Today, I want to share a conversation I had with Kurt Nielsen, a Mortgage Broker from Clackamas, Oregon, who's been in business for several years and works with his wife, a real estate agent.
I've known them for many years. I love how enthusiastic Kurt is and how I have no doubt that he's an implementer because I've seen it happen where he's taken our Bank-owned Weekly and Tax Credit Guide programs and just run with them to build a very successful operation.
Real Estate is one of my favorite things to talk about because it's the perfect way to illustrate the Listing Agent Lifestyle principles and demonstrate how the 8-Profit Activators, your Before, During, and After units all work together.
This is what happened in our conversation when we applied real estate examples to all the 8-Profit Activator steps, from identifying a target audience, all the way to converting those people into clients, and I have no doubt that he'll be able to execute and apply the things we talk about today.
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Transcript: Listing Agent Lifestyle Ep141
Dean: Kurt Nielsen.
Kurt: Dean Jackson, how are you doing today?
Dean: Fantastic, how are you?
Kurt: I am fantastic also, how's weather down there in Florida?
Dean: Well it's warm & sunny.
Kurt: A lot better?
Dean: It's perfect.
Kurt: Isn't it always, I hear?
Dean: I'm excited that we're getting to do this. We've know each other for a long time, kind of reconnected here and the way this works, I'm recording right now, got the whole hour to just hatch some Evil Schemes for you and it probably be helpful for you to set the stage and tell a little bit about what you do and what kind of Evil Schemes we can hatch today.
Kurt: Perfect.
I am a Mortgage Broker, I live outside Portland Oregon in a little area, not a little area but a pretty good size area knows as Clackamas County, south east of Portland and I help people get home loans obviously. My wife is a Real Estate broker, we've both been in the business since about 2002. I kind of look at both of our businesses as kind of one business in a way-
Dean: Complementary.
Kurt: Yeah, exactly and that I'm kind of the marketing division of both of our companies so to speak, so I've been the one over the years that has taken some great things that I've learnt from you and put those to use and have developed the, you know a nice business for the both of us, so we're -
Dean: Awesome.
Kurt: Yeah, we had a lot of good stuff going back in the mid 2000's and 2008 hit and with the mortgage and housing crisis and that obviously took a toll on our business. We had recently refied into a higher payment 15 year loan and the bottom dropped out of the market back then and we were running scared. I had been following you for a few years and started implementing the system, I believe it was called 'Finding Buyers,' back in 2008-
Dean: Yep, right.
Kurt: It literally saved our businesses, we just went to work and started doing what you taught.
Dean: Well, I'll tell you what, that's a really great ... That's a good example Kurt of like pivoting, being adjusting to what the market is and when everybody was riding high in the early 2000's right, I mean the market was doing nothing but going up, prices were going up, money was easy to get. It was like great times to be in the Real Estate the mortgage business. Then just like you said, the bottom fell out but along with that came the blessing of the stimulus program that Obama put into place and we hit the ground running with that program because at the time they were offering an 850$ tax credit for first time home buyers which is literally like they write you a check back for $850.
Kurt: Yep.
Dean: That was as good as free money for first time buyers, so you have to be ready to pivot where the market goes and the people who were happy about the change in the market were first time home buyers certainly who felt like they were never going to be able to get in the market because the prices had just taken off and now prices are plummeting so the people who didn't buy get another chance and so we were able to put together the two things that really worked for that period of time right after, was the Tax Credit guide. We did a, remember the guide that we did for first time buyers for that?
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: ... and we had our program a Bank Owned Weekly which was something that you really took to and because the more and more people gave up their homes so there were more bank owned homes on the market which was again great for first time buyers. That really, just like people rather than whiling and crying about, "Well, the markets really changed." The people who embraced it like you did, we had a great opportunity there and made lemonade as they say.
Kurt: Yeah, no question it was really a brilliant program that you put together and I'm glad you brought up the pivot part because that's kind of where I'm at right now. To be a hundred percent transparent I tend to sometimes over think things and then in that respect might end up complicating things a little bit and I just want to get a little tune up and make sure I'm firing on 12 cylinders here and as Jay Abraham says, before you go running off doing anything too different make sure you optimize what you already have, so ...
Dean: Sure, exactly.
Kurt: ... kind of what I want to talk about today with you. Just to backup a little bit we've got this, through your teachings, we have implemented the get response, a direct response marketing and we've created all these adds in Craigslist back in the day where we would offer people a list of homes and they would opt in to this list of homes and then we would send them the updated list weakly of the new homes that come on the market. Now that was done. My wife did that, the real estate agents that I had thought to do that and they were bringing in the leads and then off course when people come into the system on a Home-buyer list then I eventually began marketing my mortgage services to them and that's worked very, very well, so. Now we've got this list, a really nice list and right now I'm just going to be speaking about the list that my wife and I have together, right, like I mentioned I do have some other agents that have some lists.
