#305 Mail-Right Show The True Power of Seeing Your Numbers

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The True Power of Seeing Your Numbers With Special Guest Jack Tompkins of PineApple

Jonathan Denwood: Well I think, I think this is really fascinating. And one of the reasons why I asked Jack to come on is that one of the strongest areas of companies like Redfin or Zillow, and they’ve got weaknesses, their weaknesses are when a company gets to a certain size, it becomes very bureaucratic. It goes with the territory and people, at least you worked for a large company. You don’t realize how much slowness, endless meetings. And endless bullshit is involved in a company that gets to a certain size. And that’s why small companies can really outperform much larger companies with much larger budgets, but one area where Redfin and Zillow and some of this other wholesaler kind of quasar real estate companies, whatever they are planning to become, is they got access to data and a lot of data and they know how to use data to benefit themselves. And I think it’s an area in which a lot of real estate agents, those that are in small power teams, boutique brokerages, tend to underestimate the power of data. That’s my little commentary on that. Robert, what do you think?

Robert Newman: I mean, I don’t, I mean, John c’mon, you just, handed me a hot potato. I could take, I could take a full year of every single show that we do and do nothing, but talk about data and feel like I still hadn’t covered everything. Seriously we could have 10 shows on just me looking at the various types of traffic, how long people stay on each social platform, how they’re engaging, what kind of content they’re engaging with. And, and I would still probably have something left to say at the end of our show series. But, let’s, let’s go back over to Jack, Jack. I have a question for you. So, Jack, I’m a real estate agent and full transparency for our audience. And if you, and I’m going to ask if, if you think you answer this question, I will be the first thing that I do.

So I’m going to ask you if you think you can give some good advice in terms of what kind of data you to analyze when somebody was buying or selling a home. Now, if you feel like that, you’re not, because you haven’t done a ton of that kind of data analysis, is that correct?

Jack Tomkins: That is correct.

Robert Newman: Okay. But do you think that you could advise somebody with a degree of expertise on that subject?

Jack Tomkins: Yeah. So the beautiful thing about, analytics to an extent is if you have somebody like me, who is an absolute nerd and will live in Excel all day or Google sheets or whatever, and you have somebody who knows the industry, it works out really well. So I’ve had conversations again, haven’t really done the work, but had conversations around different growing areas, kind of like on the commercial side that we were just talking about other commercial examples. We were just talking about, the hot areas of town, whether it’s zip code streets or anything like that, is the population growing? Things like that are businesses forming there as well? So there, there is a whole lot of data that goes into it. And like I said, I’m, I’m no real estate expert by any means, but with somebody who has the idea, I’m sure that we could find the data and I could definitely make sense out of it.

Robert Newman: Awesome. So, so I’m going to interpret what you said. Okay. Let’s say that I’m a real estate investor. All right. Because I don’t know that I feel like the average consumer-based real estate agent would be able to conceptualize how they use that. I do however really easily think that a real estate investor, which there are a few that listen to our show, would be able to understand what the value would be of you being able to say, look at, Los Angeles. And look at them, let’s say that we’re looking at a radius of 80 miles circle around LA proper that’s downtown Los Angeles is the center of that research. And let’s just say that we wanted to say, I want to find the best medium price with the fastest growing population, with the least amount of people moving out of the neighborhood with decent business growth, excellent amenities, and a low crime rate. Would you be able to do that analysis?

Jack Tomkins: Absolutely. Yep.

Robert Newman: Okay. So that’s how somebody would, in my opinion, leverage a data analysis skillset. Right. Let’s just say, I don’t want to do that myself. I can. Maybe let’s just pretend that I could do that myself, but would you, as part of your analysis for somebody, would you put everything into a spreadsheet so that they could see what the data points were that you looked at or in the first place?

Jack Tomkins: Yeah. So now we’re getting to my sweet spot and I appreciate you framing it this way. Once the data is all in there, I love making it pretty more or less making it very visual, making it easy to understand. So they would pull out a few of those KPIs or key performance indicators that you just mentioned. Put them into a dashboard. We put some trends on there. We’d make it a very, very visual thing. So the investor, they’re probably fairly number savvy and fairly data-savvy to an extent, but doing the work is a whole nother story. Once it’s the individual dashboard, everybody from the top investor to whoever else works with the company, somebody, who’s nephew, who’s just doing the books or just running the counter or something like that. They can understand their overall picture with the dashboard.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. I think this is really interesting. What comes to mind was that I was watching a YouTube channel where the end, I won’t name the individual. Cause I keep asking him to come on the show and he won’t respond to my email. But, he was doing an analysis of what, in these very turbulent, difficult to judge times where would be good places to consider, to buy property in the US and what do the figures suggest would be areas where you might be wise at the present moment not to buy property in the US and it was fascinating when he looked at the historical data and the data that’s freely available. And what comes to mind being I’m English so negative aren’t I listeners and viewers. Is The two areas, one broad or one Pacific, where you really shouldn’t be looking at buying, retail or any type of property is the south of the US the Florida Carolina, Georgia, because the market there to say it’s hot would be an understatement.

