The Mystery of Umar and Offers2Owners.com (LA 1085)
The Mystery of Umar and Offers2Owners.com (LA 1085)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steve Butala here. Welcome to the Land Academy Show entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Today I talk with Umar, the manager of one of our companies called offers2owners.com, and he’ll share some stories of our Land Academy members and their success sending out offer campaigns by the ton. Hey Umar, how are you buddy? How are you doing today?
Umar Awar: Good. How about yourself?
Steven Butala: Excellent. I know you’re seriously overworked specifically this month. Before I turned all the cameras on today and stuff, I checked our performance on Offers 2 Owners and it’s just, it’s spectacular. This has been the highest revenue month for us and for our members, isn’t it?
Umar Awar: Yes it is.
Steven Butala: What do you attribute that to?
Umar Awar: You know what? More people are getting out of the scared mindset of sending out their first mailer honestly, it’s phenomenal.
Steven Butala: I know we talked last week, and you said that was the biggest thing that people had to get, they just had to get it out of their minds and get the thing in the mail.
Umar Awar: Exactly. I mean people get hung up on how they’re going to scale the calls and all that, and how are they going to automate their business, and there’s so many questions there. Well once you get it out, you’re kind of in a no turning back position. So I think that’s all this really good to put yourself into because there’s no way you can’t move forward from there.
Steven Butala: It’s like baptism by fire.
Umar Awar: Exactly.
Steven Butala: So people call you and they say, I mean I’m sure they say some version of “Umar, I am just having trouble getting this thing into the mail, or getting it over to you so you can get it in the mail.” What do you say typically to them?
Umar Awar: I generally ask them if they have their data pulled to be honest. It’s if they already know the state and the county that they want to target, that is the most important part of it because we can handle everything else because everybody generally has their own information available. But not all of them have good data available, or [inaudible 00:02:13] data available. So if they have that file, we can pretty much do everything else. If they don’t have that file, they can go through the full service option, and we’ll pull it for them, so.
Steven Butala: Wow. So I think you gave us percentages last week. I think you said 40% of the people ask you to do the full service, pull the data for us. Is that an accurate number?
Umar Awar: Right, right, right. It actually significantly dropped in the last since our last podcast, and I think it’s attributed to people really getting more and more into the course and rewatching it, so because it really is the basic background. It tells all, so there’s no reason for people get hung up. But if they don’t have the time or anything, that is why we offer that full service option.
Steven Butala: I mean I’m going to go against common sense here as a business owner, as the owner of offers 2 owners, and I’m going to say this, it doesn’t make sense to use full service. You join this group to learn how to send out mail consistently and learn how to understand the data part of real estate, and sending out a blind offer campaign. So I mean the only valid reason that you would use the full service product in my opinion is just because like you just said, you’re out of time, and it’s your first mailer, and you just want to get over the hump, and get all the systems in place, and kind of see what happens, don’t you think?
Umar Awar: Absolutely, but there are a couple of other instances where you would use full service. So let’s say you did work on your first mailer and you have it sent out, while you’re scaling the call from the first one, you can automate your second one using full service. So you’re already reset to double your equity.
Steven Butala: Yeah, do you have the numbers in front of you? I mean ballpark, how many offers, I mean it’s at the time of this, of recording, this will air in October, but it’s September 26th. How many offers ballpark have we sent or processed so far this month?
Umar Awar: We’re looking at close to 330,000 offers.
Steven Butala: Wow. Man if you do the math on that, the properties, so for house, let’s just say 3000. For every 3000 offers you send out, you buy a house or a piece of land and make let’s say an average of 10 grand. Those numbers are staggering.
Umar Awar: Right.
Steven Butala: The only other thing too, and we never talk about this Joe and I on the other show, on this show I guess, if this didn’t work, we wouldn’t just watch Offers 2 Owners send every month over month, send out more mail and more mail and more mail.
Umar Awar: Right, exactly.
Steven Butala: Did the success stories get back to you? Do people call you on their next mailer and say, “Man, you can’t believe what happened on my last mailer?”
