This is episode number 2241. Jill and I are talking about the truth about cold calling, emailing and texting for land and house deals.

That’s a lot. Is this going to be a three-hour show?

No. Do you know what the episode should be called? Here’s four ways or five ways you can contact the potential seller. There’s only one that works.

Ask us how we know.

The Necessity Of Local Presence For Remote SFR (Single-Family Residence) Deals

Each day on the show, we answer a question from our Land Academy Member Discord Forum and take a deep dive into land-related topics by popular request.

Tracy and Dave wrote, “To all SFR mailing peeps, are you emailing where you can be boots on the ground only? If you’ve chosen a remote market, how are you managing the assets through the sales cycle? Are you relying on an agent, family, friend, etc? We live in a seller’s market in Washington and would need to mail remotely. How have you solved the asset management and remote SFR sale?” I’m so glad they’re asking this.

I’ve had deals often come to me that our house deals and what do I mean by come to me? They’re coming to me going, “Jill, we found a great deal. It’s a house. It’s in, fill in the blank, town and state. Would you do the deal? Would you be the bank and fund the deal?” I look at the deal and I’m like, “Yes.” The first thing I do is look at the deal. I’m like, “Does it check all the boxes? Heck yes.” The next question is, “Who’s managing the deal?” “I have an agent that we love and we’ve done two deals with her.”

It stops right there because you need a local presence in that town when you’re managing something like this. It’s not just to rule vacant land where if there’s a fire, great. Now the brush is all burned away. That’s my biggest worry, or nowadays, flooding, sadly or something like that. You need to have a local presence and someone that you trust. Not an agent that you’ve done two deals with. That’s not your person.

Why are you saying this? Here’s why. They need to be there to handle the seller. They need to make sure the seller moved out. Probably you’re going to need help dropping off a cashier’s check to get the utilities turned on because the house is going to be vacant while you’re trying to sell it. There’s all these little things. Maybe while you owned it, two months in, a hurricane went through and knocked over a tree. They’re going to be there to manage getting that tree chopped down and hauled off. Things like that happen and an agent is not going to be that person for you.

Maybe in certain situations, 50 deals down the road and you guys are like buds. You guys drink together when they’re in town and they are more like that. You pay them a whole separate fee to manage the property outside of their commission. I can understand that, but starting out, that’s not the person. You need your brother-in-law who will work like a crazy person for $5,000 when it closes and make sure all those little things get handled.

Well said. The closer you can align yourself with somebody you trust in this position, the better. You need this person. You can’t buy and ask for a single-family residence effectively, in my opinion, or start a business to do it. Cross state lines. One of the things that matters is that when somebody calls back, they’re going to call back. The deal is going to go like this. “I just received your letter and I had a life event. My husband’s in the hospital.” You name it.

There’s some type of life event that’s triggering this person’s decision to sell. They’re going to need a lot of attention. They’re not going to say, “I’d like to sell on Thursday. Let’s get the ball rolling.” That person’s going to say, “I got to clean my house out.” You want to make sure the house is in good shape. It’s not like a piece of land. There’s a lot involved face-to-face.

People who are wildly successful at this business, do it like this. The seller calls back and they say, “Can I meet you at 3:00 at the house?” “4:00 could work better.” “I’m not going to be there myself at 4:00. I’m going to send my friend Jack. He lives right around the corner from you and he’s going to come over and take a look at the house. He’s going to bring his wife Janet and they’ll talk about whatever you need to help you to facilitate this transition. I’m so sorry for whatever is going on.” That’s what has to happen in this business. There’s nothing like that on land.

That would scare me too, by the way, if an agent showed up. I’d be like, “What are they doing?”

It becomes and I don’t like to say this out loud, but I’ll say it anyway, an appointment setting business. You can hire a professional appointment setter. Some successful real estate agents do this. Where something calls in and be like, “I’m thinking about selling my house.” “Sally, who you see every 30 seconds on TV. She’ll be over at your house at 8:30. How’s that sound?” “Yes, I’d like to meet Sally.” That business model works.

Ineffectiveness & Disadvantages Of Cold Calling, Emailing, & Texting

Our topic is the truth about cold calling, emailing and texting for land and house deals. As I said, it could be titled 4 or 5 ways to contact potential sellers and one of them works. That is sending direct mail with an actual number to offer the potential seller. Cold calling may or may not be allowed legally in the municipality where it’s happening. I can tell you this for sure, no matter where you’re doing it. Everyone hates it.

I was going to say you cover each one. Can we talk about them one by one? Cold calling, that’s going to say. Who wants that and who answers that?

 What’s the effect of result rate?

My often thing is too, what are you trying to do here? You’re cold calling a person hoping you’re catching him on a bad day, basically. A) You’re hoping to answer the phone. B) You’re hoping they give you the time of day. C) You’re hoping they will listen to what you have to say. D) You’re hoping this is a perfect time. For all those stars to be aligned, I can’t even imagine how long this takes.

I would think the real numbers of cold calling and I know people have posted them in social media, so go check those numbers. I’m sure, it’s like, I may get a warm lead every two weeks. I’d be lucky if I had that and that would be somebody sitting at a phone for 8 hours a day cold calling. Maybe they get someone saying, “My so-and-so just passed or I did lose my job or my car blew up. You hit me at the right time. I am moving back East.”