We've got a pretty ... I have a pretty extensive list that I can market to but we've got this good size list and what's happening now as you know, is that the market now is just experiencing this massive appreciation. The Portland market for the last 12 months, I think we've just been recently overtaken by Seattle, but the Portland market has been this fast just appreciating market in the country in the last 12 months, so ...
Dean: Nice.
Kurt: We've got this big list but we're into and it's probably my fault because of the way of the adds that I've been placing but we seem to be attracting a lot of people that, and no disrespect to them but they're just ... They can't come into the market where it is right now, so bottom line is what I'd like to do is maybe look at crafting some different adds or some different programs to attract perhaps maybe higher end ...
Dean: Yep.
Kurt: ... some higher-end clients and ...
Dean: Perfect.
Kurt: Work on something like that.
Dean: What would be ideal, what would be the high-end for you? How would you describe that?
Kurt: Yeah, as far as price is concerned, the average price in the Portland area right now is around 325, 350, I would say higher-end would be anything over 400. We did some ... We looked at the statistics of the area that would typically market in here in Clackamas County and there about 25% of all the homes sold in the last 12 months have been in that category of 400 plus. You're talking basically 400 to 800 thousand right in there.
Dean: Okay, and what would they ... How would be kind of a common element of those four hundred, eight hundred thousand dollar homes? For example here in Winter Haven the highest-end homes are lakefront. In Paradise Valley, the highest-end homes are view homes, you know? In south Beach, it's the oceanfront condos, what would be the thing in Portland, in your area there? Would it be view homes in Happy Valley or what would be ...?
Kurt: Yeah, that's a good question and my wife and I we're talking about it. It's a little bit of unique area in Clackamas County, it's broken down into three little subsets. You've got some smaller subdivisions with the less expensive homes and then you've got, actually Happy Valley is the name of one of the most popular cities in Clackamas County. I don't know if you knew that?
Dean: Yeah, no, I'm very familiar. I know the area well, yeah.
Kurt: Okay, yeah so Happy Valley, another area called Damascus that would be ... There's not necessarily a lakefront or a waterfront or a view type of thing, I mean it would be almost like a person is either going to be interested in a higher-end home in Happy Valley subdivision or they're going to be interested in another subcategory, would be, they would be interested in a higher-end home which is more geared towards like acreage or a farm house out in the country a little bit more. Two, I could kind of see that as two specific niche markets.
Dean: Off course, Yeah, two different things, that whole ... Let's talk about the country homes then, like the acreage, what would be, are there horse farms, are there just ...? How would they describe them, ranches, estates, what would be ...?
Kurt: Yeah, horse farms wouldn't be out of the questions, estates wouldn't be out of the question. Typically when people are contacting us, the main thing that we hear is they want some acreage, they want a couple acres and a lot of them aren't even that concerned about the home per say. They want a decent home, it doesn't have to be a big executive home, they want a decent home on five acres.
Dean: Yeah.
Kurt: I would say Clackamas County Acreage.
Dean: There you go, that's on .Com for sure, that's the great ... Right there is a good start if you were looking for acreage, that would be a great domain name to start with, 'Clackamas Acres,' 'Clackamas Acreage. Com.'
Kurt: Yeah, I got it.
Dean: Yeah, so if we start with that, the same what you've learnt is that the underlying formula, right, the guarding for what was made your Bank Owned Weekly successful, was that you've got a target audience, you've got an offer that gets them to raise their hand and we've got a website that allows them to do that. If we look at this thing, we're selecting our target market. How much would homes with five acres be in Clackamas, are they on the higher end? Would they be ...?
Kurt: Yeah definitely 400 minimum more closer to five likely.
Dean: Okay and how many of them are there, are there a lot of homes with acreage?
Kurt: Yes, I'm not sure the numbers but there's a ton of them, yes.
Dean: Okay great so it's a viable big market?
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: How narrow, like if we went down to horse farms as an example, would there be enough horse properties to make a sense of it, is that a reason that people want acreage in Clackamas?
Kurt: Yeah, that would definitely be considered highly, highly targeted for sure but yeah, absolutely, yeah, a lot of people want the horse farms, yeah.
Dean: It's viable?