And the other thing you would have for certain areas of California, and they are, I’m just going by my memory of the maps that he was producing from the data. Yes, definitely. certain parts of California, but they weren’t red zones. What was the rate zone was Boise. Boise was the area where you shouldn’t be buying any property because all the data factors that he was using showed that if you bought the property in Boise, as an investment at the present moment you are really exposing yourself to some considerable risk factors,.

Robert Newman: And with that ladies and gentlemen, I’m pretty sure that we have to go to our break. When we come back, we’ll be talking a little bit more about data with Jack Tomkins states.

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Robert Newman: Welcome back Ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 305. We are having a fascinating conversation with our guest, Jack Tompkins, Jack Tompkins is a data analysis specialist. I believe did you reach out to him or did he reach out to us?

Jonathan Denwood: He reached out to us.

Robert Newman: Okay. So I believe that Jack actually reached out to us and asked us to be on the show we said that, we said, okay, and what we’re talking about is we’re talking about how we might apply data to the real estate business. Now we’ve talked a lot about properties. Now, I’m going to take a leap or a gainer here, because this is definitely outside Jack’s, previous experience. But it seems as if correct me, if I’m wrong here, Jack, that if anybody approached you with a data consultation request, you’d probably feel comfortable and confident in doing that request Is that correct? Or am I-

Jack Tomkins: That is absolutely correct? Yes.

Robert Newman: Okay. So one of those things that somebody could do, and I’m asking a question is let’s just say that I am a real estate agent with a lead generation operation, and I’m getting a ton, like, let’s call it one or 200 registrations on a website that is like name, email, address, telephone number so on and so forth. Could you take that list of people and research where they had, where the lead had originated? Let’s say you’re given sort of the like all the core data to the clients like marketing operations. Like, let’s say they have three websites, but you can separate out where those leads come from. What part of the country was most prevalent to those people calling that, that real estate agent, and maybe even, figuring out which one of those lead sources had been producing actual deals. If you had access to their MLS and could see where their sales were coming from, is that all correct? Or am I incorrect with that?

Jack Tomkins: Yeah, That is absolutely all correct. I’ve done very similar things for non-real estate clients, but, you said mentioning like the form filling out again, Amy email, all that stuff. Google Analytics is a super great tool that has a lot of that stuff. You can go in there and I’ve used Google analytics, all over the place, and a bunch of different industries. So all that data real estate specific or not is totally doable, easy to get into a nice web-based dashboard.

Robert Newman: Gotcha. And then what you could do is you could separate it out into data points so that somebody else could, could then look at what you call KPIs, which is key performance indicators. And you could essentially at that point for the client would have a better understanding of what key point indicators a data specialist was looking at. Am I, again I don’t want to steer you down a path. Is that basically true or not true?

Jonathan Denwood: You never stop putting me down that path.

Robert Newman: I know you better. I’m trying not to get you any more complaints from our guests on my questioning style.

Jack Tomkins: Very well phrased Robert can definitely help with all that stuff. it comes down to things like in its simplest form, what’s working and what’s not working. So whether it’s different leads, different lead sources, marketing SEO, email campaigns, all that stuff, geography component as well, where are they actually coming from? And leads are converting and things like that. Totally doable love getting into that kind of data.

Robert Newman: Gotcha. All right. So having said all of that guys, ladies and gentlemen, boys, and girls, this is a guest that’s very similar to another guest that we had on the show. I’m going to say three or four months ago, what was his name? Christopher [Inaudible19:33 ] right. I’m getting that right. who was an actual performing COO of a major real estate team? Okay. That’s essentially what Chris did and does. And by the way, for all of those real estate brokers and small teams and people that have are outside of the phase of getting started in real estate and are in the middle of their career, or are already somewhat successful. This guy is probably the guy that can make you more money than almost all of the lead people that we have come on the show. Because past the point where you’re getting 100 leads of 200 leads or 300 leads a month, it’s no longer as important to get more leads.

