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Boost your sales with AI Clone Video Marketing for Real Estate Agents—engage clients with personalized, high-impact videos that close deals faster.
This insightful video explores the revolutionary concept of AI clone video marketing tailored specifically for real estate agents. Discover how cutting-edge technology can create engaging, personalized video content that showcases properties like never before. Learn the benefits of leveraging AI to enhance your marketing strategy, attract potential buyers, and stand out in a competitive market. Don’t miss out—watch the video now to elevate your real estate game.
#1 – Introduction
#2 – Robert’s insight connected to developing a usable clone video solution.
#3 – What does an agent need to know connected to trying to build a DIY solution?
– a – Argll AI
Prices Classic $39 | Pro $149 per month
– b – Synthesis
Prices Free | Starter $29 | Creator $89 per month
– d- HeyGen
Prices Free | Creator $29 | Team $39 per month
– c – Bhuman. AI
Prices Free | Growth $39 | Scale $99 per month
Get Opus → https://www.opus.pro
Prices: Starter $15 | Pro $29
#4 – Extra AI Video Tools
ElevenLabs – https://elevenlabs.io/
Free | Starter $4.17 | Creator $18.33 | Pro $82.50 per month
Get Descript → https://descript.com
Prices Hobbyist $24 |Creator $35 | Business $65
Get Veed → https://veed.io
Free | Lite $24 | Pro $55 per month
Get Opus → https://www.opus.pro
Prices: Starter $15 | Pro $29
Maverick – https://www.trymaverick.com/
Prices: Starter $200 | Pro Price on Request
Gan.AI – https://www.gan.ai/
Studio Free | Studio Plus $24 | Studio AI $100 per month
#5 – Final Thoughts
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 473. Today is the MailRight AI Clown Video Marketing. And once again, John is spreading his stuff that has made us, drum roll, number 86 in the world for real estate podcasts. That’s right. You have found the ’86 Most Popular Real Estate podcast. Congratulations. What we’re going to talk about today is video cloning, AI Video Clone Marketing, Video Marketing, and we’re going to talk about some real estate applications. This particular episode might have been inspired by something we were doing at InboundREM, the company I founded, and we’ve been testing video cloning. I have some stuff to say about this, and we have released an actual beta test of this product in a live fire situation with a real client. It was tough to get to the point. It takes a long time to get people on board. Took us two weeks to produce the video. I can go on and on. But anyway, we will talk about the results, not the work. It should be super exciting.
But before we do, the man behind the curtain, my own personal Oz, go ahead and introduce yourself, John, and tell the audience who you are.
I’m going to surprise Robert. I’ve got a little secret that I will tell him during the show that will surprise him. But I’m the joint founder of Mel-right. Com. We are an affordable CRM, but a lot more. We give you a suite of digital tools linked to your CRM that can get you or will get you some quality online leads at a very affordable price, starting at slightly under $49 a month. Back over to you, Robert.
Beautiful. All right. For those of you who don’t know, you may not understand what we’re talking about when we say the concept of an AI clone. A clone is where you take yourself, not anybody, somebody else, just yourself, and you go, I would like to have a talking head version of myself do a video. For those of you who are old, and I’m going back farther than even John will probably remember, we’re talking about something similar to a more realistic version of Max Headroom. For those of you who are like me, who are Generation X or whatever we are, you will know exactly who I’m talking about.
I have loved Generation X for one year. Okay.
All right. All right, Boomer. No, I’m just kidding.
I’m a Generation X.
I believe you. I believe you. I know you are. I’m just screwing around. All right. So you can find out how cutting edge… Anyway, the concept of a clone has fascinated me, mainly because John, the use cases, as you know, really are deep for real estate. The number of real estate veterans I have is very similar to the actual case study I did, which is, okay, you have some different types of real estate professionals. This small broker owns his own brokerage, and he thinks he doesn’t have the time to do the video. It doesn’t matter whether he does or doesn’t, and he doesn’t want to do it. He doesn’t want to do it, doesn’t have the time, but he’s a vet of 25 years, so he has plenty of knowledge and expertise, and he’s very typical of many of my customers. Telling him that there was a way to do him in video but have us produce it, you’d be surprised, ladies and gentlemen, how many people are excited by that. I was for sure surprised. John, so that’s the introduction. Before we go any further, though, John, I noticed you nodding, and everybody cannot hear the nods. However, they’re listening to the show.
So do me a in favor and say, answer me this, with your experience, which is a little less than mine, but you’ve now talked to a lot of realtors, do you think that you also see and understand the need that I just pointed out?
Oh, totally. Do you want a little secret, Robert?
Yeah, sure.
I looked at this over a year ago, but not in the same way you looked at it. I was in the midst of doing, for my other business, a LinkedIn business-to-business campaign. And I was looking at the possibility of a system that could clone me. But then the system I looked at could automatically introduce the client’s name in the video. So you have one video, but your lips would change for the different first names of each client. It was a system that’s on this list, Behuman. I spent much time on it with them, and it was a total, utter failure. It was one of the worst experiences with a startup company I’ve ever had. But I bought it from Sapsuma, a special deal, and that looks like they’ve continued, and I have an account with them, so I might repurchase it because I plan to do another business-to-business outreach in the next month to two months, and I would like this. But in general, I’ve just been with the research I’ve done this week, and I’ve just been blown away by how far some of these platforms have gone.
It’s just mind-boggling, Robert.
It is only a matter of time before you cannot tell. I’m very grateful that I’ve been getting so much pressure from my social circle to keep my eyes firmly locked on how and what’s happening in AI. Because I looked at it, and then I started it. I’m still, even with the video we’ve produced that we sent out to our audience, which, for those of you who are interested, you can go to youtube/aboutinboundrem. If you’re curious to see what it looks like, you will find my video of the test, essentially the generative AI video, already posted there. But I have to say that I wasn’t there, John. I’m still not there. It was a beta, but it’s the most explosive beta I’ve ever done. I didn’t tell anybody, you included, that it was ready for full-time. I’m just looking at it and trying to see what can be done. I found a client who was willing to do it with us. And then I had a whole bunch of clients message me going, Yeah, let’s do it. And I’m like, Whoa, it’s not ready. And I have to charge you.
Because here’s a few things that you may not know, John. I spent two weeks of my own time on that video. It was no joke.
Oh, he’s the process. Some of the resources that I’ve given you are other agencies that have been showing what they’re doing on YouTube. And it’s a multi-step process. A team, obviously, they will get quicker, but there’s some agencies, and I’ve given you some resources, and it’s just amazing. I’ve given you some of the tools which they’ve recommended. I don’t watch American television, so I just do research on stuff. It’s really very impressive, Robert.
Just one more small wind up, because this What is the introduction and the DIY part? Well, it is DIY. You could do it yourself, but here’s what it took for us to do it, John. Number one, we needed Hey, Jen for the deep fake, which is we’re going to review that service towards the end of this podcast. Chatgpt. John and I haven’t talked about it specifically, but certainly everybody should know who and what that is at this point. We use that for the script, which, by the way, the only complaint that we did get from the client about this product was the script. I feel like I handed this off to a team, and I felt like I didn’t oversight it very much. When the product came out, I still didn’t oversight it very much. I feel like the team made a small mistake in letting ChatGPT write the script. They certainly made a mistake in that they didn’t reach out to the client to get approval for the script because all of us were just like, Huh, wonder what we can do with this. It was really a test. Then we used Adobe Premiere Pro for compiling and editing, and that is where it took us all the time, John.
I’ve got some tools that might help you with that, Robert.
I love to hear about them. Then we used Canva for stock media and other elements that we added into the video, which once again, the very few little pieces of pushback that we had from the client were on the stock media and the elements, but that was because the client didn’t provide these things to us in advance. That is the nature of this job, which is so farging frustrating because the client was asked for the deliverables. They did not give them to us. So we went ahead with our pre-discussed project and produced him using what we could get our hands on and get the rights to in a fairly inexpensive way because it was all on my dime, not his. And then he looked at it and said, This general stuff is crap. Let me give you the real thing. And I’m like, Buddy, it was going to take me another four hours to get my video editor back in here and change this stuff for the things that we asked you for in the first place.
Obviously, Robert’s having a little bit of a day, but in fairness to Robert, You did show me the video, a bit of it. I thought you did a really great job.
Thank you. I mean, thank you. Really, all the credit goes to the teams. The credit I get is as a leader with a focus on the effort, not the actual work.
I thought your team did a great job as a beta.
Yeah, I was really impressed. Actually, my entire company was really impressed. We were all shocked about how far we got with this beta. I strongly recommend everybody listening to the show reads it. Having said all that, we’re going to jump into reviewing some tools that might do something like that for you, the people out there listening.
Well, I think we should… I’m sorry to jump in, but I think we should leave the tools for the second half. But I think what we should cover in this first half, just the end of the first half, is what are some of the major lessons that you learned in doing your own beta Is there anything that you observe, some insights that you could share?
Right now, AI, this type of AI, at least, is a long ways away from being even close to as efficient as just doing the video yourself. It was so not even a comparison. Took us weeks of work to build this beta, and it’s a ridiculous amount of effort so somebody can avoid five minutes in front of a camera. Really, that’s my… If you want I don’t know what my knee jerk was, John. I looked at two weeks worth of work and close to 50 billable hours, which we didn’t bill for, and then said, But all of this could be accomplished by one human being with a phone and five minutes? Are you kidding me? But no, there’s some people that just they want to do it the other way.
I’ve got some good news about that as well.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah, which I’ll share with you the second off by my research.
Okay, well, fantastic. Fantastic. I can’t wait. I guess the other lessons that were learned were… I will say this. Part of the reason I agreed to the beta, John, and for all those listening, and this would apply to real estate agents, this applies to John, this applies to everybody. You know the reason I did the beta, because I’m sitting here griping to all of you about how much time it took me, and I knew it would be time that we didn’t have and money I didn’t want to pay, and I can go on and on because it might have been free for the client, but it was not free for me. So Why did I do it? Well, I really did think and still think that the conversation around AI, the white hot fire around you add, you say the words AI and you add anything after that, and I think there’s marketing value in that. I learned a long time ago, as much as it might frustrate me, not to fight the forced fire of people’s time and attention. Just dive in and see what you can do with it. That’s what I did with this video.
It’s proven to be A hundred % like what I thought it would be. An attention getter, a marketing leader, a thing that is getting people to respond to me when very little is right now, inside the marketing world. All the things I was hoping for was accomplished. Then there’s one thing that I have not yet been able to figure out, John, if it will or won’t accomplish me, but I decided I wanted to make sure the Inbound R. E. M. Remained at the forefront of the conversation surrounding AI, even though I have vocally and still think that we don’t want to necessarily be an AI agency. However, I do know and made the decision, when you’re having the conversation about AI as it relates to real estate marketing, I want to make sure one of the first companies that you think of. So with that, I shifted a lot of my time and attention. And this is one of my first public efforts, this video. The lesson that I learned, it worked. If you can attach something that fascinates people and use AI, right now in this very brief moment in time, you’re going to get a lot of attention focused.
