The way to greater profits lies with thoughtful, responsible automation.
Real estate investing keeps changing as technology evolves. I have watched real estate education move from cassette tapes to CDs to flash drives to purely online. The wise real estate and note investor will use technology to improve business processes and systems. Here are three places to start.
Segment your email list
Building an email list of contacts to streamline your marketing and lead generation is common practice. Darin Adams, a spokesperson for Infusionsoft, advocates turning your general email list into a segmented list. Why? It’s more effective at building relationships.
“All business is done through relationships. You can’t do it randomly.” (Darin Adams, Infusionsoft)
Adams stressed the importance of timely, relevant follow-up. “If you can follow up with someone within hours of meeting, your chances of having a successful relationship increase exponentially,” he said. But follow up with the wrong message and you could lose the relationship entirely.
Say an investor meets someone who wants to buy a home in a certain area. Entering the new contact into an automated outreach program starts a series of follow-up emails that keeps in touch and strengthens the relationship. Some programs also let you “tag” contacts for customized campaigns. That helps you avoid being tuned out for sending content that is too general or not of interest to the lead.
Pro tip: Use your automated email system to build up your base of testimonials from time to time. Ask existing clients to describe the experience of working with you.
The right email-list management system fits your budget, scales to the size of your list and handles, in real time, the routine contact tasks you don’t want to do by hand.
Add text-message marketing
Emails may go unread, but nearly all text messages get opened, so texting may be a better way to reach your customers. Like email, though, texting can eat up time. Integrated text-message marketing systems connect you to your customers, leads and clients and handle follow-up in a way that is easy to use and can be fully automated.
Consider adding images or video to your text messages. They make the message more compelling and make a reader more likely to click.
For example, I might be a guest on a podcast about note investing. I could use that “marketing event” to tell listeners to text a short message to a five-digit number. You’ve probably heard this kind of call to action before. Once listeners text in, they receive an incentive for their trouble and join a “drip” campaign that keeps us in touch in case we can do business together in the future.
Automate parts of your due diligence
Depending on your strategy, due diligence may take up most of your time. Fortunately, several systems can find deals, automate the purchase process and even do your due diligence for you. Everyone’s definition of due diligence is a little different, though, so you will have to do some due diligence on your automated due diligence system! Once you find a good fit, it can save you hours and hours.
Several parts of due diligence can be largely automated:
- Property specifications, such as the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, square footage and year built.
- Key financial information, including high and low estimated values, last sale date and price, last tax assessment date and amount, and estimated rental value.
- Crime data.
- Maps and street views.
- Local real estate agents.
Many of these systems also include project-management tools to help investors keep track of their notes, leads and transactions in progress.
Test the data before you rely on it
Before you rely on any system to gather this information, do several test runs and find out where the program is “scraping” its data from.
For example, one note-investor resource, NoteProz, builds spreadsheets of property information specifically for note investors. The spreadsheets come from the company’s database of banks and assets and focus on the 13 states of most interest to note investors. Knowing the source tells you how likely the information is to be accurate.
Many turnkey providers also offer “automated” due diligence packages to investors who buy through them. Check with each provider where its information comes from, then decide.
