What someone sees when they look at a home is only one part of the puzzle, and it's easy to overlook all the other elements that go into their decision. It's good to remember that your knowledge and understanding of a market can establish you as their 'go to' person, helping your clients make decisions that meet all their needs.
Today on the Listening Agent Lifestyle podcast, I want to share a conversation I had with William Madison from Portland, Oregon. William has one unique characteristic that's going to make his adventure in real estate a little bit different. He's completely blind.
We had a really great conversation about how, in an industry that's very visual, you can capture the essence of the marketing, the insight, and the relationship building, to work around being completely blind and still be a successful real estate agent.
We looked at how a listening-centric approach can help leverage his knowledge, and he started a Getting Listings program in a high-end neighborhood of Portland. He has a great attitude and wisdom around the psychology of how people interact. I think he's going to be a big success.
So enjoy this conversation. It's a great example of not letting challenges hold you back!
Links:
GoGoAgent.com
Be a Guest
Transcript: Listing Agent Lifestyle Ep145
Dean: William Madison.
William: Good morning, Dean.
Dean: How are you, sir?
William: I am doing good. Can you hear me okay? Am I-
Dean: I can hear you just perfectly, immersively even.
William: Okay, fantastic, so my mic isn't too hot. All right, good.
Dean: It's good. Welcome. I've been looking forward to our conversation.
William: Yeah, me too.
Dean: I know a little bit of what we're going to talk about, but I figure it would be good for you to kind of maybe tell people a little bit about you and about your goals here, and then we can talk about how we can make it all happen.
William: Fantastic. My main objective in reaching out to you was, in this direct response marketing space, one of the challenges, especially now since I lost my vision completely five, six years ago was, okay, how do you do or how would you go about doing this blind? Whether it be real estate or not, but we're focused on real estate. I was interested in real estate back in 2002, 2003, but I never got my license because I was legally blind at the time, and so I didn't have the freedom of driving a car or ... Real estate is a very visual industry.
Dean: Right, yeah. That's what's so kind of intriguing about this and about your desire, you know?
William: Yeah.
Dean: Because I'm really inspired by it to think ... You think about it, I thought about the same thing because real estate ... When I first met you, when we first connected, and you told me you were blind, that my first thought was, wow, that's really ... because real estate is a very visual thing. That was kind of my thought, but then I thought, but so is everything else, so why not real estate, really, right?
William: Yeah.
Dean: Yeah, so there's something here, so I'm excited to explore it and have the conversation. You're definitely in the right mode of thinking about applying marketing and direct response to it because it's certainly all doable, you know?
William: Yeah.
Dean: Are you-
William: Go ahead.
Dean: Yeah, when you say legally blind, do you have no ... completely blind or you can see things but not-
William: Right now, I am completely blind. As of January of 2013, I lost the very little vision I had. If you think about when you go into the eye doctor, and the goal is 20/20 is preferable. Some people may have 20/15 or something like that. Basically, that is that you can-
Dean: Show-offs.
William: Yeah, yeah, really. You can see the chart at 20 feet, basically. I was born without irises. It was a mutated gene. The iris is also what drains the fluid from the eye and, therefore, I developed glaucoma as a result. I only had vision out of my right eye, and my vision out of that one eye ... If you think about three-dimensional vision, I don't have that. I don't understand three-dimensional, but my vision-
Dean: That's been for your whole life.
William: Yeah, that's been for the last 36 years or, so sorry, for the last 30 years. My vision out of that one eye was 2,400, on average, and it was believed that ... It was like, whoa, how in the world does he do what he does? My parents allowed me to climb trees, ride a bike for a little while when I was a kid, let me be a kid, which also developed my kind of challenging the idea that, okay, well, you stay home in the safe environment.
Dean: Looking at it as a limitation that most people would, right?
William: Yeah, yeah.
Dean: Exactly.
William: Yeah. Typically, the research is that, out of your five senses, vision plays about 80% of the visual information that you take in or the sensory information you take in. The other four senses consist about-
Dean: Because they amplify that.
William: Yeah. They just about 5% each.
Dean: Wow.