Yeah, I think unless you’re dealing with that rare agent that really likes to spend time on technology, this is best to leave to a agency, folks. But I’ve got some good news, which I’m going to share with Robert in the second half. Shall we go for the second Well, for a bit.
Shell. So, ladies and gentlemen, John has been very cagey today about what he’s got to share with me. He’s got a few different little things, apparently, to tell me, which I’m deeply curious about. Hopefully, you are, too. Wherever you’re watching the show today, help propel us to number 85 by smashing that like button, by telling people about the show. If we help you, if we give you something to think about, if we re-inspire you to tackle your marketing again, anything at all Well, then do us a favor, show us a little love wherever you’re listening to the show. I didn’t even know we were being considered as one of the top 100 shows. I’m going to keep pounding away at that because now that I know there’s a list, I want to be number one. We’re a long ways away from that, but apparently what this platform does is measure by reviews and likes and things like that on wherever it is you guys are listening to this podcast. So, yeah, do us a favor. Hit the like button. It matters to us. We’ll be right back. Three, two, one. Welcome back. It is episode number 473, and we are talking about AI video cloning, something that we at InboundRAM have already done in the whole first half of the show was talking about that.
The second half of the show is all about John’s surprises. John, I seat belted in. Surprise me.
Yeah, I think by watching the videos of other agencies and utilizing the four platforms that we’re going to quickly go through, is that you got to upload about 3-5 minutes of video. After it’s uploaded of the original individual, it can then, depending on the platform being manipulated in multiple times. After the initial upload, the next clone video, after you got it into the system, it should be a lot quicker to make another clone video. The other factor of the two main platforms that we’re going to discuss that had the most video reviews and had conversations about both of the platforms, they said one of the area where it did fall down, and it’s very similar to podcasting and normal video, is audio quality and syncing, the lip syncing. The two leaders that we’re going to discuss by the reviews that I watched, this was a consistent problem. But The two of the reviews that I watched, they utilize a third party audio script, audio sync. And one of the main platforms we’re going to discuss enables this third-party system called 11 Labs. It utilizes 11 Labs API system, so you can integrate what 11 Labs does with the audio and the syncing with HeyGen in a very automated way.
You do have to pay for both platforms, but it makes the sound quality and the lip sync much, much better and reduces the amount of time that your team are probably having to redo things based on the videos I watched.
Well, John, all I heard you What I’m going to say is you have cool enough stuff that you’ve just mentioned that now I need the recording for the show as fast as you can get it to me so that I can send it to my people and just tell them to watch the whole damn thing, because I am terrible at remembering. I need those. This exists, by the way. Everybody was in the show.
I’ll put all the links for you.
Not for seven laps, you didn’t.
No, I put it in the calendar. Updated the calendar. So they’re all in the calendar, you invite? I’ll send them again to you.
Great.
All right.
Okay. All right. So first on the list, provided by John with all his copious, copious, copious research skills is agile AI, which we did look at and we discarded. I don’t know why, though.
It seems I might be totally wrong here because the other three I’ve done a lot more research, and one of them I’ve got a lot of experience with. But this one It does seem newer on the market. It’s got a very polished interface. I presume that your team were a little bit disappointed with the end result. It has a big jump in price. It has a starter price, which they call Classic, which is $39 month to month. But then the Pro version is $149 a month. So there seems to be a big jump from their classic starter to pro. But it did seem I couldn’t find too many reviews on it. I did watch one extensive YouTube review that was very long and it did look very polished. They didn’t really cover the clone. When you upload a bit of video and you clone the individual, they were utilizing or they were showing pre-made actors and not an individual, because a lot of these platforms have a library of clone actors, but we’re talking about a video of a real estate agent and uploading them and cloning them. But I did get the impression it’s one of the newer ones out there, so maybe that…
But it looked reasonably polished, but obviously your team were dissatisfied with the output.
For reasons I don’t know, because I can tell everybody listening to this right now that our Arial AI already. They’ve done something that a lot of AI companies didn’t take the time to do. They either have the best fake avatars. In other words, they’re real people doing real things, or they’ve edited them, they spend a lot of time editing them in such a way that they won’t anymore, that they won’t do it again. But let’s just assume that they are not doing any of that and that if it’s a real product, it’s the best-looking product that I’ve seen.
Well, the demo on the website, they got a video on the front page, the home page of this lady, and she tells you I bet this is a clone, and it’s pretty impressive, isn’t it?
Yeah, I know. It’s really impressive. You found one that’s incredibly impressive to sign up with. But here’s what I don’t like about our Argyll AI. Everything that you do on the site to try to figure out if it’s real or not drives you into a signup form. Then in the signup form, it tells you you get three days of this app without paying. Then, of course, they’re probably going to ask you for billing information. What Argyll has done, which leads me to believe it’s probably fake, is they’ve created something that’s really sexy, and then hit it, or you cannot test the sexy before you pay for it, and then they hit it behind a lockout. 99% of the time when I find companies that do that, John, it’s because there’s something sleazy or scammy on the other end of it. It doesn’t work the way it should. For everybody listening to the show, and I’m not saying that that’s true, I don’t know. I I don’t know what’s going on with Argyll. I just know what I just tried to do, and I am highly suspicious of locked out. If any of the listeners of the show feel like taking a risk and putting in some payment information and trying the tool and want to send John and I a review, I’m just going to use my email because it’s easier.
Just send it to robert@inboundrem. Com. I would be happy to. I would love to take a look at it. I just don’t want to pay for it.
On to the next one.
Yeah. Synthesia. Io. Synthesia. Io. So starter price, $29. 89, $89 per month with a greater membership. Tell us what your research… How you felt about it, John?
Yeah, it seemed to be one of the leaders, apart from the last one we’re going to talk about, which I added, which might not be in your show notes, but it’s the one that you chose. But of the two, it seems to be one of the leaders. The reviews I watched that were comparing the two, the other one was Hey, Jen, is that they were saying that if you’re a team, not an individual or a small agency, but you’re a larger team, this might be the better choice. Because it’s got more team features than what, Hey, Gill. If you’ve got a group of people working on a project, The output, they didn’t… They said, most of the reviews, and I’m just going by my memory, that Hey, Jen was slightly better. But they also They said that the HeyGen put more natural movements into the video, because one of the great things is when they were first… These solutions were first brought out, you had a very static head, a very static body. But especially with HeyGen, you get much more natural movement, which you’re not having to tell it to do. So it looks like the person leans in and out and moves the head, moves the body.
But one of the good things that Seignishes this, whatever they call it, it provides a more library where you take the clone and you could swap the clothing. You could change the clothing from one video to the other, instantaneously, which Heyjell doesn’t offer you or It doesn’t offer you so many options, where the other one, the Symphonies, it gives you a whole library where you can swap out the clothing of the video. It’s really quite amazing, really.
All these tools, whether it’s Synthesia or HeyGen, are amazing. Now, I, at a very top did a little bit of recommending on these tools. Then what I did is I had my team do the deep dive, the deep well, go down the well. In specific, I have one guy who’s very dedicated and determined. His name is Jed. He can learn pretty much anything if he really focuses. He’s the one who made the decision. But I know the guy, one of the reasons I love him is because he’s cheap as hell. If there’s the slightest price difference, like 50 cents, between one product and another, he’s going to go with the one that’s 50 percent-The high journey is a lot more…
It’s much more competitive price. Shall we go on to the next one? I’ve got some real insights about the next one. Yeah, please do it. Let’s do it. Yeah, like I was telling, about a year ago, I bought a AppSumma deal, folks. Appsumma offers some lifetime deals, and this one came up because I was looking to do a beta business campaign through LinkedIn, and I had exported a number of contacts in LinkedIn, and I was going to send them an email, and the email was going to be a video video, and like what Bombom offers, but I wanted to do it on scale. I had a couple of thousand people that I wanted to do a… Not a cold email, because they had They had agreed contact through LinkedIn, and some of them I had conversations with. But I wanted to send the email with the video, and the video for me to name them by first name. Behuman had a system where you could import a list of emails, and it would send them as batches, and it would sync the video, so it would replace the first name. All right? So hello there, Kevin.
And the next one, hello, Bill. Hello, Robert. Sure. It’s just amazing. And I was really up for it, and I spent time, and it never worked. It never worked correctly. And the support I got from this bloody company was some of the most atrocious support that I’ve ever got from a startup. I actually got to the stage, I got so worked up about it, The amount of time, they said they would come back and help me, they would email me back, blah, blah, blah, and they never did. And I had constant Zooms with them and they said, Oh, they’re fixing it, and they never bloody did. I actually emailed the founder, the CEO of this company, and I had exchange of emails with him, and they never bloody sorted the thing out. So I’ve given it up on it, but it looks like they’ve continued, and it does look like by the website that they have expanded it, and they’re still offering this LinkedIn feature, and I’ve got my AppSuma for life, and they seem to still be honoring it. So I I might give it another quick go, but the good news is there’s some other players, because they were first to market with this feature, and they did get a big response through their AppSuma deal.
But I just got disheartened with them. Like I say, it’s the worst experience. I even… It’s very rare for me to do this, Rob, because AppSumma, I know the name of the game, you’re getting it at a high discount, and they don’t promise that things will work out. That’s part of the deal. But I even complained about these people to Apsuma. The funny thing is that Apsuma didn’t listen because they had them do a second run at it, so they didn’t care either. But I complained to Apsuma about these people because I told the CEO, the founder, that I thought that this was on the verge of a rip-off. I said, You are in a sticky gray area here because this thing doesn’t work. They found me off with some generalities and said they were working on it. Let’s hope they’ve fixed it because I’m going to have… But some alternatives now don’t do what Behuman is doing, right?
Absolutely. Could you give me a second? So sorry. This is- Shall I go on to the next one? Oh, yeah.
So the next one is hanging, which is the one that Robert and his team chose. And compared to Symphonix, it’s a lot cheaper. It’s a creator plan; they got a free plan to start off with.
I do not doubt that Jed used a free plan. I’m telling you, John, this is the cheapest human I’ve ever met.
And it’s not crippled by the look of it. It’s token-based. And then the creator is $29, and the team is $39. So these are very affordable prices. And if you’re a smaller agency or a one-off real estate agent, this is the platform to go with. And it does a good job. Like I said before, the only problem is the sound quality and the mouth sinking. It’s not bad, but if you can afford to link it with 11 labs, it will be quicker, and the results are much better if you allow these 11 labs to work with hygiene.
So, ladies and gentlemen, this has been my experience in general. I’ve now done deep dives in Gumloop, Manish, and many other top, super sexy, hot, like white fire hot AI apps that are out there. And what John says about this application is similar to everything I find. Yeah, there are some cool things. You’ll have to spend a while getting good at building processes, looping them in, layering them, which is what John is talking about doing right now. There’s nothing wrong with it. Sooner than later, all of this stuff won’t be necessary. What AI can do to familiarize you with it and understand it is suitable for any business owner or service provider who’s been at it for a little while. Because either one, you can save yourself a lot of time, energy, or money, or two, expand and increase your efforts a tremendous amount by getting AI familiarity early and doing things like automating your marketing, email, and monthly market report. These are all things you can do completely. I mean completely. I’m talking about automating not merely the fact that you’re doing one, but the video, all of it.
