April’s first Keeping It Real Training offered by Real Geeks and hosted by Greg Harrelson and Frank Klesitz explored direct mail strategies for lead generation in affluent real estate markets. Featuring Brett Jennings, a real estate agent and team leader in the Silicon Valley, this episode provides direct answers to the question, “How can I generate seller listings now?”

Establishing credibility through sending direct mail to property owners and following up with phone calls, targeting mapped school areas, and circle dialing were all ways Jennings suggested staying in front of sellers. “All will sell at some point,” he said.

Recalling the words of his mentor Tony Robbins, “Wealth exists in the gap between ideas and their implementation,” Jennings explained that exploring that gap has been the key to his success. He sells real estate in a very affluent area, Silicon Valley, and has found that consistency as a team effort has allowed for predictable results. He targets an area of at least 2,000 homes and defines it by school district boundaries in his MLS. Using Remine or Realist, he then downloads the contact details of those homeowners and sends hand addressed, stamped letters to each. He mails one to himself so he knows when the letters are received. After they’ve been received, typically 3-5 days later, his team begins calling as follow up.  This technique has allowed Jennings and his team to secure listings in a low inventory market.

Jennings said the direct mail campaign works alongside his digital efforts. Every lead also is set up to receive a monthly Corefact postcard, monthly e-market report, and he has seller alerts set up for his CRM, showing pending and sold homes within 2 blocks of the property owners’ address. In addition Jennings uses HomeBot for his entire SOI and reports a 70% open rate using that tool. Jennings said his focus is to become known in a variety of ways. “Not just digital, but do digital and print to make you unforgettable,” he said.

It’s More Than Direct Mail Alone - You Need a Team

These techniques alone are not the cause of Jennings GCI jumping from $3.9 million to $12 million, however. He had a plan to scale and said he only did that through hiring a “rockin' admin,” scaling lead generation, scaling to 50 quality agents, and scaling quality support.

Listing Realtors Property Resource (RPR) as another tool, Jennings, Harrelson and Klesik discussed how this could be used to print out market updates for all buyers and send personal messages congratulating them on their increases in home values. The note could also provide the “most universal offer to sellers” which is the idea that you have a buyer. Jennings suggested leveraging your most committed buyers by finding out from the agents on the team who the buyers are and what types of homes they need. 

As you mail to your farm areas, Jennings advised to intentionally choose a hand written font, even on the envelope. He explained that using a service such as Addressable, which uses a real robot pen to write addresses, can achieve a 50% open rate for mailings. Jennings then shared that his team accentuates results with mail and a followup call in a 3 tap system, “either call, mail, call or mail, call, mail,” he said. He also recommended using a short url for zoom to make it easy for people to get on a video call, such as zoom.name.com.

Jennings acknowledged that this approach is large scale and cost-prohibitive for soome, but encouraged agents to look for partnerships on the mailing. He suggested including a 2nd page with a referral to a financial advisor offering a seller tax implications webinar, and having them cover a portion of the postage.

Explaining that letter frequency mattered due to message fatigue, Jennings said that in his market, “the ideal cadence is every 3-4 months,” and explained that this way, “if you call behind the list, you may get advance news of seller plans so you can add them to CRM.”  Harrelson and Klesitz agreed, with Harrelson adding, “Never do direct mail unless you're willing to prospect behind it.”

Direct Mail Stays in the Home Longer

Harrelson spoke from experience saying he’s found that sellers take a letter and “put it in a property folder to access in 6 months,” and encouraged agents to do multiple things, as Jennings does, not only direct mail. Speaking of Jennings, Harrelson said agents needed to be more like him, "He's not a dabbler. He's a doer, he's a get-it- doner. He goes deep." Klesitz suggested more tools for agents to use if they need to find buyers, explaining that institutional buyers are available through multiple companies, including Offerpad, and Opendoor. Klesitz also mentioned Homelight as a trade-in way to access equity and then sell the property as an "Exclusive Partner."

In wrapping up this episode of Keeping It Real, Klesitz mentioned his “Magical Seller’s Email” and offered it to agents. He recommended personalizing it and emailing the letter to an entire database as a way to get conversations started. Download it here.

This Keeping It Real episode shows you best practices for staying in front of potential home sellers. 

Utilizing these concepts and tools with your Real Geeks CRM is sure to increase your seller leads and grow conversion in 2021. Let us know what works for you and reach out if you have techniques you’d like to share in Real Geeks training. We’d love to have you on LIVE event!

 

Here is a transcription of the entire discussion:

Frank Klesitz:

Hey everyone. It's Frank Klesitz. Welcome to Keeping It Real. It's good to see you all. Thanks for coming to the show. Been doing these since 2014, you need to go back and watch all the shows. You'll hear a lot of patterns of consistent principles that you can kind of piece together to find truth by going back and listen to the show. The principles, tactics might change, but many of the principles stay the same. We're going to talk today about Direct Mail, which is probably one of the oldest principles and how you can use it today to actually generate listings for yourself profitably. I'm going to introduce you very shortly here, Brett Jennings, who is one of the top selling real estate professionals in Silicon Valley. That's like San Jose south of ... Silicon Valley is what, south of San Francisco, San Jose area, probably somewhere in there. Basically, Brett was telling me, I believe Brett, real quick there about 1.8 million people in the Santa Clara County and how many homes are currently listed for sale right now? How many homes are on the market?

 

Brett Jennings:

740.

 

Frank Klesitz:

There's only 740 homes on the market with 1.8 million people, so prices are up. What is your median home price in Silicon Valley, Brett?

 

Brett Jennings:

$1.3 million.

 

Frank Klesitz:

$1.3 million. All right, so we're going to go dive deep in what he's doing in a very affluent and educated market to get listings. Here when this is recording is in March or actually April now, April 1st, 2021. All right, so first before we get into it, I want you to go to keepingitreal.com. You can watch all the previous shows. You can also go to the Facebook page, Real Geeks, Facebook page, where we post all the shows. You can also go on iTunes, and we turn this into a podcast. It's really easy for you to listen to the car. Hopefully, while you're going on listing appointment, that'd be nice, right? Doing lots of those. If you go to Keeping It Real as well, you can put your email address in and you can get notifications on the show. We'll only update you about the show. You won't get any emails about anything else. All right, so with that, I'm here. I'm Frank Klesitz and I'm with my cohost, Greg Harrelson, who sells, how many homes did you sell last year, Greg in Myrtle beach, and your affiliates in your structure out there?

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah, we did right around that 3,700 closings.

 

Brett Jennings:

3,700 closings and that's the experience-

 

Greg Harrelson:

We're up 27% right now, first quarter, so it should be a good year.

 

Frank Klesitz:

It's going to be a very good year, so you have someone very knowledgeable here with Greg and then myself is your cohost, so Brett welcome. Thanks for being here, bud.

 

Brett Jennings:

Hey, thanks for having me.

 

Frank Klesitz:

You've been selling real estate for a long time. How long have you been the business?

 

Brett Jennings:

I have been in the business here for, well, 12 years actually. I got started in 2008, right at the beginning of the downturn. The only reason I remember because they say it's not days, weeks or months that you remember your life, but you remember moments. I remember signing the paperwork to join Keller Williams office. My wife was eight and a half months pregnant, and we just got me announced in a bit Bear Stearns collapsed. It was definitely a make it happen moment for me, and it all paid off. I'm excited to be here and share what I know, and what's working now.

 

Frank Klesitz:

I will say this, 12 million in gross commission income is an insane number. Obviously, you have the support of your market, but I do want to share something really quick that we're not going to talk about today on Keeping It Real, but just a year or two ago, you were at $3 million in gross commission income and you jumped to 12, okay? Can you share with the audience real quick what you shifted, before we get into Direct Mail strategies, to go from 3 million in commissions to 12 million in commissions in such a short timeframe? Let's just spend briefly on that, so we can put the commission claim in the title of this kind of in context.

 

Brett Jennings:

Okay sure. Yeah. I mean, well, it comes down to growing your real estate business and growing your income and growing GCI. It comes down to three things that you have to scale up, right? You have to scale one, actually first before you scale, you want to make sure your admin team is rock solid, but you're going to scale three things. You're going to scale quality consistent lead generation. You're going to scale quality agents and you're going to need to scale quality support. The two things that really have helped us kind of grow exponentially, there was scaling agents, Frank, we took your recruiting course that you had provided us in viral marketing. We implemented that just as you said, and did doing two videos a month, doing some workshops and things for local agents, and we've targeted just the top 10% producing agents in our model. I wasn't looking for new agents because we're-

 

Frank Klesitz:

How many agents are in the top 10% in your market there?

 

Brett Jennings:

There's 16,000 agents in our 1.8 million [crosstalk 00:04:56]-

 

Frank Klesitz:

You targeted the top 1,600 performers.

 

Brett Jennings:

We targeted the top 1,600 performers, and of those we brought on 50. We went from basically like eight agents to 50 agents in the course of about 18 months. Now, in order to incentivize and have a value for those people to come on and grow, we did have to have good quality, scalable lead generation. That's kind of been my core focus. One of the things that also helped us with that, Zillow has been part of our business building strategy. It's about 30% of our business and we did a partnership with them on their flex program. That gave us some good scalability to our lead generation on the buyer side. Today, we're going to talk about seller lead generation, but scaling leads, scaling agents and scaling support was our formula to go from, actually it was 4 million, Frank, not 3 million. Go from 4 million to 12 million in about 18 months.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Four million to 12 million GCI in 18 months by targeting the top 10% of the agents in your market. I just wanted them to hear that. They joined your team because you provided them with the support and obviously, probably the lead generation in a very competitive market, right? You are going to learn those scalable lead generation strategies today. How cool is that? Brett, thanks for sharing this.