William: It's something that I have tried to really work with. I've tried to become a stock broker because I was interested in the stock market since I was 12. Mortgage, I've worked in the mortgage industry. I passed by real estate because, well, it's a visual industry, and I really can't ... Unless I have a platform to work from, it's not really something I believed, at the time, that I could do until I came across direct response marketing. Then it was like, okay, this possibly could be done, but then what kind of team, ultimately, would I have to build if I lost my vision, which is what I planned for. My doctors told me that I would lose my vision by the time I was 35, 40. When you're dealt with that kind of deadline, it forces you to have to think and prioritize way more effectively than if ... What we're looking at now, one out of two people over the age of 65 will have some form of blindness.
Dean: Wow.
William: My question in approaching you, or if I'm approaching software designers and developers in any industry is, okay, if you want to do what you love to do ... I'm assuming, Dean, that you like what you do.
Dean: I do.
William: You wouldn't mind doing it for another 20 years.
Dean: Right, exactly.
William: What if you lost your vision in that time? How would you build the systems to prepare for that inevitability? That's my biggest question. That's what I come to the table here with.
Dean: Okay. I'm curious about how you got introduced to direct response advertise, how you came into that world. Yeah.
William: My path, when I first started wanting to build my own business in '09, 2010, was I read two incredible books that really made an incredible impact on me: The New Psycho-Cybernetics by Dr. Maxwell Maltz and edited by Dan Kennedy and The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.
Dean: Oh, okay. Nice.
William: Those two propelled me because Joe Polish is mentioned in The New Psycho-Cybernetics, so then I started digging into Dan Kennedy, and who's Dan Kennedy, and who is he connected to? Tim Ferriss is connected to Joe Polish, and then Joe Polish was connected to you and Dan Sullivan.
I have found myself in an arena where the combination of neuroscience, ethical sales, and marketing neural leadership is really something that this arena loves but is not talked about readily, but I find myself so relating to it because a lot of it has to do with the brain. It has to do with thinking before you react, thinking before you respond, and not particularly about you if it's in leadership or if it's in marketing. It's not about you. I love what you're doing with the Listing Agent Lifestyle where you use the illustration of the flashlight behind the customer. It's not about you standing in front of the customer. It's about shining the light on the opportunities for the client, and they can choose.
Dean: Right, yeah. That's exactly right.
William: I love that, you know?
Dean: Yes. Well, very cool.
William: It was a very long road of reading a lot of books, but that's how I found myself in the direct response marketing arena. I love the work that Dan Kennedy does. His No B.S. series and his Ultimate series, I love those books.
Dean: Yeah. Well, that's good. I mean Dan Kennedy is how Joe Polish and I met, I mean, well, I don't know how many years ago now. 20, almost 25 years ago, we met through Dan Kennedy. Yeah, that's a cool thing. I'm actually speaking at Dan's Super Conference coming up next month here in Orlando.
William: Oh, I would love to be able to go to that.
Dean: Yeah, it's always fun.
William: Oh, yeah.
Dean: Okay, so I think now, as I listen to you here, this ... Let's really get into the practicalities of this here, you know?
William: Yeah.
Dean: What does this mean here? The things that obviously ... The actual going to look at homes and doing things like that are a ... that is a different experience. How do you currently work with people, or are you just getting started in real estate now?
William: Yeah. I just got my license in-
Dean: Okay, perfect.
William: ... for it in January.
Dean: Okay, perfect.
William: A lot of my work has been either over the phone, or I've done business executive coaching, and I do that primarily in person because I prefer that type of interaction.
Dean: Yeah, sure. Part of the great thing about right now is that we are in the midst of a total migration to what I'm calling Cloudlandia as a society. I mean we're migrating so that everything about our world is online. You can be anything that you want in Cloudlandia because there's none of the sort of physical limitations that there are on the mainland, in a way.
It's kind of a fascinating thing because we're starting to see now ... I just found a survey that showed that 29%, right now, of all Americans consider themselves online almost constantly is the phrase that they use, right, as opposed to the 11% or less that go online daily or the 5% who don't go online. You look at that among 18 to 34 year olds, that number jumps up to 48% are almost constantly online. You start to see all these things that we're conditioned ... that we can do almost everything online without ever having to deal with the mainland.