You could automate the entire thing, including a clone of yourself doing the update. The only thing you’ll have to do, ladies and gentlemen, is still be an editor for your own stuff. But the level of time that you should be able to, is 75%, I estimate. John, this has been a fascinating show. Thank you so much for… And there’s a whole bunch of… For those listening to the show, John has included a lot. This is one of those shows you’ve got to go to the mail-write website, look up the podcast, and look up the show notes for episode 473, because he has a lot, 5-10 different links in this particular set of show notes. If you want to know all the support sites that he looked at, and you really want to know what we were using as footprints for this episode, you’ve got to go to the show notes, take a look at them. John, how would you like people to contact you with questions about the show, your service, or anything?
Yeah, thanks for that, Rob. You can go to the Mail Right.com website. We’ve done some massive improvements to the system. We’ve broken up different elements into separate product lines to reduce the main product’s price to a very competitive $49. We’ve recently massively improved the product. And go to the Mail-Right.com website, have a look at what we have to offer, the features, and everything. And then book a free chat and demo with me. I’m sure you’re going to be blown away. Back over to you, Robert.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m historically known as a real estate SEO guy for those of you who may not have known me this whole time on the podcast. But truthfully, I’m a lifetime sales and marketing guy. I’ve done many big and impressive things with many of them in traditional marketing, now in digital marketing. If you would like to learn more about me or find out the over 100 pages of dedicated materials, the eight ebooks at this point that I’ve written, all on digital marketing, all for free. They’re all on my website, inboundrem.com, and you can go to the services or about page to find out everything you need to know about us and our product. We have something super exciting coming up in the next couple of months that I’ve been working on for two years. So please stay looped into the show. I promise you it will be worth your time.
Is that the end?
Yeah, that’s the end. You can end it.
I don’t know.
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Master real estate online lead generation in 2025 with proven strategies to boost your client base and close deals faster. Start growing today.
Unlock the secrets to effective online lead generation in real estate for 2025! This video delves into the latest strategies and tools that can elevate your business. From leveraging social media to optimizing your website for SEO, we cover everything you need to know to attract and convert leads. Don’t miss out on the future of real estate marketing.
Introduction
#1 – Google Local And The Power of Online Reviews
#2 – Video Marketing
#3 – Speed, Patience, and Persistence in Lead Management
a – Speed to lead
b- Patience
c – Persistence
#4 – Becoming The Clear Market Local Expert
#5 – Niche!
#6 – Keep Your Sales Generation Process Personal
Final Thoughts
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to one of the country’s top real estate podcasts, as you voted. It’s the Mail-Right podcast, talking all things real estate marketing. We were recently, thank you to everybody listening to this show, you voted us number 86 out of all real estate podcasts. This is on Millionpodcast.com. We’re on the same list with Tom Ferry, Mike Ferry, and many other luminaries in the real estate space. I am tickled pink. I won’t speak for John, but it’s an amazing attaboy for years of hard work and conversations that we’ve had. We got a 4, 4 out of 5 stars from 18 people who wrote us reviews. If you’re listening to the show, you’re on a platform that takes reviews. Please do us a favor, give us a five-star review, and help us bump that up even higher. I would appreciate it. Without any further ado, though, I’m going to introduce my co-host, whose name is Jonathan Denwood. Jonathan is a legend in the WordPress space, and he’s quickly becoming a notable luminary of the real estate marketing space.
He has designed and built an all-in-one system for realtors with a smaller or larger budget. Works both ways, but most likely, he’s got offers that will appeal to almost anybody with any budget starting at $50 a month. We’re going to talk about some new design directions he’s taking. If you’re listening to the show now and reach out to him soon, he might even have some new stuff to show you. Without any more ado, John, could you please introduce yourself to the audience?
Oh, thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Mel-right. Com. We are a CRM focusing on getting real leads for real estate agents. We’re all in one platform. At an affordable price, that starts month to month at slightly under $50, so very cheap. Back over to you, Rob.
All right, today’s show, we’re going to break out to what is the core of why most of you listen to this show. We will succinctly say how to master real estate online lead generation in 2025. Now, for those of you who’ve been long-time followers of the show, I am sure we will cover some ground we’ve already covered. But right now, right out of the gate, it’s good to say that marketing is changing incredibly fast right in front of our eyes. But it’s not so much that you’re doing different things, it’s that you’re using other tools to accomplish the same things in much easier, faster ways, making this a revolution, an evolution, an acceleration you want to be a part of. I can’t emphasize that enough. So even if you’ve heard us talk about the subject before, buckle up, put us on go while you’re on your drive. Listen to this show today. I’m super excited to dive into this. The last little piece of business here is that John is consistently the guy who does all… He calls it the donkey work. It’s he who produces the show, and he publishes the show.
I am somewhat more the guy, the talent. He’s the talent, too. But I showed up and talked about the subjects he decided on for us. So do us both a favor, check out his YouTube channel and give him a thumbs up and a like, and make sure that if you have any comments about the outlines that he’s publishing, you communicate them to him. I’m sure he’d appreciate it. Jon, why don’t you start us off with the first subject on the list that you so kindly prepared for us?
Yeah, sure, Rob. Let’s recap the essential things we covered a few times during the show. Still, I think doing an overall recap and giving some structure to what I believe, and I think you agree, of what a real estate agent should be doing in 2025, if they’re looking to be successful. I think we start with Google Local, whatever they’re calling it now, and it’s linked to the power of online reviews. What Google offers for free to real estate agents is impressive. But what’s also amazing is the number of agents that don’t take up their free offerings and concentrate on getting online reviews as well. So it’s all mixed up. This has two elements, but I was tempted to separate them. But I think they’re so interwined with what Google is looking for that I decided to keep it in one point, Robert.
Copy you. So my take on local, which I’m all over my channel, my website is hyper local. Google business profiles are one of the most relevant and exciting forms of SEO, search engine optimization that real estate agents could theoretically focus on, pay for. There is a performance-based ad system that’s connected specifically to local service ads or your hyper local profile, and it’s performance pay. In other words, you do not pay anything unless you get a call, which makes it 10 times more appealing than anything else I know of in the entire industry. Now, it’s not their traditional advertising system, which is the only thing I don’t like about it is it’s hard to sign up for, and it takes a a lot of time to understand that it’s not connected to the rest of the Google advertising ecosystem. I really wish they’d figured out a way to combine it, but they didn’t. But part of that is that for those of you that have maintained diligently a great real estate license in good working order for a long period of time, you’ll appreciate this. They actually do check the license as part of the vetting process, and not just anybody can sign up.
You do have to have some form of track record and a good license and transactions and other things that they vet during the signup process. Now, having said all that, if you can rank organically and apply these service ads, it is a one, two combo that I’ve rarely seen return anything less than 8 to 10 times ROI across the board, sometimes far more than that. It just depends on where you are and how successful, like how many people are searching for a local realtor What I love about this form of advertising, John, is that when you do get calls, they tend to be what we call on my part of the business. They’re high intent leads. They’re already looking for a realtor. Oftentimes to list a home, the number one request I’ve been getting for as long as I’ve been in this business is, Get me listings, get me listings. Well, this is a way to get listings. It makes it really compelling. The advertising expense, if you decide to hire a professional company like me, is It’s not that expensive. It’s half as much as traditional SEO. That makes it compelling as well. Less expensive, faster return on investment, a local services ad component, full trackability off the profile.
John is correct. It is not a perform in silence marketing. You do need to participate in the process, get reviews, make a post every month, focus a little bit on how your I don’t know how your profile looks and feels. But you could do worse than partnering with one of the biggest marketing companies on the planet.
I’ve got a question.
Yeah.
How would you compare it in the air of lead quality to what Zillow Premier is providing? Is it the same, based on your experience, is it the same quality of lead, or is one of them slightly higher their quality of lead?
Zillow is broken. So first of all, it’s shitty, John, that Zillow has broken their advertising offerings into five different offerings now. Zillow Premier, the service that you just listed, yes, I’d compare Google profile leads all day long and twice on Tuesday. Zillow Flex, which is where they take a piece of your deal. No, I think that Zillow is so in tune with partnering with you as an agent. They want their money so bad that you actually get every call is essentially some form of qualified. Whereas these inbound calls can be people selling to you, they could be other things. Out of every 10 calls, we get about five good ones. Right now, of those five good ones, my average close ratio for my customers is like three out of 10. So it is a reasonably high close ratio, a reasonably high quality ratio. Frankly, the one thing that you can’t argue with is It’s all inbound. In other words, it’s even more passive than Zillow Premier because Zillow sends you a lead, and oftentimes, it’s not a call transferred to you. It’s a lead. It’s like a written lead, which is the old-school way of doing it.
This is a phone call where the person actually rings you. I, personally, as a salesperson, John, I want the voice on the other end of the line every single day. Do not give me an email if I have my choice. Call me because I can do something with that almost every time. I hope that answers your question.
Yeah. On to the next one. Video marketing. What do you think about that one?
Oh, my God. So we just, eight hours ago, I e-mailed out our beta test for AI. You probably have it in your inbox. You probably haven’t opened it yet yourself.
I did, actually. I had a quick look at it just before the show.
Okay. So I’ve already got two brand new inquiries. Less than eight hours later on that service, the speed in which things are changing is staggering. We cobbled together something that I thought was usable. I’m already getting told that was 60 days ago, we started the beta test process. 60 days later, I’ve had a few people reach out to me and say, Oh, we could do much better than that just in 60 days. Maybe not using the toolkit that I used, but nonetheless, we got it to a place where we thought it was functional. Not great, but functional. Then I think that very quickly, John, very quickly, we’re going to see complete functional. Just for those people listening to the show that don’t know what we’re talking about, what we did was we used video editing and we used AI and a real live video editor, but we made a talking representation of an agent that never got on camera, ever. We just used a 30-second video file as source material, which you recorded only for the AI algorithm. Then the rest of it, we wrote scripts and basically have him talking for six minutes. And he looks a little AI, but he and other people that saw it said it was possible, which means that essentially for the countless realtors I do business with, I now have You have an option for all of you that says we can do an AI product for you that only requires a source material for 30 seconds or less.
We can’t make video marketing any easier than that. That’s it. I can write the marketing for you. I can do the research. I basically can produce it like a blog post, and now we can do video on an agent site with what’s called in the marketing world faceless marketing, which I’m saying for the audience, John knows this already. We’re doing something called faceless marketing, a faceless marketing option. And it is so relevant for everybody because one of the ways that we could use this, John, that we didn’t use it for the test cases, but I’m most excited for, is market updates, like email updates.
Yeah.