 

Brett Jennings:

Sure, man. Let's go.

 

Frank Klesitz:

All right, so let's get into it. Everyone's here because they want to know how to get listings with Direct Mail. Let's start with your, you put a little PowerPoint slide presentation for us.

 

Brett Jennings:

Yeah. Let me go ahead and do screen share here and we'll get started. Present.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Brett, we got a couple of people. Is there any way you could move your microphone up a little bit so you're a little bit louder?

 

Brett Jennings:

Sure.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Let's try the headset, or do you have some earphones by you by chance?

 

Brett Jennings:

I do, I do. We could do that.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Want to plug those in, that's fine. That'll probably help out with the audio, but let's see if it switches over.

 

Brett Jennings:

Stop share. Put my earbuds in, so apologies for the technical. Can you hear me now, Frank?

 

Frank Klesitz:

I can hear you. I don't think it switched over.

 

Brett Jennings:

Switch over yet? Here it comes. I think ...

 

Frank Klesitz:

There we go.

 

Brett Jennings:

... We-

 

Frank Klesitz:

That should sound better everyone, does it?

 

Brett Jennings:

Good. Yes.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah. That's much better.

 

Brett Jennings:

Okay. Now, give me one moment to get back to our slides here. I will share screen and we'll get rocking here.

 

Frank Klesitz:

One of the things I like about Brett is I've seen him basically probably at every real estate conference that exists and that crossed our paths in the space.

 

Brett Jennings:

Just a few times.

 

Frank Klesitz:

I can't even begin to tell you probably how much money on travel and hotel rooms and flights and mastermind fees that Brett has spent to try to figure out what works and what's consistent for him in his market specific to a highly-educated affluent market. You're going to get that presentation right now.

 

Brett Jennings:

Let's do it.

 

Frank Klesitz:

All right.

 

Brett Jennings:

This is really geared towards getting listings in a low inventory market. I hope, my intention today is to help people overcome the challenges. I'm in this market with 1.8 million people, and there's only 740 homes for sale. Us as agents, you can get burned out, right? Writing offers time, after time, after time, getting your butt kicked. We set a record yesterday for one of our listings, highest sold over the asking price, 711,000 over the asking price on a $2 million house. We didn't price it really low, so just crazy. To solve that and our goal for today's review three strategies to get more listings in today's market that you can implement now to increase your business. A quick word from one of my mentors, Tony Robbins was a big, obviously mentor of mine. I worked for his company for two years coming out of college.

 

Brett Jennings:

He's helped both my business and my life tremendously over the years, but I love this quote, "Wealth exists in the gap between ideas and their implementation." Take what we say today, what Greg says today, and put it to so your time is not wasted. Our top three listing getting tactics are tactic number one, is listings from your sphere. Before you go spend money, marketing to people you don't know, let's make sure we harvested all the opportunity from the people that we do know. Our process has been pretty simple around that. The core concept here is everyone that owns a home in your sphere of influence will sell, at least at some point. Even if they get carried out in a box, you get those people say, "I'm not moving out of here until somebody carries me out of the box," they will sell eventually, right? Don't miss the opportunity to serve them. The only thing you have to do is stay in front of them.

 

Brett Jennings:

National Association of Realtors says what, 70% of consumers, when surveyed said they'll use the same agent that they use last time, but only 20% actually do. It's because they don't stay in front of their people. Our formula is kind of a set it and forget it. Sending a monthly update postcard. There's several services out there. We like Corefact. You upload your list to them, just whatever new sphere of influence contacts, add that to that every month. For less than a dollar per contact per month, you can stay in front of those people. Emails systems, which we're going to talk about are great, but people read maybe what, 20% of their email, a lot of it gets deleted.

 

Brett Jennings:

The first thing we want to do is make sure we're doing some direction mail piece, and I'll show you what that formula looks like. Second thing is the monthly market update. We use BoomTown as a CRM, so there's something called a seller e-alert. Many of you have any kind of CRM IDX solution, you want to send something equivalent. Worst cases, if you don't have any of those tools, then set your people up on a search on your multiple listing service for homes that sold, went pending or sold right in their immediate neighborhood, maybe two or three blocks around each of those properties. Then lastly, is what we've been focusing on is getting our sphere of influence on Homebot. If you haven't explored Homebot as a tool, it's probably the best digital farming tool. Has a 70% open and engagement rate, so there's a little bit of a land grab there.

 

Brett Jennings:

Meaning, you do want to get to your sphere of influence because likely look, everybody knows five realtors. You want to make sure you get your sphere of influence on Homebot before somebody else does. If you haven't seen the tool, it's super cool. It doesn't just tell them what their home value is. It tells them how much equity they have and what they can do with it. How much of a price that they can afford to move up to. If they want to buy investment property, what that equity would enable them to do and positions you as the expert and resource. That's the first part of it. Just to give you an idea, the digital market update, I think this is the one example you see on the left there, is Market Snapshot, that's by a company top producer.

 

Brett Jennings:

Again, we use BoomTown and this is a sample of the Corefact postcard. It's automated. All you have to do is put your list in there. Their computer system will determine the five homes that are closest to them and what they sold for, and then give them that market update once a month. Again, you want to do not just digital, but do digital and print because not everybody opens their email, but make you unforgettable.

 

Brett Jennings:

Tactic number two, is getting listings from past clients who bought from you. The cool thing is no matter where you live in the country right now, prices have gone up at least 13% is what I heard the national stats are in the last 12 months. You want share that good news. This is in our market, we use ... Actually in our BoomTown, the there's the, I think all of us as realtors, licensed realtors get access to RPR, Real Property Resource.

 

Brett Jennings:

You can go in there, take everyone who you've sold a home to that's a buyer and print out a market update report for them if they are a buyer. I put a little Post-it note on there, it says, "Congrats Joe! Look what happened to your home value. Have you had any thoughts of trading up or down in 2021 or beyond?" Get really great engagement with that because they get to see in writing, we're counting on the fact that people are going to go to Zillow and check their home value, but until you put it right in front of them and let them know, "Hey, I'm here. If you have any thoughts, let's chat," so make sure that you're doing that. That's a simple tactic, but if you haven't done it, do it. Where does wealth exist? It exists in the gap between ideas and their implementation.

 

Brett Jennings:

Tactic number three ,is farming for listings based on your buyer needs. All of us have tons of buyers right now. I don't know what it's like in your specific market, but here where we are, we have five buyers to every one seller. Our team members who have gone through showing them everything that's on MLS, showing them everything that's off market that we can find or curate, then our next thing is like, "All right, what do we do next? How do we shake loose some more listings?" Probably one of the most universal offers to a seller, if they're even having an inkling of selling, is the idea or the thought, "Look, I've got a buyer," that usually will get them to raise their hand. Our core concept here is leveraging your most committed buyers to build a seller campaign to find them a home and get listings.

 

Brett Jennings:

Here's how it looks. First, is you're going to want to create your target list. What we did here, because I have a big team, I sent a Google form out to all my agents. I'm like, "Hey guys, respond back to me your top three buyers, the price point and the zip codes they're interested in." I then got a response back from 20 of my agent partners. They said, "Oh, we know a 95125, we've got like, whatever it is, six buyers. They're looking between one, six and 2 million." We know, "Oh, wow, we got some density there of buyers that are looking for a place." Then we then want to carve out and do this mailing campaign right in that pocket.

 

Brett Jennings:

Here's my results. I reached out to 3,000 homeowners. I had 12 responses to two listings over 60 days. Our cost to implement that for the mailing was right around, it's a little less than a dollar a piece when you use the ITI Direct Mail, but about 20 hours of my time and our return on investment in our market was 87,000. I know you guys go, "Oh, well, your price points is 1.3 million," but even if my price point was 300,000, which is like close to what the national average is right now. That still would be about a $75,000 ... I'm sorry, about 25 to $30,000 return. Let me ask you, as a realtor or a real estate agent and a business owner yourself, does it make sense to spend 3,000 to make 25? I hope your answer is yes. You would be willing to do that time and time again, because that's what, again, what creates this kind of scalable business is finding those lead generation pillars that are predictable, that are scalable, that you can invest money in over and over again and get more results.

 

Brett Jennings:

As far as the execution of what that really looks like, to get the best results come from not just mailing, it's mailing and calling. As far as the mailing goes, the resource, Frank, I'm sure will provide at the end of this call is a company called ITI Direct Mail.

 

Frank Klesitz:

[crosstalk 00:16:36], in the chat.

 

Brett Jennings:

He's going to put it in the chat and you can do hand-written fonts. You can do type-written fonts. I prefer hand-written fonts. Then our letter, letter on the right side here, you see, "Hey John, I'm representing a serious buyer who's interested in your home. Inventory is low. I told my client I would do everything I could to find them a home in Sunnyville, and I'm sure you've seen what's happened with home values. My client's financially qualified and flexible with timing. If you have any thoughts of selling, this could be the best scenario. Here's a few reasons why. These buyers are motivated and paid full market value. You don't need to do any fixing and cleaning. If you need time to find a new home, no problem. They can offer a flexible close date. If you're concerned about capital gains, we can refer you to a tax specialist that may be able to provide some options to minimize or defer your gains."

