Getting Started Marketing in a Virtual Market

Mike DeHaan: [0:01] Welcome to the collecting keys Friday focus. What's going on, guys? This episode of the collecting keys Friday focus, you have me, Mike DeHaan, and I'm going to elaborate on a topic that we discussed on this past Wednesday's Mike and Dan show. And that is diving into some more details about what it takes to get started in a virtual market for real estate investing. So Dan and I, you know, we're not shy about it. We do a lot of virtual wholesaling and virtual investing in a huge number of different markets. I think as of time this recording, we're active in what, 15 or 16 or 18. I don't know. I forget, because we keep bringing them on. We choose our markets mostly based off of partners that we start working within our partnership program. So that kinda helps us, I guess, scale up a little bit, because we don't have to spend a lot of time like pointing at a map, trying to figure out where to go. But people always wanna know sort of like the little nuances of it, how exactly to find a market to go to, and kind of what it looks like to run a virtual off market business, whether you're wholesaling, flipping, buying rentals, it's all kind of the same process. So I just wanna talk about some more details regarding that. So first off, regarding finding the market itself, I am not going to go into too many details because we discussed that heavily in this past Wednesday episode, episode 100. If you did not listen to that, and you wanna know about how to find a virtual market to start investing in, you should go and check out that episode, because talking into we talk about that specifically a lot, Dan provides some insight as well, and there's no point in me kinda repeating the same stuff that we already talked about.

Mike DeHaan: [1:40] So go check out episode 100 if you wanna know more about specifically how to find a virtual market to get started in. Instead, on this, I'm gonna talk about kinda the gotchas and the practice of things that you need to be able to, I guess, figure out when you launch in that market. So I have three main things I'm gonna talk about, and I'll kinda go through those one by one. So first off, when you launch into this market, into these virtual markets, one of the things that people always ask me questions about is, how do you find boots on the ground? How do you find someone that is going to help you do due diligence, and you know, make sure that the properties are actually what the sellers are telling you you are? And a lot of people tend to over complicate this, they tend to have trust issues around other investors, or people that are on the ground there. And if you're going virtual, you kinda can't have that. You have to be willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the different professionals in the area. And so, what we do when we go into these markets and we find someone due diligence, honestly, we start by just posting on a local investor Facebook pages. And we'll just say something as simple as, hey, we have a property that we are looking at, we're curious if someone would be willing to go and go check out the property, get us some photos, and let us know kind of just the general condition, we'd willing to pay someone to do it.

Mike DeHaan: [3:02] So that out there, you know, you don't put the address in the public forum yet, you don't have to sign around, all these different sort of things. But you would be shocked at how many people are willing to go and walk these properties for 50 or $100 or whatever, and just take some photos for you. You know, you can be, it could be another local investor, it can be a realtor, you can find like, just always like a young kid that's kinda lurking around, that's like 18, 19, that's trying to get started, and is more than happy to make a little bit of money, and be involved in the investment process. We've even found in some markets, especially in like really competitive markets in the Midwest, where there's tons of investors, we have gone and tried to get photos, and found people that have built whole businesses around getting photos for wholesalers. And not only do they have a whole business and a system around doing that, but they also have photos of a lot of the houses that you ended up looking at. I'm not even kidding, when we were doing stuff in Dayton, Ohio last year, there was a lady that we connected with, and it was like 50% of the houses, she would be like, oh yeah, I've already walked that one. I walked it earlier this week. Here's all the photos for it. I'll sell them to you for a $100. Like, done.

Mike DeHaan: [4:04] Cool. And this lady was probably making thousands and thousands of photos a week to sell them the same photos to everybody, but it worked out super well for us. In some larger markets, another option can be, you can usually hire a local BPO service, so broker price opinion service. There's been different iterations of that that we have seen all over the country. If you just look up like your market name BPO service, you can usually find a couple to pick from. Those can be hit or miss depending on how they work. We've had some that have been great. We've had some that have been terrible because they don't respond in a timely manner. They take like a couple of weeks, and it's just a nightmare. But that can be something else that you can look into. Regardless of what you pick, the key for this to be successful is that you send them a checklist with what you need for the photos, and the things that you want them to look for, to make sure that you are getting what you need. And also two, you make sure that they are acting as an extension of your company. Right? So, you wanna make sure that they understand your business name, they know who you are, they kinda know some nuances about the transaction, because they should ultimately be building rapport with the seller, like if you had a local acquisitions manager on the ground would be doing. Right?

Mike DeHaan: [5:15] If you just send like a random person there, and they make you and your business look bad for whatever reason, you know, they show up, they're dirty, they swear, they don't have, you know, good body language, whatever, that will cost you the deal. So you wanna make sure that you don't have that person, that you set those expectations. So that's sort of nuance number one of finding someone to do due diligence. One of the second concerns or questions people always have about virtual wholesaling and virtual markets is how to find local buyers. And ultimately, this isn't that different than finding people to help do due diligence. You can sell most properties, even still to this day, in April 2023, by posting them on social media pages in most markets. You don't need to build these big buyers list and have these fancy, you know, email softwares, the Email Blast, and all that sort of stuff. We actually find it's better most of the time to post them on social media feeds, and then start to sell properties that way. It doesn't require a lot of legwork. If you post it and you are not getting a lot of traction, it means your deal either sucks, or you're not posting on the right pages. Because in every market, you will find pages that are very active, you'll find ones that are not, and you'll kinda find everything in between. So you need to make sure this is the right one. So if you're having trouble selling deals, either reanalyze it, or post it on a different page. Another great strategy on top, like, I'd say, but I would even prefer this, is to put in a little bit of legwork, and find who your key buyers are, or the big dog buyers that are flipping, you know, fifty, sixty, 100 properties a year in each of those markets, and to start bringing deals straight to them. This can be a great way as well to start learning valuations for your local market there, your virtual market rather, when you're not entirely sure of the neighborhoods and the different sort of price expectations.