Bom BOM, stuff like that. Raw data that we wrote but is fed to the audience via video and via the client’s mouth, because How is his voice? Which is what really shocked me. They nailed that voice, John. That’s 100 % Ken Powell’s voice, even though all I had was a small…
Yeah, well, what I propose is that we Actually, you have an episode next week where we discuss what you’re doing there. But I think it’s quite exciting, and I agree with everything you’ve just said. It’s totally passable. Obviously, if you can do it yourself, that is the best. But what Robert has achieved with his team is totally… And I actually think it’s stronger than that because I gave up doing this, but for a while, Robert, I thought I was forcing people to try and do video, and we were just doing it as an experiment because it was at a price point where we weren’t making any money at it. But I literally was having a Zoom with somebody, and I asked the questions, and then we had to edit it, and we were just doing it as an experiment. But it didn’t matter how much handholding I did or how much editing we did. If they weren’t comfortable in front of the camera, we If you could do it five, six times and think that they would gradually get comfortable, they didn’t actually, Rob. Some people do. Obviously, if they like the idea and they’re committed to it, I was useless when I started doing videos in front of the camera.
I think I’m a lot better now. It’s one of the main sources of lead generation, and my other channel is growing quite rapidly. But if you really, really aren’t comfortable and you really don’t want it, there wasn’t really. I gave up because I could see that the bulk of people were not comfortable. So this is a great solution for those type of people, because trying to force them, if they’re really, really not comfortable when using video as a marketing medium, I don’t think how much handholding that you can get them up to the standard where it’s worth doing.
I agree, which is why… So here’s a funny story for everybody. John, I am not a force my team to do shit leader. I never have been. I forced my team on this. I pressed hard. Everybody was thinking I was out to lunch. They kept telling me that it was too soon. I was like, I don’t care. I want to see a representation of what’s possible. Now, once my lead operations guy got deep enough down the rabbit hole and he researched about 10 or 15 different AI services, he’s like, I don’t know. This one seems good. He gave me a teeny tiny little sample and I said, It seems possible. Then we had to go through the It was back and forth of the client and he’s like, This is so difficult because it was the client. It’s always with you and I. It’s the client. We were asking quite literally the bare minimum of the client. We were still having a little hard time.
You still get resistance, don’t you?
Yes. Even though we signed them up for beta, even though I spent, of my own money, $500 or $600 on this beta, the client didn’t pay for this. I paid for it. So And this is all at cost. Imagine how many hours we’re talking about. It’s at low cost because it’s Philippines resources and stuff like that. But nonetheless, I insisted and drove towards it. And what I got back was light years ahead of what I thought we could do. And I turned the conversation in my head instantaneously. I’m like, this for about 20% of veteran real estate agents, this is a service they will care about. And I’ve I’ve already gotten proof, John, in less than eight hours that that’s true in the form of two responses from two different new to me people that were on my list, but I’ve never talked to them, and they’re already talking to me about this. And what does that mean to you people listening to the show, all those people that we love so much. Ladies and gentlemen, do not sleep on video marketing anymore. It’s going to accelerate beyond your ability to catch it. My advice is really, truly off the bench.
You don’t even need to get in front of the camera. Not really, not anymore. You have an option, but you can’t just sit back and think that you’ll just wait. Because the people that are going to figure this out are probably going to jump out ahead of everybody else.
Shall we go for a break, Rob?
Yeah, let’s do it. There is no Timer on my version of this, just so you know, John. It says scheduled, so I can’t see the time. Anyway, we’re going to We’re going to break, ladies and gentlemen. John and I are going to tell some dirty jokes, have a little bit of fun, discuss how awesome we are. No, just kidding. But we’re going to be right back. Thank you so much for tuning in. Stay tuned. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. We’re talking in very broad strokes about what’s going to work for lead generation in 2025. We covered Google Local. That was number one. We covered video marketing. That was number two. And very broadly, there’s so much more to say on video marketing. Number three, speed, patience, and persistence in lead management. A favorite topic of John’s as long as I’ve known him. Database management, lead management, persistence. So, John, this is absolutely something you’ve been talking about since the very first podcast that we ever did. So why don’t you lead us off on this on this subject?
Well, it’s speed to lead. Don’t know what lead generative system you’re using, Facebook paid leads, paid advertisement, Google local ads, Zillow. It doesn’t matter. But when you get that lead, when you get that phone call, you’ve got to respond to it. And the quicker you respond to it, the more chance it’s going to generate into an actual commission check. If you are getting lead, me and Rob, whoever you hire in the digital lead area, if their systems are getting leads, phone calls to you and you’re not available or they’re texting you and you don’t You can’t text back in less than a couple of minutes or five minutes. Nothing’s going to happen. Nothing can save that lead. There’s no point in complaining to Rob or complaining to me. We’ve done our bit. We’ve done what we were supposed to do. Too many agents that seem to struggle, just struggle in general in understanding what they’re getting into. That’s what I would say, patience. Not all people are ready to sell or buy a house. They might be on a different… But they can still be marketed to if they get into your system, and there will be a time that they will be ready.
I do understand, if somebody’s paying money and it’s going out of their bank account every month, they won’t lead straight away, but you got to be realistic. Alona, it seems to be getting lead generation. And the system seems to be working, I think, and you can… I think whatever system you got to give, you got to give it at least three months and better, six months, but at least three months. And persistence. Too many agents give up. It’s a difficult one because you might be… You might be a dead horse, really, but you But I think most, as long as there’s signs that it is working, most people give up too early, and they’re not persistent. That’s what I would say, Rob.
Is a lifetime salesperson There’s no doubt that speed lead, persistence, patience, professional salespeople, there’s a reason why we’re called professionals. There’s a reason why Tom Ferry and Mike Ferry still have a job because mostly they focus on sales. And part of the sales game is building relationships, oftentimes for years. And in the luxury space, which Tom Ferry has a circle of 10 agents, all of them hyper luxury agents, I know two of the 10, and they sit and get trained by him personally. Those people, most of what they’re getting, quote, unquote, coached on, it’s the same thing as when you huddle up and you’re in the Super Bowl. It’s not like you’re going to do something different, run a different play. It’s more like, are you ready to run the best version of the play that you’ve practiced a thousand times? And are you ready to pivot and adapt for the unexpected things that will happen in any live fire situation? And a professional salesperson is exactly the same way. Number one, know your material. Number two, practice, practice, practice. I love calling people even when I know that they’re not going to be a deal that day, John, because it gives me a chance to exercise my relationship building skills.
That’s where persistence comes in. If you are a person that is lucky enough to be selling at the top of your market in terms of inventory, it makes all the sense in the world to build a list of 100 people and make sure that you are their first call, those 100 people, because you’re diligent, you send flowers on their birthday, the names of their pets. This is all stuff that a guy by the name of Harvey McKay taught me 30 years ago, how to swim with the sharks without being eaten alive. I’ve used long term database building sales My strategy is my entire career, and I’ve rarely been less than top 1%, top 5%, usually number one or two, no matter how big the sales force, because all you got to do is be willing to work hard, nurturing relationships. If you don’t have anybody new to call and you’re more of an inbound rep, fine. Call old clients. Find a reason to have a dialog. If you’re sitting at a desk, ladies and gentlemen, and you’re not on the phone with somebody that either has been a client, could be a client, or is vaguely connected to somebody that might get you to a client, then you’re not doing your job as a salesperson.
You need to be doing that. John and I have talked about this before. Sit in open houses, sit anywhere where you can meet somebody. Hell, for those of you who are fans of movies, sit in a bar. There’s an old sales movie about a guy that makes all these sales in a bar, and it’s really famous. It has a couple of really famous lines in it. And one of those lines is, You can win the Mercedes, or you can win the steak knives.
I encapsulate it in one phrase, actually, Robert. I say to people, real estate is a discussion business.
Yeah, absolutely. So number four, and I love this one, become the clear market local expert. I’ll John, I’m going to put my spin on this subject.
Yeah, because you’ve been very passionate about this. This is one of the things that you’ve consistently talked about, isn’t it?
Yes, because if you have a question about your local real estate market, lifestyle, pricing, quality of the market, crime, you name it, you want to be the person that’s been having those discussions in so many ways in so many places that people are inclined to ask the question to you. You need to be non-threatening and you need to be have a high level of expertise. And you need to define the market that you’re working in because there’s no… Where I live in the valley, in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, California, the San Fernando Valley is hundreds of thousands of people deep, and there’s no human being that could keep up to speed with even two of the cities. Never. So specialize. Make sure that you have subjects that you talk about over and over again. And the in Our marketing part is when you are giving out the information, the hard one expertise that you’ve got, and find a way to have expertise. Go to City Hall planning meetings. Make sure that you are up to snuff on zoning rules. Can you do an AU on a property? Know every single rule of your own city, which is what you do in major metro areas, because having that unparalleled expertise is going to, one, is going to give you something to talk about.
Number two is going to make sure that when you have your 30 seconds to meet a new customer, you impress beyond all other people. All you need to do is display your expertise in what is is what concerns locals. I discovered a new thing. The owner of my property doesn’t know if there’s a limit on how big of a shit I can build out back. They literally sent me to the city to get an answer I would think there should be a real estate agent I could call who can answer that question for me, for crying out loud.
Yeah, I think passion is over I’ve used a bit. Maybe I’m getting too old for passion. But I don’t like using the word passion. But I think if you’re going to be a successful real estate agent, I honestly think you’ve got to be really interested in property, in real estate. It’d be like you might have a hobby, golf, and for some reason you got to pay a lot of golf, but you’re not You don’t really like playing golf. I think you can get by, but I never, without that real interest or love or whatever term you want to use, I think you generally got to have a real… If you’re going to be really good at real estate, and you might disagree, Rob, and other people, it’s just my opinion, I really do think you got to be interested in property. But I don’t think that’s a big ask, because if you’re interested in business or you’re interested in deals, I’m that type of individual, I’m interested in business in general. I think being involved in properties is a great… It’s almost like having a job as a hobby, having your hobby as a job.
That’s what I meant. If you’re the right type of person, it’s hard, but it’s never as hard as other people are finding it. Is this making sense, Rob?
It is, but I have a question for you, John. So secretly, I haven’t asked you or called this out in years on the show, but it is a thing that you revealed to me a long time ago, and I’ve always found it to be fascinating about you, Which is John, in his own right, is a real estate investor, for real. I am not, to draw a clear delineation between the two of us. John owns and manages a property, at least one, maybe more now, but certainly back in the day, one. You have a very specific insight that I don’t have because I haven’t actually owned property. I’ve stayed away from it for personal reasons, not investment reasons. It’s one of the best investments that a person can make, so please don’t anybody read into it. I’m a weird dude. But, John, I have a question for you that plays into this whole idea that you have invested in real estate for reals. If you were going to have a niche yourself, if you’re going to say, If I was a real estate agent, licensed and all that stuff, and you had to focus on a niche in the same city that you’re in right now, which is Reno, Nevada, what would that be?
It’s actually Carson City, actually.