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: Okay, so there is where I would start. I would start with that, like that and the horse farms are probably because if they got a burn, if they've got ... Do you have ones that have indoor arenas, like riding arenas and stuff like that, like they can get up into the highest of the high-end?
Kurt: Yes.
Dean: Is that the kind of thing, do you just in your experience do you see people with ... DO you see homes that have that kind of thing like with stables and with arenas or jump courses and all that kind of stuff?
Kurt: Yeah, definitely, there's quite a few of those out here, obviously not as many as just a nice home sitting on some acreage but you bet there's quite a few of those out here, yeah.
Dean: Okay, and that's a good start, so what I would like to look to do is, I would look for a market like that, that I could dominate. By dominate I mean, is go into it with this mindset that you're going to get all of it. I read a book, like one of the things that guides my thinking on this is I read a book about Procter & Gamble and it's called 'The P&G 99,' and what it does, it's written by a former P&G executive who wrote out the 99 principles that Procter & Gamble uses when they're thinking about new markets and the way that they operate their business. By the way, they are the most successful multi-brand business in the world. They have 23 individual brands that do more than a billion dollars in sales.
Kurt: Wow!
Dean: There's something to learn from that and the three that jumped out for me of the guiding principles that they have the most instructive were number one, Plan to dominate. I thought, you can't even say those words without changing your physiology or you say those words and automatically you get a sense of confidence and a sense of purpose and mission around it, so… You go into it, not just thinking, "Hey! I wonder if we could like get a little bit of this horse farm business?" You go into it with the mindset of, we're going to dominate the horse farm market in Clackamas County. That process there, thinking that way is really a unique thing, then the second principle that stood out for me from them was, to create the very best product from the customers perspective. That's an interesting thing that they, when Procter & Gamble is going into a market, take laundry detergent as an example, the categories that they're in, it's not just laundry detergent. They've broken it down into the strata of the laundry market where they've got subsets. If you want to get your clothes as white as possible they've got Tide. That's the whole purpose of Tide, right, and they've got the whole teams of scientists and people just dreaming the day away trying to figure out how to make clothes whiter-
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: ... and that's their total focus. It's not about what's the most cost effective way we can ... How can we make clothes sort of white knowing that that's important to people. They look at approaching this from even at great expense, what is the best way to make clothes whiter? We want to build the very best product, if that's what they're interested in, you know? You look at even just the way they approach that laundry detergent market, they've got Tide for people who want to get their clothes as white as possible. If you want to get tough stains out, you're going to go with Ariel. If you want to have your clothes smell great, they've got Sunlight. If you want to just through it all in and not worry about getting ruined, they've got Cheer, all temperature Cheer, just throw it in and don't worry about it. When you look at those things, all of those seem to compete with each other in a way, but they're all a viable sub-market of the laundry detergent market. We're taking most and you're in a great situation where you've go the combination of the mortgage and the real estate working together with your wife. That's a great combination, right, because people are going to use both of them together, so ...
Kurt: Yes.
Dean: You're taking this from, you got a great solution for people but rather than just coming into a situation and say, "How can we just sell more homes in the greater Portland area?" Casting that wide net, you've narrowed it down the Clackamas County and within that now we're looking at all the individual markets there and we're saying, we want to go on the higher-end , okay, so lets look at the higher-end and break that down into, what have we got on the higher end, and homes with acreage is certainly one of those things. Then what would be a sort of passion driven seeking out something market with the horse farms, horse properties. When you look at it, if we're saying now, somebody looking for a horse farm, you've got a very specific audience there.
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: We've got a great audience that we can attract here and now the third thing that I learned from that book is to treat each brand as it's own unique business. It's like we want to create now within this, a unique situation just for horse farms, just for horse properties right? You imagine that, that you're Kurt Nelson Procter & Gamble approach to this is that Kurt Nelson and your wife are the Procter & Gamble and now we're creating this one billion dollar brand called 'Horse properties in Clackamas.' Okay, so when you look at that now, part of this will be fun to do the research for you. If you put your blinders on, as a horse metaphor here, put your blinders on and focus on what's the lay the land for the horse properties here, right. What is the lay of the land, how many horse specific properties are there and what was the total kind of yield from that market? I would imagine that if the prices are closer to that 800,000 or more sort of market, I would imagine that probably some of the higher, higher-end would even be horse properties with stables and an indoor ridding arena and they're really like checked out. People with horse farms are very passionate about it, you know?
Kurt: Yeah, very true.
