The Mystery of Umar and Offers2Owners.com (LA 1090)
The Mystery of Umar and Offers2Owners.com (LA 1090)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steven 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 OffersToOwners.com. He’ll share stories about our Land Academy members sending out their offers and their offer campaigns by the ton. Umar, how are you doing today?
Umar Awan: Good, sir. How about yourself?
Steven Butala: Excellent. This little weekly thing, I think this is like the third episode, this little weekly thing we’re doing here is getting pretty popular. The numbers are coming back pretty strong.
Umar Awan: Absolutely.
Steven Butala: I wonder why? Are you getting… I know that you send out like how many letters did we send out last month in September, ballpark?
Umar Awan: We did close to 310.
Steven Butala: 310 thousand.
Umar Awan: 310 thousand.
Steven Butala: Do you think this weekly thing that we’re doing has any impact on that?
Umar Awan: You know what, I think it is getting people going, to be honest. I think a few people listened to it and they were like, “Let’s just do it. Let’s just send it out and see what happens.”
Steven Butala: I mean, that’s what the real issue is, it’s just to get that first offer campaign in the mail. Right?
Umar Awan: Oh, absolutely. It’s like anything else. It’s the first time.
Steven Butala: Yeah. So how was September, in general, from an offer campaign standpoint for all of our Land Academy members?
Umar Awan: It was great. One of the many success stories I heard for the month of September was one of our members sent out a 500 letter campaign and landed one of the biggest deals ever. And that was their first one. They were just starting out with that small number of mailers and just got a crazy deal out of it. I mean it’s truly amazing. The return on that deal is upwards of 50, 55 grand.
Steven Butala: What?
Umar Awan: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steven Butala: Say it again. I want to make sure I heard it correctly.
Umar Awan: Right. So they sent out a small, essentially, just a test campaign to see how they would do.
Steven Butala: Yeah. What are the numbers? Ballpark?
Umar Awan: So they sent out 500 letters. Got a bunch of callbacks. But I think got three or four really good properties. And then the one that he’s planning on moving forward with right now, I think, if I’m saying this correctly, it goes for purchase of 20 and sale of 79.
Steven Butala: Wow. So 20 grand and 79,000 on the sell side.
Umar Awan: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steven Butala: I have to tell you, well, I have to say to our listeners, this is exactly what we don’t recommend doing, which everyone’s going to do now because of this episode. But I generally don’t think sending out 500 offers your first time is a good idea. I think that you should send at least 1500 out to make sure you get a property. But this person obviously picked a great location, a great place to do this and priced it correctly.
Umar Awan: Well, this was also a very rural, rural part of town. And, I mean, the state itself is really rural, too, though, but honestly, it was a total luck shot. And I honestly, I haven’t heard anything like that in since I worked here, really.
Steven Butala: So what do you think is a more likely or logical… What’s an average or regular order that you get? What’s the average order that you get from a Land Academy member?
Umar Awan: The average order from a Land Academy member generally ranges between upwards of 1500 to about 2500 and then that’s on the average scale, but on the lower side. We have people sending out 10,000 offers at a time. I mean, just getting deals crazy. And then we have people sending out a thousand offers and not getting deals, either. So there’s always a number adjustment that needs to happen.
Steven Butala: I mean, we send them, our regular order is 10 to 20,000 units.
Umar Awan: Oh, absolutely. We actually did a lot more than that in September. And that 310 didn’t include any of our internal mail. [inaudible 00:04:37].
Steven Butala: Right. Obviously. Tell me about the this thousand… There’s so much positive stuff that goes on and we always report it on the air like this. I would love to hear a story where somebody either misjudged the pricing scenario or it just didn’t work. And before you answer, I’m just shocked that this gets back to you. Whenever you set up a company, you always think there are certain stuff that happens that you can predict and not predict. But I could never have predicted how these stories actually get back to you, the person who’s taken an order for a mail campaign. Tell us a situation that got back to you where they just didn’t get what they wanted out of the results of the campaign.
Umar Awan: Well, a perfect example of that is someone severely under-priced their mailer and, I mean, like 5% of the assessed value under-priced. And honestly, they just got destroyed on the phone and it was a big, it was 4,000 letter offer campaign. And it’s crazy. And they called back and [crosstalk 00:05:53]
Steven Butala: What was the pricing like? I really want it to… This is a great… I’m really, really glad you brought this up. I don’t know what would prompt someone to spend thousands of dollars on a mail campaign and send out insultingly ridiculously low property prices. So what was the pricing like?
