How to Automate and Supercharge Your Real Estate Investing Bunsiness.

Automating your real estate investing business consists mainly of 3 things.

1) Marketing that get motivated sellers coming to you

2) A system for collecting and screening motivated seller information

3) A system for tracking leads and managing lead and deal information.

Real Estate Investor Marketing That Gets Motivated Sellers Coming To You

I always liked the idea of people coming to me for a sale rather then going to them. This type of marketing is necessary for automation.

All your marketing should focus people too your website or your phone number.  Local numbers seem better the 800 numbers in our tests.

You want people calling you or your live operators or going to your website and filling out the form. There are several ways to market to get motivated sellers coming to you, the first step in automating your real estate investment business. 

Newspaper, radio and television ads

These are passive advertising. You are hoping a certain type of person will contact your real estate investment businss based on your ad, but the ads are thrown at the market.

Letter campaigns and direct marketing

Letter campaigns like 30-60-90 day NOD or pre-foreclosure, probate or other direct marketing targets a specific audience, but many people will pick this audience as a target. Most direct mail is not unique and people are getting tons of it when they enter foreclosure. In addition, the recipients generally did not ask for the information, even if it may be helpful.

Internet Marketing

This is our favorite. It has the best rate of return both in costs and in response rates. Internet marketing is great because rather then pushing something at a wide audience like newspaper ads, or even a targeted audience like direct mail, with internet marketing the audience is looking for you. The Internet is a concentration of people searching for things. Many of them are searching for waht you have. Internet marketing is more about getting your store,  product or service in front of the people who are looking.

Bird Dogs

We like real estate bird dogs as well. They have a GREAT return on investment. However, you generally have to apply some marketing to find the bird dogs. Bird dogs can be a great way to get leads for your real estate investor business. We have a special birddog software that integrates with our real estate investor websites.

 

A system for collecting and screening motivated seller information 

You need a system for collecting information from the motivated sellers your marketing attracts. 

Telephone Answering System Live operators or Staff

To be totally automated, you will want to use live operators and a telephone answering system combined with your real estate investor website back office software. Anyone who calls your phone number will talk to someone who enters information from a script into your website and database where it can be access by you and the back office application.

We use FreedomVoice for our phone number and recorded messages. A perosn can hit zero at any time and they will be directed to our Voice Connect live operators. VoiceConnect charges per minute for the answering system, so we ike freedom connect since with a local number there is no per minute charge.

The VoiceConnect Live operators enter the information into our operator script on our website and it goes into the database.

 

Integrated Voice Response

You can also use a computer system to collect this informatio. This is usually prohibitive and people will generally not stick with having to go through a long IVR provess. It is good to collect some intial information, but does not do as much pre-screening as the other methods. In addition, many people just will not do it. Best to go with live operators, take the call yoruself or with staff.

You

If you need to fill in for this part of the automation process, that is ok. Just read from the operator script and enter the information. You now have it and it can be used by your back office when you are ready. You already know some intiasl infomration about the deal so you have prescreened it personally.

Back Office Software

Back office software pre-screens your leads. Once you have leads coming to your website and to your live operator service, you need a way to store and analyze that information. You will have gathered enough information from your website or operators to know what level of effort to put into which leads.

 

Lead Tracking and Deal Management

Once you started getting a lot of leads, you will need to pre-screen them with the software then call them to build rapport and develop the foudation for a deal. This is a process. It can sometimes mean Letters of Intent, some back and forth and especially if you are doing short sales, a lot of paperwork. Even in tracking things like comps or pictures, if you want to do more then 1 deal a month or so, your going to need a system like our real estate investor websites back office software.