Do texting and emailing yield interesting results in real estate? Steven Jack Butala and Jill K DeWit have tried these approaches, and in this episode, they reveal whether these are worth doing in your land business. They compare texting and emailing to direct mail, how to comply with existing solicitation laws, and the impact of sending personalized follow-up messages.

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Texting And Emailing: Do They Work In Real Estate?

This is episode number 2060. We are talking about if texting and emailing sellers works, and all the associated pros and cons that go along with that.

Not to make this an hour.

Fascinating topic, and it’s one that we get this question multiple times a week.

Which is smart. People are always thinking ahead. What else is going to be doing?

Discord Question

Here’s why it applies to brand-new people. Many people have said to me over my career, “You send mail like the US Post Office mail? This is the 21st century. I would think there’s a better way to contact sellers that don’t cost thousands and thousands of dollars.” We will talk about that and the pros and cons. We are talking about five of the most popular questions that we have gotten over the last several years of heading up Land Academy. Each day on the show, we answer a question from our Land Academy member Discord Forum. We take a deep dive into land-related topics by popular request.

James wrote “I’m brand new to Land Academy. People are throwing out crazy revenue numbers. How do I ramp up that fast?” I love this. This is exciting. I know you are new. You are like, “How can I get $2 million a year,” like that guy.

My first gut reaction to this question is, I want you to do one transaction and forget about everything else. Put it in the back of your head. Maybe write something in the mirror so you can see it in the morning in the bathroom. Just know that it’s possible to make millions and millions of dollars a month, but you’ve got to get that first deal done, or else you can’t see the trees of the forest thing.

That was going to be my answer too like be slow and methodical and keep growing and adding zeros. What do you think is a good natural progression like year 1, or year 2?

Jill, that’s so good. The first thing I do when I’m trying to accomplish anything at all is open my calendar, break it down, and deconstruct the steps it’s going to take for me to get to where I want. I put the milestones in the calendar, and then if I’m crazy adamant about it, I want to speed up the process. I start putting alarms on my phone. Ask Jill. Our phones go off with alarms all the time during the day. We don’t even ever talk about this. You and I have never had this conversation.

No.

We’re the same type of weirdo.

I don’t know. My alarms started when I met you.

Your internal female alarms?

That’s a whole separate topic. I’ve never had so many alarms. Go ahead.

If I were brand new, I would give myself, depending on my work and life schedules, a certain amount of time to go through all the programs in the Land Academy content. Hopefully, this show is before you spend even $1 on, a research show. I would visualize and put myself in the position of what this looks like or what my day looks like eventually, who’s working for me, and I would immerse myself in the topic to see if it’s going to work out or not.

Being in control of your schedule, getting organized, and putting this all together is like anything in life is complicated. There’s a bunch of moving parts, and there’s a reason not everybody’s doing this. There’s a reason that the reward is so high if you can figure it all out. I don’t mean figuring out the mechanics of it, but figuring out your life and how it fits into this. I would spend six months thinking about that nebulous part and going through the mechanics of the Land Academy program, or whatever program out there you think is best for you.

Being in control of your schedule and getting it organized is complicated. But the reward is high if you can figure it all out. Share on X

Start slow. Like Jack said, be methodical. Give yourself realistic goals and deadlines. There’s nothing wrong with saying, “In 2025, I need to make $100,000 profit.” That is such an easy, attainable goal. You can do that in four deals. Do one deal a quarter, because that’s all you have time for. You’ll make that and now you’re on your way. Then in 2026, I want to double that, and in 2027, I want to double that.

Ask yourself these two things. There are two huge components to this that you will never be successful if you don’t grasp probably both but at least one. Number one. You need to pick a place to send mail and get a mailer out that’s priced correctly. There are big data components to that. There’s a large Excel component to that. The tools we provide have made it a lot easier, but in the end, you are responsible for what’s happening. That’s my part.

Once that mailer gets out, I wring my hands and say, “Good luck, Jill.” What ends up happening is, that she then starts fielding these phone calls and creating real estate deals out of thin air. Out of the offers that I sent out because we caught the person at the right time, the mailer was priced correctly, and the place we are sending these offers was chosen methodically. All this stuff that I did goes into the background once Jill gets that phone call, and then we buy it and resell it because we have staff. You have to see yourself in that position and see those things. I believe the first part of everything is always the hardest.

James is in Lan Academy. He’s new and he’s excited to get going. The other thing I was going to add to all this is, along with your own goals, hang out with those people. Hang out like the people that you are reading about right now and see who are making $1 million, $2 million, or whatever crazy millions a year. Hang out with them and mirror what they are doing.