Carson City, my bad. What would that be?
I think it would be horse ranches. The type of clientele I would hope with the client. It’s not… There are some enormously wealthy people. It would be… I’m going to try and muscle into the late time market unless you knew the right people and you were prepared to be the second for a experienced agent in or you were extremely attractive or very outgoing individual, you might be able to muscle into the late time luxury market. I think Horse Ranches is an area where the competition isn’t quite so intense, and you could find in out about That particular market, I think you could get some traction and it would be on a higher price point. And a lot of people move into Northern Nevada and they’re into horses and horse ranches.
I believe it. I believe it. I never would have guessed, John, in a million years, I’m glad I asked the question.
And I got a bag of carrots for the horses, Well, you got to have a love of animals if you’re going to focus on that.
I do. I mean, honestly, you pick something that would halfway tempt me to be a real estate salesperson. Certainly, if I decide to move out somewhere distant and rural, but I’m probably never going to stop working. I don’t want to stop working.
I can’t. But it’d be quite truthful. I’m looking to give up. I’m never going to retire because I’ll be bored to death. But I hope in about five years, if I’m still healthy, that I can reduce a bit. I should be able to do that, but I’m never going to give up because I think I’ve known loads of people retire, and they’ve got into some bad habits. I’ve known loads of people, Oh, I’m going to do this, ‘ and then they were dead a year later. Yeah.
I know. I think that most people have been conditioned into a type of life and lifestyle that doesn’t actually suit them, and that a lack of passion or vision will kill you faster than anything else, which is why I don’t ever intend to not work. Working for me, I already do something I enjoy it as much as I’ve enjoyed anything else in my career. I actually enjoy this more than I enjoyed looking at Naked Ladies when I worked over when I ran Girls Gone Wild. But the… What? I love that that amused you so much. It did, actually.
It really did.
Yeah, so the thing on our list was find a niche. And if it was me, I’d probably… And I still lived in the same place and I’m still the same human. For me, it would be apartment buildings because Van Oze has so many of them, and I like apartment buildings. What’s more important than the apartment buildings, I happen to like my clientele. I like investors. I like small business owners, and I like people like me who are always driven to do something the way that they want to do it. Most apartment buildings, not all, are owned in small groups by individual investors. Every once in a while, you come across a huge conglomerate. Somebody owns 20, 30, 40 buildings and has hundreds upon hundreds of units. But most of the time, you find apartment buildings getting passed down from family to family. It’s crazy when you know, and I want to talk to those people. I want to know what’s going on. I I want to talk about improving the building the unit. I want to talk to people where this single transaction is worth 15 million, whatever it’s going to be, way more than normal.
And it’s a long sales process because I am best, me personally as human, I’m best when I can focus all my energy on building a handful of really meaningful relationships. I’m going to focus on where those people are, 20 or 30 investments, investment groups, home offices, stuff like that. I will focus my effort there and build the relationships with those people so that when they are ready to buy, sell, or whatever, liquidate, I’ll be their guy. That would be my niche. All right. John, you didn’t put any bullet points. I have my own thoughts about this, but keep your sales generation process personal. What did you mean by that?
Well, it’s been accelerated with AI, and I love AI. It’s made a big difference over the last year. It’s made a lot more efficient, and I really love it. But there’s a downside, and it’s the way that some people in the marketing space are selling it. These trends were there anyway, Robert. It’s just put gasoline on the fire. You can have an AI agent and it will automate the whole process and it’s You will just get the check, the commission check in your bank, and it will literally deal with the whole process and this, that, and the other. Like I said earlier, I see real estate as a compensation business. And what digital marketing or more one-to-one marketing, whatever you want to call it, it’s really about trust, building having trust and having conversations with somebody that’s identified that they need your service in a timeline that can be turned into a commission check, and you’ve got the skills to give them what they’re looking for. I love AI and lead general, but you’ve got to keep it personal. This idea that it will just be It’s totally automated. I’ve got problems with that, Robert.
I agree with the… Now that I understand the way you were taking this, I have said this many times, I agree with it. You can’t outsource A conversation with somebody. The second you outsource the relationship to somebody else, it’s the second that you’ve outsourced the entire business. All of us, everybody in real estate is in a service business. So whoever’s providing the The service wins. That’s it. If a machine is providing the service, it wins. And so you don’t want to outsource that. You can outsource all the mechanics of starting a conversation. I believe in that. Sure. You can outsource a lot of your marketing. You can’t outsource certain types of personal bits, though. This is a conversation I have with people who are going to sign up for the video AI service. It’s like you’ve got to be present and conscious enough to focus on the channels that have these videos. Somewhere at some point, there needs to be a live human beings participating in the conversation, somebody that has buy-in to the brand, not just a service person. Having said that, I think that the definition of personal is going to change a lot.
I really do. I think that personal is going to become like we’re going to see a massive rush towards in-personal faceless texting, writing. But I think that over time, maybe a couple of years from now, you’re going to see a rebound and one-to-one conversations between two live human beings is going to become even more cherished than it already is today. I get so much gratitude sometimes, John. The level of gratitude that I’m getting from people that I talk to on the phone is growing and rapidly. I’m not doing anything different, but the fact that they can get me on the phone and I still have a consultation is like, holy cow. Speaking of which, if somebody wanted to get you on the phone, and everybody listening to the show, please, for the love of God, avail yourself of John and have a good conversation about WordPress websites, what he’s done for real estate, see if it can help you because it’s at $50 a month, you can’t beat it. Now, I, if you have a larger investment or you want to focus on more verticals for SEO, organic marketing, you can have a conversation with me, But if you’re just starting out or your budget is smaller or you have some WordPress questions, every single thing I just listed, John is an expert at.
So, John, how would somebody reach out to you if they were so inclined?
Oh, that’s great. Thanks, Rob. Just go over to mel-right. Com and have a look at what we got to offer. We’re having some more upgrades in the near future that I will be able to talk about. We’ve already We spent more money this year on upgrading things, and it’s a great platform. You can go on to the top navigation and you can book a chat with me, a free Zoom, and we can have a quick chat, and we can see how we could help you. Back over to you, Rob.
And if anybody listening to this show is inclined to talk to the crazy maestro whose voice you’ve been hearing over the It’s not…
I’m sorry to interrupt, Rob, but I’ve been very good, I think. I haven’t interrupted you too much. But actually, it’s not him, folks. This has to be the AI person that we’ve been using. He’s not here.
No, people are going to believe you. You can go to inboundrem. Com, look at our services or About page. I highly recommend that you check out our portfolio. We are getting ready. John and I, completely coincidentally, happen to be updating our in the same year, which is what you do when you own an agency and things are slower. We are also upgrading the design. I am so hot on our product line currently. I think we’re going to have one of the best websites, one of the best SEO products with one of the fastest rates of return of any company you can call or look at. We’re not as inexpensive as John, news flash, but we have some other compelling offers for if you have a a small to medium-sized marketing budget. So inboundrem. Com, About Services page, Portfolio. All right. Oh, one last thing for everybody. And then John, I’m going to have you take us offline. Please, I am so thrilled, so tickled pink, that you guys made us one of the top 100 real estate podcast because it was all you. John and I didn’t even know we were submitted. We wasn’t even on my radar, it wasn’t on John’s radar.
They tweeted it to me, John. They messaged me on Twitter and notified me that way that we had won, not even that we were nominated, that we won. I just, wow. Thank you, everybody. Like, share the show. Please continue it on. I want to be, now that I know there’s a list, I want to be higher on it.
You’re so American, aren’t you, really? Americans love these type of things, don’t they? It It’s fascinating to watch, actually.
We’re competitive, John. I didn’t even know that there was a list, but now that I know there’s a list- I’m competitive, but I’m competitive in a very English way.
A lot of Americans think I’m not competitive, but I am. I just do it in a very English way.
Okay. I don’t even know what you mean by that, but you can tell me after you turn the show off. Thank you for tuning in, everybody. I’ve been Robert. My co-host has been John. We appreciate your patronage. Thank you for making us number 86 out of 100 podcasters. We really appreciate it.
I enjoyed that. It was a good show. All right, but we’re not done, you and I.
So let’s talk about this list that you e-mailed over to me.
Yeah, what do you reckon?
Well, I only like It’s one of the designs, so it’s an easy conversation to have. I looked at all of them. The same point was sticking with me on every single one of these except for number one, which is WP tonic,, the edu, cdnalpha. Com. I guess it’s… No, they’re all alpha. I’m going to open these up just to refresh my memory here. But I remember that in all of these, you had a space for real estate stats. And I feel like that is a thing that is died off, that whole, let’s put something on the home page that fills space but says something, whatever. I just I don’t think it’s relevant anymore. And all of the designs that you sent over, except for one, feature that heavily. The one that didn’t was Alcor. That was the name of the design was Alcor. And Alcor is much more where I think that all the Webby awards, all the top 100 Tom Ferry, they’re all similar to Alcor. Minimalistic, spatial, focusing on images. I loved Alcor. I really did. I thought it was a very sexy design and a very limited amount of space being taken up, and most of it was iconography, not.
There was only one place that was our specialization, and then it was like comfortable homes, modern design, convenient location. But I did think that the filtered way of doing that, if you can make an IDX work in a way that was like that matched this, then I thought it was very fascinating.
They’re not really… I wanted to discuss with you. I I would rather we come to some deal that you make a little bit money from it, but hopefully you do me… If they want IDX integration, I would like your team to do it, really, if possible. I want to get out. I had some people in India I was using, and they’re being okay because my normal development team are pretty good, but they don’t want I didn’t get involved with IDX, so I had to use somebody from India that had experience. And the experience wasn’t terrible, but it was also similar to what you were saying about Indian people. But I haven’t got a client at the present moment that wants IDX integration. There might be one coming up in a month’s time, and they’re looking at IDX broker, and that’s what you use. So But these were for people that are using my 49, and it does come with a website, but we only had one design. When When I’ve got it integrated, I’ll show it to you, and they will have a little library with all these themes, and we’re going to add two more to this.
That should be done by the next week. So they have a little library of not a dozen, but more than six, be it eight, maybe eight themes, and they’d be able to switch over from this with one button click. So I wanted a group of looks that were a bit different in color. But they’re not really designed for… They’re not designed for IDX optimization, and that side. It’s for that lesser market. Does that make sense, Robert? Yeah.
All right, so you covered a lot of ground, so let me reverse. I’m comfortable doing IDX outsourcing or at least entertaining the conversation as long as it’s IDX broker. We’re definitely very confident at that. All other IDXs usually require a learning curve to learn how to do. We could do it, but I’d have to charge you at the point that you’re paying me for a learning curve. I don’t know that it makes sense. On IDX Broker, if I’m going to implement IDX Broker, which I’d be very willing to entertain if the following is met, IDX Broker allows you to assign a client either under their own code or your code, like it’s a subcontracting arrangement. You get $30 a month, roughly, to manage an IDX account on the ongoing basis with IDX Broker. I would certainly be willing to install IDX Broker if I got the recurring revenue on it.