There are a couple of really cool concepts that I've heard in the last little while here. There's a group in New York and Chicago that have started nine different restaurant brands that only exist on Grubhub and Seamless. They're calling them ghost restaurants, that there's no physical location for them. They run nine different brands from one kitchen and stage it all in the bags and the logo, stuff of that restaurant, and then the delivery guys take it out. That micro-specialization, you can be whatever it is you could be, this wings-only restaurant that's got all these different kinds of wings, and it seems like you're in just the right place if you're a wing lover, but they prepare them all right there beside the sushi stuff that they're preparing in the same kitchen, right?
William: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Dean: That kind of philosophy here allows us to imagine what it could be like to do that same thing in real estate. You start to see now how everything really kind of takes place online mostly. Everybody has access to everything about every property that's on the market right now, including the history, and the last selling price, and the ... if you go on Zillow, even the estimated value of the property, which is often wildly off.
William: Incorrect, yeah.
Dean: Yeah, yeah, but it gives that ... In theory, that's all coming that that's going get more accurate, and that's going to get more stuff. Compared to 30 years ago, they had no access to it, but what hasn't changed is that you can't digitize the last 100 feet of the real estate transaction, right?
William: Exactly.
Dean: I think the opportunity is in orchestrating all of the other things, all the things that get somebody to that last 100 feet, and then I think that there's an opportunity for you to collaborate and build a team of people who can do the things that you can't do, you know?
William: Yeah.
Dean: Or do the things that are the last 100 feet kind of things, the mainland things.
William: Yeah, because I'm very good on the phone.
Dean: Of course.
William: But at the same time, I don't want to be a phone robot. I can relate to people very well over the phone, but I'd ... and I have no call reluctance like he talks about in Zero Resistance Selling. I have no call reluctance, but I want the time I spend on the phone ... If I'm talking to a customer or a potential client, I want that to be a valuable conversation not just a, okay, I'm just dialing for no apparent reason except for maybe, hopefully, I'll talk to somebody.
Dean: Yes. I love it, and so I think that there's a great opportunity for you to start with taking a listing-centric approach to it because, that way, you get everything to the point ... We've seen with the Getting Listings program, everything can be completely orchestrated, outsourced even, and to the point that people call you to come and list their house. That's really exactly how it happens. Now, if we can get to that point, then there's just the matter now, logistically, of how would we handle that situation? I know you've just chosen the area where we're going to focus to get listings, so tell me a little bit about that area and what we're going to focus on here.
William: I'm focusing on the Forest Heights area of Portland. Skyline, it's on the, basically, the west side of the West Hills of Portland, and so it's Skyline and then Burnside going ... or Barnes Road going west. It's all high-end homes. I've chosen it not because, well, I just ... I want to get my price point up. I actually find that I, through my mortgage experience and my ... I was in internet car sales. I can relate and have the self-image to interact with the higher end more effectively than I do the 200, 300, $400,000 homeowner.
Dean: Okay. How much are the home in Forest Heights? Is that what you said?
William: Yeah, Forest Heights. The list I pulled from the title company was owner occupied for three years and above $500,000. A good portion of that list is actually well over 700,000-plus.
Dean: Nice, okay. How many homes are there? Are there-
William: These are right up there-
Dean: Yeah. How many homes are there in Forest Heights?
William: With the criteria that I asked for, they pulled 992.
Dean: Okay, and so the other ones would be ... That's great. How many homes are there altogether in there if you didn't take just the ones that had been lived in for three years or more?
William: If you're calculating in townhomes, because townhomes are really popular up there, as well as condos, which I did not have them search for because I thought that that would be a separate marketing funnel-
Dean: It might be, yeah.
William: You're looking at probably 2,500.
Dean: Okay, perfect, so there's something that there's ... You can expand into it a little bit, which is nice.
William: Yeah, yeah.
Dean: I like that. Okay, so you're on the right track then with single family, 500-plus, owner occupied three years plus. I usually don't go with the three years plus because there's a lot of times people end up setting the stage for selling sometime in the future too, so I'm not looking to just eliminate those people, right?
William: Okay.
Dean: Because every year that goes on, they're getting closer and closer, and I look at this as, going into it to dominate, right?
William: Yeah.
Dean: That means I'm looking at this as taking a five-year interest in Forest Heights, you know?
William: Yeah.