I have to say, as an instructor after a decade of doing this, the kinds of questions that I pay attention to that people ask are as follows. I never got them. We never get these types of questions. I went through chapter three. I understand this part of the red-green-yellow test, but I’m wondering about this one little subsection of whatever. That’s not what we got. The questions that we got, and we are dealing with them are, “Have you guys ever considered texting?” The answer is, “We have.” They halfway want to educate me when I get these questions. I want to educate you on this new thing called texting or this new thing called email and why it could apply to being successful at Land Academy, buying and selling land.

As we are going into the topic right now, I’m going to say, you are not an instructor. You are a mentor. It’s very sweet when you call yourself an instructor like it’s somebody else’s program, and you are like, “I’m here teaching, your coach.”

I don’t want all the responsibility.

I know. You are not an instructor. I hate to break it to you, but you are bigger than that. Thank you.

Texting And Emailing

This topic, does texting and emailing real estate sellers work?

Good. I want to talk about this. I’m like, “Hurry up. I want to talk about this.” This is such a hot topic. It goes with AI and everything. You notice there’s a theme, these questions are all leading toward the future and what everybody’s trying to do. They are trying to make it a little bit easier on themselves, and they are trying to find shortcuts.

I’m so tired of shortcuts and easy buttons. Everybody is like, “This topic came to me in a Facebook group that I’m in.” It’s not a Land Academy one. It’s a bigger group than that. It’s all land investor groups from all over the world. What’s funny, though, is I go through and I pick out the people in there. I’m like, “Land Academy.” I’m like, “I know you guys.” It’s very sweet you are out there sharing this wonderful knowledge with the world and it’s great. This topic came up, and it was like there’s a lot of people that are going, “Why is this so hard?” First of all, “What the heck? How are you doing it? How is this legal?” Then it’s like, “What’s all involved?” Then it goes into, “Why is it so hard,” and all that stuff, and it is flipping hard. I want to bring up some texting and emailing and try to make it work because it doesn’t. That’s the whole point here. Is there a way to do this? Sure. Is it legal? No. Are there workarounds? Sure. Are they easy? No. Is it worth it? You decide.

Here’s my question, and before we get into the mechanics, I love the path they are going down here. I want you to ask yourself this question. I’m going to ask you all these questions. I have a 100,000-unit database, and I have their phone numbers, their email addresses, and their physical address. Their mailing addresses are where the taxes go. I send the same note and content via mail, email, and via texting. One hundred thousand units, how many properties am I going to buy in each scenario?

I have a good answer. First of all, how many are going to get through? I’m going to start right there. I feel way more confident, extremely confident, because it’s legal and ethical, that my mail is going to get delivered. Check. Let’s move to email. I text out 100. Now the filters are getting so good. I have to go find it like I didn’t get that email. We use Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft Outlook has a new thing called clutter, and it’s choosing for me what it thinks I should see and not see. Can I tell you how many times I have got important email messages that I need from my bank in clutter? I’m like, “I didn’t get that I had to go looking for a passcode.” As of these filters and these things going on, your 100,000-unit, if I’m lucky, 30% of that gets through.

There are filters and gateways and things to stop spam and clutter. If you don’t think that they don’t know that many texts went out at one time, you’ve got another thing coming. They know. They see all this filter, so that’s that. Then we get to the texting. Again, not legal, but these gateways, filters, and texting I bet, I’m going to argue, even less get through than you think, and you wouldn’t know. You’ve spent so much time and so much energy, and that’s what’s going on here too. People who think they are successful texting are having to spend a lot of money, time, and energy to get a fraction of them through that I’m getting. Then you have to bring up the whole other thing right now, we are exactly one week before election day. I am sure your phone, like mine, is bombarded with all of the political texting messages that get through.

They are mean and stupid like, “Did you know the senator did this to his wife right before she went to the hospital to deliver a baby?” I got that. I’m like, “What the heck?” I saw the line. I was right there at my screen, and I was like, “I can’t stand it.” Many people are not paying attention and ignoring all that stuff. There are 50 texting platforms that we know of. I know many people who have tested stuff. Not all 50, but I know people who have used all 50 and tested this. There are gateways now. There’s a middleman in there to stop spam texting. You have to find a way around that. How do you do that? You need to have a programmer to cheat and bypass this stuff.

Which will only last for so long.

If you are doing it right, you register a phone number, and that takes 1 to 2 months to get it registered. This flags all the attorneys. I love that someone said, “When you do it the right way, you are trying to do it the right way, I should say.” You are registering your phone number anyway, so you could at least blast out thousands at a time more than 150 a day. You are accidentally triggering ambulance-chasing or text-chasing attorneys that they are going to be on you. They are going to know it. I don’t want to deal with all that stuff.