What’s important is for you to understand beyond a shadow of a doubt, which of those lead sources is generating you the highest ROI. In other words, what did you spend for the lead versus how many of those leads did you sell versus how much did you make off the lead? And then it’s because that becomes the question that should then dictate where the rest of your marketing budget would go. Would you agree or not agree? And you’re nodding. So I’m assuming you’re going to agree, but these people are listening. So they can’t see me nodding. So like

Jack Tomkins: For the listeners, i have been Vigorously my head back and forth during that entire thing. absolutely that, it’s a really good point of great. We’ve got a whole bunch of leads and we’re getting conversions from it. We don’t know what’s the best source though. And that tells the full story there.

Jonathan Denwood: Just to put it in language. If you don’t know all these terms is that if you’re selling a widget for 20 bucks, but it’s costing you $30 to get somebody to buy it, you’re making a $10 loss. You can’t keep making $10, It’s fine if you’re selling 20 widgets, you probably won’t make a big difference. But if you start selling a hundred to 300 or400 widgets 1000 widgets and every widget, you’re losing 10 bucks, you can go bankrupt real quick. And that’s what happens if you don’t have a really good, it doesn’t really matter the beginning. But as the volume increases with digital marketing and using paid marketing, it can soon lead to problems, would you agree with that, Robert?

Robert Newman: Yes. Jack, I heard you take a breath. Go ahead.

Jonathan Denwood: I din’t know you were going to call it Robert, but I, I totally agree. there’s, there’s a big, obviously like the cost of acquisition. So how much does it take to actually get a client from all these different marketing things totally plays into kind of the marketing version of what you’re just talking about John, much like ROI too. How much time are you spending on it? Because your time is worth something. It’s got to factor that into. So a whole lot of fun math behind the scenes there, but it gets to that let’s figure out what’s working, what’s not working. And also can we do more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff.

Robert Newman: So I’m going to say that, I’m really grateful that, John decided to accept you coming onto the show, Jack, and the reason I’m so grateful isn’t specifically because of you, but I do want to touch on something for our audience. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that badly. I just meant like, I just meant that, that we hear in what we do in this world called real estate real estate is so overheated right now I have no language for it. I haven’t seen it be this overheated since 2006 and 2007. It is actually ridiculous. It’s it’s not funny.

Jonathan Denwood: I actually think it’s worse. Would you agree with that?

Robert Newman: In some ways, it is because even then in that market where the overheated part was coming in, was the, was the mortgage section of the business. So unqualified people were buying too many properties, which meant real estate agents were busy. This is different. We’re not seeing all those bad loans being written, but what we’re seeing is 35 qualified people trying to buy the same property. And if you don’t have cash and aren’t willing to offer 20, 30%above this you’re not getting the property, which is frustrating for the buyers. For the 34 people that can’t get their offer accepted for the real estate agents, all of the 34 real estate agents that are rep repping those buyers on a commission-only basis and are not making any commission even though they had a qualified buyer and man who had money to buy a home, but could not get the home that they wanted.

So now that same real estate agent is having to work, go do two or three or four of these processes before their buyer finally gets their home. This means that for the average real estate agent, and they’re literally working four to five times as hard for each transaction that they’re making. So I say this, and I want to encompass this all into a concept for everybody listening to the show. Many of you have been doing business with Zillow or doing direct mail or doing some kind of marketing that has been the same kind of marketing for 5, 10, 15 or 20 years. And you are assuming that this marketing is working for you. All of you. I know you are, I’m looking at you. Yes, you and those assumptions in this particular kind of marketplace might very well be bad assumptions. So how do you check it?

How do you make sure that you’re not actually losing money? That marketing, that used to be working for you is not working for you anymore, and you just don’t know it, or you spent $12,000 more on it than you’ve actually made from it. How do you know? Are you going to pour over spreadsheets and get into it for 20 or 30 hours? My guess is for most active real estate agents, especially in today’s market, the answer is going to be hell no. This is where a guy like Jack would come in. I am guessing that I don’t know what his rates are. I haven’t even ligated, they’re not really posted on the site, but most likely it’s not more than a couple of thousand dollars and that money, like let’s just say over 10 years you spend $12,000 a year on the same marketing source. That’s $120,000 over the 10 years that you’ve been doing that marketing, having somebody like Jack analyze what you’ve been doing over that 10 year period. And how does it compare to today, which might cost you a couple of grand could very well save you 10, 20, 30, $40,000 in the long run.

This is why data analysis is so important. This is why I believe in it above all other aspects of marketing. And it’s one of the things that we talked about, the least on the show. It is really, really important. Am I correct? In everything I said, is this the kind of analysis that you could do if, if the job was given to you, did I rampantly undersell or oversell your services in terms of pricing,

Jack Tomkins: You hit it perfectly on the head. I think that is very, very well done. Thank you very much for that, Robert.