Dean: To be the dominant agent in that area. Just like we've seen Tony Kelsey do in Scarborough and to see Kenny McCarthy on the ocean front homes in Cape Ann. There's a really great opportunity for us to start with that, with the 900 homes. That's a perfect number to start with. Now, so what's going to happen is we'll mail the postcards, and then people will respond and ask for the report, the currently monthly report. Then, each month, we'll send the updated information along with our Get Top Dollar newsletter. Then, when people are ready, they will call. It works just like that.
There's no outgoing phone calls required, nothing like that, and so ... because my provocation when I set the whole thing up was I know I want to get listings. I've got to do it in a way that will work for anybody all over the country kind of thing, and so my provocation was how would I do it if my phone only accepted incoming calls? That was really how I went to work on creating the system, and we've done it, and we've seen it work all over the country in all kinds of price ranges and with longevity. You're in a good spot here. You're jumping into a proven system.
Now let's pick it up from there, because that's a certainty that it's going to happen, and you'll get the call from somebody who says, "Come on over." Then, how we handle that from there is going to be a matter of logistics here, so do you have a partner, or an assistant, or a collaborator? How do you see that working?
William: Yeah. I have two partners that I'll be working with, and I'll be able to potentially go out to the listing presentation with them.
Dean: Nice.
William: It's kind of how I operated in the ... when I was working for Honda of Seattle was I would set the appointment, and then the customer would come in, and I would have already told them on the phone, "I'm blind, so you're not going to go on the test drive with me, but I'm going to introduce you to a salesperson that I know will take care of you." I would go out to the desk when they came in and meet them. Sometimes they would want me to actually just hang out with them, and it was great. They'd go on the test drive, and they'd come back, and then they'd want me to kind of hang out because they liked the way I had built the rapport on the phone and had set up everything, and so they wanted me around just because they had trust in me.
Dean: Yep, yep, yep. I think that's great because now here's what's going to happen is that people are going to feel like they've bonded with you over all this time, that they've been ... You've been sending them all the updates. You're the most persistent person, consistent in their advocacy, in a way, that you're giving them a lot of attention every month, and they feel like, "This is the person that I want to work with," and so that's going to go a long way. Then when you talk to them on the phone, then you'll bring them ... come over with your partner. I don't think this'll be any different, really, than any other situation. It's just you've brought an alternate set of eyes, really, right?
William: Yeah.
Dean: That's an external set of eyes. That's all it is because you still have the same ... You've got the insight. You've got the knowledge. Certainly, you've gotten them to that point, and so that's a ... Yeah, I'm excited to see it all unfold.
William: I had a question about when you send out the postcards, how often does the postcard go out to the list?
Dean: Once a month.
William: Okay. All right, I just wanted to make sure.
Dean: Once a month, yeah. Yeah, so we send out once a month, and it gets ... For March, we send out the March offer, April, May, so that's the only thing that changes, but we send that every month. Then when people respond, then we send just the people who respond a ... We take them off the postcard list, and now we mail them a monthly newsletter, and cover letter, and update on what's happened in Forest Heights in the last 30 days, along with any extra things. We may tell them about a new listing that you just got in Forest Heights, or a buyer that you're working with, or tell the story about somebody you just helped. There are inserts and things that we would supplement with the main thing, which is the cover letter, which I've already written, the newsletter, which is already written, and just the market data, which you provide, so it's very simple to execute.
William: That will be another logistics of getting the RMLS information, and that will be something that I will wrangle my partners to pull once a month for me for them.
Dean: Yeah, really, all they need to be able to do is, just once a month, see what's ... Here's the new listing that came on the market in Forest Heights in the last 30 days, here's the ones that sold, and that's it. That's all you need once a month to be able to do that. Then, of course, once a month you would create the here's what happened in the last 12 months so that ... that's for the initial report for people.
William: But in the-
Dean: It's very simple, and it's routine.
William: The book that you provide in the initial packet, is that something that you still do or-
Dean: Oh, yeah, of course.
William: Okay.