Dean: When you look at that now what we've got, two sides of this market. First of all we've got the people who own properties that would be horse property suitable right, that are specifically set up for horses that already have stables, already have paddocks, already have riding arenas. Already have that kind of setup, they're purpose built for that. Then you've got properties that would be prefect to develop into a horse property, you know? So some people, they may not limit themselves to just the once that already have that done but they may want to have property so that they can get horses and build a horse property around it, you know?
Kurt: Right.
Dean: I think that then part of it becomes, how do you create that? Now we did this great thing where if you're looking for an entry into that market, most of the time, what people end up doing is having to, you want to try and find listings so that you can get some of those horse farm buyers, right, it's kind of like the chicken and the egg kind of situation and so ...
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: ... but I think it's, let's do both, so we've got here in GoGoAgent, we've got a whole program called, 'Getting Listings,' which would fit perfectly for the horse farms here, so your first valuable thing that you're going to create, is to identify the owners of the horse properties, you know? If you take all of the properties that are specifically horse related properties that would be an asset for you, because that would require a little bit of work.
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: I think what you want to look at is to just take, I love that you've got the boundaries of Clackamas County kind of thing, I you say that, right?
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: that you're going to be in certain parts on Clackamas, not the parts that are closest to the city, that's probably not where the horse farms but the further you get away, it's like that the further away from Clackamas is probably where the horse farms are going to be, so you've narrowed it in that way but then you start to think, "Well, how many properties are there that have more that five acres?" or whatever would be the minimum viable horse property, and what are the by-laws, how many horses can you have per arce or whatever, however they do that.
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: Some number of those, maybe it's 1,000, maybe it's 2,000, maybe it's 500 I don't know. Well how may properties would you guess are more than five acres in Clackamas County?
Kurt: Wow! 5,000-
Dean: Wow! that many properties.
Kurt: That's a guess ...
Dean: Okay.
Kurt: .. but it's a big county, yeah.
Dean: Yeah, I understand so that's great, if that's the truth then that's a great thing and maybe if you narrow it down off course properties that are 10 acres or do you have 100 arce farms like the same ...?
Kurt: Yeah, probably not many, your probably talking 20 acres is a pretty strong average.
Dean: Okay, that's great.
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: I think when you look at that, that's a pretty good part of it there. I'll continue like down this path of the horse property because it could be just as easily applied to any target audience, like you've seen it in action with first time home buyer.
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: I mean that was what Bank owned Weekly and The Tax Credit guide were geared towards trying to attract that segment of the market and now times are good and you want to get up into the higher price ranges and you want to focus on the people who are most interested in those kind of properties, so horse farms is certainly one way to rap that around. Just like when we were talking in Paradise Valley, it's all about the view homes and in South Beach it's all about the oceanfront condos with Kenny MacCarthy up in North of Boston on Cape Ann it's the Waterfront properties. There're nine hundred and something oceanfront properties on Cape Ann and that was Kenny's target market.
When we look at this we want to know start identify who owns the homes, that's the basic inventory thing here. We look at it that we want to plan to dominate this so part of that is going to be, we want to know who they are. We want to gather up our information. When we did it here in Winter Haven, we had to go through the process of individually looking at the tax records and the maps to find just the lakefront homes ...
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: ... so we could say this one, this one, this one, this one so we had to kind of hand build the lake front home owner list which was a little bit of an effort but it's a phenomenal asset, you know.
Kurt: Yeah, I'm starting to put somethings together here, I guess what you said, I mean even getting off the horse farms we do, have there's quite a bit of water around here. We could do the waterfront or yeah, I'm following you. Suggestion is obviously whether we choose waterfront or horse farms both of them would in the high-
Dean: Yeah, well you got me all excited about the horse farms now but if want to go waterfront that's fine too.
Kurt: Will stick with horse farms for now.
Dean: Okay.
Kurt: That sounds good, yeah so, ID the horse farms that's possible to do. ID in the waterfront would be a little easier but it could be both. Okay, I'm with you.
Dean: How many waterfront, are their lakes and like are there kid size lakes that have homes on them?
Kurt: Yeah, the Willamette River slices Portland and Clackamas County in half. There's a river that we live near by, the Clackamas River that runs through Clackamas county, there's a lot of waterfront property out here.
Dean: Okay great, let's switch gears and focus on that, is that more interesting to you?
Kurt: It is.
Dean: Okay.
Kurt: We live actually on the river so it's very interesting, we can relate to people and kind of...
Dean: Yourself, so you're one of them?
Kurt: Yeah, exactly.
Dean: Okay and so that's the kind of thing that people would aspire to too, right? They would say, "Oh! I want to get a house on the river."
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: Okay
Kurt: No doubt.
Dean: There would be other lots of homes on the river which say there's more than a thousand?