You got to talk about price.

We haven’t even covered any of that. They don’t know who you are, how it’s going to go or what you do. You just happen to say, “Are you thinking about selling your house?” That was my other thing, too. If you called me and I answered the phone and you asked me that question, “How are you?” “What’s going on?” “Do you ever think about selling your house?” For one, no. You had a number.

For $42 million.

Sure. You got to make my moon number. Are you ready? How much time has that wasted? You’re going to get a lot of that. To me, that ends not even just the legality. Only the time and the energy and the expense to maybe get a deal or to maybe have the opportunity to talk to someone about a deal. Maybe I do two a year at that. Heck no.

Nobody likes receiving those calls and nobody likes making them. The technology for the rest of the things that we’re going to talk about is constantly changing. There’s robocalling now because nobody wants to do it, which makes this the recipient. Which I am sure, 99.9% of the people reading this and us included are the recipient of that. It makes everyone live it.

Can I tell a story real quick? I have a cold calling experience story. That was my job. I was like nineteen years old and I love to talk. I love talking on the phone and people everywhere. We all know that. I had to cold call. I’m like, “I can do this.” I haven’t even had some of my major life sales experiences. I can do inbound calls all day long but outbound, I suck. You would think I’d be a good fit.

I had to call doctor’s offices and sell gloves. I am not kidding. You think you wouldn’t be hurt. I know who I’m calling. I ask for the manager who’s in charge of whatever and it’s something I know they need. It’s like it should be easy and a good fit. I didn’t last two weeks. I don’t even remember how many days I lasted. I hate it. I just one day didn’t show up and that was it.

Everyone gets a stack of mail, and most of it is junk. But then there’s that one plain envelope at the bottom—addressed simply to Mr. and Mrs. Jones. At the top, it says something like “Jack and Jill Land Investment LLC.” They don’t know what it is, so… Share on X

There’s no respect for that on both sides.

It was awful.

Emailing is a little bit easier. In fact, if you’re a data driven person like me, what you’re going to do is say, “This is a data set,” just like the land ownership like we do in Land Academy. All you have to do is manipulate this data set, get all my ducks in a row and send off a bunch of emails. That worked until the anti-spam laws happened in the ‘90s.Now, it’s not legal for sure. If you’re old enough to remember what that was like. Overnight, for whatever reason, there were a million Viagra ads and the spam filters are amazing now. That’s one of the reasons I’m a huge advocate of Microsoft, because they work on this stuff minute by minute.

It’s hard as a business owner, though, because sometimes the people want our stuff and it doesn’t get through because of the filters.

Emailing is not legal and even if it does get through, I don’t believe it. There’s no real credibility. There’s no established relationship, so that doesn’t work. Texting is a worse version of emailing.

Texting is annoying to me. If I could have random texts like I do now and then, “Do you need HR help or payroll help or whatever?” Leave me alone. I have it all established.

The Superiority & Effectiveness Of Direct Mail

Here’s a forget about this for a second. If you’re experiencing a tremendous amount of cold calling, emailing and texting, whatever your carrier is, they have a system for blocking and reporting it. For years and years, I would never want to be that guy. I’m like, “I can deal with this.” This isn’t so recently. Finally, I’m done because it’s happening every five minutes. Now I just report it as spam and it helps. Somewhere in a server, your phone number is getting identified as someone who’s not going to put up with this anymore.

Texting is the same deal. That leaves sending a letter and every time I get into it into a deep conversation with people who are a lot younger than me about this. They laugh. “What do you mean you’re sending mail? How old are you to send a letter to somebody?” It works and it always has worked. Here’s why. Everybody gets a stack of mail. All of it is garbage, but you get that one letter at the bottom that has nothing on it. All it says is, “To Ms. and Mr. Jones.” Up at the top it says, “Jack and Jill or Land Investment X or some number like that.”

They don’t know what it is, so they open it. The world is in the business of, if you had someone to click on my stuff, clicks. That’s the old school version of that. If you put, “We want to buy your house.” and big flashy letters on the letter. You’re going to get thrown away. If it’s nothing, it could be your credit card. It could be something. I don’t know. I got open.”

It could be, “My neighbor next door is about to demolish their house. I need to know that.”

If they open it and the first of the sentences says, “We are interested in buying your property in Navajo County, Arizona for $3,422.82.” That’s the first sentence. A very material percentage of the people are going to continue to read to find out what that’s about. Maybe they forgot they even owned the property. I can tell you this for sure. They’re sick and tired of paying the property taxes every year. It’s very effective. We can bank on a 1% response to mailers the way that we do it.

I don’t mean 1% of the responses we do deal with. It’s 1% that gets responded to. Some people are going to say you’re the devil and some people are going to say, “$3,822 doesn’t work for me. I’d like $10,000.” A lot of people are going to say that and some people are going to say, “Jill, I’m calling you back because it’s time for me to sell this piece of property. What should I do next? $3,800 sounds great.” You just don’t get that first click open and response in any of these other ways, number one.

Number two, it’s not legal. There are class action suits in case law all over the country and it’s getting more prevalent. Join us in the next episode where we discuss the truth about adding houses to your land business. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.