 

Brett Jennings:

That becomes a problem in our market because people who bought these houses for like $40,000, 20 years ago, they now have a million dollar gain. "If you're interested in, perhaps I can share your home with my client, please call or text me right away." Then I invite them, if you have good reviews online, either Google reviews, Zillow reviews, whatever, give people that reference point. That's we do down in RPS. We say, "Hey, it's a legitimate inquiry to present an offer on your property. Not a solicitation for listing." We're not directly trying to solicit for listing. We do have buyers. It is earnest and it is sincere. That's been very effective. This is just the message in detail, just so you guys can see it if you had a hard time reading it on the screen before and yeah, so that's the formula we've been been doing. You can follow up with a circle of prospects-

 

Frank Klesitz:

Hang on, bro. I'm going to step back just really quick. I got some questions here for you. This is good.

 

Brett Jennings:

Sure.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Why don't you take the one to take the screen share off and let's just kind of recap so far. First thing with your database, you're sending the mail, right? You have past clients, you have sphere. Most people when they go to their database, don't have mailing addresses. I mean, the match rate when someone sends us their list or any list of someone's Gmail contacts, Outlook contacts, CRM contacts, past clients, we've got email addresses probably, but no mailing addresses. I'm just curious, how did you go about getting all the mailing addresses for just in section one of your talk to send them the postcards?

 

Brett Jennings:

Got it, so I'm putting something in the chat right here, and there's all kinds of like, what do you call it? Data append services, but I'm going to give you a free one that's actually really effective. It's called faspeoplesearch.com. You can't do bulk lists. You can only do one-by-one, but what I'm finding for most agents on my team or group that are coming in, they maybe have 100 contacts and either they are a virtual assistant with just a name and a phone number or name and city. You can find mailing addresses for most of your people. If you just have an email address, you're out of luck, but if you've got a name and a phone number, that is very effective. That should eliminate ... You should be able to get about 70%-

 

Frank Klesitz:

Fast people search?

 

Brett Jennings:

Fastpeoplesearch.com.

 

Frank Klesitz:

You Probably tried a lot of these. You like that one?

 

Brett Jennings:

I tried a bunch. Yeah. You got a couple when you go online. Like a lot of them, they click you in and then you got to click down and then he wants you to pay five bucks a month, and $10, a dollar per contact or something. This is truly free, and it's a great research resource.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah, I'm-

 

Greg Harrelson:

Frank, I was going to say, I mean, you can take the email address and use some of these append services in reverse into a name and an address.

 

Brett Jennings:

And an address? Cool.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah. Yeah, so definitely. We do that quite often. You just go straight from an email address and then that reverses into the name and usually its name, first name, last name and address.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Got it.

 

Brett Jennings:

Cool. I'd love to have that resource, Greg, if you're willing to share.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah. I mean, it's one that actually a guy named Abe in my office created, he's got a great one. It's called exactdial.com.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Exact Dial, I'll put that in chat. That's what you guys use for checking everything out.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah, and in our accountability, Brett, let's talk about it and I can give you some additional high-level things that we're doing with it.

 

Brett Jennings:

Sounds great.

 

Frank Klesitz:

That's how you get the mailing address, is you put it on a set it and forget it plan. Then I think what's so important is that you're using your existing buyers to market to neighborhoods where they want to buy. That's the key takeaway here, is that right?

 

Brett Jennings:

Yes. Two things. Two core concepts. The first for your sphere, is that everybody in your sphere is going to sell eventually, unless they're a forever apartment dweller, or they live under a bridge, they will buy or sell real estate at some point. Our job is just to make sure that we are unavoidable and that they can't forget about us.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Let's get a couple of resources for everyone and where they can go to pull that property information again. You showed us how to go on a map and draw a neighborhood or a zip code?

 

Brett Jennings:

Yes.

 

Frank Klesitz:

There's lots of tools out there for you to pull that and they keep going down in price. The first place I want everyone to know where they could probably call that would be free to you is likely your title company. Call your title company up. They probably have subscriptions to these things and say, "This is what I want," and they'll probably just give it to you. That's kind of usually a good go-to, all right? The second option is inside your MLS. You may not log in there and see what tools are actually available to you, but they're trying to add more value all the time for your fees, and there's two companies out there. One is Realist ...

 

Frank Klesitz:

For your fees and there's two companies out there. One is Realist, that's a core Logic product. It might be inside of your MLS or it might be Remine, R-E-M-I-N-E. You might have to pay a little bit for it. It's very reasonable, maybe 100, $200 a year. But it gives you this full service to be able to go in and draw the areas where you want to send your pieces of direct mail, to let people know that you have an opportunity, you have a buyer in the area. Now, the next step after we've used using something inside the MLS, there's other retail services you can just find on Google. Probably one of the more popular ones is Cole information. I think it's like the old crisscross directory. Cole Information, C-O-L-E. There's some new ones that just popped onto the scene that are getting really popular. Go check out propertyradar.com. So Property Radar, they used to only be in the West Coast, but now they have national access. It's only 80 bucks a month, I believe. They have a [inaudible 00:22:57] called Prop Stream, P-R-O-P-S-T-R-E-A-M. You can get property data that way when you want to mail a specific neighborhood or really anything for a direct mail piece.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Frank, because you're giving a lot of resources, I've never seen an MLS that doesn't have direct connection to the courthouse records. Every one of the MLS's that I've ever seen, it's free. You could do a mail merge. All you're doing, go in your MLS, connect to the courthouse records. If you do it this way, then what you do, let's just assume there's a community called Belgrove Preserve. Then all you have to do is type in subdivision named Belgrove Preserve, hit a button and the entire list comes up. Then you hit another button says export to CSV and you got it. It's a free service that just about every courthouse allows you to do in the event that you want to do a direct mail to specific areas.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Got it. So we probably figure you're sending letters out to the specific areas, not postcards. That's a distinction that I see here Brett. In addition to that, the message is that you have a buyer or I have a buyer for you. Please give me a call, which I'm assuming you do. Now let's talk about the mail piece a little bit. It's a one page letter with color. You're showing up as a realtor, but maybe we can pull it up when we bring the screen again. Bring the letter up. I want to show people the envelope.

 

Brett Jennings:

Go back, the envelope.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Go back to the envelope, show us the envelope, because America sorts its mail over the wastebasket. Doesn't it Brett?

 

Brett Jennings:

They do.

 

Frank Klesitz:

You have to get into the A pile and not the B pile. So you put a lot of thought into this envelope. Will you break down the thought you put into the envelope for the audience?

 

Brett Jennings:

Yeah. First of all, again, coming back to your concept Frank, that the average person does sort their mail over, if it's not the trash can ... In California, we're trying to be eco-friendly. We sort it over the recycling bin.

 

Frank Klesitz:

That's good Brett. Good job.

 

Brett Jennings:

But nonetheless, they're doing the A pile, B pile. If you look at the way this is done, we intentionally did not do a typewritten font, because a typewritten font often either means it's a bill or a collection notice. May or may not be a bill, but whatever. It's either a marketing message, or a collection notice or something. If it's handwritten, it looks like it came from a person. So that's why we choose the handwritten font. Then also, we don't do bulk rate mail. We do a first class hand canceled stamp. It's more expensive to mail, but look. If I mail a letter and it doesn't get opened, it was a waste of my money. So that really helps us get the open rate. In email, your subject headline is the number one thing that determines the engagement level of your message and your campaign. In direct mail, it's the envelope. [crosstalk 00:25:59].

 

Frank Klesitz:

That's not a human hand addressing that. That's a printed hand addressing, is that correct?

 

Brett Jennings:

Correct. Actually, and I've split tested this. The best company out there for hand addressing stuff is called Addressable. This company ITI direct mail. They have a handwritten looking font. But ITI ... I'm sorry, Addressable. Those guys, they use a robot that actually writes with an ink pen. I literally have had people call me when using Addressable. It's more expensive than this group, but the open rates, we got a 50% increase on the open rates. I literally had people call me that said, "The only reason I'm calling you is because you wrote me personally. I looked at this card, I saw you wrote me." It's that compelling.

 

Frank Klesitz:

So what are you doing, man? In your market we have a very educated consumer. Is it physical, actual handwriting? Are you doing the fake handwriting? What's your anecdotal recommendation?

 

Brett Jennings:

I think the thing that's gotten the best response for us is Addressable. The second best response is using a company like this ITI. [crosstalk 00:27:08]

 

Frank Klesitz:

So you hire a firm that specializes in actually writing the addresses.

 

Brett Jennings:

Yes.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Got it. Okay. I want to show you guys, once you un-share, I want to show maybe what a letter looks like a little bit that is effective. So here's an example of a letter. Notice how it does not say the brokerage or the real estate on here, just your name. So you want to go in personal. You'll maximize your open rate with personal, as opposed to putting the brokerage information on it from what I found anecdotally. Then here's generally what a letter looks like, a nice personal letter. Something to this effect. Don't read it. That's not important. What's important is this seeing it, as far as the feel of what we're talking about here. That going out with something honest and real and relevant, like if you're actually having a real conversation with somebody just writing down what essentially you're saying, pulls the best. A little trick of the trade is making sure the phone number you put at the bottom may not be your cell number, because it's hard to manage maybe the inbound calls or keep them logged. Brett, do you have a phone number tracking system? Or Greg, do you have a phone number tracking system of using a special number that you could forward anywhere, it tracks everything that you could recommend to the audience?