Kurt: In Clackamas County, I would say close to a thousand, 500 to 1,000 wouldn't surprise me.
Dean: Okay, then you got a viable market there.
Kurt: You're thinking a thousand, you're thinking it maybe if possible try to get a market that has at least a thousand is kind of what you're thinking?
Dean: Well, that'd be great because then it gets ...
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: It's kind of exciting, I mean you said there were 5,000 potential horse farms-
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: ... or acreage properties so it seems like a bigger market but again it's a separate thing. It's not, again the context of how we're doing it hear is applicable, so if we find the riverfront homes, would they be riverfront or primarily is that what we're talking about?
Kurt: Yeah, there's rivers and lakes but it could be mainly riverfront but there's some lakefront but I would say mostly riverfront.
Dean: Yeah, okay, so no we've got our market of the people who live on the river, right, who own the riverfront homes, that's knowable and you've got to develop that list, right, so you now took the time to compile that list from the tax records of the owners of riverfront homes. That's a valuable asset and we can start with that as our approach, so the same way we did here in Winter Haven, we picked lakefront homes and so you narrow that down, you get that list of those owners and I would quickly kind of calculate what the turnover is and what the value is, are the riverfront homes the most expensive, are they in that higher-end?
Kurt: Absolutely, yeah.
Dean: Okay, perfect and so when we look at it, you've got a thousand riverfront homes let's say or if it's less, whatever the number is and then you've got the historical data to show you how many of the riverfront homes sold in the last 12 months to give you an idea of what the turnover rate is among riverfront homes and that then will give you an idea of what the total yield of that market would be so if we say that there's a thousand of them. If we did in lakefront there were just over 2,000 homes 2,100 and there was about a 4% turnover rate so 84 of the 2,100 homes sold in the last 12 months, but on average, the average commission of those was ten or twelve thousand dollars, right?
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah, so when we look at this, if you take the thousand homes, what would you say the price range would be on the riverfront, what would you guess would be kind of like entry level for the river and what's the high-end for riverfront?
Kurt: Say entry level would be 500 and high-end would closer to Portland but still in Clackamas would be over a million, yeah, a million and five.
Dean: Perfect and so that all counts, that's great, now once you've got that list together the thing that we want to focus on is you want to know who among those thousand riverfront home owners is going to be selling their house in the next six or twelve months, right? If you could wave a magic wand and know of the thousand riverfront homes which ones are going to sell, that would be a valuable list to have, right?
Kurt: Absolutely.
Dean: We start that process by thinking like the seller, thinking like the person who owns that home and is thinking about selling this year and just offering them the February 2017 report on Clackamas riverfront house prices. Right, that's like the person thinking about selling is really going to be curios about what their house would sell for as the first thing. That usually the trigger thought, you know?
Kurt: Yep.
Dean: "I wonder what my house is worth, how much can I get from my house," that's going to guide any sort of planing that they're doing because maybe they're going to move to a horse farm or maybe they are going to move to a bigger house or whatever it is but the first thought is always, "Well, I wonder what my house is worth." I know the markets changing, you just said it's an appreciating market so they're probably curious about what they could get for their house and this is an easy way for them to see what is happening on the riverfront, it's that horoscope effect. I wrote an email today about the horoscope effect. This idea that when you get a postcard and you're on to it that, this is the report on riverfront house prices, that's me. I own that riverfront house, right?
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: I mean it's like right there, we get that familiarity so I caught their attention and then we're making it easy for them to raise their hand because all they have to do is go to Clackamas riverfront price report. Com and get, download a copy of the February 2017 report. We mail out that postcard and people start raising their hand, now we've got this last of people who are thinking about selling their house. Then we don't want to wait until we get a listing in there to start looking for buyers. We don't need their listing when it's a category like this.
What we've been doing even in the highest-end markets and I think it's smart to really, no matter what your market conditions are to always look for how high is high, like what's the luxury end of the market and so you imagine having an add in the Homes and Land and I've got an example of these adds on the GoGoAgent member blog for you that has ... We would run adds that would say, 'Looking for a great lakefront house, read this,' and it would be this beautiful picture of the lake from a dock like exactly what you would be looking for. The reason that you want a lakefront house is to sit on it and get that view, you know.
Kurt: All right.
Dean: When you say that, then we would offer the free guide to Winter Haven lakefront house prices for buyers, so if your thinking about buying a home on a lake in Winter Haven then this guide will be very helpful. It shows you all of the different lakes, information about the lakes, how many homes are on the lake, what the houses sell for, all of those kind of things that would be useful for a person looking for a lakefront home. We could do that same thing for you, is looking for an amazing riverfront home in Clackamas, read this, and you have a picture of what would be the iconic vision of what somebody's got in their mind with buying a house on a river in Clackamas.