Umar Awan: I believe they offered $35 an acre.
Steven Butala: Oh, my gosh. I’m going to go on record here and say this to everybody listening. I don’t recommend that you ever send out, and in any circumstance, in any county in the country less than a hundred to $125 an acre. And I also don’t think that you should… We do this. These are the my rules, too. We don’t send out an offer for less than $500, like dollar dollars. So I’m sure that there were offers in that campaign that were like $35, right?
Umar Awan: Right. Exactly.
Steven Butala: That’s just insane.
Umar Awan: That was pretty bad. My advice to them was mainly to just, from that point onwards, they’re going to have to spend a little more time on the phone convincing these people. Hopefully get a few deals out of it, but yeah, the backlash was quite, quite bad.
Steven Butala: What was the profile of this person? Were they brand new?
Umar Awan: Steven, you just stopped for a minute. Your video stopped.
Steven Butala: I can still hear you.
Umar Awan: Okay. There we go. What was your question?
Steven Butala: What was the profile of the person? Were they like a brand new member?
Umar Awan: Yes. Yes. This was their first campaign and they’d already gone through the course and I think it is more so a it worked on their Excel sheet, but I think it missed something. Like they just missed a small piece of the pricing and that’s what created the error. Hey, Steven, are you there?
Steven Butala: Yeah, I’m still here. Can you hear me?
Umar Awan: I can hear you.
Steven Butala: Yeah. Hey, if you’re listening to this, thank you for your patience. We just had a little internet interruption, but we’re back. Go ahead.
Umar Awan: Oh, amazing. Yeah, so I was saying that they are a new member and I think it was just a mishap of checking their pricing and somehow it skipped the final proof and it went out.
Steven Butala: Have they given you any indication about what they’re going to do next?
Umar Awan: They are going to spend more time on getting their pricing right was the first thing. And next day they were still working on trying to kind of make that mailer work.
Steven Butala: Oh, okay. I mean, that’s a perfect example of really kind of going rogue.
Umar Awan: Right.
Steven Butala: Away from the education that we provide and the community that we provide at Land Academy. Just going rogue and doing it yourself and failing.
Umar Awan: Right, exactly.
Steven Butala: But what I try to say or what we, Jill and I, try to teach is or what we do teach is, follow the program to the letter your first six months at least. And then really get creative. That’s kind of what… We’ve got an advanced member group, you know about this in our community.
Umar Awan: Right.
Steven Butala: This is more now for the people who are watching or listening and that’s pretty much the template for the the the advanced group. They did it my way first and then they got creative and added their own creativity and thinking out of the box methodology and are doing incredibly well. They’re taking it to levels that are clearly moving beyond where Jill and I take it. So that’s really why I want to talk to you every week because you’re on the front lines and that this kind of stuff doesn’t get back to me.
Umar Awan: Right, right.
Steven Butala: I’m in a different situation. We’re concentrating on buying, selling land all week, our own stuff. So I don’t hear what our members are doing.
Umar Awan: Well, another great thing, though, is that everyone who follows the guidelines in the program, right off the bat, does acquire pretty consistent results. So that has yet to change.
Steven Butala: Yeah, it’s really interesting. You and I always talk about these outlying results for people like the two things that you brought up so far, which is good, is some extraordinary example of sending 500 out and making 50 grand.
Umar Awan: Right.
Steven Butala: And then sending 2000 out that was grossly mis-priced and having a poor result. What we don’t talk about is the hundreds of people every month that send out 1500 letters, like we recommend, price it like we recommend, and then have great results.
Umar Awan: Right, right. Exactly. And, I mean, some of it is just works in a nice fitting puzzle almost. They just keep repeating this method every month and getting consistent results over and over again.
Steven Butala: How many members, ballpark, do you have who just every week or every month put the same kind of order in for different geography and maybe probably different product types? Probably the same products in different geographies. How many, I mean, 25, 150 what do you think the number is?
Umar Awan: I think it’s close to about a hundred that have gotten really consistent and just know the process. Kind of mastered it on their own there. Applied the knowledge, the education, and and just ran with it. Their hitches are now gone because they’re a few months in and now that they know your process. That’s it. They know Land Academy.