Yeah, it sounds okay. We can have a talk about it. That doesn’t sound outrageous.
Okay. Because what we do is we provide a website But if they want IDX, we say you got to go to a higher hosting plan, and I normally manage it through WP tonic.
But if you want that fee, we can give them a package. Yeah, that’s fine. And not at the present moment, but I might want you… Because I think we can run the Facebook campaigns. We got a couple of people we’re doing that for, but I don’t really We’ve got it advertised on one of the subpages, but we don’t actually want to get in it, is to run these Google Local campaigns. So if we get somebody, we send them your way. And maybe if you’re prepared, give us a small cut. But we don’t actually want to run the Google Local campaigns. It’s just too much work. But you’ve got all these people in the Philippines, haven’t you?
I’ve got somebody that’s very good at it, that we’ve trained up to be an expert, but she’s working for me full-time. All my guys work for me exclusively. She, so far, has been able to manage our workload. We’re charging $100 a month to manage the campaigns on an ongoing basis once they’re set up. I’d have to create a special price to you because honestly, that price is based on the fact that it’s an add-on for us where we’ve got $500 that we’re charging already. So to say, go from five to six is… We’re not… Whylopo is charging their clients 200, okay? So everybody’s charging more. We decided not to charge more because we didn’t want to make people feel like we were nickel and diming them. If I’m going to take a referral client and give you a piece that it’s…
Yeah, I can do that. Oh, well, it might be the otherwise best. You just give me a flat rate and I’ll just put my mark up on it and you just manage it. That’s probably better then, hasn’t it?
$100. Give you the same rate I give everybody else. $100. Manage the campaign.
Okay? That sounds good. What’s your minimum? Is there a set up for you and do you have a minimum contract?
So the way that I’ve been working it right now, John, is 12 months. Contracts are really loose. There’s no penalty if they cancel. So yes, it’s a contract. It’s a written agreement that I send somebody, but I don’t charge somebody to cancel. I mostly do reputation protection. So if I’m signing up with somebody, I’m still going to do that. Reputation protection is we inform you of these things as you sign this agreement because real estate agents are not great when it’s said, Oh, you said this to me. No, I really didn’t I really didn’t. That’s what pisses me off. I have people sign agreements that are like that, John. I told you these things, you’re signing something before we even- It’s not any real estate agent, Rob.
It’s everybody.
Well, it drives me crazy, John. That’s what I make people sign. So yes, I have a twelve-month agreement. It’s month-to-month, really. Seven days cancelation notice for the agreements that I have. What was the minimum?
It was by What’s basically happened is I haven’t totally fallen out with Adam, but he’s had to take a corporate job. He actually has got quite a good gig, and he’s still part of Melright, but he can’t spend as much because he was doing his own marketing agency, he specialized in video using drones, and he had quite a few real estate clients, but in the Bend area, Oregon. And he’s had to to get a corporate job because he had one before it for a mortgage brokerage. I can’t remember. You’ve seen something else, actually. So he’s having to cut down on his own work for his own agency, and he can’t commit so much time for me either. He wasn’t too keen on the Google stuff anyway. He’s okay with the Facebook and video editing. I I want a more automated, and that’s what we’ve got now. So if I can… Yeah, that should work. All right?
So here’s my offer/ counter proposal, whatever. I’m going to give you the world’s best deal with PPC. If you ever have anybody talk to you about PPC, I don’t even want to… Listen, I could theoretically outsource that, but I’m going to give you the same thing I do. I have an outsourced resource who has grown from one person to in Turkey. His name is. I’ll simply give you his name. He charges me, I think it comes out to be about $100 account per month somewhere in that neighborhood. I don’t want a piece of this. So whatever he charges me, I’m going to ask him to charge you the same thing, and you get to put your profit on top of it. All I’ll tell you is he’s extremely good.
I will commit to that. Oh, yeah, it’s great, because I don’t think Adam wants to do it. So if you can send those details. If you’re not Don’t have to do it this week if you’re too busy, but if you just send an outline of some of the prices you’ve quoted me. Obviously, the IDX broker, it’s on what we have to discuss is what level of information that you require from me, so you can give me a quote. So we got to discuss that. The Google the $100 sounds fine. And if you just send me the resources of this Turkish guy. Because like I said, I haven’t fallen out Adam, and he’s done a lot of free work, and he’s really helped me, and he still can help me on the Facebook side, but he won’t have the bandwidth to help me on this other stuff. I’m too busy with WP Tonic Thank God. I don’t want to give up on Mel, because I’ve invested quite a bit of money in that. I have spent more money on it the past four months, and we’re doing these websites, so you But I can see that I’m still investing money into it.
Hold on one second. I’m finishing out this.
When I’ve got it all set up, I’ll show you the back-end because we’re doing improvements. It’ll be a nice system. The main problem is The main problem, what we’re building, Rob, is that, and I’m prepared to do it, is that we have to spend too much time showing them how it works, and it doesn’t seem to register. So it’s like we’re getting a few people that want to spend the $50, but they want us to manage it for $50, and it ain’t going to happen.
Sure.
But I get people that sign up for my hosting at WP Tonic, and they get a white onboarding call, and we spend more time giving them a more customized hosting experience. And if they pay yearly, it’s $35 a month. Month to month, it’s 55. And they get a load of plug-ins. But still, a lot of them think that we’re going to build a whole website out for them, a whole learning management system. It’s quite amazing, really, Rob.
Believe me, I understand the difference between Gucci wishes and Walmart budgets.
Yeah, that’s it.
I’ve sent you that email. The next time you want to walk me through the system, I’m down for it. But, John, I’m going to say the same thing that I’ve been saying to you for a long-ass time. To get me involved, to get some opinion, to get anything from you, really, you need my technology partner. If you don’t want to show us code or give us access, great. But if you want to do a walkthrough by video, I got to have this guy there. I got to. In order to have an opinion, to have anything like long term conversations between you and I, we started to build an all in one platform that wasn’t going to be owned. We’ve been on it silently in the background. Nobody knows this for two years because he wanted me to start another brand with him. He’s been doing it on his own dime. He wanted me to start another brand with him because he wants to have something that he can sell, which Iron was never designed that way. I’m not building a technology company that’s easy to sell at all. I built it as a dream of my own.
He wanted something different, and I because he is overqualified and over talented for what I use him for. I agreed that I would market the hell out of it and maybe even start a second company as long as he finished it. Now, he’s been working on it for years, and unfortunately, what he wants to do and what’s realistic is crazy different because he had these massive visions for this thing. Anyway, I would need to have him Just to see at least what you’ve built, see if he has a vision for it from technology, or if he even thinks he could pick up the… Like he could do something with it at some point, if ever that conversation happens between you and me.
I think I totally understand where you’re coming from, and it’s what you said before. Let me think about it, but at the time being, if you can not help me because you’re… But I don’t want to do the IDX integrations. My team doesn’t want to do it. Sure. Like I said, I was using these Indian people. They were okay, but I had to keep… They’re not up to the standard of my own normal team. When we looked at their code and some of their work, we had to clean it up a little bit, and my team really didn’t want to do it. I just wanted to see if you I’m going to give me a quote, and I’ll let you do it because you’ve got experience in it. But we have to work out what information I’ve got to gather from the client to give to you.
Listen, I’m going to make this simple for both of us. John, it’s going to be difficult for me to answer process-based questions from an outside source. I usually take over customer relationships entirely. What I’m going to tell you that would make sense, probably for both of us, is you find somebody who’s interested, and we schedule a core Zoom, and we’ll all record it. I will come away from that with a better understanding, better process, the ability to quote you. All these IDX integration, like in integration conversations, they happen at different quote rates. When I’m charging just a flat rate for my guy, the guy that can do it all, it’s $150 an hour. But obviously, you know as well as I do that there’s a whole bunch of grunt works, creating save links, stuff like that. We don’t do that with him. The guys that do do it for me, they charge me like… It comes out to be like $5 a link, maybe even less, something ridiculously underpriced. However, you occasionally have a realtor who calls into you and they literally, and with no visible change in their face, they go, Well, I think I have like a thousand pages on my website.
You’re like, So a thousand saved links, if I have to recreate them, even it, let’s just call it $2. 50 a link because it takes 10 minutes to create a link. Now, all of a sudden, you’re talking about… I’m just doing the math. It’s like $2,500.
I understand where you’re coming from. It’s so broad and that. Yeah, I totally understand where you’re coming from. But we get the things and then, yeah, sure, I don’t mind showing your guy if you wanted to be part of it. I’m just looking for us to do a little bit of business. I’m not giving up on Mel, right? It’s just I do. I had to improve it or give up on it, and we have spent a bit more money, and there’s a little bit more work Because I’m also using it. I’ve also taken a copy of it, the core of it, and I plan to offer it as part of my hosting package for WP tonic as well. So I’m going to use elements with my hosting package with WP tonic because I offer a library of plugins, and some of them I’ve got lifetime unlimited website licenses. Others, I’m getting close. It’s not scalable. So by offering what Melright offers, I can duplicate what we’re offering without having to buy more licenses for the plugins. We’ve done that, and in the next few months, that will be more public.
Have you checked out GPO vault?
I chose to go to… Because I have relationships with all these people. I chose to go, and they gave me some really good deals, and some of them lifetime deals. I do use it on individual properties that I own, but only very occasionally, if I’m trying something out. Because it’s not illegal, it’s totally under the license. But I didn’t want to upset the relationships that I’ve got in the WordPress community by doing that.
Yeah, I wouldn’t just casually tell you I’m a coke smuggler, and do you want me to hook you off with my smuggle? I know it’s not illegal. It can be, depending on what worlds you walk in, it can be unethical. To be honest with you, there’s no way in the world for me to do what I do using what I use on websites and pay the licensing fees. None. Real estate agents don’t want to pay a one-time fee of $80 for Yoast, let alone the yearly updates and all the other things that go along with it, because it is a, You use this tool, and they don’t want to do that. It’s all out of the question. It’s just absolutely out of the question. Either you’re going to self-manage it, and the only way for me to self-manage at a reasonable price is GPL vault.
Yeah, I totally understand, but I chose, and a lot, the that we offer as part of our hosting packages. They’re fully licensed, all of them. And there’s about three or four that they didn’t give me unlimited lifetime. They gave me a certain amount of websites. Most of them are between 100 and 200, but it’s only about three on the list that I have that deal. But we’re getting close to going beyond that. And I want something I think that’s truly scalable. We’re going to use what I built with Melright as part of what we’re offering as our hosting package, aimed at membership and learning management system. So even… And the Melright is ticking over, it’s doing right. It provides about one-fourth of my income. The bulk of my income comes from WP tonic. I But I’m not prepared to give up on it because it’s been a learning exercise. Unfortunately, I’m a bit maybe too old for learning. But I think you’ve seen that I’ve educated myself, and hopefully you would say I’m a much stronger marketer than I was a few years ago.