Umar Awar: Absolutely. So we actually, and this is the success story of a brand new member who did full service, and they went with the minimum number, which is 500, and they are about to pick up 12 parcels from a 500 mailer [crosstallk 00:05:31].
Steven Butala: That’s exactly what I say not to do, and good for them I mean. That’s a really small mailer, but good for them. Is it all from one owner or do they just, they priced it right?
Umar Awar: That’s what it was really. They hit a gold mine with one owner, yeah and they just got lucky there. Then I have another client who consistently sends out 1500 on a Monday, 1500 offers on Monday, and every two weeks from that Monday he has the deal in hand, so just multiplying over and over and over again. So, that’s when they start to really double up on the mail.
Steven Butala: Wow. Do you have any really negative stories? I mean there has to be a flip side to every coin, right?
Umar Awar: Right. Well, absolutely. So we actually a couple of months ago, we had someone seriously overprice a mailer and I mean, yeah, we can’t tell people what to do, so they’ve overpriced this mailer, and they just got an abundance of phone calls. Everybody that sent a letter to was ready to sell, and they thought it was a big success rate. But when they finally started researching these properties, they figured it out and they’re like, “Well, I offered 40% over the total market value or the total assessed value.” So yeah, that was not a good one. Then [inaudible 00:07:07]-
Steven Butala: Yeah go ahead.
Umar Awar: Yeah, they broke a lot of hearts there because they got some calls back and yeah, they were like, “Hey man, I’m ready to sell for $98,000 for one acre.”
Steven Butala: I mean, we laugh, but I’ve done that many times throughout my career. I’ve overpriced and under priced, and sometimes now I even intentionally under price just to get sent out a huge mailer, but just to get one transaction done.
Umar Awar: Right.
Steven Butala: We actually just did that in Arizona. We sent out almost a 20,000 unit mailer, which costs seven to 10,000 bucks depending on how you’re looking at it. But we bought a single house that we made $80,000 on. So it’s not hard to do the math.
Umar Awar: No, not at all, and the numbers work. I mean, I work with these numbers, and they definitely work.
Steven Butala: I know we talked last week about starting a new product where we price the mailer for them, and you said it would be a smash hit overnight. I just can’t. I thought about it and there’s no way we can from a legal standpoint, price their mailer. The option or the possibility of them, like let’s say we price that mailer grossly overpriced it for the person that you just described, they’re not going to be happy about that.
Umar Awar: No, absolutely. Agreed.
Steven Butala: In fact, it’s probably actionable from a legal standpoint, so it’s official. We just, we can’t have a pricing product for legal reasons.
Umar Awar: You know what I was thinking was too about, because I thought of it more in a smart pricing service way, so where we take all those numbers if we could just apply some kind of the same concept to land, that is essentially the closest we would ever get to pricing.
Steven Butala: [crosstalk 00:09:02] Have them kind of sign a waiver that says, “Here’s what smart pricing is to the listener. Umar deals with this every day. For House Academy, this is what we suggest for pricing.” Just like always you pull the data from one of the providers, probably DataTree if you’re a House Academy member, and now you’re sitting and looking at a 3000 unit mailer and a couple of zip codes in wherever. You’ve got 3000 units in an Excel spreadsheet. What smart pricing is this, you send it to Offers 2 Owners and we have our team input all of the algorithm values that are assigned to those houses from Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, realtor.com, DataTree and I think RealtyTrac, there’s six of them in total. You take that number and you divide by six so now you have an average price of these algorithms, and then you ask yourself this question, “The house is valued at $250,000, how much of a discount am I going to send this mailer out?”
Steven Butala: So let’s say one house is valued at 250, one house is valued at 300, and all different variances down to the cent. If you decide that you want to send a mailer out for $30,000 less than that actual I call it an algorithm value, then you just set it that way, and then that’s the pricing on the mailer. Let’s say it’s $80,000. Here in California, the offers are much higher, so seven or $800,000, so we tend to markets on 90, $90,000. You can also implement a percentage, and you can also implement a price per square foot. All this stuff we teach in House Academy. So what you’re saying is do some version of that for land, and then ask them to fill out the number that they want us to discount that algorithm value-
Umar Awar: Right.
Steven Butala: … and that keeps us out of prison.