 

Brett Jennings:

We use Call Rail. I'm not sure. Greg, what do you guys use?

 

Greg Harrelson:

We use Direct Dial.

 

Frank Klesitz:

That way you can put a specific number in there to track the response, right?

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah. We're tracking response. Then from there, obviously there's a lot of conversions. There's a lot of things that we can track. If I'm distributing leads from a certain source to a certain lead team, let's just call it. I can also not only see how many leads, what was the time, how many of those leads actually got somebody to ... my team took those leads and how long it took for them to actually accept those leads. There's all kinds of things you can start tracking from an analytical standpoint.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Now I want to ask you Brett, so a letter runs you, what? A dollar at lower volumes, a piece. If you go probably in the several thousands, you can probably get it down to 70 or 80 cents a piece for a letter.

 

Brett Jennings:

It's about 80 cents a piece for 3000 letters. So it's about-

 

Frank Klesitz:

But someone would say a postcard is half the price. The postcard's half the price, Brett. Why letters and not postcards when your main mailing Cole to homeowners?

 

Brett Jennings:

That's a great question. So the question is we want to fly under the marketing radar, right? If a message is perceived as a sales message ... When you walk into a sales floor, someone says, "Can I help you?" What do you usually say? "No, I'm just looking."

 

Frank Klesitz:

No, fine. I'm walking.

 

Brett Jennings:

We all have these innate tendencies to have deflectors up for marketing. So a postcard, how often ... I don't know. I was going to say, how often do you get a postcard that's not a marketing message? Way back in days past before the internet and this other stuff, and before people were texting pictures of their vacations, you used to go places and you buy postcard. "Hey, we're in sunny Florida." That was cool, right? But now a postcard is ... I don't think I've ever seen a postcard that's not a marketing message. So what we're doing right there, if we choose that as a medium to deliver the message, we're shooting ourselves in the foot because we're eliminating 80% of our audience. But by contrast, that handwritten looking envelope looks like it's coming ... They don't know who it is. It's the handwritten, so it looks like a personal message. The tone of the letter is addressed to you specifically, not some mass message that, "Hey, all homeowners, the market's hot." So through that personal one-to-one communication at scale is going to get us the best kind of engagement. That's my thought on it.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Well, here's the deal. What's really interesting too, is I just had to go back. It's very clear that you're dealing with a very fluent, very educated market and people still respond to a personal letter. It's actually working, isn't it Brett?

 

Brett Jennings:

It actually works.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Once you give people an idea of maybe where you're at now, of maybe how many are you sending? What's your return? Give people some guidance on, how many do I have to mail? Maybe it's in your presentation.

 

Brett Jennings:

It is.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Is there a recommended number to maybe have some statistical advantage of actually getting a response? I'm assuming if you only mail 10, it's probably not going to work. Probably got to mail more. Let's go back to your presentation and catch back on to where you were after I took [crosstalk 00:31:45].

 

Brett Jennings:

So really again, you can just mail and I got good results from just mailing, but you're going to accentuate your results if you mail and call. So the best results you're going to get are typically doing what we call three taps. It's either call mail call, or mail call mail. Two taps are good, but that second tab if you're making a call, this is what we call our circle prospecting script. "Hey, it's Brett with Real Estate Experts. I want to see if you received my letter. I reached out because I'm working with the buyer who really wants to move in your neighborhood. I promised I would do them everything I could to find them a home. I'm just curious if you're interested in selling."

 

Frank Klesitz:

That's great.

 

Brett Jennings:

Or if you've know any neighbors who talk about moving. But here's the implementation tips that you were asking me about Frank.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Great. Thank you Brett.

 

Brett Jennings:

Oops. What are the things that they should be ... Sorry, that was mine. What are the things that they should be thinking about? It should be a minimum of 2000 homes, because you might only get half a percent response rate. So if you send out a hundred letters, guess what? You didn't get a response. If you send out 200 letters, you maybe get one response. But at 2000, even if you only got a half a percent and you get 10 responses, you're probably going to pick up a listing or two out of there. So oftentimes what we see is people don't go big enough. The second thing you want to do is we use the MLS school to find the area, because when we find our buyers are looking for homes, they're usually school district driven. So that's another side benefit, is when you're going to map out those areas. When you pull the list, like you said Frank, you could go to a title company. It's easier if you could do it yourself, because you can really use the mouse thing and control it.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Control it.

 

Brett Jennings:

So you can use Remine or Realist. Fourth implementation [crosstalk 00:33:31].

 

Frank Klesitz:

Or the MLS, like Greg said. You can pull maybe directly from the MLS, right Greg?

 

Greg Harrelson:

The list?

 

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah.

 

Greg Harrelson:

100%. 100%, 100%.

 

Brett Jennings:

Got it. It's interesting. I'm paying for a tool I probably don't even need.

 

Greg Harrelson:

If you're talking about neighborhood list, yes. You don't need Remine and Realist for that, but there are other things that Remine and Realist can do that expands beyond just pulling the list. So these are very valuable resources that you're giving for sure.

 

Brett Jennings:

Then with the letters, you want to make sure you use a hand addressed or font that looks handwritten and a first-class stamp. Then we use Mojo to circle dial. The cost of 2000 letters, it should be less than 2000 if you use ITI directly.

 

Frank Klesitz:

How long do you wait? So you place the order for the letters, you upload it, they process it, they send you an email. "Hey, we dropped 2000 letters in the mail." It probably takes a couple of days to get there.

 

Brett Jennings:

You want to put yourself on the list. So pay the buck to get yourself on the list, so then you know without a shadow of a doubt ...

 

Frank Klesitz:

Oh, good idea.

 

Brett Jennings:

... that the letters went out and when they hit.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Brett, that's just too logical. That's good.

 

Brett Jennings:

So then we'll call four or five days. It's somewhere between three and five days after the letters hit, to give people a chance to have read it and opened it.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Now why direct mail, man? You're spending money on marketing. Of all the other ways you could spend your money, I want to know why you chose the marketing weapon of direct mail. So many other ways to put your resources.

 

Brett Jennings:

When it comes to digital, digital is great for finding buyers because buyers go to the internet. They go to search for homes, so it's easy to find them through digital. People don't often, until the late stages will they go looking for a realtor to help them sell their home. So we got to reach out to them and find them. That's a lot harder to do on digital. You can do it on Facebook, but the way you're finding them, it's not by their intent. You're just interrupting their day when they're at the carwash with a paid boosted ad on Facebook about their home value or something. We've experimented and tested with [inaudible 00:36:02]. It just so happens that direct mail is a very predictable way for sure to get your message in front of them. If you execute well with a proper message and a proper medium, then you're going to get the results, at least for us.

 

Brett Jennings:

I think we are also seeing, that's what I hear. I'm not a total direct mail expert. I spend a lot of money and I do it, but we're hearing that people are getting better returns on direct mail now. Because so many people had moved away from direct mail to market digitally, the amount of stuff people are getting in their mailbox at home started to drop down. So people are paying more attention to what they're getting in their physical mail.

 

Frank Klesitz:

How about the return mail address? How do you handle the return mail?

 

Brett Jennings:

So for the return mail address, we do put our office address, but I don't put my name on there. I don't put like suite number, I just put unit number. So it could be coming from an apartment for all they know.

 

Frank Klesitz:

So the return address looks a little more personal.

 

Brett Jennings:

Yes.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Got it. Okay. Greg, you ever used direct mail in your history? I know your style of marketing is a bit different. You're very heavy on the phones for your people. But tell me about maybe your experience using direct mail to get listings based on what Brett is saying here. What's your take?

 

Greg Harrelson:

Well, first of all, I think everything Brett saying is ... I like it. I would say it's spot on, but I just think it's very valid. A few things. So everything that he's saying, we've done some variation of that. Not saying I've done everything he's saying, but some variation of it. So a few other little tips, like you're doing direct mail on centers of influence. That's a little different than doing direct mail if you're really going to farm an individual community. So another, a little trick or tip is in the top left corner you can say, "Attention Grand Dune property owners." Then you could use an envelope that has, if you don't want to use the handwritten type of print, you could use, "Attention, property owners, Grand Dune property owners" in the top left. Have that in one of the windows, and then have their name and address in the other window.

 

Frank Klesitz:

So something like this? The little window things?

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yes, so it looks much more official. Then it's also attention property owners, so people are like, they've got to open that. They don't know, is this from the Homeowners Association? Is this from this? Is there something going on with our community that I need to know about?

 

Frank Klesitz:

There's something I want to share with the audience here. There's a common theme between what Brett shared and Greg shared, is we go in with sneak up mail. Is that right? Not putting their brokerage on here that you're a realtor on the post, on the envelope. That's okay. You reveal that on the inside, but not putting it on the outside. Would you agree with that, Greg and Brett?

 

Greg Harrelson:

I do. I do agree.

 

Brett Jennings:

I agree with that as well.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Brett said, it's worthless if it doesn't get opened. I bet you Brett, I haven't ever known, I've never heard a study, but when the question about a letter versus postcard and you're thinking you're over the recycling bin. Well, the time that it takes me to throw the postcard in a recycling bin is going to be a lot less than the time that it takes me to open up the envelope, read the letter, or see the letter and then throw it in the recycling bin. So if we just look at time on hand right there, it's going to translate to conversion.

 

Frank Klesitz:

So Brett, what you're recommending for people to do, we're sitting here. We're in a low inventory market. They hopped on this training to be like, "God, I need some listings." Right?