Mike DeHaan: [7:04] As you know, you find the big flipper, you go to them and you say, hey, I'm looking at this deal, what would you pay for it? They say, I'll pay $300. Let's say you wanna wholesale it to them, great. You just go and you get it for less than $300, and now you know that you have some margin on it. And, I mean, you can do a ton of business this way. We've still, even to this day, in a lot of our markets, we build our whole businesses around just getting things for the key buyers. Sure, we leave some money on the table, but it also just makes life easy on the disposition side. And when you're trying to acquire a bunch of properties, having to deal with a whole other headache on the disposition just makes stuff more complicated than it needs to. And usually too, if you have good end buyers, or like you have, you know, one or two key buyers, sorry, you have two or three key buyers, and not just one, you can get them to be paying you an appropriate amount, because they're gonna realize they're competing with each other for your business. So, it's a great way to find local buyers there, social media, or just looking to find that big buyer. And I guess too, in order to find that big buyer, a great way to do it is just to ask. Ask other people, ask title companies, and most people will know who the big dogs are. So, just go by what other people tell you. Alright. And then the last nuance, and this is more of a tip about how you can be more competitive with all the already established companies there.

Mike DeHaan: [8:21] And that is simply to position your brand to, I guess, stand out to that local market. Right? And that can be as simple as having a new page on your website. So let's say you're going to Spokane. Right? That's where I am. You can have your business website slash Spokane, so that people can immediately go, and they can see your company, they can see the Spokane page, can have a specific copy of those sort of things, and honestly, more often than not, if you do it that way. They don't really care if you're a national brand, they just wanna see that you do have a little bit of a local presence. That's what we do in all of our markets. We just have a slash page that works out great. You have a like, I guess, alternatively, if you have a brand name that is something super specific, so let's say that you are Snowy Mountain Homebuyers, and you decide you're gonna go start marketing in Miami, that's gonna be kind of a weird thing. Right? They're like, why is Snowy Mountain Homebuyers trying to buy a property in Miami? On those ones, you might wanna do a rebrand. But make it simple, just stand up a Carrot page, you know, get a new logo on Fiverr, do it really quick and easy, and then just set up a Google My Business for that entity, so that people can find you.

Mike DeHaan: [9:31] Right? So many of these virtual companies, they have either these huge national presences, which kinda turns off people, or even worse, they have nothing at all. And if you just take a little bit of time and money to set up a local brand, it will really, really help you stand out amongst all the people that are doing none of that. You still gotta compete with the other people that are actually local, but this will at least give you a fighting chance. So that's something else to do there. But, yeah. Anyways, in terms of marketing in these virtual markets, there's nothing else that's crazy. We do the same stuff that we do in every other market. We do SMS. We do direct mail. Those are our core things. And then we do online retargeting. That's the bulk of what we do. We don't do a lot of cold calling. We only do cold calling when we're kinda filling gap time for our staff. There isn't anything too crazy about the copy that we run, about the kind of mail that we run. It's all basic stuff you can hear us talk about in all the different content that we produce, and just comes down to consistency over time, and having a really strong sales and follow-up process. That's really where the opportunity comes from at the end of it. So anyways, guys, that is our, you know, some tips and tricks about launching any virtual market. Again, if you wanna know about finding the market itself, go listen to this past Wednesday's episode, episode 100, and we kinda go into a lot of details regarding the specific market on that episode.

Mike DeHaan: [10:47] But, yeah, if you find this helpful, I would love if you would let me know. Go ahead and hit me up on Instagram at Mike underscore invest. Just say like, hey, your virtual market tips are awesome. Virtual market tick tips suck. These are better. I wanna hear the good and the bad. I just love to engage with people. So go ahead and shoot me a follow, and send me a DM at Mike underscore invest. Besides this, you should share this with anyone who might find it interesting. The easiest way for us to grow the show is for you to share it with all of your friends. If you share it with five people, they all share it with five people. That's 25 people right there. That will go grow pretty dang quick if you guys all did that. So I'd appreciate it if you did. And then besides that, you guys can just check out some merch at store.collectingkeyspodcast.com. Got some shirts and some different stuff up there. And I have this awesome vision of one day having a conference or a get together or a meetup or barbecue or something, And people can show up and everyone will be wearing Collecting Keys swag. And I think that would just be the coolest thing ever. And we do spend some time putting that stuff together. You know, we do have nice shirts.

Mike DeHaan: [11:46] We're not making any money off those things like our margins literally zero. I just want our name and our brand to be out there. So go to store.collectingkeyspodcast.com to check that out. Anyways, guys, thanks so much for listening. I appreciate you all, and I'll talk to you next week. Thanks for listening to this collecting keys Friday focus. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts.