Imperative Market Research Before Sending Your Mailer (JJ 595)
Imperative Market Research Before Sending Your Mailer
Transcript:
Jack Butala: Jack and Jill here.
Jill DeWit: Hi.
Jack Butala: Welcome to Jack Jill Show. I’m Jack Butelic.
Jill DeWit: And I’m Demi Moore. Just kidding.
Jack Butala: Oh, Jill. You’re not feeling well.
Jill DeWit: I know. It’s actually sounding better than it did yesterday. I called the office and they didn’t know who I was. It was awesome. But, I’m Jill DeWit, and we are broadcasting this week from sunny Southern California, where everyone apparently is in the real estate business.
Jack Butala: Can you believe that?
Jill DeWit: I know, it’s so funny.
Jack Butala: Everywhere I go, no matter who I talk to, up or down the chain.
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Jack Butala: They wanna talk about the real estate they own and how much money they’ve done-
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: Especially when they find out what we do for a living.
Jill DeWit: Totally, even the college kids, and they own the house, and they rent it out to their buddies, which is brilliant, by the way. You know, everybody’s got their foot in it, or they want to get into it, which is awesome.
Jack Butala: There’s all different types of people that live in Southern California that have done well in real estate. And they all handle it differently. Like, some people just do one house, you know, make a couple million bucks, on accident. And then that’s it. They’re done, and they just kind of walk around.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: Or surf or whatever.
Jill DeWit: Talking about being in the real estate business.
Jack Butala: Some people that take it real seriously, like we do, and just keep pounding it over and over and over again.
Jill DeWit: Isn’t that funny? We can’t stop, I don’t know how to stop.
Jack Butala: I know. And it’s everything in between, it’s amazing. Entertaining real estate investment.
Jill DeWit: Gonna try.
Jack Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about it, imperative market research before sending out your mailer. What the heck does that mean? Well, we’ll find out. First, let’s take a question posted by one of our members. On the Land … oh, new script. On jackjill.com, online community, that’s right.
Jill DeWit: Love it. Peter T asked, “I’m trying to narrow down a profile of the average buyer in Arizona for 40 acres. I’m making an assumption that the buyers will be male, age 40 to 60, hunters, RVers, outdoor folks, etc. Why? So I can keep that in mind when targeting for Facebook and social media. Anyone have more experience here, and can this be more focused? Is it off the mark? What do you think? And I would love to get input from the group.”
Jack Butala: Yeah, so here’s the thing, Peter. Social media marketing, dude, there’s nothing cheaper. So especially in the beginning, and I can tell kind of reading between the lines here in your question that you’re probably kind of new to it. There’s nothing cheaper. So per impression, you’re gonna be spending less than 1 cent. In fact, it’s less than one tenth of 1 cent very often, if you do it correctly.
So in the very beginning, I think, it’s important not to exclude anyone. What you want to do is build a click-through audience, so a year later from now, what happens is you go in and you choose an audience you think might be interested, an audience type that you think might be interested in buying 40-acre properties, or at least knowing that it’s available. And all the stuff that you think about that person is probably wrong.
Jill DeWit: [inaudible 00:02:53].
Jack Butala: And I’m telling you from my experience. In the beginning, you want to collect a huge viewing audience, because later on, a year later, one of the options that you will have is, do you want to post this graphic, this click-through graphic, that sends you back to where the thing’s for sale? Do you want to post it to everyone who’s ever clicked through the ad in the past? And so you don’t want to narrow yourself in the front in the beginning.
Here’s an example. When Jill and I post a piece of property for sale, like land, I choose people who are interested in real estate, not licensed real estate agents, but just are interested; real estate investors, people who are interested in HGTV, and that’s a little bit tailored toward Jill and I because we have the show; and people who have clicked through my stuff already, and since the years that we’ve been marketing. And it sells pretty quickly in land case.
Hey, by the way, don’t forget to post it on … If you’re a member, and I think you are, post it on landpin.com, it’s free. We sell a lot of property there and-
Jill DeWit: Yeah, so much traffic right now.
Jack Butala: Yeah, we sell a lot of property there, and we’re getting tremendous reports from our other members that … We spent a lot of money marketing that site, so we’re kind of doing it for you.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: That’s part of the benefit of being a member.