 

Brett Jennings:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

 

Frank Klesitz:

Let's break this down and start transitioning this as more actionable for everyone after they took away some principles here. The first thing you shared is trying to spike response from your existing database. That you have buyers and inventory is low. If you want to sell your home, I can sell it for full market value, and probably pretty quickly and painlessly given the amount of demand that's out there and to contact me. Is that right?

 

Brett Jennings:

That's right.

 

Frank Klesitz:

So work your existing database first and get your existing database, your SOI and your past clients on some type of drip mail campaign that you exist there. Correct?

 

Brett Jennings:

Correct, correct. [crosstalk 00:40:33].

 

Frank Klesitz:

Then once that's done, now you want to pick an area of town. You pick a neighborhood, a district, you go draw it out, probably about 2000 homes you like. I have to ask, where did the 2000 come from? Why 2000?

 

Brett Jennings:

It's just coming from that response rate formula. Oftentimes either farming or direct mail, when we see agents execute and not get results, it's either they got a crappy message, crappy medium, like they did postcard instead of letter, and or they didn't go big enough. Because depending on your area and what kind of response rate that you will get, if you got a decent direct mail piece, you're going to get a half a percent to 1% response rate. But like I said, a half a percent response rate, you send a hundred letters, guess what kind of results you get? Nothing. If you get 200, maybe you get one response. I know it's a little unnerving. As an agent, maybe you've got a limited budget. Here's my formula. What I did, a lot of this stuff I didn't figure out all on my own.

 

Brett Jennings:

You mentioned earlier, I spent 150,000 and traveled 150,000 miles, went to every mastermind convention and I'm like, "Who's the guy who's crushing it in this?" That was a principle I learned from Tony Robbins. Look, you don't need to be the smartest kid in class. You just need to go sit next to him and take really good notes. That's what I've done and just that formula of copycatting. See who in your market is doing this. It's working for us in our market. What we find is usually the strategy will work across the different market. You might have to tweak it, change it slightly based on the cultural tone or what we call market to message match for where your people are. We're in high price markets, so we get ... It's a harder market to market to.

 

Frank Klesitz:

So let me address a couple of small nuances here. So obviously you need to legitimately have a buyer before you nail the area, right?

 

Brett Jennings:

Yeah, I think that's important-

 

Frank Klesitz:

And you have to understand how to handle the inbound call. That's the next question. I'm going to ask you how you handle the call. I would think Brett, someone just takes a look at their buyer leads coming in from real geeks.

 

Brett Jennings:

Correct.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Figure out where they want to buy. "Hey, I'd love to send a letter out to try to find some homes for you, because there's not much for sale where you want to go." Right?

 

Brett Jennings:

Right.

 

Frank Klesitz:

So I think getting the story and using your buyer leads to where they want to buy, and using that in the direct mail piece would be powerful. Now let's say you send this out saying, "I have a buyer. I'm working with somebody. I can arrange maybe an off-market sale." Modeling the letter that you shared here in the presentation. Somebody calls. Why don't you share with us how you handle that conversation to turn it into a legitimate listing opportunity or how you even handle? Is it a one day listing? How do you handle it to get paid from this? Or turn it into a listing ethically?

 

Brett Jennings:

There's a lot of different ways to go about it, but I think it starts with having an authentic, genuine value proposition that's within integrity. That's why we say start this mailing in or around an area where you have a high concentration of buyers. So when that inbound call does come in, you're confident and they go, "Well, they sent me this letter. Is this buyer for real? Tell me about the buyer." Well, no. Tell me about your house. I got the buyers for real. So I have even gone on, and this especially with expires when we've done a similar letter. When we get those inbound calls, if that-

 

Brett Jennings:

We've done a similar letter. When we get those inbound calls, if that perspective prospect's a little testy, like, Hey, is this for real? What do we got here? I'd say, great. Do you have three minutes? Can you get in front of your computer? Let's hop on Zoom, and if you haven't done a short URL for your own Zoom account, you should definitely do it to make it easy for people to get on. I just go, go to Zoombrett.com right now and get on there.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Zoombrett.com. That's it.

 

Brett Jennings:

Yeah. Yeah. And then I-

 

Frank Klesitz:

Zoomfrank.com. I like it.

 

Brett Jennings:

Just because I shared that, don't go Zoom bombing my Zoom account.

 

Greg Harrelson:

GoDaddy's blowing up right now. [crosstalk 00:44:39].

 

Frank Klesitz:

That's a really good idea. When you're on the phone with someone, let's quickly hop on a Zoom.

 

Brett Jennings:

Yeah. Go to Zoombrett.com. The second one thing on that same note that I would advise you to use is if you could get Calendly, if you're not using. It's a free calendar scheduling software and they get your name calendar, like I got Brett'scalendar.com. You need 15 minutes, go grab 15 minutes at Brett'scalendar.com. So anyway, this is what we do. Where is my Firefox? I was going to show you in BoomTown. I basically will jump on with the guy and say, great. Let me show you right here. Okay. I'll say this is our CRM. Okay. You're asking me if we've got buyers. So yeah, go to Zoombrett.com

 

Frank Klesitz:

So you do a screen share and just show them all the buyers and the backend of your system?

 

Brett Jennings:

Yes. So I'll go in here and I'll put in a zip code, 95125.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Brett, resize that so it's a rectangle, not a square. That'd be easier for the audience. Let's resize the window.

 

Brett Jennings:

Okay. Got it. Thank you. I will.

 

Frank Klesitz:

There you go.

 

Brett Jennings:

Got it. So then I'll go, great. This is the backend of our customer database, and just to give you an idea in your area right there, these are all people who we have looking for a home.

 

Frank Klesitz:

1,849. And here's the active ones and here's-

 

Brett Jennings:

These ones, guy's been on the website two minutes ago. He's been on. This person here, Carrie and Brian, they've been on the site two hours ago. They're looking for a house that's a million.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Brett, this is a wonderful way to overcome that I think you're baiting and switching me and lying to me.

 

Brett Jennings:

Yeah. So actually, I wrote you about one buyer specifically, but I don't just have one buyer. I have lots of buyers who are looking. So tell me a little bit more about your home. So now what I've done is I've invoked trust and credibility and I've disarmed the guy that I'm just some smarmy sales guy that's trying to hook them in to try to get a listing, and then I'm going to take the conversation, tell me a little bit about your home because that's what his interest... He knows my buyers are interested in his home. That's where I'm going to take the conversation. Once we've developed some rapport there, then I'm going to ask them, well, tell me a little bit about the circumstances. Why are you guys moving? Now, we're starting to open up that conversation at the human level.

 

Brett Jennings:

And that's where we're really starting to develop some rapport, and I will set the appointment to go view the property. Now, if I know that house is not going to work for my buyer, one of my buyers, when I show up at the front door and I know that either I don't have the buyer or it's not going to be the right fit, I'm going to tell the guy right when I'm at the front door. Hey look, I got here. I'm looking at your house in the neighborhood, but the buyers I told you about, this probably isn't good for him. However, as I mentioned, I do have lots of other buyers that we could be working with and we're getting buyers all the time. If you'd like, I'm here, you're here. We could still take the 10 minutes if you allow me to walk through a floor plan.

 

Brett Jennings:

Again, the reason I do that is what have I done? I've invoked trust and credibility and let them know, Hey, this isn't going to work for my guy. If I know in earnest it's not, and then from there, you got to use your sales skills to take the conversation where you will to the next level, whether it is going to be listing or you're going to sell it directly to the buyer.

 

Frank Klesitz:

One of the things I want to share with the audience is you're probably walking away with, man, I got to go spend two grand on a mailing because it's about a dollar a piece or so, a little less, or 2000, to go get the response that I need and those economics have to work in my market.

 

Brett Jennings:

But what did we start with? What did we start with? We didn't start with 2000 pieces. We started with our sphere of influence first. If you've got 20 past clients, 50 past clients, I promise you if you do 50 past clients and you write them that thing. Hey, look, what's happened to your home value. You have any thoughts on moving? You're going to get one. Then take your part of your commission from that, leverage that so you're leading with revenue to grow that next stage of your business.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Yep. I'll share another little tip because we've done this is there's a lot of financial advisors that would love to get in front of someone, especially in Silicon Valley when they walk away with a huge check from probably living in the house for 20 years and selling it, that would love to get in front of people selling homes, and by approaching a financial advisor or another complimentary business, give them the second page. It doesn't have to be a one page letter. It's a two-page letter and they've split the cost. So it's a little tip for the audience is, and we've done this and it's been very effective, but you take your $2,000 cost of a mailing after you work your database, but because it's a letter, there's not much marginal costs to two pages.

 

Frank Klesitz:

And you can include a second page where it's like, Hey, Alison will let you know about my financial advisor, that if you do sell your home, especially if I'm writing you because maybe you've lived in it for at least 10 years or so, it's probably significantly appreciated and you're going to have some money. Congratulations. Prices are way up. What do you do with it? What are the tax implications? How do you yada, yada, yada? Well, there's a little workshop I'm doing with so and so. You can also attend that. It's a webinar and we're going to discuss what to do with the proceeds of your home sale, and you might be able to find a financial advisor to help pick up part of the cost.

 

Brett Jennings:

Cool. I like that.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Something to think about. All right. So let's transition here. We've got about 10 minutes left and we'll do some overtime, Greg, and we'll talk about all this. Sound good?

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah.

 

Frank Klesitz:

But let's go through some questions here. So let's scroll back on up. Do you mail the same 2000 every month I have a buyer or do you kind of do it around different places?