Kurt: Yes.
Dean: Use your own view probably, you know?
Kurt: Yeah, no question, I love that idea.
Dean: Okay, so that now in Homes and Land or in the Homes magazines or in the newspaper, in the real estate section and yes I think that the most under valued thing in real estate right now is print adverting, it's so ... Everybody's thinking, got to get online, got to get online and it's true but it's the, you know we're running so many print adds, it's crazy. We've got one specific print add that we're doing with a Reverse Mortgage client that we're in thirty plus different forms on land publications all over the country and running at a twelve to one ROI.
Kurt: Wow!
Dean: Yeah, so you look at it that the price on print advertising is going down, the attention is still there in that people pick up ... Do you have Homes magazines in your area?
Kurt: We do, yes.
Dean: Yeah, and so people still pick them up and as they're looking through what makes this work is coming to this full page with this big picture of the ideal thing that, that riverfront person is looking for. If you think about their mind, somebody who's specifically got riverfront on their mind, they're looking through that Homes magazine and all of the pictures are small of all of the properties, right? They're having to adjust their gaze to look and see is that riverfront, is that riverfront, is that riverfront, that one. "Oh! Is this one riverfront," and circle the ones that are riverfront or draw their attention to it and then all of a sudden they turn the page and Pow! Here's exactly what they're looking for just slapping them right in the face. The idealized version of what they're looking for and the goldmine of all of the information about the riverfront homes.
Kurt: I love it.
Dean: That is the most powerful thing that you can do, that's one of the things that's so great about real estate and mortgage is that, the real estate, you can be a market maker. It's a transactional business. There's two sides of it, so you can on the one half, be sending out the postcards to the riverfront home owners saying, "Offering the free riverfront price report. "Then you can, in the print publications be running an add full page looking for buyers for riverfront properties without, even though you don't have any riverfront listing.
Kurt: Right.
Dean: There's nothing stopping you from putting that because your saying to people, if your looking for an amazing riverfront property in Clackamas read this and then you're describing that there's many miles of shoreline, and this many homes and there's you know just describing all of the elements of it and that they can get the guide to Clackamas riverfront house prices. That's like exactly what I want.
Kurt: Yeah, exactly.
Dean: Now they're raising their head, yeah. I would look at it that there was a Molson Canadian beer, they would run one of the most brilliant campaigns ever. They would run in men's magazines, sorry in a women's magazine, Cosmo magazine, they would run a full page add in Cosmo with this dreamy looking model guy with a sweater and the long blond hair like a supermodel guy holding puppies in this field and it would say, you know, his address, the intersection of masculinity and sensitivity and he's beer Molson Canadian and it had that logo there. That was it, okay.
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: Then the only reason they run that add was so that they could run an add in the men's magazines that said, 'Hundreds of thousands of women pre-programed for your convenience.' It said, basically they showed a picture of the add they they're running in Cosmo magazines and so while your reading this add, hundreds of thousands of women are reading an add that's scientifically designed to increase the attraction they feel to men who drink Molson. All you need to activate, all you need to do to activate this is order a Molson Canadian and it was just so brilliant that they are thinking about their audience's desires and acting as their advocate, right? They are running this magazines trying to increase the attraction that women feel to guys that drink Molson and then they let the guys know that that's what they're doing, so we're doing that on a similar level right? When you've got this home owners who own these riverfront homes and imagine you can say to the sellers, "Hundreds of riverfront home buyers, preselected for your convenience," because now you can go to riverfront home owner and say, "Listen, we started looking for the buyer for your house 180 days ago. Every month we run this add in this publications and we've generated 550 people who have asked for and are on our riverfront weekly newsletter."
You see how it all kind of fits together here?
Kurt: Yeah, absolutely, I do, like I said, I tend to over think things a little bit and I've been listening to your stuff for a long time but to really put it into context like this when I'm really niching down this market, is very exciting, yeah, very exciting.
Dean: Yeah,
Kurt: Okay perfect, I'm following you a hundred percent here, so now that-
Dean: You could do that same thing for horse farms, yeah-
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: I was just describing it the way, yeah, okay?