Steven Butala: Yeah. It’s interesting because Jill and I were just talking about it earlier today. That’s about the number that we came up with. There’s about a hundred to 150 people in our group that have just have taken this program where it needs to go.
Umar Awan: Right.
Steven Butala: I think there’s varying levels after that. I think there’s people that are in our group that are doing this as a hobby or they’re in some version of testing it, but there’s about 150 people that have made it like they’re living and are doing really well.
Umar Awan: Oh, yes. 100%.
Steven Butala: I think that’s a great place to be. I keep hearing, not keep hearing, but there was an entry in landinvestors.com, our online community, yesterday or the day before, about how somebody just got off the phone with a seller and they said the seller said some version of “Hey, this is like the 10th letter I got this year.” And so, first of all, I don’t believe… I think, I believe sellers will say anything. Because some of them can’t wait to sell their land and some of them are real angry about your pricing. I think this is the latter.
Umar Awan: Right.
Steven Butala: And this person said, “It’s saturated. There’s nothing I can do. Everybody’s sending out too much mail.” And I think that’s so funny. I know that’s just not the case. I know in our own case, we’re mailing… Right now, we’re in the middle of a mailer in a state and in counties that I’ve mailed many, many times. And I know other people have mailed and we’re buying all kinds of property.
Umar Awan: Right.
Steven Butala: It’s really, really interesting to see people’s perceptions. My whole point is this. I know there’s this core group of people that get creative about where they’re sending mail and they price it correctly and make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. That’s my point.
Umar Awan: Exactly. And there’s just… I’m always surprised by how different every mailer is personally and then all these crazy areas that I haven’t personally, you’ve ever heard of.
Steven Butala: When someone says, “Hey, I just mailed some weird county in Maine or some strange county in Alabama” or some county that I’ve never heard of, I always know they’re going to succeed.
Umar Awan: Right.
Steven Butala: Please expound a little bit on that. When you get a mailer in, what makes you go, “Wow, this is really going to work”, when you get a mailer in and process it?
Umar Awan: The first thing is judging it off by the confidence of the person that is sending it in. Because if they send it in as a ready to go, when we send back the proof to them, they immediately approve it without really double checking any of the work. It means they’ve already done their homework. They’re pretty confident about it. Another thing that… If it’s a county that I kind of know about, then I know what the prices are and how they price their mailer by looking at a few of their letters when I proof their work. And just the way they have everything set up that’s really the main point that tells me that they’re going to definitely end up purchasing a really, really good property or more.
Steven Butala: I think that’s incredible advice, Umar. So confidence. Confidence and organization. Just like in everything else, right?
Umar Awan: Exactly.
Steven Butala: It’s awesome. Hey, before we wrap it up, do you have anything else that… Any advice to people? I really believe that the people who are listening to the non-Jack and Jill show, this episode every week with you and I-
Umar Awan: Right.
Steven Butala: They haven’t probably sent the mailer out yet and I think they’re probably just… Do you have any advice for that person?
Umar Awan: For someone who has gone through the program, understands it and hasn’t yet sent out a mailer? Just do it. That’s it.
Steven Butala: As simple as that.
Umar Awan: Exactly. And if there are hiccups, call me. We can end it.
Steven Butala: Perfect. Here’s my advice. Don’t offer 5% of the actual retail value, at $35 an acre. In fact, as far as pricing goes, there’s not a lot of cases where you should be at 125 bucks an acre. I just think that’s too low in the vast majority of cases, too. You’ve got to go through the pricing models in the program.
Umar Awan: Exactly. Exactly. And one last thing before we do wrap it up is I’m extremely excited to meet everyone at the live event.
Steven Butala: Me, too. I can’t wait. This is actually going to air after the live event, but what we’ll do next week is we’ll talk all about what happened at the live event and what we learned. Jill and I just talked. We’re going to do a breakout session for people probably on Saturday, maybe Sunday, who have not sent a mailer out yet because I think they’re going to have real specific questions and I hope you join us there.
Umar Awan: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
Steven Butala: Great, Umar, thanks. It’s awesome.
Umar Awan: Thank you so much.
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. Thanks again, bud. I’ll see you around the office.
Umar Awan: Will do.
Steven Butala: All right, bye.
Umar Awan: Talk to you later. Bye bye.
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