Dean: We have two versions. We have the book called How To Sell Your House For Top Dollar Fast, which we set up so that you can put your name, your picture, your contact information. It's all like it's your book, and we have two versions of that. We have a version that you can desktop publish with saddle-stitched, and they're just folded and stapled, you can get them printed off at Staples kind of thing, or we have a perfect bound paperback version, which is really nice looking. It looks like a real book, so we offer those. We just do those through CreateSpace on Amazon, so it's a couple hundred dollars to step up your version of the book with your picture, all your information, and then the books themselves, you just order 1 or 100 at a time, and they're $2.20 each, I think.
William: Okay. All right. Fantastic.
Dean: Yeah, but it looks really great. When you get this initial package now, they get the cover letter, and the newsletter, and your book, and all the information, and we've got a nice label that we put on the front of the envelope. The first report goes in a 10x13 envelope or a 9x10 or whatever, and we use a full-page, an 8.5x11 mailing label so that we have a nice graphic that we put on the thing that's like Your Forest Heights Report with a picture, and so it anchors what they actually asked for. It looks like a professional subscription type of thing that they've paid for.
Then, each month, then the monthly updates goes in a 6x9 envelope with ... We use a half-size mailing label on it, and it's got the picture and here's what's inside kind of thing. It's nice. It's a good looking package that arrives in their mail every month. People save them. We were joking because, sometimes, you mail those for a few years, and then want to purge people, you know?
William: Yeah.
Dean: Kenny up in Cape Ann, did you hear about this? Where the-
William: Yeah, I did. It was great.
Dean: Kenny switched companies. He'd been mailing to this group of people for three years, and when he switched companies, he decided to purge some of the people who hadn't responded or listed. Then, three or four months later, he gets a call from a guy who said, "I had to call another broker to find you," kind of thing because all the information he had was the old brokerage. That guy ended up ... wanted a $2.75 million house.
William: Yeah, absolutely.
Dean: That commission funds mailing ... never giving up on anybody, you know?
William: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Dean: Yeah, that's the great thing.
William: Absolutely. That's the thing is, with this, and with the mailing, really, the visual does come in, and so it requires that ... I've gotten 20 hours of Easy Button.
Dean: Yeah, that's nice.
William: We're in the process of getting that set up, and it-
Dean: Yeah. I saw, when I arrived here today, Diane was here working on your postcards, so I got to see the pictures. I told her the one with the Forest Heights sign would be the one I would choose. That would be the one.
William: Fantastic.
Dean: Yeah.
William: Fantastic. Yeah, and I wanted to do something-
Dean: I might use the view one for the initial package, you know?
William: Okay.
Dean: Or the ... view them differently.
William: Yeah. Yeah, and thought I wanted to do something a little bit different with my head shot with me and my dog-
Dean: Your dog. Yeah.
William: ... instead of the standard real estate broker look of a backdrop and that kind of thing. That's the thing is, with the packet, with the book, one of the things that really requires a lot of more trust on my end is, okay, so I'm relying on, whether it be my wife, my partners, you guys, to help me feel really confident that the visual presentation is there, kind of like if you're staging the house, right?
I can't see how the house is staged, so I have to put a lot of trust ... and that's hard for a lot of people, but that's something that I've had to do all my life is trust other people to help or to understand the standard at which I operate, which people have kind of accused me is the standard I operate is very high. I require a lot from people who I have to really put my ... If I go out in the world and I'm with them, I'm on their shoulder. I'm trusting that I'm not going to get smacked in the face with a branch or whatever. That's the same thing in this case, and so that's why I was wondering about the initial packet.
One of the things that I would love to get is a copy, a digital copy of the book so that I could actually read it with my screen reader so that I know what the material is. One of the things that-
Dean: Yeah, it's in there. Yeah, it's in GoGoAgent in the Getting Listings section. When we list the entire action plan for it, it's there. It's one of the things. It's the How To Sell Your House For Top Dollar Fast booklet.
William: Okay. All right. Honestly, that's one of the things that I run into is there is so much information on the web that trying to ... I mean the visual overload for people is insane right now.
Dean: Yes. Right.
William: Think about trying to do that with something that is reading to you constantly.
Dean: I bet.
William: You have no ability to skim.
Dean: You can't skim.
William: You have to-
Dean: I know exactly what you're saying. Right.