I’ve definitely noticed a shift in a different sense. Just to circle back around to something that perhaps I wasn’t clear on, I understand full well that all you’ve asked me for is the possibility of a partnership that you’re not giving up on mail rate. I am in no way inferred by anything you said before. No, you didn’t. But I did have it in the back of my mind The sooner I can have a look at this technology, the more I know how to have a conversation with you in the future about how to frame it. It could be just something I never want to talk about.
Let me think about it, and I would ask you to sign a non non-compet. The thing is, you’re building this other thing. So I would have to think, because I probably would ask you to sign a non-compet, and you’d probably say, I thought… Oh, you would, right? So that should be okay then. But let me think about it.
I’m not trying to copy anything that you’re building, what I’m trying to figure out is if at some point in the future there’s a possibility of me licensing or acquiring it.
Can I tell you a little story before you go? Sure. I don’t know if you do. I get all All my subcontractors to sign non-compet, that if they’re working on a client’s project, they can’t work on that client’s project outside of WP tonic for two years.
Sure.
I had a quite major client. I told you I had a rough week last week. Yes. And this client, she got an employee. She was part of the call in the background because they put it on speaker phone She denies it because I had to have a very difficult come to Jesus discussion with her, which she didn’t like. She doesn’t really like me, but I don’t really care. I just want the money. They tried to poach one of my main project managers, tried to poach him.
Sure.
It’s unbelievable. But he signed Everybody, he signed a non… He’s totally straight. He told me straight away what they said. They worded it. They worded it that they wanted to hire him. They’ve got a contract with me until October, and it’s a lot of money, and they’ve told me they’re not going to renew it. She says that she doesn’t like me, but basically, they’re looking for cheaper alternatives. That’s what it’s It’s always about money, isn’t it? And they said, Oh, we want to hire you after October for another project. It was worded that, but… So it’s worded very carefully, but I know what’s going on. But the thing is, he makes a lot of money out of me, and he’s my co-host on my other podcast, the WP Tonic, and we’re pretty friendly. Obviously, I can’t say we’re true friends because he’s making money from me. So that relationship, you can’t say somebody’s a total friend, because But we get on. And I think he’s a pretty honest guy, and I’ve done him favors, and he’s done me favors, and he told me straight away. And the funny thing, he hates them more than I do.
He hates her. He absolutely hates her, and he absolutely hates the member of staff that we’re working with. He’s the one that works with them, but I think he’s lovely. But he gets me on the owner of the business, so I have to do the dirty work. I have to tell him the realities. So they think he’s Saint Jesus walking on water, but he hates them. He’s constantly they complained about. It’s really strange, isn’t it, Robert?
There’s nothing more befuddling than a human being. But, John, before we lose track of it, I will sign whatever you want me to sign. I’m not interested in copying anything from you. I’m interested in evaluating any long-term potential that might exist in a tool, especially if at some point you do fold up shop. I will be transparent about what my motivation is. If you decide at some point fold up the shop and I happen to be doing better than what I’m doing right now, maybe I buy it on the cheap. Who knows? I’m a transparent dude. Love me or hate me, I am usually going to tell you what direction I’m coming from.
Totally understandable, Rob. There’s nothing more with that. No, there isn’t. I would like to…
Yeah. So yeah, sure. You just think about whether or not you even want to mess with that. In the meantime, though, if there’s some cross purposes with the IDX stuff, happy to help. I see you the prices for the other things that you asked about. I see you the name to my guy. There’s nothing- That’s really appreciative, Rob, because I haven’t got the bandwidth.
As you said, the main problem with many of these real estate agents is that they’ve got Gucci tastes and a Walmart budget. I’m doing better with WP Tonic. I’ve I managed to get some good… A lot of them… I’ve got a good spread of a lot of small and about three or four large clients. I’m looking for medium ones, but I have a nice spread. But it’s amazing human beings, just mind, you want to get a gun and shoot. I was talking to the owner of Lifter LMS, and he’s got about 20 people working for him, native and offshore. And he’s got a very… He’s a nice guy, Chris, and he gave me a lifetime license for Lifter LMS Infinity. I also promote him a lot through my podcasting and videos. And he said he’s a nice guy. He’s no idiot, but he comes across nicely. And he said, I get tons of abuse from my clientele. I get it constantly. And they give a lot to their plugin buyers. And he said, Oh, yeah, we get abuse all the time from a minority.
Blissfully, John, there’s a considerable price I pay to get this result, but I don’t get a lot of abuse. But that’s because I spend, which will blow your mind, because it’s a real number. I spend about three hours with every person who calls me about IRIUMN, three hours. When I finish the call, I have a good idea of who they are. We get demanding clients. We do. We’ve got a difficult one working through the system right now. But the thing about the difficult ones in my space, if they’re that difficult, boy, oh, boy, have I quoted them something to accommodate the difficulty. I have done that with the person walking through the system right now. We’re $40,000 in with the real estate agent. Now, they are incredibly, insanely hard to deal with. I’ve had to open a Slack channel to my leading developer because it’s hard to explain, but they’re insistent with their request. Their expectations are insanely high. They’ve never dealt with developers. They have no understanding that you don’t get developer-type resources just on fucking speed dial answering all your questions.
Wow. But blissfully, I have charged them up with a wazoo to get that service, and they are floating like… They’re like 5% of my revenue right now.
Yeah, it’s around 40 grand for this woman I’m talking about. I think she’s got a personality disorder. Honestly, she is semi-paranoid all the time, and it is really… She is a handful. And she’s a gaslighter, supremo. You have a conversation with her and think you’re losing your mind.
I’ve noticed it is an insane thing to me, John. It’s taught me a lot about business, and I know that there are a fair number of people out there who make a fair amount of money but don’t do it nicely or well. They do it. I have learned in the hardest way possible, it’s like, well, I wish there was a world in which you could be a total and utter shit heel and not make money. I hope that wasn’t. It’s possible. But the squeaky wheel, the complainers, the loud people, the fucking people to get in your face, friendly people tend to go, Jesus Christ, you’re a lot. I’m going to give you whatever you want. Go away. It is nutty to me how many people with personality disorders you see who make a lot of money. You know where you see it the most in the real estate space? It’s absolutely in the luxury space—no doubt about it. Jake Mills and Joyce Ray are lovely ladies. They both have personality disorders, though. Jade Mills has been begged by her family, her kids, her husband, and everybody to retire, and she won’t do it.
She is obsessed with work, which is great for her clients and fucking shitty for every other human in her life. She can’t drop the small details, though, at all. I mean, at all.
This woman is a control freak, a supremo as well, and also. But he is what he is, isn’t he, Rob? We move forward, don’t we?
We do.
All right. I’ll be seeing you later then. Bye. Later, buddy.
Ciao.
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Personal agent photography is really important but usually semi-forgotten. We have a great guest "Preston Zeller" on the show who recently Read more
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Would you be able to find the best real estate virtual assistant companies for 2025? Compare top services to streamline your workflow and grow your agency fast.
Are you a real estate professional looking to streamline your operations in 2025? This video explores the best virtual assistant companies explicitly tailored for the real estate industry. Discover how these services can help you manage listings, handle client inquiries, and boost productivity, allowing you to focus on closing deals. Don’t miss out on valuable insights—watch the video now to find your perfect virtual assistant match.
#1 – Introduction
#2 – What are some of the key things a real estate agent needs to look for before hiring a VA services provider?
#3 – What tasks should you assign to a real estate VA?
#4 – We look at some of the leading providers in 2025
Summit VA Solutions
https://www.summitvasolutions.com/
Prices – No public pricing information
Virtudesk
Prices – $450 set-up fee, Hourly rates from $9.55-13.30
MyOutDesk
Prices – Starts at $1,988 per month.
TaskBullet
Prices – Philippine VA pricing: $7.50-11 per hour, U.S. VA pricing: $25-30 per hour
Brivity VA
Prices – $350 onboarding fee – Part-time: $1,250 per month – Full-time: $1,750 per month
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. It’s episode number 471 of the Mailright Show. Today, we have a fancy title for the show, but really what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about the real estate assistant companies, places that you can find and source real estate VAs, which we feel strongly is one of the most essential elements of a real estate, a professional real estate agent’s toolkit that is a medium to long term vet in the industry. Before we got into this subject, though, John and I used virtual assistant-type resources to build our businesses. I’ve worked with virtual assistant-type resources for 30 years. We have a lot to say about this subject.
You probably will because you have more experience in this topic than I do.
Well, I’m not going to disagree on this one. Please give us a little intro, though, John, and give us some background on how you built your business. As you provide the intro, why don’t you give a little background on the places you use, like overseas resources, or just a little top-level thought about it.
Yeah, sure. I’m the joint founder of Mailright, mail-right. Com. We’re an easy-to-use CRM with a real strong focus on providing lead-generating tools as part of the CRM. And it starts at around $50, $49 per month if you pay month to month. So it’s affordable, folks, and it’s easy to use. So my thoughts about… Well, I’ve used a bit of Upwork. That takes a lot of time. There have been bigger projects; sometimes I’ve had success, and other times it’s been a heap of failure. But on reflection, that was more down to me not having the process that you have, which you talked about in previous episodes. For some projects, I’ve had more success using Fiverr, where it’s a very narrow deliverable that I wanted. The people have clear evidence of a lot of experience and examples, and are a premier Fiverr supplier. I wouldn’t spend much money on Fiverr, but to get the intro for a video or get some audio work, I have a long-term retainer and an audio editor who helps me with these podcasts.
But if I only had a one-off or was looking for a long term, I was trying different people out. Fiverr can work out. On the right project, I’ve had more success and quicker success than on Upwork. Upwork, I wouldn’t recommend it to somebody without experience in hiring offshore staff, because you have to understand what you’re getting involved with. Over to you, Rob.
Brilliant. So my name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound REN. I’m your second co-host. I’ll be the voice that usually steers a little bit more than John, but it’s John who founded the show, Mailright, and John who founded numerous companies in different tech spaces, such as SAAS. He’s got a couple of podcasts. I’m an SEO expert with a very deep pedigree in running massive call centers, which is why I’ve worked with overseas resources for almost the entirety of my career, John. It’s been since I was 19, and I’m 54. So, I would never guess. My experience has been, and I have about 20 day-to-day overseas resources that I’ve hired and trained for Inbound R. E. but I’ve leaned heavily on my experience hiring in mass. Very much, I’ve taken the road less traveled. I’ve flown to the Philippines. I’ve met with the people that I’ve hired. I’ve met every single person that works for me right now, with only a couple of exceptions, even at the lowest possible end of the company, because you can get good work from people, no doubt.