Robert Newman: Perfect. we are coming up on the end of our time here together. And, I just want to tell you how much I appreciate you, reaching out to us, John before we wrap up. Is there anything else that you’d like to cover with Jack?

Jonathan Denwood: Well, I think if Jak is Ok, we have a quick bonus section and in that bonus section, I want to ask Jack how- Can we give some indication of how like Redfin or Zillow and some of the big players, how they utilize the data, which they are getting and then apply it to the decisions that they are probably making. But just to finish off, what you’re saying is so right, Robert, because I apply it personally because over the past several months before that, for another 7 months before that I was trying to lose weight and I wasn’t measuring anything. I was just instinctively trying to cut things out and my weight was going up, even though I was cutting things out. Now I weigh myself twice a day. I got an app where I put all the food that I’m eating in it and I have a break-off point in calories.

And I have another app where I measure the physical. I walk twice a day for about five miles a day and I’ll measure it. So everything is measured and in a six-month period, I’ve lost almost 40 pounds. That’s the difference. And you can just apply that to your business. Cause, I’m very instinctive, it is not naturally my tendency to want to measure, but you must measure if you don’t measure something, it’s very unlikely. You’ll get the result that you want.

Robert Newman: Agreed so I should’ve opened up with this, John, and I’m directing this to John Jack, and then I’m ready to take a breath and we’ll let you wrap it up. And then we’ll, we’ll head over to the bonus content. John, I have a 13 hour day today, a really unusual day where it started at eight and it’s going till eight or nine. This is one of the few sections of my schedule today where I can get a 10 or 15-minute break. So we’re in the-

Jonathan Denwood: I’ll do the bonus.

Robert Newman: Yes please,

Jonathan Denwood: Wrap it up. And then we go for bonus folks.

Robert Newman: Lovely. Alright, listen, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Jack, you can wrap with whatever you want. this is for the podcast and then we’re going to move over to video. That’s how we do the bonus content. It goes strictly on the YouTube channel. And for those of you listening, it’s Mail-Right It’s YouTube Mail-Right And if you want to catch the podcast if for some reason you’re not on iTunes, go to the Mail-Right Website,Mail-Right.com. And you can check all the past episodes. I highly recommend that you do, we’ve put together, I mean, a couple of hundred amazing guests over the years and John’s done another a hundred beyond that with the guy that, apparently was legendary in terms of his-

Jonathan Denwood: Well the first 30 which you can’t see you on the website, but you can see on the YouTube channel, back then I had a couple of non-spectacular co-hosts before you,

Robert Newman: So there’s lots and lots and lots of content to go ahead and look at on the Mail-Right Show but Jack if somebody wanted to get in touch with you, how would you like them to do so?

Jack Tomkins: I would say head to my website, pineapplecf.com is the address. I know you mentioned earlier in the show, Robert, a lot of examples on there, transformations of boring data to exciting data, if you will. All sorts of ways to contact me and stuff like that. so yeah, pineappleCf.com. Where all that good stuff is at, and thank you both so much for having me, Robert, and John absolute pleasure meeting and talking with both of you.

Robert Newman: Thank you so much. And then, John, if somebody wanted to reach you, for anybody that might be new to the show, how would they go ahead and do that

Jonathan Denwood: They have to go to the revamped Mail-Right website It’s stunning looking at, I think, I’m so delighted by the new website and the message that you’ll get through it. And please go to it, see what we’ve got to offer you, and please contact us for a chat. And we see if we can help you.

Robert Newman: I agree with John, he has an amazing, website, funnily enough. he has, he has on his homepage. He has a testimonial where somebody who has the same, last name is me, but it’s not me.

Jonathan Denwood: But it is you I put it in your words I would have thought that you would have agreed with the statement. it’s Richard Newman I’m Robert You gotta change it to Robert. You gotta change, if that’s me, then you got to change it to Robert Newman and I’ll be happy to own that, that statement there. All right guys, I, of course, Robert Newman, I’m your fearless host. This is going to be my agent from this particular show. but you can find me if you want@inboundrem.com. I’ve been doing years and years and years of, content, talking about, the systems that you can use, which are the best for your lead generation. How to do SEO? And the list just goes on and on and on and on at this point, I have an amazing head of brand and content. I do the videos, he does the blog posts, but you will be amazed by all the shit that I have on there. I even tell you how to use postcards. All right. So thank you so much. We appreciate you tuning in we are so grateful. Have a great day.