William: You have to move from heading to heading, or link to link, or the text if it's plain text. That's one of the things that I love helping people try to figure out is how to format your page in such a way that it's easy to navigate, not only visually, but also when you're using accessibility. That's one of the trends I've seen is that websites going simpler and making the font a little bit bigger. Who is that for? Well, it's the 50-plus who don't want a cluttered website, and so that's ... I apologize for not finding the book, but that's one of the things is like I'm ... you could say I'm effectively lazy in that it's like okay-
Dean: Wow, right.
William: How many pages do I have to go through to find a link to download a thing?
Dean: Yeah. When you're in the GoGoAgent members' blog, the very top navigation is broken down into Getting Listings-
William: Yeah. It's great.
Dean: ... Finding Buyers, Getting Referrals, so it's very like ... so that kind of puts it right there that that takes you to the ... kind of narrows it down that that's the action central for everything to do with the Getting Listings program.
William: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I will look for the book and, hopefully, I will be able to read it. That was the challenge with the I Love Marketing Breakthrough Blueprint Manual was the book was all-
Dean: They're PDFs, yeah.
William: Yep, and it was all scanned images.
Dean: Right, right, right.
William: I was back and forth with Gina at Joe Polish's office, and there wasn't really anything they could do because it was just all scanned in. Hopefully, the book is accessible that way, and if you guys don't mind me-
Dean: I think it's a Word document, so that should be-
William: Okay, fantastic. Yeah.
Dean: Yeah, so I think that should be easy.
William: Fantastic. Awesome.
Dean: Yeah, because it's editable, right?
William: Okay. Okay, gotcha. All right. Well, I will read through that. The other item that you talked about on the academy call this last week was Facebook.
Dean: Yeah.
William: You guys are ramping up to potentially start doing that in April. Is that something that's going to be included in the Easy Button, or is that an additional service?
Dean: No, that will be something that you could have as an Easy Button task. It's just an expansion of the things that we can do with the Easy Button, that we can do for you. That's what we're looking to do. That's the whole intention with the Easy Button is to be able to help execute all the things that we talked about. We've really gotten it to where, with Getting Listings especially, we could literally do every element of it, right?
William: Yeah.
Dean: It's like a set and forget it kind of thing, which is really kind of cool.
William: That's wonderful.
Dean: The Facebook, we've been experimenting with micro-targeting now where you can drop a pin on an address and take a minimum of a one-mile radius around that. We were just testing with ... there's an area here in Winter Haven, an active adult community called Lake Ashton. We played around with dropping the pin in different locations so that the one-mile radius would encompass the whole community, and so you may ... I don't know how big Forest Heights is, but there may be a way of positioning so you get all of Forest Heights but a little bit of overflow.
We ran the Getting Listings postcard as a Facebook ad, and so it's the same. I've been finding, across the board, that we're getting response rates very similar to what we would get with postcards in terms of impressions. I'm almost treating the news feed like the mailbox, in a way, right?
William: Oh, yeah.
Dean: And the ad itself as like a postcard. For instance, so I do ... for the Listing Agent Lifestyle, we're running ads for real estate agents, offering the Listing Agent Lifestyle book, and so I was looking at our stats, so month to date we'd had almost 100,000 impressions and had 2,700 opt-ins.
William: Wow.
Dean: 2,700 leads, so it's like a 2.7% response on impressions, you know?
William: Yeah.
Dean: Then we did the same thing with the Lake Ashton, and it was like a 2% response rate on more limited impressions because we're only showing the ad to the audience of people who live in that one-mile radius. Even though there's some overflow, we just narrowed it to Lake Ashton, and it's very ... I mean it was very affordable, you know?
William: Yeah, yeah.
Dean: It was a cool thing. I think if we take your targeting the kind of specific homes, right, in that area, and then, in addition, we could overlay and do all of Forest Heights with the Facebook ads, kind of do the ... send the postcards one week and then run the Facebook ad for another week or maybe even two weeks a month and see ... supplement the response rates like that, which I think will be great.
William: Yeah. We just had a call to action meeting yesterday at Windermere. They brought in their marketing person from WFG, and that was one of the things he said was doing almost a ... Monday, you send out the postcard. Tuesday, you launch an email. Wednesday, you post the Facebook ad and let it run for a short period of time. As long as you know who the audience is, they are getting the same information images almost simultaneously over and over and over again.
Dean: Yeah. Absolutely, multisensory. Yeah, exactly, multichannel.
