download a copy of the Listing Agent Lifestyle book, the manifesto that shares everything that we're talking about here, and you can be a guest on the show if you'd like to talk about how we can build a Listing Agent Lifestyle plan for your business. Just click on the Be A Guest link at listingagentlifestyle.com. And if you'd like to join our community of people who are applying all the things we talk about in the Listing Agent Lifestyle, come on over to gogoagent.com. That's where we've got all the programs, all the tools, everything you need to get listings, to multiply your listings, to get referrals, convert leads, and to find buyers. You can get a truly free, no credit card required, trial for 30 days at gogoagent.com. Come on over and we'll see you there.