Kurt: Yeah, no, that's beautiful, now once we've got this people kind of in our funnel so to speak, I mean can you help us with maybe just a couple little extra ideas as far as what we can do to ensure that when the time is right for these people, that they're going to contact us. I think you said it a long time ago, I think it was you, it was kind of like, "You need to be thinking about this list of people that you have that, you've got to do everything in your power to get those people to contact you when the time is right or else you're going to lose all of them." I forget what it was but it was…
Dean: Yeah, well, I actually said like imagine and that's a great example, I said you know, because now do you have any doubt that if you did that postcard program for the sellers and that print add in the Homes and Land for looking for riverfront buyers, that you would be able to generate leads, is there any doubts about that?
Kurt: Absolutely none, no doubts.
Dean: No, so you know that you can generate the leads, now we're into Profit Activator three, which is about educating and motivating and then making offers, right?
You've already gone through the experience of the process of doing the Bank owned Weekly when we were doing the finding buyers program, it's the same thing for the riverfront, 'Riverfront Weekly.' We were doing Lakefront Weekly and that is the same principle, that every week you're going to send them an email with update's of all of the new riverfront properties that have come on the market and at the end of that email, you're going to say, "Whenever your ready, here are our three ways we can help you and we're going to lead to the next step. Join us for a daily tour of riverfront homes. We do daily tours." You could even say by boat if you wanted to. Do you show riverfront homes by boat or ...? if you don't, you could potentially, I mean if that's something people can do here or the chain of lakes here in Winter Haven but whatever it was, daily riverfront house tours, so you're saying, "Yeah, we do daily tours of riverfront homes at 10:00 and 1:00 you can join us for a tour," or you could just say Saturday, or whatever dates you wanted to say and the only thing ... The purpose of that is just to make it easy for people who want to start the process of looking at homes to just say, "You know what, let's jump on one of these tours," even though the tours are just you and them, right?
It doesn't have to be this big thing, you're just saying, like this is where I had to get people they have this perception of, I don't want to say a daily tour because I don't do tours everyday or whatever. It's metaphoric, like we're saying to people, if I called you today and said, "Hey, can you show me some riverfront homes tomorrow?" Would your wife have time to set that in?
Kurt: Yeah, absolutely.
Dean: Off course that's all we're saying, so we're making it easy there. Then what else would be the next thing, are there some lenders who might not lend on waterfront homes or are there some things that would be specifically related for financing waterfront homes?
Kurt: Yeah, maybe if something was a manufactured home or if it was in a flood zone or something, but not, there wouldn't be too many restrictions but I'm trying to think of some-
Dean: No, right now just thinking about how to make, if there's something obscure about it that there's that opportunity. Would there be any riverfront home that would fall in the USDA areas?
Kurt: I have to double check on the loan amounts, maybe very few but possibly, I mean yeah, there definitely could be.
Dean: Right-
Kurt: Yep.
Dean: ... and so you look at that, right, is like that could be another possibility, but the basic thing is that even if you just said to people, whenever you're ready here's how we can help you, join us for a daily tour of riverfront homes or they can get a free home loan report and you could call it a free riverfront home loan report.
Kurt: Yep.
Dean: That talks about, that you monitor hundreds of different loan programs and find the very best low down payment loans, low interest loans, lowest total cost loans and put all those funding together in a system home loan report. There's two things that people can get started with, you know.
Kurt: She could do a little weekly video, the riverfront home of the week or something like that.
Dean: Off course, yes.
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: All of that, yeah.
Kurt: Wow!
Dean: That you become, it's like this is the best information available. Remember it goes back to, let's look at our three principles. Number one, plan to dominate, so if you go into this and plan to dominate the riverfront properties, that's one mindset. That means you're going to stick with it, that means your going to look at this as a long termed thing. That means that you're going to realize that to dominate you're going to put a little bit of effort into something like this, right?
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: Then building the very best product from the customers perspective. What would be the very best thing that could happen to somebody looking for, searching for a waterfront property and what would be the very best thing for somebody who owns a riverfront property that you've got a buyer?
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: Now, the great thing is as you're sending out this postcards and you're generating leads, your getting all this people to raise their hands, that's now an asset that nobody else has. We just found out, I don't know whether you saw this on the GoGo Agent members blog that they posted up a thing about the Google maps now, where you can export data to your Google map and you could, when people respond for your report on riverfront house prices, you're going to get their address. You can export their address and create a special private only for you Google map that overlays, drops a pin on where their property is.
Kurt: Wow!
Dean: ... so that you could look at the map and say, now you've got, here's the thing, now you've got this asset of these people, these people, these people, these people. They're thinking about selling their house and now when somebody from your buyer side decides to say, "Hey, we'd like to come on a tour of homes," that now you've got somebody whose looking for a riverfront home and your able to look at the inventory of the once that are available right now and then look at your map and say to somebody, "Hey Nick, I'm showing riverfront houses to somebody this weekend and they're looking at one just down the river from you, I'm not sure what your plans are but I remember looking up your house online when I sent you the riverfront report. I thought maybe I'd check I and see if I could tell them about your house."