There are ways you can use programmers. You can get phones and numbers and manually send 150 texts a day. I have a whole team to do that and manage that. The bottom line is, the money, time, and energy that you think and you don’t know what’s going through that makes it not worth my time. Could that change? Sure, but for right now, I am not a fan.

Let’s take a step back to the basics here. Back to my 100,000-unit example. If you send out 100,000 letters, texts, and emails with the same content, delivered to the same recipients. You are going to do deals on all three. Can you split-test it and see which one’s more effective? Probably not, because some people love to text, some people turn their phones off at night, and some people don’t. There are solicitation laws that directly apply to texting and email that, for whatever reason, do not apply to sending out US mail. You are already setting yourself up to succeed by sending out a letter. You are setting yourself up to fail unless you have a lot of software behind you and technology that’s constantly changing to bypass solicitation laws.

What are solicitation laws? They say this. You have to have an established relationship to contact somebody via text or email not to sell them something, just to contact them. Jill and I have an established relationship so it’s okay for me to text her and she to text me. When people sign up for Land Academy and they are in our group, we have now an established business relationship. It’s very legal and encouraged for us to send a text or an email saying, “It’s Wednesday. We are having a Thursday call. Please join us. We’d love to hear about what’s going on.” That’s what texting and emailing in a business setting is made for.

A great example is your bank. You would love to get text or email alerts from your bank saying, “Somebody pulled $12,000 from your operational account. That doesn’t look right to us. Please let us know what you think.” That example of how texting and email and the overseers of these awesome products wanted them to be used. They do not want you to robo-sign so there’s a huge law set up for it. In many cases, there are huge cases all over the country where people have been through class action suits and come out the other end in not a happy place. Does it work? Yes. Is it legal? No. Is it way cheaper and easier to send out US posts, yes. It’s the shortcut in the end and it’s going to get worse, not better.

I don’t agree that it’s easier and cheaper. It’s harder and more expensive. You know what bums me out is that you think you sent out 1,000 units. What percentage is getting hit? You don’t know. It’s going to discourage some good land investors from having a nice business because it doesn’t work out.

If you own a bunch of land and get a message, whether it’s by email or texting that says, “Do you want to sell your land?” You’re just going to delete it. Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s not going to you and capture your attention. If I get an envelope that’s blank on the outside that is written to me or one of my LLCs, I’m going to open it. I don’t know what it is. I want to open it to see what’s inside. It says, “We are interested in buying your land in Mohave County, Arizona, for $12,332.” That’s step two for the call to action. That’s whoever was trying to buy it. It’s correct. Trust me. We have tried all this stuff.

I do want to talk about this and I have another point to make. We haven’t even discussed texting and emailing. Getting their attention is one thing, but are you sending a unique offer so you are not wasting your time? Is it a personalized text? That’s a whole different thing versus a postcard that says, “We buy ugly houses.” It’s like, “We want to buy your house with the yellow door on this corner for this amount of money. Let me know if this is something you are interested in.” That’s a whole different thing, too.

Getting your target market’s attention is one thing, but sending them a unique offer is entirely different. Share on X

The mail works and for whatever reason, the governing authorities on all this allow it. Largely because it’s a revenue stream for the federal government, the post office. They have created this and they continue to allow this database and data sets, for whatever reason, open-source in real estate in this country to go hand in hand. Not anywhere else in the world does that. It’s impossible to split-test this, and we know that the mail works. We have multiple people in career paths who tell us how much mail they send out and how much success they have. Sidestepping this because it’s cheaper upfront will probably end in you exiting the business.

Why do you think it’s cheaper? I don’t believe it’s cheaper.

It costs $0.70, whatever the stamp costs now.

I’m saying ours is much cheaper.

You will never know the deals that you missed if you text and email. That’s what kills me is when it’s not cheaper.

You are probably sending out ten times as much to get the volume.

Episode Wrap-up

I’m going to end this because Jill wants us to stay on the clock. Here’s how it works. If you send a letter out, if you do a micromail of 200, 300, or 400 properties, we have done this. We still do this, and they get the letter like we do. ‘We want to buy your property for X amount.” Then they get a follow-up text from us that does not go through any type of application or system. They get a text from a phone, and the phone has the same area code as where you are sending the land.

An 888 number. They are not getting it from New York City or Los Angeles. If they are in Arkansas, they are getting the Arkansas area code on the phone. Potentially, if you have the correct data set which we never do. It’s too hard to get an email follow-up that says, “We did send you a letter for $32,421 on that piece of property that’s on Demington Avenue, and we are serious about buying it.” That works. Is it legal? No, but it works because it’s coming from an individual source, and it’s extremely personal and meaningful, and it’s a huge amount of work but it’s effective. Join us next time where we talk about how to end a listing agreement with the wrong real estate agent. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill. Information and inspiration to buy undervalued property.