How to Scale Your Real Estate Business from $100k to $200k

How to Scale Your Real Estate Business from $100k to $200k

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10 min max read

There’s nothing worse than dropping $5000 on direct mail for your real estate business this month and feeling like you’re throwing money out the window.

Your real estate business brought in over $100,000 in wholesale deals this year but you’re frustrated. All your profits went straight out the door to pay bills for direct mail and Facebook ads.

How are you supposed to keep leads coming in… without having to invest all your profits every month to do it?

How are you supposed to start a real estate investment company that scales without requiring you to work 80 hours per week to keep things running?

People are telling you to invest in direct mail, Facebook ads, skip tracing and cold calling. You’re dabbling with everything, bouncing from one technique to another feeling tired and underpaid. Nobody is telling you the one thing you can do that will take your business from $100k to $200k, if you do it right.

You’re ready to find deals more consistently and keep an extra $100k in your pocket this year. This is the year your real estate business will easily thrive.

When you first started out, you started with driving for dollars. You spent hours driving around looking for houses. Then you had to spend more hours looking up the owner. Once you drove past the same house a few weeks later and noticed someone else bought it and they were renovating it. This could have been a $10k wholesale deal for you, or a $50k fix and flip profit. You looked down at your list of addresses, still sitting on the passenger seat of your car. Realizing you hadn’t got the mail out since you found the house three weeks earlier, you knew it was time for a change.

There is a technique that I’m going to share with you today that puts $10K more into investors pockets each month, and requires you to do nothing more than spending 10 seconds pressing a button on the DealMachine's flipping houses software app. It’s called the 10K for 10 seconds technique. This rock solid system will easily generate 100 leads each month and turn that into $10k in your pocket each month. You don’t have to worry about anything else. Just answer the phone when the seller wants to sell their house. That sounds nice… almost too good to be true. It is possible! Here is the exact way this will help you build a healthy, scalable, and profitable real estate business:

1. Spend 10 seconds when you drive by a run-down property. Turn 10 seconds into $10k in your pocket each month.

We all see properties when we’re driving to the store, the gym, or to dinner. If you don’t have a system in place to quickly capture and follow up with them, you’re leaving them for someone else to profit from. Imagine — you see a vacant property, you take a picture, and your phone tells you who owns it. Without any other work, a postcard arrives in the owner’s mailbox, and she notices her rental property pictured on both sides, so she actually reads the postcard and decides to give you a call.

DealMachine GIF

Once you put a system in place to capture the property addresses and automate outreach, your normal daily activities can become a lead source that pays.

Start your 14 Day Free Trial of DealMachine by clicking here.

2. Invite family, friends, and employees to find properties for you. Find 100 properties per month, and that will scale your real estate business by $10k per month.

With an extra $10k per month, you could really start having fun in your business. No more wondering where your next deal will come from. No more worrying about your bills.

We’ve found that it takes about 100-200 properties in order to find a deal. So spending 10 seconds when you see a vacant or interesting property, that can turn into a deal you can wholesale for a $10k profit every month.

You can easily add 100 properties yourself, and even more with teams. Recently I added 73 houses in 1.5 hours by walking around the Bates-Hendricks neighborhood in Indianapolis. After taking a picture of each property, the DealMachine App instantly looked up the owner’s name and address. I simply pressed a button to send mail to the owner. Once you get this process down, you’ll find a couple deals. A couple wholesale deals can earn you an extra $20k profit.

This has been a reality for DealMachine users who are consistent, like Heath Meadows from Meadcore Investment Properties who earned an extra $20k in a few months. Once you reach this point, you’ll be ready to scale up with a team and train them to automate their workflow using the DealMachine real estate investment software.

With the extra money you’ll be earning, hiring a team member to search for properties could work wonders for you. You’ll be able to free up your time and focus on building more systems. You’ll be able to get out of the day-to-day tasks of your business and focus on making it scale.

Adding team members to your DealMachine App can help you consistently find 100-200 properties per month, or even more.

Here’s the rough math for an average deal:

10 seconds to add a property x 100 properties = 10 minutes = $10k wholesaling profit

Hiring team members can help you add 100+ properties per month easily and consistently. You can also get your friends and neighbors on-board so you can double your profits.

Now let’s say you made friends with your mailman who sees houses every day, and he is adding properties for you. You can also add your landscaping friend, a roofing friend, your Uber driver from last weekend, and your nephew who delivers pizzas. All these people drive by houses every day as part of their jobs. You can give them an opportunity to earn extra money on their normal routes, and all it costs them is 10 seconds when they see a vacant or distressed house that you could buy.

Each team member you hire could be paid $10-15 / hour, or if they have an existing job where they already drive, you could simply pay them a 10% commission for each house they bring you that turns into a deal.

Tracking who sends you each deal is key to making this scale. You will also want to consistently follow up with the leads they send you. The DealMachine app makes it easy for team members to add deals for you. You can add team members through the app and watch the deals flow in. Look in the app to see who sent you each deal and approve each to send out mail.

DealMachine House Screenshot

See Who Added Each Deal – This Deal was Created By Team Member David Lecko

DealMachine Team Member Screenshot

See Which Team Members Contribute Most. This Month David Added 107 Deals and Nick Added 7.

Team members can easily add deals for you during their daily commutes, and the mail sends out with your name on it (while you’re at home, doing whatever you want — like eating a delicious pepperoni pizza from your nephew 😉.

3. Build Trust in 10 Seconds with Automated Follow Up.

For most people who own a house, the house is the most expensive thing they own. They will want to feel comfortable and trust you when they sell you their house. For that reason, starting a new lead source like direct mail or paid ads requires consistency to pay off. Most of the time, the sellers will call after the Nth number of consistent contacts.