Jill DeWit: We’ve had that … you know what’s so interesting? It’s been a year now, Jack, when we switched over that site. It’s been over a year to make it what it is today. And the traffic and the growth has been phenomenal.
Jack Butala: We went in to look at Wired. Our websites are a little bit slower because we’re getting so much traffic. And to my massive surprise, I actually called Jill and talked to her during the workday, which never happens. And I said-
Jill DeWit: Thank goodness.
Jack Butala: … “Guess which sites has the most traffic?” And we all guessed.
Jill DeWit: And I guessed wrong.
Jack Butala: We all did.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: It’s Land Pin.
Jill DeWit: Yep, that’s awesome.
Jack Butala: Rock bottom price properties. It’s turning out to be a plug, I didn’t intend that.
Jill DeWit: Exactly, now it’s gonna get more traffic.
Jack Butala: Today’s topic, imperative market research before sending your mailer. What the heck does that mean? Well, I’ll tell you. There’s a bunch of stuff that I look at, in horsing around on the internet fashion, that I look at before we choose to actually send out mail. If you listen to the show at all, Jill and I send out mail to purchase our wholesale houses, and we also send a ton of mail out for land, which is probably why you’re listening. So I review or research, the very first things that I do before we actually get the stuff in the mail, is pretty different based on that product site.
For land, I look at how many properties are available or for sale on Land Pin, Land And Farm, LandWatch, anywhere on the market. Not so much the MLS at all, but for this inexpensive property, and then I kind of eyeball it and see if there’s just tons and tons of really low-end property in that area. I kind of stay away from that. I also look at how many properties are involved in any given tax sale. And about six months ago, I compiled a list of the whole country. I started landacademy.com, and the resources section, it’s free. For instance, if you’re thinking about sending a mailer out in, I don’t know, some county in Alaska, you can go there and find out, oh, they had a tax sale … and there are only three properties at the sale.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: Or like if you want to send one to Northern Arizona, you can find in Mojave County, you can find out their … every tax sale is usually has 40,000 properties, literally, that are back taxed properties. So what you want to do is find your zen, somewhere in between those two numbers, and look at those things. And you wanna make sure you can buy the property obviously cheaper than you’re gonna sell it for, pretty quickly. And so the more you do it, it’s like fishing, you know? The more you do it, the better you get at it.
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Jack Butala: I have a whole fishing analogy that I’m not gonna bring up right now, mostly because of you, Jill.
Jill DeWit: Well, thank you very much. For me, thank you, and the other 12 listeners. Thank you.
Jack Butala: Yeah, well now 6.
Jill DeWit: Oh, that’s right, because you brought it up.
Jack Butala: Yep. So with houses, the very, very, very first thing I look at, immediately, is days on market. How long, from the time that it gets posted, does it get sold? If it’s more than 45 days in this market right now, we just move on to the next market. The easiest, fastest way you can do for free to do that is on Redfin. You get it on your phone, get the app or on the computer. Just go in, log in, and pick your market. And you can see right there, days on market. Just make sure you set it up for completed sales and do it that way. It’s really, really easy, really fast, and it costs no money.
When you do identify a market, and I’m not gonna get into all the details now because it’s beyond the scope of this venue-
Jill DeWit: And you don’t want to lose the other six.
Jack Butala: And Jill’s falling asleep on her mic.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Jack Butala: Then you want to pull the data from one of the data subscriptions that hopefully you have through us as licensed providers. And you want to get the actual data to confirm what you’re seeing out there, and the only way to do that is to pull the data into the Excel and really review it in detail. Then confirm it, now you’re spending money on … Here’s the whole point. You don’t want to spend a ton of money on postage. You want to spend a little bit of money, tiny, comparatively, tiny amount of money on data.
Jill DeWit: Is there any non-conventional research that you do, Jack, that’s like a little special Jack tip that you, and only you, know how to do?
Jack Butala: Yeah, well for houses … Yeah, you know what, Jill, that’s a great question.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: This is a good thing to bring up. For houses, the more like-kind the houses are, the better result you’re gonna get from a price mailer. What that means is, like we’ve all seen in these downtown areas across the country … before there was such thing as subdivisions and mass re-planning communities. A builder would build like two houses next to each other, and then the house right next to that is completely different. And maybe it was built 10 years earlier. Those are much harder to price. I tend to stay away from those.