 

Brett Jennings:

It's a great question. So there's a principle in direct response marketing that you get something called message fatigue. If you put the same message out to the same audience over and over, they start to tune you out, and so what we found is probably the ideal cadence of hitting an audience with that kind of a message is probably every three to four months because people's life situations change. A different segment of that audience will... Circumstances have changed. Somebody got a job transfer, baby was born, somebody passed away. So an audience like that of 2000 people, you're going to get some rotation of circumstances that will get new people to respond, but not more than every three months. I mail my list three times a year.

 

Frank Klesitz:

I think what's interesting too, is you implied that when this letter goes out, you're going to get an immediate response. This isn't I have to mail and mail and mail and wait six months for a response. Is that correct?

 

Brett Jennings:

Correct. And you will get, here's what's going to happen too. If you do as we prescribed and you call behind the list, guess what? You're going to get a bunch of people like, you know what? I got your letter. I didn't call you because it's not really the right time, but my wife and I, we actually are thinking of selling this summer. Oh, fantastic, great. So what am I going to do? I'm going to put them in my CRM, and now they become part of my sphere of influence. They're going to get my 12 direct, my one postcard a month, and they're going to get my digital market update from them, and I can take them off that farming list because I got them in that hopper now.

 

Frank Klesitz:

So once you get your mail list, I'm going to show the audience really quick here what a mail list looks like because sometimes, you may not have even seen one. So bear with me. I'm going to pull up Excel. You guys ready for Excel, but when you download a list, it looks something like this. You'll have the owner first name, owner last name. You'll have the address of the property and then you'll have the mailing address. Now there'll be a lot of other stuff that comes back, but you just delete all that. You mail to the mailing address, not the property address, right Brett?

 

Brett Jennings:

Right.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Got it. You mail to the mailing address and then maybe in the letter, you merged property address saying, Hey James, are you interested in selling 10210 North 191st? Got it. Now a lot of times when the list comes back from the MLS where it comes back from these services, this is in all caps, street and avenue and circle isn't spelled out, these aren't really formatted that well. Personally, what I do for my mail is I send a list over to a VA, a virtual assistant, and they go through and find and replace in Excel to format long form everything to make sure it's very personal looking for the data that when you use the mail merge, you don't want to do like dear first name and the first is in all caps, or you're using handwritten font and it's shorthand.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Those are all tips when you're doing the mail merge. So I thought I would just show people what a mailing list looks like. So you take the letter that you have written, one page or the second page of the response. You take the mailing list and the services that you like to send mail that was addressable. If you want real hand addressed envelopes or letterprinting.net for the something just as good, but probably less expensive, either, or. Is that correct?

 

Brett Jennings:

Correct.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Cool. Greg, what are some of your thoughts on this stuff, man?

 

Greg Harrelson:

I like it. I think we need to put some more emphasis and say it again. I understand that Brett's talking about direct mail, but he did not leave out a second tab, which he calls it the tab, which is that prospecting call behind it. So I just, again put emphasis. He says he puts himself in the mailer so then he gets notified when the mail has hit the mailbox of all the recipients. He then counts down three to five days and he starts a circle prospecting campaign around that same list. I was always taught that when you do direct mail... Well, I was always taught never do direct mail unless you're willing to prospect behind it, and when you prospect behind it, studies show that you get a 25% increase, 25% increase in ROI when you actually use that format.

 

Brett Jennings:

I would say it's at least 50. In my market, it's at least 50%. We almost double the response at least because it's-

 

Greg Harrelson:

Amazing. Yeah. So that's very significant. So when you're listening to Brett and other people said, well, I'm doing direct mail of 2000 pieces and you start calculating the money, you got to understand that they know what they're doing here. This is not an expense for Brett. This is an investment for Brett. He's saying, look, I can put $2,000 out and get 50,000, $80,000 worth of gross commissions in. I mean, I would be saying, how many $2,000 bills can I invest this month with those types of returns? So think of it as an investment. Don't think of it as an expense, but the investments paying off because he's using multiple channels to approach these people, and let's not also ignore that even though Frank, you said it's a direct return, you'll get immediate calls, I can guarantee you that people are taking that letter, they're putting it in their property folder, and six months later, he may get a call from a mailer that was from months ago. So it compounds over time.

 

Brett Jennings:

Totally.

 

Frank Klesitz:

What happens if you don't have a buyer, Brett?

 

Brett Jennings:

That's a good question. I don't know anybody that's a realtor that has been in the business more than six months right now in this market that doesn't have a buyer, but that's a good question. You stumped me on that one. I don't know. Greg, what do you think?

 

Greg Harrelson:

There's no such thing as don't have a buyer. So that would be answering a question that doesn't exist. I was always taught not to answer questions that are not real.

 

Frank Klesitz:

I'll give a little more direct answer. I like your answers. Two things is go to another agent in the office that has the buyer and use their story and offer a deal on or something like that. The thing that you're seeing more of, and you'll see a trend there this way. I don't know if you could agree with it or not, but there's a lot of institutional buyers of property. You could have a relationship with Opendoor. You can have relationship with Offerpad. There's a service out there I'll give a shout out to called Zavvie. Your broker signs up for this. You might have a Keller Williams offers or exp offers. Your brokerage might offer the Rittenhouse offer solution, but there's companies right now that all the institutional hedge funds and institutional buyers go to where you can submit a property and get a whole bunch of offers on it from institutional buyers regardless if you have a retail buyer.

 

Frank Klesitz:

And you'd be surprised they're actually coming in now. It's not that much of a discount to market value, especially if they're institutional guys, not your local real estate investors, 70% of market value, but I'll go ahead and put their company in the chat, no affiliation, but if your brokerage has something like this, you could still go out and say I have a buyer. In fact, I have several. They're not retail. They're institutional. Still a buyer. Got it. What else we got? Yes. The recording is right here on the YouTube channel, and let's see here. You just send it out once every what? Three, four months to the farm of 2000 people or so Brett? Yeah, let's see if there's anything else out here.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Other questions you guys have? Phone numbers, another question on adding phone numbers to a list. I'll just how everyone here how this works. You're going to go to the MLS. You're going to go to Remine, Realist, PropStream, and you're going to end up getting a list that looks like this. This is not very expensive to get. The problem is you don't have any phone numbers. So my screen decided to lock up on me so I can't move it over, but you would add a column in here for phone one, phone two, extra columns on here. You upload that spreadsheet to a service like ExactDial. Is that correct, Greg, or a phone to pen service and it'll add the phone numbers on there. Then what you do is you scrub them through DNC lists and you call the ones that aren't on the DNC.

 

Greg Harrelson:

And you can append them for email addresses. So if you want to do phone numbers, email addresses, and then make sure you... You introduced me. I can't remember it, V12, K12. I can't remember that service that you can check for bounces within the email addresses.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah. So what you do.... Yeah. So the other option too.

 

Greg Harrelson:

It's NeverBounce. That's right. I've used NeverBounce.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Once you have your mailing list, you can append phone numbers, but you can also likely append email addresses and just send out personal emails too with the same message following up, but one to one to one, you can't really do a broadcast email of the cold list. That's against a lot of the terms of service, but you can still send one to one to one emails, and before you do that, whenever you purchase an email list or you append it to a direct mail list, it's a good idea to run it through a service that scrubs the bad ones and a service that we use at Vyral, it's called NeverBounce.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Neverbounce.com is something we use and we like. One more question and then we'll wrap up. How's it working? Jay asked a question, HomeLight bridge loans, this whole concept of sellers liking the idea of getting a loan or a trade-in program where they can buy before they sell. Are we seeing that message pull with homeowners or solve pain points on the listing presentations or in marketing messaging to help increase response rate or Greg, are you seeing that? Brett, are you seeing that?

 

Greg Harrelson:

I can't speak on those. I'll let Brett handle that because I don't really do that yet.

 

Brett Jennings:

We're testing some messaging to that right now. We have an exclusive partnership with HomeLight. So they're doing, it's a variation of the iBuyer model. It's called trade in. It's been very effective with our sphere of influence and the buyers that we're working with. We picked up a ton of listings. We talked to someone they want to write, do you have a home to sell? Yeah. Do you need your equity in that home purchase? Yeah, we do. Oh, well, crap. You're not going to get your offer accepted. We do have a program called trade-in where you can use your equity to buy up to that next house. About 40% of the people that we put in front of that solution are selecting that solution and they're selecting us as the listing agent because we're the exclusive partner in our market for that.

 

Brett Jennings:

So we're testing some direct mail to see how that works, just to go out there with a message. Hey, do you want to move up? Are you concerned about figuring out how to do it and if you can, well, we can help you. So we're going to see how that works. My hunch is it would be as effective or more effective than the, I have a buyer letter strategy we've been talking about on this call, but yeah, the results remain to be seen, but they should be in shortly.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Well, Brett, that's all the questions that I want to share with you. I mean, I guess the question is, is who's calling? Let me ask one last question. Yeah. Who's calling around the neighborhood after a letter drops?

 

Brett Jennings:

Yeah. I mean, typically I think for myself, it's going to be agents on my team and I've set up a structure where agents can work what we call company generated listings, and if they want to do that, then they'll pay a referral fee on the listing opportunity and they would be required to do the calling behind the mailing so that they increase the response to it.