Umar Awar: Exactly.
Steven Butala: We could try it for houses for sure. My concern is that the algorithm data for Atlanta is just not available because there’s no address, but let me think about that, because that’s not a bad idea. You’d think everybody would jump on that?
Umar Awar: I think so. I think one of the other hangups when sending out that first mailer is also the pricing because the people generally don’t know how much to offer just because every county it’s a little bit different of a percentage so [crosstalk 00:11:32]-
Steven Butala: Getting really to the root of it, I mean honestly think about this for a second. Is the customer asking us to make the pricing decision for them, or to just do the work in the spreadsheet?
Umar Awar: I think it’s moreso the work in the spreadsheet I would go with.
Steven Butala: Oh.
Umar Awar: Yeah.
Steven Butala: We can work with that then.
Umar Awar: Right, and in some cases-
Steven Butala: So what if this would’ve been land we said just I’m going to use Mojave County, Arizona as an example, you get somebody who submits an offer campaign in Mojave, Arizona, for all the five to 10 acre properties, and they scrub it like we teach in Land Academy, and they’re sitting there staring at those spreadsheet, if we sent them some type of a agreement or waiver where they fill in the price per acre, and then they’re signing off all kinds of liability and all that stuff-
Umar Awar: Right.
Steven Butala: … you think that product would be useful for the members?
Umar Awar: I do. I do. If they just know the basic concept of how it’s going to work, I think they would jump on it.
Steven Butala: Okay because we’re always looking for better, easier ways to help people get this stuff in the mail, because we all know it works.
Umar Awar: Exactly, and the more automation, the better, the more on your business and in your business thing, well that’s why they have VA’s and all of that, really so-
Steven Butala: Right.
Umar Awar: … the whole point of O2O is to automate all of that.
Steven Butala: Okay, great. So this is like we had a meeting in front of a camera.
Umar Awar: Oh man, I’m sorry.
Steven Butala: No it’s good. No yeah. Last week was the first time that we interviewed you, and the numbers came back so good that I mean you know this, now we’re making it a weekly thing because I really think it’s helping people. So let’s do this. Next week let’s talk about if you want to think about between now and the next week we record putting together some type of product like that on the website so we can actually price the mailer, go through the motions of pricing the mailer without an opinion-
Umar Awar: Right.
Steven Butala: … and what we would charge, and how it would work because you’re on the front line there. I think it’s a great idea, and I would love to test it, so let’s somehow kind of materialize it on the actual website so you can process orders effectively and stuff. How does that sound?
Umar Awar: Right? Exactly. Yeah, sounds good to me. Then I’ll actually, it’ll be beneficial for me to get the input of some of the members on this as well. So over time as I talk to them throughout the week, I’ll definitely get a little bit more information from them, how they feel about it.
Steven Butala: Excellent. Maybe pick a guinea pig and do it for free.
Umar Awar: Right.
Steven Butala: I’m sure you’ve got somebody who’s, well you said … I mean as a percentage, how many people are going to take advantage of this, just ballpark?
Umar Awar: I think everybody that recently joined-
Steven Butala: Okay.
Umar Awar: … will [crosstalk 00:14:46]-
Steven Butala: New mailer people. Okay, awesome Umar. Do you have anything else to add, pal?
Umar Awar: No sir. We did a massive price cut on the smart pricing service for House Academy members. So it’s truly a price to jump on if they want to do it, and we are planning on making it a limited time maybe, so take advantage of it while it’s there. That’s about it.
Steven Butala: What’s the price?
Umar Awar: So we went from 15 cents to 10 cents.
Steven Butala: Okay, great. That’s great. I love when we do the stuff like that. I don’t know what the decision was or why there, but it doesn’t matter. I just think anything that helps people get more mail out there just to make some money, I’m all for it.
Umar Awar: Exactly. That’s the end goal.
Steven Butala: Join us next time for another interesting episode, and we answer your questions posted on our online community landinvestors.com. It’s free. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. Hey, thanks again Umar, and have a great day, bud.
Umar Awar: You as well, thank you.
Steven Butala: All right, bye.
Umar Awar: Bye. Bye.
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