Kurt: Absolutely.
Dean: You've got this thing that they really want, which is a buyer.
Kurt: Yep and they know you're on top of the market, why wouldn't they list with you when they do decide, absolutely.
Dean: Exactly, yes.
Kurt: Beautiful.
Dean: Yep.
Kurt: I love it, can't wait to share all this with my wife.
Dean: Well, if only we recorded it.
Kurt: If only we recorded it, so glad that we did, I've been taking notes here seriously and I'm so glad we've got this recorded, perfect. You have been such a mass of help to our businesses over the years, I really appreciate you having me on the call today. It's been a joy being a part of your email mastery course and getting a lot out of that. When I signed up for being a guest here about three month ago, I thought, "Oh! Men he's never going to get around to me. He's got so many other people," but I got a email from Lillian the other day that you wanted to have me as a guest now it's awesome.
Dean: That's awesome, yeah we're making our way through, you got-
Kurt: Yeah.
Dean: ... lots of people we want to be on but, it's your turn.
Kurt: Thank you so much, hey, I've got one more quick question. It's a little bit off topic from where we were going here but a while back you had mentioned something about somebody that you were working with that you guys did a type of an add that was geared towards refinance for a mortgage broker and I wasn't ... I didn't know if it was something that you guys did as far as an add on Facebook or something. Do you recall ...?
Dean: We did .. Well I do a lot of work with Churchill Mortgage which is a big mortgage company. They are the only mortgage advertiser on the Dave Ramsey's show.
Kurt: Yep.
Dean: One of the things that we did Mike Hardwick who's the owner of Churchill Mortgage is good friends with Dave and Dave went on a rant one day talking about why he couldn't understand why people haven't refinanced yet, right, like why not, rates have never been lowered. He was going off on people saying, "Why haven't you refinanced yet?" It struck me that the reason people hadn't refinanced is because most people don't know whether it make sense. They don't know , and so I had Mike do a Little conversation on camera with Dave saying, "I think Dave that the reason that people haven't refinanced yet is that they don't know whether it makes sense."
We put together a report for people called, 'I don't know when it makes sense to refinance your house,' and it answers the questions that can show people exactly how it works and how to know whether it would actually even make sense for them to refinance and where they can get that for free at Churchill Mortgage. Com. That was really the essence of how we did it and they've got a huge email database and so we were able also to send out and offer people that report, how to know when it makes sense to refinance your house. When they would respond for that then we would invite people to come on a webinar presentation and talk all about it and then offer ultimately a home loan report, a refinance report where we would say lets compare your situation to what's available in the market right now side by side and see what the comparison would be. That's so much easier to ease their way into than just shouting at them, "Rates have never been lower, now the time, refinance before the rates go up."
Kurt: Yeah, now that's beautiful, I remember you talking about that, I was trying to remember what you had called it that's perfect.
Dean: Yep.
Kurt: That's what I was looking for, thank you for that little extra bonus tip there.
Dean: There we go, all right. Well, Kurt you've said it all.
Kurt: Dean thank you for your help very much.
Dean: absolutely.
Kurt: Yeah, appreciate your time, thanks again for all your help and will talk to you soon. Thank you Dean.
Dean: Thanks Kurt, bye bye.
There we have it another great episode. I love how enthusiastic Kurt is and how I have no doubt, I know for sure that he is an implementer because I've seen it happen. I've seen him take our Bank owned Weekly and the Tax Credit Guide program and just run with it and really build a successful operation around it. I've got no doubts that he will be able to execute and apply those things.
Here is how to keep the conversation going, if you're a real estate agent or a mortgage broker, right now the very best thing that we can do for you is give you access to all of the tools that I talk about. I've got all of the programs specifically laid out for the real estate business at GoGoAgent. Com, so we've got programs for getting listings, for finding buyers, for multiplying the listings that you already have, for getting referrals, for converting leads and finding buyers. All of those thing are already done and available in one easy to execute package along with all of the tools that you need to do it. The landing pages, the auto-responder, the toll-free voicemail, the texting, the CRM all of those tools all in one place. You can come and see what we're all about, we offer a thirty day free trial no credit card required. Come on in just take a look around, see if this is for you. I know that if I can get you to look around, start implementing things for 30 days that, that's going to convince you to at least try us for six months and I know that after six months your ROI will be so great that you'll never want to leave.
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