 

Frank Klesitz:

I could see that being a lot of value in joining your team. Hey, man, I'm going to give you a farm at 2000. I'm going to throw some phone numbers on there. I'm going to put them into a CRM for you. I'm going to send a letter out and have fun. Give them a call. Here's a script.

 

Brett Jennings:

Yeah. You just call behind it and any of the ones that come in from our mailing, you pay a referral fee on, and we do require our agents get listing certified. We collect six and 7% commissions in our market where most of the market's four and five because we have a really good listing process, but so if our agents want to participate in getting these listing opportunities, they got to learn the real estate experts way of the way we manage and handle those listings and bring them to market.

 

Frank Klesitz:

We could do a whole show on that. We could do a whole show on how you went from 4 million to 12 million on GCI recruiting. Brett, thank you for coming on and sharing these great tips with everybody.

 

Brett Jennings:

Man, the only thing I don't feel good, I mean, I feel bad about is I know this guy here who's been my co-host on the show. I got most of the airtime today, but this guy, I'm telling you.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Well, we have overtime. Greg and I have overtime now so we're going to spend about 20, 30 minutes talking about all this.

 

Greg Harrelson:

I'm getting ready to go on my rant in just a minute, don't worry. Don't worry.

 

Brett Jennings:

Okay. Yeah, because I got my notepad ready because I came on this call. I said, I'm going to be on with Greg Harrelson so I got my notes ready.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah. One thing that I'm glad we reconnected. For those of you who've never heard of a mastermind group called GoBundance. Brett's been with GoBundance for years. I was in it at one time. I shied away. COVID, the year of COVID reminded me how important it was for me to be around people and be into masterminding, and I joined back with GoBundance recently. Brett and I reconnected and we're going to do some accountability. I'm going to connect with you in the next day or so.

 

Brett Jennings:

I'm looking forward to it, brother.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah.

 

Frank Klesitz:

So Brett, you can go and hop on off. It's just going to be me and Greg now and you can go ahead on YouTube page. So thank you for coming Brett.

 

Brett Jennings:

Thank you guys. Have a great one. Later.

 

Frank Klesitz:

All right, Greg. I want to hear your thoughts in all this. Break it down for the audience, make this digestible for everyone.

 

Greg Harrelson:

So first of all, I don't know that we asked Brett what percentage of his business was direct mail, but I believe it's a good percentage, but it's not an overwhelming percentage, and there's a real important point here is you take a guy like Brett, he's doing multiple things. We could do a whole conversation with Brett on Zillow. We could do a whole podcast recording on just online leads. We could do a whole call like we just did with direct mail, and there's probably other subjects that we could do.

 

Greg Harrelson:

And so when you're dealing with a guy like Brett who's doing so much business, he's doing multiple things very well. So he goes deep. He's not a dabbler of these things. He's a doer. He's a get it done-er, and so he's going deep and that's what's important. As real estate agents, sometimes we just dabble too much and we don't go deep enough, but he's saying this is what we do. This is how you do the audience. This is the frequency. This is the messaging. This is the envelope. This is how you get the data. This is the call. This is the-

 

Greg Harrelson:

This is how you get the data. This is the call. This is the script for the call. You have to be listing certified to actually even be able to get these leads. That's what I call going deep. And so to me, no matter what agent I'm talking to, no matter what team, what strategies they use, what I'm looking for is how deep do they go within the strategy? Because so many strategies work, and the ones that are failing, it's usually not the strategy that's failing, it's the failing to execute deep that's actually causing the failure. So that's what comes to my mind when we're talking to them.

 

Frank Klesitz:

It's the detail.

 

Greg Harrelson:

The detail.

 

Frank Klesitz:

There's a lot of detail that went into that process. Yes.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Yep. Yes.

 

Greg Harrelson:

One of the things that I would add, and he may be doing it, and I'm going to talk with him about it, when him and I start being accountability partners. And one of the things that I'd add is once you've got all that data and you go to like exact down, you open, get all the telephone numbers and email addresses, then what you can do is you can actually now time it. So he had it timed, right? I'm going to mail. I'm going to receive the mail. I'm going to count three to five days. We're going to call. Well, what he could do is the day that it receives the mail, he could upload that data as a custom audience into Facebook, run a post to that same exact mailing audience, then three to five days make a call. That'd be an extra tap. That would be an extra tap. I'd love to see him do an AB testing on that.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah.

 

Greg Harrelson:

So that would be a four tap. He's got a three tap. That would be adding a fourth tap.

 

Frank Klesitz:

I've always wondered, and then we put it in the title of does the market and where you work like, Oh, this doesn't work in my market type of language.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Oh gosh.

 

Frank Klesitz:

This doesn't work in my-

 

Greg Harrelson:

Oh gosh.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Hang on. This doesn't work in my market. This doesn't work in my market. I remember when I went to San Diego at first, I was very fortunate to live in this nice condo building. And I swear to God, the realtors would send me like, literally they might as well just mail me money. I mean, these mailers had to have cost like five, six, $7 of full color crap. And there was literally a trashcan next to all of the little mailboxes for the condo building. And everyone just took all of their crap and threw it in the trash. I remember posting on Facebook just the whole trash can full of realtor crap. Because they're mailing this building to get the condo business. Right? And this is expensive stuff. Brett, is in an extremely affluent and educated high price point, rich market, right? Wealthy market. And he's not spending these big, expensive mailers. It's a letter. And clearly it's working for him. That's one of my takeaways from this. Is will a simple letter pull in a very affluent market? And the answer is yes.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah. And I would argue that it's not the letter. It's what Brett's doing. Is Brett is doing different.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah he is.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah. So if everyone starts letters, the postcard is going to probably be more effective.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Get the opposite?

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah. Do the opposite because it becomes too much noise and then everyone tunes it out. So if people are tuning out the postcards, because it's so overused, so it makes the letter standout. Now I'm not trying to discredit the letter, I'm trying to say that there's actually probably some deep psychology as to why this is working. This is more than just the letter. This is he's doing different. Different stands out. Different is not noise. Different attracts attention. Similar basically gets tuned out.

 

Frank Klesitz:

To piggyback on that, one of the first things that Brett said is before you go, spend $2,000 on a farm of 2000 homes to send it. I have a buyer letter. He was really big into working your database. Brett's a client of ours, long time, and he publishes videos to stay in touch as well. Then I put his link to his blog on here for you to check out. It's called the Silicon Valley real estate journal. It's really good.

 

Greg Harrelson:

I've seen it.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Silicon Valley real estate journal brought to you by his company. All right? Now, every now and then in addition to sending out some helpful videos, we always recommend you send out like a direct offer email. So just like you send out a letter to a farm, or an area of 2000 homes in Brett's case, they have a buyer. You should round up all the emails you have in your system and send them a kind of a long form, email. It's a difference, like a long kind of well-written email that you have buyers and you can help people sell their home, to get ahold of you. And about four times a year, two or three times a year, I write what I've always liked to call... Actually, I think I did it back on a Real Geek show years ago called the Magical Seller Lead Generation Email, Greg. And if you actually type in magical seller, it's like a Google suggestion.

 

Greg Harrelson:

I think I remember that.

 

Frank Klesitz:

It's a thing.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah. I remember it. I think I remember you doing that years ago.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah. So for those of you that actually stuck around this long in the show, I posted a link here in the chat where you can get it. I'd like to go over with you today and I encourage you, Greg. I'm going to encourage everyone here to copy and paste this, personalize it and email out to your entire database to get some seller leads. How does that sound?

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah.

 

Frank Klesitz:

May I go over it? I'd show it to you. And I'd like to hear your thoughts. So let me pull it up. And feel free to personalize. So here we go. Here's an example message that you can send your database. So you take all your contacts out of Real Geeks. All your buyer leads and even seller leads out of Real Geeks, take all your contacts from your CRM and your Gmail and Outlook, round them all up, scrub them. We don't have time to go into all that, but basically you just basically have everyone that you've known pretty much forever, and you're going to send them an email like this that's all text. Right? Here we go.

 

Frank Klesitz:

So from Greg Harrelson, spring 2021 Myrtle Beach home price update. Clients and friends, I want you to fill in the blanks when they come up, Greg. Okay?

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah.

 

Frank Klesitz:

You're getting this email since I either helped you buy or sell a home here in the greater Myrtle Beach area, you inquired about real estate with us, or you're a friend or family member. Thank you for opening this. I want to let you know the Myrtle Beach real estate market is the most active I've ever seen ever. This isn't a 2008 or '09 bubble. Either loan standards are high, this is true buyer demand. Last year, there were how many active homes for sale about do you know, Greg? I'm going to put you on the spot.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah. I have no clue. No clue.

 

Frank Klesitz:

So here's the deal. You're going to look these things up. [crosstalk 01:13:15].

 

Greg Harrelson:

There's a lot less today. [crosstalk 01:13:19] And there's a lot less now.

 

Frank Klesitz:

And that's crazy, right?

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah.

 

Frank Klesitz:

So I just helped a buyer secure some super ridiculously low rate mortgage. They were 18% in the eighties. So, if you're thinking of selling your Myrtle Beach area home or condo in your case, or property this summer, you're likely to get the highest price ever. Just in the past X number of months, in what County is Myrtle Beach?

 

Greg Harrelson:

Horry.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Horry County? In Horry County, we've seen the average sales price rise... Any idea?