Example: I just bought a house for less than $5000. The owner had lived there for 40 years. He had a tarp over the roof, and his electric bill was $450 per month (that’s a lot for a 590 square foot house). The owner recently had hip surgery, and couldn’t keep up with the maintenance to keep his house in good shape or the excess finances to make efficiency upgrades. He was ready for an apartment so he didn’t have to worry about those things.

DealMachine House Screenshot

I took a Picture of This House with DealMachine and The Owner Called Me 4 Months Later Ready to Sell.

With a click of a button, I used the DealMachine App to send the original postcard to him on July 8th. The second postcard went out automatically on August 15th without me even thinking about it. The third postcard on September 7th. I received a call from the owner wanting to sell on November 27th. Visited the property later that day. Submitted an offer on November 29th. The seller accepted on December 2nd, and we signed all paperwork on December 4th.

It takes 7-13+ touches to deliver a qualified sales lead, according to the data and marketing association. I was not the only investor sending mail to his neighborhood. When I asked why he called me, he said because of the postcards I sent to his house over the last few months and the timing of his hip surgery.

Adding a driving for dollars technology makes it easy to consistently reach owners when you use it during your normal, daily commute and activities.

4. Scale your business while keeping more profits.

New investors flock to driving for dollars because it doesn’t cost a lot of money out of your pocket. The cost is your time, the gas in your car, and sending mail. These first two costs are negligible if you’re using real estate lead management technology during your normal driving. The response rates can be as high as 6 calls back for every 50 postcards you send out. Since you’re hand-picking the properties, the list is highly targeted. Combine that with the high response rate and low out-of-pocket cost, it’s not hard to see how your ROI can exceed other lead sources.

Many investors pull the same list of properties to send mail to. In practice, that usually looks like going to listsource.com and selecting your geographic area, then filtering by Absentee Owners, 3 bedrooms + 2 bathroom properties. If you own a rental property, you likely already receive bulk mail from these types of investors. The problem is, a lot of investors use this same list, and there are many, many owners included on this list who show no other signs of motivation to sell.

So, how much can a driving for dollars technology impact your business?

Comparison: Many investors would be very happy to get 1 deal for every 1000 properties they mailed to. That costs about $125 to download a list of 1000 properties. Then an additional $790 each time you mail them. Let’s say you mail them 3 times. That’s $2495 to get one $10k deal, making the ROI 400%. That’d be truly excellent.

Versus: Driving for dollars allows you to compile your own list of properties based on the houses you see that meet your criteria — especially those properties you can clearly see are abandoned or run down — meaning the owner may want to sell. You’ll have less competition reaching this list of unique owners, and because of that, we’ve found it takes about 100-200 properties to find 1 wholesale deal that yields $10k on average, when you’re adding properties consistently. If it costs $1 per mail piece, sending 100-200 properties 3 times each would cost $300-$600. That puts your ROI for each deal in the 16,000%-33,000% range.

Start adding properties during your team’s normal commutes to turn these high ROI deals into a consistent stream of $10k extra per month. Step 1: Download DealMachine. 2: Start your free trial. 3: Start adding deals to DealMachine!

5. Uncover the “hidden” deals you would never find sending bulk mail.

If you or an employee spot a house, you may add the address to your driving for dollars system and forget about it. All you have to do is wait for the owner to call wanting to sell! Now, since you’re already at the house, you can choose to knock on the door and meet the owner face to face. Some neighbors may also be outside. You never know what saying “Hi, I’m looking to buy a house in this neighborhood. Do you know anything about this one?” can lead you to on your next deal.

Example:

Neighbor: “Hey! Why are you taking a picture of that house!?”

You: “I took a picture of it because I’m interested in buying it. Do you know anything about it?”

Neighbor: “Oh! Yes, the owners aren’t great landlords and you should definitely buy it. Also this house down the road has problems with cockroaches. Just so you know in case you want to buy that one. Oh, and that’s my cat! I have 8 more but they’re inside right now.”

This example happened to me. A neighbor was mad at me for taking a picture. Then she found out I was looking to buy a house and she let her guard down. She really told me a lot more info than I bargained for!

6. Personal postcards that bring you endless leads.

Most investors send the same old mail to thousands of houses. If you visit the property, you can take a recent photo of the house and add it to your mailing. Now you’re sending personalized real estate direct mail to a customized list. That puts you in a good position to build more trust faster than someone else.

Which postcard would you rather see?

Average Real Estate Postcard FrontAverage Real Estate Postcard Back

Best Real Estate Business Postcard from DealMachineBest Real Estate Business Postcard from DealMachine Back

Postcards sent by DealMachine feature a color photo of the property on both sides.

Example responses from owners: “I called you because it looks like you put a lot of time into this postcard. You even had a picture of my house on it.”

I have heard this response personally several times.

Implement this one simple app to scale your real estate business $100k-$200k this year.

Think back to dabbling with many different techniques, moving from one thing to another and not knowing which one to focus on. Compare that to waking up and flawlessly executing a simple proven technique. If you’re on a mission to grow with a deadline to meet, spending your time with fewer, more highly targeted leads can grow your real estate business from $100k to $200k this year. The key to scaling is a repeatable system executed consistently. Let DealMachine help you input a house, look up the owner, and send direct mail in as little as 10 seconds. Sign up for your 14 day free trial of DealMachine today.

David Lecko

About David Lecko

David Lecko is the CEO of DealMachine. DealMachine helps real estate investors get more deals for less money with software for lead generation, lead filtering and targeting, marketing and outreach, and acquisitions and dispositions.