William: I had a question about the Facebook ads that you guys are testing. One of the things he talked about yesterday was that, with the ads, he has seen where people are basically just taking a scan of their postcard and making it the ad. Are you guys formatting the Facebook ad appropriately for the ad?
Dean: Yeah. No, we're doing it. Yeah, we're formatting it specifically because you’re ... the images, you're only allowed 20% text on the images, so it wouldn't work to ... I would love to just scan the postcard and stuff, but you can't really do that for the exposure. They throttle you back kind of thing.
William: Well, he was saying that the fonts and that kind of thing just don't look right if you try to insert your postcard into an ad-
Dean: Right, exactly.
William: ... and it just like ... They're going through your… Okay.
Dean: No, no. We model it. We use the same language, but we have the ... so the ad would be the picture of the Forest Heights entry like you do. They body copy would be the same language we use on the postcard, and then the headline is the headline on the postcard. We've been using lead ads where they never have to leave the Facebook environment. They click the download, and it automatically pre-populates with their name and their email address, and then all we ask for is their mailing address because that's what we want for that, so yeah it's really ... it's cool, you know?
William: Yeah.
Dean: It's kind of-
William: So not something I need to-
Dean: ... just some targeting that you can do.
William: I need to set up that kind of thing for my The World's Most Interesting Postcard for all my 150 because, like I was telling Diane and you talked about, in my case being 36, I've collected people's emails, but not specifically their mailing addresses. I have close friends, and I have people who I want to send this to, essentially to stay in contact because I mean, five years ago when I lost my vision, I went into a black hole, basically. It was like there was no way to communicate with anybody through Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever, and so I want to have those relationships, and I think The World's Most Interesting Postcard is that way, is kind of give them something interesting.
Dean: Yeah. Yes, it really does.
William: Yeah. I need to either get the mailing address or I need to figure out how to build a form and send out an email to all those people and go, "Go and fill out the Google form or whatever and give me your-"
Dean: If you've got their names ... That was one of the early things that we were able to sort of Easy Buttonize was getting your top 150 compiled, so we've joined some people-finding sites where we just have the first and last name and the city that they live in, we can go and find the mailing addresses for people. If there's multiple of them, you can pretty much know by what age they are kind of thing. If it's somebody that you know is in their 30s, but there's three William Madisons, and one's in his 30s, and one's 70, and one's 20, you know that that's the one. We've been able to get all of that compiled for people, and that's a thing that is ... you only have to do that once, right?
William: Yeah.
Dean: Once you get that done, then it's smooth sailing.
William: Okay. I wasn't sure how much work that was for Diane and her team.
Dean: I think Diane said, from a running start, from 100 just name and emails, I think it took four or five hours to do the whole thing. Yeah.
William: All right. Okay. All right, well, I will definitely consider that and getting that list over to her. I've been very impatient to get my marketing out because it's been ... I had to get my professional pictures done, and then I've been waiting on the photographer to get the pictures to me, and then they weren't in the right resolution, so I've been kind of ... I'm marketing to a high end, and so I'm being very particular about how I want the images to look, and the quality, and that kind of thing.
Dean: What is it about Forest Heights that would be attractive for buyers? If we're starting now, because you know that I'm a big fan of let's triangulate this, let's now, while we're doing this, the best accessory you can bring to your listing appointment is either your checkbook or a buyer who wants to buy the house, you know?
William: Yeah.
Dean: We want to look at how can we, at the same time we're trying to get listings in Forest Heights, what can we do to start finding the buyers?
William: The Forest Heights-
Dean: Is the view the big thing?
William: The view is the big thing, but it's also the proximity to the city if you don't want to live in the city. If you're a Nike, or an Intel, or a Providence executive, or a ... There's a lot of software companies that are in downtown Portland. Let's say you're in the 35 to 50-year-old range, and you are an executive somewhere in one of those large organizations, but you don't want to be downtown. You want your own home with a view, but you want easy access to downtown, either to take an Uber, or a Lift, or whatever and go into town and have drinks and then get an Uber back home, that is the big advantage for Forest Heights because it's not very far away from downtown, so it's not going to cost you a lot to get an Uber.