 

Greg Harrelson:

26%

 

Frank Klesitz:

Sounds good. So, you personalize this, right? So with the shortage of homes, I have several buyers willing to pay whatever it takes to get into a bigger home in a desirable location, since so many people are working from home now. My phone rings off the hook. I may be able to arrange an off market sale. So you can skip the strangers walking through your home while still getting full market value at your price. So please call me or reply to this email and let me know if you're thinking of selling your home. You can also check out what your home may be worth on your website. This goes to your home value tool. Real Geeks has a wonderful home value tool. We shared other options out there so you can compare. It'll give you a very accurate idea of what your home would sell for based on the recent home sales of your neighbors.

 

Frank Klesitz:

I paid a lot of money for this tool and it's free to you. You can also search all homes for sale in Myrtle Beach on my website. This is your Real Geek site, Greg. Go search for houses, get the buyer lead, right? Linked to that. So the number one concern I'm hearing from clients, however, is where will I move if I sell? This is kind of an issue that comes up. So I had the exact solution to this problem. Not a lot of people know about it. I have a lender that can likely get you a bridge loan. We talked about this in the show today.

 

Frank Klesitz:

With a few thousand dollars of interest, that'll be well-spent, you can get a cash upfront to buy your next home now without selling your current home first. Yep. It's possible to sell your house after buying now. And again, depends upon your market. Doesn't sound like it's a big thing where at. In some options, you have companies like Knock and Home Light, and even your local lenders will do these, it's just not really known. Because the big challenge is that when your person sells and they go buy a home and there's 26, all cash offers on it... Did you happen to see that CNN article, Greg, that went around?

 

Greg Harrelson:

No.

 

Frank Klesitz:

About someone, had 26 all cash offers like in two hours on someone's house?

 

Greg Harrelson:

Incredible.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Case in point, this way you can make an all cash offer to beat out everyone else, we're subject to give you a mortgage, and skip the hassle time of your closing dates. Yada, yada, yada. Call me. I can explain how it works. You check out my video blog, I'm here to help you sell, I know what buyers are looking for. Sincerely, your name.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Now with the local market data and maybe changes so it's in your voicing, you sending out a personal, helpful, authentic, simple email like that to your whole list. Greg, it's magic.

 

Greg Harrelson:

You're going to get engagement, you're going to be in conversations, and you're likely to generate leads.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah.

 

Greg Harrelson:

That's the reality of it.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Yep.

 

Greg Harrelson:

It really is. [crosstalk 01:16:19].

 

Frank Klesitz:

So what about the seller who needs a home now? Bridge loan. Highest price ever for your home, could be as market will go down later, I don't see that happening here in Honolulu. Well, highest price ever to date.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah.

 

Frank Klesitz:

So maybe add that in there. I apologize. So highest price ever up until to date. And then who writes your letters and sales copy? Well, I do. That's what I do at our firm, but that's something. So you can get that. You can feel free to personalize it, there's knobbed in there for you. But that's probably one of the big skills that Brett didn't cover is if you do direct mail and it's going to be a letter and not like kind of a canned postcard, you actually have to sit down and write it. Right? You can give Greg to like help people with writing?

 

Greg Harrelson:

Well, the challenge is it's kind of like speaking to people. A lot of people just resist it and they don't really know that they're good or not so good, but they just resist it. But to me, you're either going to hire somebody to do it for you, or you're going to do it yourself. Let's just assume you're going to do it yourself. Start collecting all the information that's actually piling up in your mailbox. Actually look at it, study it, ask your friends to give you all the letters, everything that you're getting from other agents and start to just pick and choose things that you're seeing, that you like. You may take a sentence here, a sentence there and kind of rewrite them and make it your personality. But I would say this always make it your personality.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Yeah.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Always think, in the letter that you just shared, you're giving information, you're enlightening them of options. You're kind of educating them. I think the best thing that you can do is make sure that you make it about them. That your writing is about solving their problems, even if they haven't told you what their problems are. So the bridge loan thing is like, we're making an assumption that there are people that have the concern of I can't sell because I need a place to live, but I can't sell because I need the money. Then we're assuming there's a lot of people in that situation, which they are. So we're assuming there's that problem, and then we're going ahead and solving that problem without them telling us. Those are just great strategies for direct mail or email themselves. I should say email or direct mail. It's a great strategy for writing, but don't over complicate it. Don't over-complicate it. I can tell you right now, a decent letter done consistently or email consistently sent will provide a return. It's more consistency than anything else.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Greg, what do you think are some topics? And I want to engage you guys here. So for those of you still hanging out with Frank and Greg overtime, keeping it real. Thanks. All right?q Maybe share a couple of ahas that stood out to you in the chat. We're watching it right here, but also what shows and topics would you guys find of interest? Because we get to book some really cool guests, don't we?

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah. [crosstalk 01:19:30].

 

Frank Klesitz:

We get to ask them whatever we want.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah. There is many topics that can be covered.

 

Frank Klesitz:

So many topics.

 

Greg Harrelson:

[crosstalk 01:19:37] the feedback. I think one point we could talk about community domination and I want to hear what the guests are saying, and go way beyond just the direct mail and the call. Because if anybody's listening, and I know there's a lot of Real Geeks people, because Keeping it Real is of course, sponsored by Real Geeks, [crosstalk 01:19:59] owned by Real Geeks. And so naturally, there'd be a lot of Real Geeks users. If y'all don't have a Real Geeks account, I suggest you get it.

 

Frank Klesitz:

I don't get one.

 

Greg Harrelson:

I don't make one penny, if you do. I don't make any money if you do, but I suggest you do. But the reason I was going to say is because community domination like multi-channel marketing is so critical if you actually really want to dominate an area. And like in my Real Geeks account, let's just say that I have a community that I'm mailing. And then that same community, I'm going to call. Then that same community, I'm going to do a Facebook post to a custom audience, and I'm actually going to be socially. But then what I'm doing is I've got this same list as in my Real Geeks account, getting a market activity report every single month delivered through automation from Real Geeks.

 

Greg Harrelson:

They're also getting a sold report every single month delivered through Real Geeks. So think about this. You got a sold report from Real Geeks, a market activity from Real Geeks, a video newsletter that I'm sending out. That's the third touch. Then we've got a direct mail, fourth touch. Then we've got the call behind the fifth, the direct mail. There's the fifth touch. Then we have the social media custom audience. There's the six touch. Times that by 12. That's 72 touches. And the reality is only one of the touches is not automated.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Like that's community domination, that's going deep, but you do that on a smaller subset of data. You don't do that for your whole market. You pick five, six communities, one community and you go deep on there. Just thought I'd share that.

 

Frank Klesitz:

What do you guys think? Put in the chat, I've got some ideas here, Greg, just as people are hanging out with us. Community domination. I know you won't like this, but there is a market that will have hiring your first ISA, because the agents that call. Right, Greg? [crosstalk 01:22:07]

 

Greg Harrelson:

Well, yeah. I mean, listen. I mean, I don't dislike... I have ISAs, so that's just y'all's fantasy. The reality is, is what you're hearing is, I want it to be clear. The ISA only exists because the agent doesn't do their job. That's the reality. By the way, Zillow exists because the agent doesn't do their job. [crosstalk 01:22:31] So we can do a whole conversation on that if you want. Everybody that you hate exists because we didn't do our job.

 

Frank Klesitz:

I was at the Zillow conference maybe three years ago or so, or three or four years ago, and Spencer Rascoff, the old CEO, was on stage. Half of the people that go to Zillow that we send the names to our paying agents, like these are agents that are paying for premier agents. Half of them never hear from the agent and then they yell at us.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah.

 

Frank Klesitz:

So we've got to do something because it's ruining our brand. Case in point. Right, Greg?

 

Greg Harrelson:

And Frank, I really believe that's the case.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Oh yeah, the CEO, I don't know if it was live, it was full of his customers in there?

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah. I believe it. I really do.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Maybe hiring your first assistant or I really like the idea of me building out your community pages on your real deep site, something like that.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Yeah. That's a big deal, but we ought to do one on ISAs. I think that would be a good one. I think virtual assistants, there's so many people that just don't understand what kind of tasks can you give a virtual assistant? It's not just, so how do you hire them? How do you train them? Sure, we can talk about all that. I mean the video library I have for tutorials to train virtual assistants on every single task, we give them, I have an expansive library on that. So it's not hard to train them, but I think with the confusion with virtual assistants is what can be delegated to them? And we can answer a lot of those questions.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Cool. Well, I appreciate all you guys hanging out. I'm going to let you know if you want to watch the replay. It's right here on this YouTube channel. They'll process and you can watch it here. Go to keepingitreal.com. Watch all the previous shows. You're going to learn so much. All right? We're also on iTunes. You go on to the Real Geeks Facebook page, and of course, check out Real Geeks. Excellent CRM, top notch CRM. Buyer leads that you can show like Brett shared on the call today. Here's the real buyers that I have, do this [crosstalk 01:24:38]

 

Greg Harrelson:

I do that all the time. By the way, I don't do that just for mailer. Before I go on a listing presentation, my agents will go through our database and here's what we search. We can search the community name in Real Geeks. We can search the community name, find the list, print off the list, take it with us.

 

Frank Klesitz:

Go to ZoomGreg.com.

 

Greg Harrelson:

Well, we print it off and go into the presentation and say "Here."

 

Frank Klesitz:

Here's all my buyers.

 

Greg Harrelson:

For your neighborhood, all searched in the last 60 days.

 

Frank Klesitz:

That's great. Yeah. Thanks for watching. So I got nothing else. We'll see you in two weeks and we'll call it a day. Greg, thanks for your time.