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Podcast Transcription
Dave Dubeau [00:00:09] Everyone, I’m Dave Dubeau here with another episode of the property Profits Real Estate podcast today zooming in. Tyler Austin Tyler is a very accomplished real estate entrepreneur, and he’s in the military. He’s an Air Force guy and he’s done some amazing things with real estate. But what really, really piqued my curiosity about interviewing Tyler here today is that he’s not only a real estate guy, but he’s a tech guy, and he understands software, and he understands automating things and how this can help us with growing our portfolio. So, Tyler, welcome to the podcast.
Tyler Austin [00:00:48] Dave, man, I really appreciate you having me on, I’m excited.
Dave Dubeau [00:00:50] My pleasure. All right. Let’s dove into this, Tyler. What has what has technology really helped you to accomplish with your real estate investing career and path?
Tyler Austin [00:01:02] Man, a lot, but mainly time right time buyback is probably first and foremost one of the most important things about technology is his time buyback. One of the most dangerous things about technology is the ability to overspend on that buyback drastically. You see that a lot in the CRM space, people buying things that they really don’t need. But second, to
Dave Dubeau [00:01:24] take time off for them without being a good example, they’re dead.
Tyler Austin [00:01:28] Yeah, but besides buying back time, buying back money. So what I mean by that is, you know, I told someone earlier today they’re like, What is RSS in general? Is it the stuff that you do like? Well? Think of it like the coupon for your business, because technology should be just like hiring an employee. You should be paying somebody to make you more money, right? Someone’s time is equivalent to a value for your business. A lot of people don’t get it created equal. They spend X amount of dollars per employee every year, and that employee does not generate more than what they’re being paid. And that’s a dangerous slope to be in, and they and people do that all the time with their software.
Dave Dubeau [00:02:09] All right, very good. So tell me a little bit about the software that you have developed, because I think that’s your main thing these days, right? You’ve got you’ve got your portfolio, but you’ve also developed some software that is very helpful for us real estate entrepreneurs.
Tyler Austin [00:02:26] Yeah. So in 2018, you know, when I started kind of delving into there, I was really 2017, I’d started delving into the wholesaling space and building business and real estate. And in 2019 is when Ari ISOF was created because of the fact that I was getting tired of buying data and not being as efficient as it could be. When it comes to when I buy data, I’m spending money to get data or I’m getting it from free from the county. And then I spend money to get numbers and then I spend money is in direct mail and I’ve seen the money going out. Of course, I was making money coming back, but I see there was this phantom metric of money being wasted. And I was like, You know, I see a lot of people talking about becoming these seven figure companies, you know, over and over and over. I want to be a seven figure company. Mike, well, I want to be free. All right. That’s what I want. I want freedom.
Dave Dubeau [00:03:14] The bottom line? What matters?
Tyler Austin [00:03:16] Yeah. You know, big with Jim Ryan. He talks about happiness being essentially a source of revenue that you pull from like a bank account, memories, happiness. You pull from it and then you allow it to bring you in the moment and. And all I ever felt like that wasn’t, you know, like for me, that wasn’t the true. So I wanted to make the money that I was wasting turn into more opportunity. So I created all I have to kind of pull apart the data and put me to where I’m spending my marketing dollars, where it matters. And then the data that that is incomplete or dirty, or I shouldn’t be marketing to you because it would cause a negative effect in my marketing dollars. I clean up and I get it better. I spend a little bit of extra time and then it funnels back into my marketing. And that was the very first, you know, iteration of that. And everything since then has been, you know, making it more efficient. Like if you have 10 phone numbers and only one of them is probably correct, what are you doing with the other nine? Are you? If you’re doing cold calling in smarts, are you hitting wrong numbers in both locations when you learn when you called them, it was wrong number and then two days later, you smashed the wrong number. That’s a waste of point zero one three or whatever that you’re paying for separate or SMS. But a lot of people don’t think about that in the real estate space because, you know, all they think about is how much do I have to send out to get a contract to get revenue? For me, it’s like, Wow, I want to know how to produce more prospects to leads. But more importantly, more leads to revenue, not contracts. And the only way that I could figure out how to do that was to build a streamlined process that saving me as much money as possible and being able to leverage that insight to not have to produce over seven figures in gross to make 400 in net profit or whatever the scenario is, but to produce maybe six hundred and gross and still have 400 in that profit.