Dean: Yeah. How far would it be by Uber or whatever? Is it a 10-minute ride? Is it-
William: It probably would be, yeah, because you'd get on either ... you either get on Cornell and just ... Basically, from Skyline to Cornell into the Northwest 23rd area, you're probably looking at maybe 8 to 15 minutes, maybe, to get to your destination.
Dean: Yeah, so you look at that, that really now becomes a selling feature. Do people move from the city out that way, or do they move from other places to it? What would be the kind of migration path? Would they start out in the city? They want to stay close to the city, but now they're going to raise their family, so they want to get a little bit out where they can get a house and-
William: That's what I've heard, yes. The turnover in Forest Heights is actually pretty good because of that. It's, yeah, you want a family, but you want a larger home, and you want kind of all of the luxuries that you may have had in the Southwest Waterfront or whatever, but now you need more square footage, and you're going to have kids or whatever, so you look at Forest Heights because you still love the city or you still want to be close to work, but you don't want to be in the burbs like Beaverton and Hillsboro.
Dean: Okay, gotcha. Okay, so that might be the thing if it's the selling feature. I talk about, with the lakefront homes or with the oceanfront homes, we start looking for the buyers as well, so if we did the ad that was the iconic photo of the view that everybody covets from Forest Heights and saying, "If you're looking for an amazing Portland view home, read this," and offer the report on all the view properties, that's a kind of thing that allows you to be ... establish that market maker position, you know?
William: Yeah. That also got me-
Dean: It's a great-
William: The view got me also thinking about pools, like I brought up previously, is a title company can pull homes with pools, and so you could market to that as well.
Dean: I got it. See, now you're thinking. That's one of the things that I think is really the smartest thing is thinking about things that are kind of what I call non-algorithmic searches, right?
William: Yeah.
Dean: You need a little bit of extra. It needs a little bit of selection to curate that list, you know?
William: Yeah.
Dean: Curation adds an element to it as opposed to compiled.
William: That's what I was thinking with the gentleman on the academy call down in California who was looking for oceanfront, that on Google Maps, you could-
Dean: Oh, easy view, right, right.
William: ... draw a line right down the road or multiple roads, and it would be able to tell you the homes that are there.
Dean: Yeah, and that was why I was sharing with him that the ... I've got good friends who live in San Diego, Encinitas, and in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, and so I've learned a lot. One of them lived right on the ocean in Encinitas up on the oceanfront, and then the other friend lived up on the hill in Cardiff, but I learned about this idea of whitewater views, they call it, where you can see the break of the waves in the ocean as opposed to, just a little lower on the hill, you can see the ocean but it's not as valuable as a unobstructed whitewater view, and so that ... You have to know that, only above this street, do these houses have ... between this street and this street do they have the whitewater view. That's what I was saying to the guy on our academy call is, when you compile that information, if you have the map that you literally know which ones are the ones that have that, that gives you an advantage.
William: Yeah. Yeah, and that's the help that I'm going to need from somebody if we're talking about views. Pools are easy because somebody could ... the title company could pull something for pools, but as far as a view, that would require somebody going out, that is not me, who understands the motivation of, okay, we're going to select homes that have the view. That's something that I'm going to have to give some thought to because it adds an element of complication as far as, okay, so they need to know the kind of standards that ... what I'm looking for and what the home-
Dean: I think you're a very descriptive-
William: And why I'm looking for that.
Dean: Yeah. You're very descriptive, and I think that there are people who can get that and help you execute it, and then you can get it confirmed with somebody, you know?
William: Yeah.
Dean: Just kind of do a quality control thing. Man, I'm excited to see how it all unfolds here.
William: Thank you. Thank you. I'm really looking forward to getting it started.
Dean: Yeah, me too. Right. Well, let's-
William: It's exciting.
Dean: Yeah. I'll stay connected here. I'll look over everything that Diane's doing to get you all rolling, but it looks like you're right on track ready to go.
William: Fantastic. Well, thank you very much, Dean.
Dean: All very exciting.
William: I appreciate it.
Dean: Thanks, William. I'll talk to you soon.
William: Okay. Bye-bye.
Dean: There we have it. We got all the pieces in place for William to get started here getting listings. We'll keep you posted because I think things are going to happen. They'll unfold over the coming months here, and it'll be a really great case study to watch.
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