Jill DeWit: That’s good to know.
Jack Butala: There’s a lot of markets like that in Southern California that we do really well in, but we’ve been doing this for a while.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: If it were my first few mailers, I would stick to subdivisions where somebody went in and bought 40 acres, or 100 acres, or 1,000 acres, sometimes in Arizona, like at Anthem. There’s really four models to choose from, and you price per square foot.
Jill DeWit: Those are easier.
Jack Butala: Come in, and it’s really easy to price. You get a lot of offers out there at once.
Jill DeWit: They’re all built about the same time-
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: So, got it.
Jack Butala: The thing about houses is that nobody does this. So you can do this anywhere, you can do it in Indiana, Maine. You can do it in Manhattan. I mean, the Boroughs in Manhattan, and it works. It works really, really well. It works well everywhere.
Jill DeWit: It does.
Jack Butala: And it works well for land. I’m not downplaying land at all, I’m just saying that … both work really well. We have a lot of success, and it’s not that hard. The whole point to this show is the stuff that I do right up front in front of the TV at night kind of thing, before we send a mailer out. That’s the point there.
Jill DeWit: What does it mean, in front of the TV?
Jack Butala: You know, that’s kind of funny, because we don’t have a TV.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, I was like what are you talking about? What does that mean?
Jack Butala: What I meant-
Jill DeWit: On your laptop while you’re watching something?
Jack Butala: Yeah. What I meant was when you’re not really doing your real workday, when you’re [crosstalk 00:10:13] in your head, like-
Jill DeWit: Just kind of thinking, do a little research, maybe you’re on your phone, your tablet. Ignoring your wife in the background.
Jack Butala: Ignoring-
Jill DeWit: … You mean that kind of thing?
Jack Butala: … If you’re ignoring your family-
Jill DeWit: Got it. You’re pretending to listen to your wife in the background. This is what you do when you’re wife’s right there.
Jack Butala: This is what I mean.
Jill DeWit: “Sweetheart, I’m Christmas shopping for you.” “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”
Jack Butala: And you’re on Redfish-
Jill DeWit: And you’re really doing that.
Jack Butala: … Days on market-
Jill DeWit: That’s it.
Jack Butala: For like a suburb of, you know, [Palos Alton 00:10:35]. Something like that.
Jill DeWit: Now I understand.
Jack Butala: That’s really what this show is about.
Jill DeWit: Now I understand.
Jack Butala: It’s not about digging … Once you identify that, then you dig deep to confirm it.
Jill DeWit: Oh, this is not like in a dark room-
Jack Butala: No.
Jill DeWit: … With one light, and you’re like sweating at it, and you’ve locked yourself in, and you won’t leave until you nail it.
Jack Butala: No.
Jill DeWit: This is like, you know, I think I’m gonna spend … I’m gonna look around over here, I’m gonna look around over there. Got it. Okay.
Jack Butala: One of our number three kids was in my office recently. And he saw my keyboard, and he said to [Number Three 00:11:05], “What does your Dad do to his keyboard to make it look like that? That’s just worn out. You can’t see the keys anymore.”
Jill DeWit: Oh, I know what he does. There’s a lot of banging.
Jack Butala: I’m not gonna touch that.
Jill DeWit: I know, it’s so funny.
Jack Butala: Well, you’ve done it again, you’ve wasted another 30 or so minutes. Well, not even that at this point. 10 minutes, listening to Jack and Jill Show. Join us tomorrow, where we discuss implementing education.
Jill DeWit: And, we answer your question should you have one. Post it on our online community, jackjill.com.
Jack Butala: You’re not alone in your real estate ambition. Good show, Jill-
Jill DeWit: That was good.
Jack Butala: I feel so bad for you.
Jill DeWit: That was kind of a serious … you know, I thank you for taking more of it, because my voice and my throat. So I’m getting … believe it or not, this is better. I’m feeling much better.
Jack Butala: It’s kind of sexy, quite honestly. That’s really what’s going on.
Jill DeWit: Oh, I love it. And hey, if you like this, share the fun by subscribing on iTunes or wherever you’re listening. Hey, and while you’re at it, rate us there.
Jack Butala: We are Jack and Jill, information-
Jill DeWit: And inspiration-
Jack Butala: … To buy undervalued property.
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