Dave Dubeau [00:05:09] OK, so Tyler, why don’t you? And that’s really simplify this if it’s okay with you and walk me through not yourself, but a non techie real estate entrepreneur, let’s say they’re getting started in the wholesale space. They took a course, you took some training, whatever the hell that looks like. What does life look like for that person to try and generate leads and deals? How are they going about doing that? You did that it that way and then initially, but now show people how it can look. If you’ve got a building process like you are
Tyler Austin [00:05:47] cool and they simplify it, really great. In fact, we have a podcast called The Real Estate Dojo that I literally just did. This was why it’s fresh in my memory. So let’s just say you’re brand new to real estate, OK, what you want to do is you want to you want to get some free data, OK, you’re going to get it from the county tax selling. Well, this was the first one. I’m going to tell you to go after it, right?
Dave Dubeau [00:06:06] So again, let’s really dump it down even further, even further data of what? What are we getting data? In order to do what is this data for,
Tyler Austin [00:06:16] so this data is so that we have a homeowner that is at least two years behind in their taxes. So it shows a sign that they don’t have money to potentially pay for it and they might get their house taken away from them. And it’s going to include typically their property address, the place where they received their mail. That’s another misconception just to throw that in their mailing address. Does that mean where they live? That means where they receive mail. So it’s called a mailing address and then their first and last name, or if it’s a company, no show the company name or the trust that might be under. OK, so that’s the data we call the typically the county tax assessor’s office to receive this list. They send it back to us, and typically it’s a little messed up. We want to get it cleaned up and get to where we have a first name and last name, and we have a full mailing address and property address separated by columns. All right. And then we take that data and I’m going to use our ISOF as an example here, and we uploaded to something like RPI, Swift or any other product that might do this verbally, my product, but nevertheless upload it and it runs it through the United States Postal Service. What’s called address normalization, which means that that address is going to be how the USPS would actually run it through their system to send it to a home. The reason this is important because every other software uses this as a baseline, you want a baseline that data. OK. Then when we do that, we’re checking for vacancy. So the next step you’re going to do to put yourself in the highest position for success. So I’m going to click on the vacant filter and you’re going to look at the vacant, let’s say you have a thousand tax lingual properties and now you could choose vacant and narrows it down to only 200 properties. OK. What are you going to do at this point? Going to select those records and you? You’re going to skip trace them. You can do that in ISOF, or you can export them in scripture or some elsewhere and then upload them whatever.
Dave Dubeau [00:08:02] OK. So remind people that skip tracing is a good idea.
Tyler Austin [00:08:06] Skip tracing is the ability to send out a mailing address in a name, first name and last name, preferably. And the reason why mailing address is important is because think about whenever you’re applying for a credit card, you don’t put a property address that might be a rental you put where you receive mail, right? Because the mail, you know they want to send you, you’re at your bill, right? So you want to skip trace the mailing address. You don’t want to send property addresses unless you don’t have a mailing address is going to get you a good result, a potential result using the property address. But it’s going to send out a mailing address and it’s going to run it through the credit bureau. It’s going to say, Hey, yeah, we see this person that this mailing address and it matches the name. Here’s their contact information. You give back the contact information. It’s not all created equal, it’s not perfect. But that’s why it’s most important to understand who you’re not reaching, not who you are reaching, so that we can choose a different marketing strategy to be able to reach out to them. And I’ll cover that really briefly. So we get back phone numbers for this individual. And rather than think about, I got to get a predictive dialer, which essentially like a bulk dial or dial a bunch of phone numbers or this, that or the other, we can simplify this really easily. I prefer air call for my dial system. I click the call. We have a direct integration with them, and you’re going to filter by those records that you skip trace. You’re going to say Skip, Trace. Yes, I mean that you got phone numbers, back numbers. Yes. And now let’s just say that’s one hundred and eighty properties that you got phone numbers back for 20 of them, you did not those 20. We’re going to select those records and just send it a direct mail letter and you can use RSA for that. So now those direct mail boom that way, because we didn’t get phone numbers, we still want to reach out to those people. They might need our help. The other 180, we’re just going to do a minimum of 50 prospects a day, 50 individuals. We’re going to open that record. One user call, click the phone number. We’re com, they’re going to pick up. It’s either going to be the owner, it’s not going to be the owner or it could be a dead phone number. There’s four scenarios here, correct? No wrong number, a dead number. Or do not ever call me again. OK. When you pick up, you’re going to ask them if they want to sell their property might be interested in receiving an offer. They say, Don’t ever call me again. It’s really simple as a tag that phone numbers don’t ever call me again. Move on to the next one. Call the next number. Yeah, I might be interested in selling that property like, OK, so you know, I know this is the owner, so I’m going to tag that phone number as correct number, and I might change the status of that record to a lead. I just generating my very first lead very simply, and I move on to the next one and we just build a process around that. And we track through that timeframe how many prospects that we call, how many numbers did we call, what numbers were correct number, wrong number and how many it was. And we start building what we call key performance indicator. So after a week of calling 50 prospects a day, five days, you know, out of the week, maybe two weeks, we start seeing a pattern here, OK? After 100 prospects, I dial 300 phone numbers. It ends up being, let’s say, 50 correct numbers. And I’ve made and had three people that were interested in selling and one offer, right? We start building that KPI and we start building predictability in our business in a very cost effective, cheap way. And since we’re. Record by record really easily. We started learning and seeing like, oh hey, I call it through all those phone number, they’re all wrong or dead. I’m going to go ahead and send that a direct mail. I’m a switch. The status of that record as send for prospecting is what we call. And that essentially means when I start researching the siblings and the family members because, you know, obviously I didn’t reach that person here. So we’re going to go out and do that. And essentially, we’re doing what we call sequential marketing or calling through the numbers. If we don’t reach them, we’re sending out that direct mail piece while we go out and we start finding other numbers from other siblings. Once we find those numbers, we call those. If it’s a mobile number, we send it a quick, single text message and we just do that over and over and over and over. And we start building up a pile of, you know, direct mails we’re sending every month and records were processing. And we’re always targeting the highest value individuals, high value prospects because we’re focused on people that are delinquent on their taxes and they’re also vacant. Maybe they’re out of state and you just do that process and get really good at it with one type of data set. And now we’re just going to start in taking even more pieces of data like divorce data. People with equity foreclosure data. And we start bringing that all together and pushing it together and finding people that are tax delinquent. Divorce, they live out of state and oh, they’re in probate because they’re after they got divorced. Maybe someone passed away. Like, That’s a problem. That’s something I can solve. And we got to focus on those people and then start expanding out from there.
Dave Dubeau [00:12:44] That’s a fascinating idea. Hold that thought for a second. Hi, there, this is Dave Dubeau, and real estate investors hire me to raise capital the right way. Why? Because most of them are stuck with two pot small of a portfolio, and they don’t know how to attract investors and raise money for their deals. So I help them to connect, capture and close their ideal money partners. Bottom line when you’ve got a deal, you’re going to have the capital to do it, so go ahead and book a no cost capital clarity session with me at Booker Chat with Dave dot com. Again, that’s book I chat with Dave dot com. Very, very cool. All right. Well, yeah, I mean, what this shows me is to get to that level of success. You have to become quite sophisticated with the way that you’re doing your marketing. So, I mean, back in the day before all this, this data was so readily available. It was it was about sending a crap ton of letters and all this kind of stuff. And I’m sure there’s still some gurus out there suggesting this. One question that kind of comes to my mind is like, it sounds like you have to be in a pretty robust sized market for this to make sense. Like what? What population area? What would be like the minimum population base you’re going out in order to be able generate a decent business?
Tyler Austin [00:14:07] That’s a great question. Believe it or not, you don’t need very much at all. We have users and under 100000 pop that make a large sum of revenue, while one is even in an 85000 pop that is a seven figure flipper. And it’s because everybody needs a place to stay no matter what the population is. Properties are always being bought and sold. And as long as you always focus on the most efficient way as possible, you can make it really predictable and you can make sure that you’re not spending a ton of money to find that answer out. Now, if you aren’t a larger population, you know, it definitely means there’s going to be more opportunity for the data side. But my population is only 200000 for me, and we do pretty well in the real estate side, you know, and it’s never hindered us. In fact, there is multiple. I mean, I can count five off the top, my head that are seven figure companies that that are in my little market and we’ve never once stepped on each other’s toes. So I think a lot of it has to do with like the way that you approach it and what you’re actually buying or not buying the units into, you know, finding land for developers you can niche into, you know, flipping you can niche into foreclosure only. I mean, everywhere has something and I don’t necessarily think I mean, my first two hundred and fifty thousand in revenue came from twelve hundred prospects. It wasn’t a lot of data. I just focused on records that had tax delinquency and were owned for more than 15 years. So I assume they had equity. And I just went after those and, you know, that worked really efficiently. I went from spending thousand dollars in direct mail to focusing in on that little, small data set and calling them leaving a voicemail. If I didn’t get them, I sent a direct mail this same process I just mentioned out. I’ve just refined it and made it easier for people now. And in that first quarter, two hundred and fifty grand later I was like, Holy crap, like this works. You know, I went that
Dave Dubeau [00:15:59] because it makes a lot of sense because you go on, really set a goal and wide like most people are accustomed to your one very, very narrow, but very deep and a much more personal outreach instead of just. Sending out a zillion letters or postcards, and ultimately, that’s
Tyler Austin [00:16:17] exactly and you are just I still believe in doing a wide approach, I just believe in still doing the niche approach because if you do both of those and enables you to get ahead of the ones that you know you need to be reaching rather than just assuming. So I talk about like three layers of your data. You have like the top layer, which is like your whole county, for example, you have the middle layer, which is all the people that are divorce and like they’re stacked data, they’re on tax delinquency and they’re vacant or something like that at this layer. And then you have the very bottom layer, which is the people that are kind of, you know, in the nooks and crannies of the city in the corner that that are really kind of hoping somebody like opens the door to them. And it’s just kind of like, you’re marketing to those. And then as you get a budget, you start marketing to other ones. But you never forget the core principles of making sure you’re doing all the right habits of updating the data. You knowing who you’re not reaching, doing the proper sequential marketing and making sure that you call them. And if you don’t reach them over phone after a period of time, we then smash them if you’re doing that. But more importantly, that I’m still a huge proponent of direct mail is the gift that keeps giving. I’ve closed deals after 14 months of never sending someone a postcard, but they picked up my postcard because there already. It sits there. It’s tangible just like anything. Anything that’s tangible gets results, and the skill set is trying to make sure that you retain as much money in your marketing as possible by not sending aimlessly your direct mail and hoping something happens because your budget is really expensive at that point.
Dave Dubeau [00:17:44] Oh, definitely. Well, this is awesome stuff, Tyler. Just before we wrap up. Who do you find are the kinds of real estate investors who are using your programs so you talk about wholesaling talked a little bit about flippers? Who else can make really good use of this system?
Tyler Austin [00:18:02] To be honest with you, it’s anybody that is looking to reach a homeowner. We have
Dave Dubeau [00:18:07] so single-family homes is what we’re really focused
Tyler Austin [00:18:09] on or multifamily. Anybody, I guess direct to property marketing is kind of a good way to say we have appraisers that use our product. Any time that you’re dealing with a property address, as you know your product and you’re trying to get in front of them, you can use REIT stuff to do that. And the more information you have about that individual, such as age of roofs or things like this, the more efficient it is to filter down the find that perfect prospect to marketing spend dollars on. But we have brokerages, too, but most of our user base is more heavy, direct to customer like marketing of direct, a home of our own or marketing, which in most cases direct to home order. Marketing is heavier in the real estate agent wholesaler space than it is like the flipper space because the flippers are buying from the MLS or they’re buying from wholesalers. So especially in the last six months, we’ve seen a huge increase in the amount of flippers coming to product because they’re not getting deals from wholesalers anymore, because a lot of wholesalers now are just, you know, flipping their own deals and doing a multi-tiered structure on their offers to be able to capitalize on most of the deal instead of giving it away.
Dave Dubeau [00:19:20] Yeah. Makes sense. Awesome stuff out there. If people want to find out more about you and the program or what you’re up to, or should they do?
Tyler Austin [00:19:28] Yeah. So the best place to contact me is through Instagram. Tyler Austin Original. If you’re going to message me, I prefer voice messages like more one on one more personal. And then we have a Facebook group, Aria Search Mastermind Community. If you want to, you know, be in that kind of environment of people who are really interested in this kind of concept. And if you’re looking to kind of, get a taste of like the marketing and educational side of how this works. We do have a challenge that thousands of investors have been through and really help them refine back their marketing and get focused. And that’s called the Auto Legion Challenge, which you can get to through leads to millions dot com or Auto Legion Challenge dot com, or quite simply, search Aria if go to our website and go under the resources section.
Dave Dubeau [00:20:13] Nice. Nice. Carolyn, it’s been great. Thank you very much.
Tyler Austin [00:20:17] Hey, thank you. Dave, I appreciate you having me on.
Dave Dubeau [00:20:20] Our pleasure already, Ray. Take care and we’ll see you on the next episode. Well, hey there. Thanks for tuning into the property Profits podcast if you’d like this episode. That’s great. Please go ahead and subscribe on iTunes. Give us a good review. That’d be awesome. I appreciate that. And if you’re looking to attract investors and raise capital for your deals, then we invite you to get a complimentary copy of my newest book right back there. There it is the money partner formula. You got a PDF version, an investor attraction book dot com again. Investor attraction, book dot com. Take care.