You don’t have to meet them, you don’t have to fly to them. There is a vastly different buy-in when they feel connected to what you’re doing, even if they’re just people on a retainer. Which is just the… It’s the same way you get excellent performance from sales teams. You train them, you pay attention to them, you hold them, you nurture them. When they can produce, they tend to stay loyal because oftentimes, by the time you train them to produce a lot, they roll on to other sales teams, especially if you’ve not done an excellent job in training them. If they had to learn everything on their own, they would bail on you as soon as they can. So in terms of hiring overseas resources, let me say that I think it’s critical for real estate agents. That’s number one, literally the introduction to the show. Why should we talk about this? Because you can pay somebody $5 an hour to create a thumbnail for you, or you can go to Fiverr and spend 15 bucks and get five different iterations of a thumbnail. You can get it with less effort and less thought than even using AI.
They deliver the product to you on Fiverr, and they do so for such a low amount of money. I’m not even sure that it makes sense to muck around with AI applications, even though they literally just deliver done for you thumbnails, like on VidIQ. I still think that there’s space for Fiverr and other tools. And to reiterate, to comment on what you said, John, I’ve had exactly the same experience, no doubt. There If I was hiring for… My original blog post for my customers were all done off a Fiverr guy who just wrote these things super fast. And my original There was so much that we did with Fiverr. The only time I started to get outside of Fiverr was when I wanted to train people to be part of my team on a permanent, ongoing basis. And then I started to get outside of Fiverr because Fiverr simply didn’t provide the commitment that I needed to build the infrastructure that I wanted for inbound REN. I wanted somebody to answer client emails 24/7, basically. I wanted to hand off an inbound REN email address, and I wanted to have these people take ownership of customer communication.
That is not stuff that you can do using a Fiverr resource. But you’re right in the sense that I had to spend a year training these people to get them to a place where they could do the work that I’m talking about, to answering emails, answering questions. They had to know what the answers were that I wanted provided. They had to learn from me for a full year before they were qualified. I still only have three resources that are approved to talk to customers out of 20 people. You’re right. It takes a ton of time. It’s training to teach, to make sure that somebody is upholding your values. But you can also go another route, which is what John is focused on for today’s show, and I couldn’t agree more because here’s the other route that you can go, John, which you pointed out. You can hire some companies to do it for you who are good at individual tasks. You can also hire companies that specialize in hiring real estate VAs. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. So one of the very first questions that I think you very smartly ask is, what are some of the key things a real estate agent needs to look at before hiring a VA service provider?
So what were some of the things that you came up with that you would look for before hiring somebody?
I’m going to I’m just going to throw it back to you because I just think you got a lot more experience than this. My development team, I have a couple US-based developers that I met through my endeavors in the WordPress community by going to WordPress word camps. I have a small group of US-based WordPress. And then I adopted a team offshore from somebody who was getting out of WordPress web development. They were semi-retiring, and they were actually moving to Costa Rica. They said they were closing shop, and they had this team that had been working for them for about six or seven years. And she said, Do you want to adopt them? And I said, Yeah, I’ll adopt them. Because I had used them as a bit of overflow. When I was needing some, I was a bit pushed. We were a bit pushed. We were using them as an overflow service, and they were pretty good. So I adopted. She said, ‘Go work for Jonathan. And that was about seven years ago.
All right. Well, when I’m hiring for VAs, Especially when I’m hiring off large message board type services. Now, I’m using antiquated language, but there are services where you can install an ad and then you find people. And LinkedIn is turning themselves into that. Twitter is even starting to in that direction, like hiring employees. I got to tell you, John, that one of the reasons I continue to use Upwork is they have a filter that allows me to target certain countries. And that’s one thing I’ve learned. Please, nobody who’s listening to this show message me, but I have tried Pakistan and Indian resources over and over again. While I’ve had success for a couple of years, the employees in these countries are usually so pressured for certain types of success that I never keep anybody over a year or two, and then I end up having to retrain them. Whereas my Philippines team, which is They’ve all been with me for seven, eight years, they’re still with me, every single person, nobody’s ever left. And that is really important to me, John. So when I’m looking for somebody, I stick with two countries. That’s it. I go with Macedonia, and that’s when I want people that speak English better, and I’m willing to pay a couple of bucks more per hour.
And then what I’m looking for, when you’re looking for a VA, first of all, it’s the country that they come from. And then secondly, what it is, is you’re looking Honestly, it’s like, number one, I look for people that have a spotless record on Upwork. I don’t mess around with people that got an 89 %. I look for people who are five-star. I look for people that are new or When they’re into their career. They don’t have 100,000 hours work. Why? Because generally people on Upwork that have 10, 20, 30,000 hours work or even a thousand hours work, they have set clients that they’re already really invested in. I am looking for somebody to go to build into working for me full-time and basically always being available to me as a resource. That usually means I’m looking for people with a lower level of hours worked, five-star review.
Before we go for our break and talk maybe about some of these companies that are on this list, what are a couple of tips, insights that When a real estate agent is looking at these various companies that provide via virtual assistant, how do they make, apart from the price, are there a couple of insights that you can give that they need that that would help them make maybe a better choice rather than just- It’s all about just being really diligent.
And this is the part that frustrates me, John, is that I’ve said this before and people don’t listen. And when you’re on Upwork, here’s one of these- Are you talking about me? No, I don’t know what you do or don’t do. But here’s one of the first things I do when I’m on Upwork, and it’s so basic. I’m always gobsmacked that people I don’t do this. I don’t just look at their resume because anybody can say anything they want on a resume. Actually, most of the time on Upwork and other places, most cultures lie. They lie on their resume. Indians, Pakistanis do it all the time. They don’t really have the work history that they said that they have. I go into a portfolio and look to see if they have a portfolio, and if they do have a portfolio, I absolutely look at the examples, and then I try to verify in some way that the person The person that I’m talking to, if I really like the example, I try to verify that the person I’m talking to actually did the work. So that’s a multi-step process. Sometimes it means reaching out to the person whose project it was, and I do all of that before talking to the resource because if they didn’t really do the work, I don’t want to waste my time talking to them.
I verify their reviews and I verify their work, and I find the work that I like, and then I verify their… And that takes care of 80% of it. By the time I’m ready to talk to somebody, I know I want to talk to them. I’m already pretty sure that there’s somebody worth talking to. It’s just a matter of, are they responsive? And that is one thing that I do that is a great litmus test, everybody who’s listening to the show, because you’re asking me for tips and hacks. Well, here’s a quick hack. You can send an initial comment to somebody on these services. You can message them in Upwork, you can. And you go, Hey, I’m looking at your resume and checking your reviews, I just wanted to let you know. Why would I send a message like that? I just like to test responsiveness. That’s it. I’m not making a commitment. I’m not telling them I want to… They’ll always go… In the Philippines and everywhere else, they’re very aggressive most of the time. They’re like, Oh, yeah, you want to set up? I’m like, No, I’m not ready to set up a call with you yet.
I’m just letting you know I’m looking at your resume. I want you to look at mine. I want you to look at mine because you know me, John. I have a five-star history everywhere I go, and I’ve got a triple A rating on Upwork. It’s like I’ve spent $500,000 there, and every single person that’s ever worked for me has given me a five-star review on the Upwork side. So I want somebody to really check me out the same way I’m checking them out. So it’s like, Hey, check me out. And then I’m checking you out. That’s all this is, is letting you know I’m checking you out. And if they don’t respond, I move on.
Yeah. So I think what you’re saying with a company is spend a bit of time looking at the reviews of each company and then do an outreach and see how quickly and how they respond to you. Is that basically- Yeah.
I mean, We’re going to go to break in a second here, guys, and John, but I want to say something that I think is really relevant. It does take a lot of time to find somebody good. But John, all the success I’ve had, all the benefits of having a company, it has all come on the backs of my employee search skills. That’s it. That is where I really shine. That’s what the telemarketing business taught me to do is hire thousands of people, and I’ve done that. You really want to be very diligent and go step by step inside hiring somebody, check their reviews, check who they’ve worked with. Because once you hire them, oftentimes you’re done with that for years if you hired right. You’ll find your assistant and you’ll done. So yes, this is a lot of time. It sure is. But my God, can somebody good change your entire career trajectory?
Before we go for our break, would you hope that one of the differences between trying to hire direct and utilizing one of these companies, I’m only surmising this, is that they should have a process. They should be open and showing you their process to hire their team members to you and have some process that identifies fitting the right team member in their own organization with the right type of agent?
I would certainly hope so. My challenge, you’re asking a very good question. I’ve certainly tried to hire subcontracting companies out before, and what I always find is they fall far short of my personal benchmarks for success. I want complete trackability. I have all my people on time trackers, and that’s on top of the fact that I used to have them on Upwork, and they were getting tracked screen by screen. I use that shit, John. I use it every day. I don’t slack off on it. I don’t watch everything that everybody does, but I check. I do what’s called the spot check. I look at one little thing, but I do it every single day. I’m very consistent about it. Everybody knows that somebody’s work is getting checked every single day. In the beginning of the company, when I first started this thing, I found all sorts of people doing all sorts of shady and strange things. That hasn’t happened in years now. My team is really good, but I still spot check. And do I find that other people who have contracting companies do that level of diligence? I don’t. I don’t hire from subcontracting companies.
They just don’t have my level of attention to detail. They don’t care about the result as much as I do. They don’t care about the people they hire as much as I do. But there’s one thing we’re seeing, though, John, and you and I have talked about this privately offline before. I also take a lot of big chances with my people. I have given out loans, I’ve taken care of health issues, I’ve bought cars for my people. I really vest heavily in my teams because I I want, I don’t expect, but I want complete commitment on their end. But to get it, you really have to be committed yourself, even to overseas teams. I want complete commitment from my subcontractors, and you don’t get it. They don’t even come close to that diligence, which is why I hire direct. That’s why I hire direct, because I know I’m going to step that game up. That’s why half the reason I started inboundarium is so that I had that direct one-to-one contact with the people doing the work. We’re going to go to break and we come back. We’re going to get into a couple of companies that you can hire.
Please don’t, everybody listening to the show, don’t take everything I said as some de facto So you shouldn’t hire a company, because for most people, you do want to hire a company. So we’re going to cover some companies that you can hire when we come back from break. And stay tuned because that will be in just a moment. Three, two, one. Welcome back to episode number 471 of the MailRight podcast. Today, we’re talking about virtual assistance. And before we went to break, we promised you a few companies that we were going to talk about in 2025. First on our list is Summit VA Solutions. Now, John, you definitely have to help me out because I have only experience with one of these people in a really random way. So what did you discover about Summit VA Solutions when you looked them, when you researched them.
Yeah, I’ve got a quick question before this, though. Would I be right that there’s probably two types of engagement that these companies adopt? There’s one where they’re a dating service where they basically do all the checks or supposed to do all the checks, like what you outlined that you do in your own company. And then they give you one candidate or small, like 2-3 candidates, and you choose one, and they get up front fee or they get a cut of… You pay them and they pay the virtual assistant that’s normally abroad. But then there’s another company where it’s more like a more traditional model where you’re hiring the person from the company, basically. They have a pool of people. They interview you. They say, Well, this person in our company, and then that person is introduced to you. Am I correct, you got these two basic models?
I haven’t used every basic model that’s out there. I’ve usually just tired people direct. But yes, you’re correct. The platform, the ideal with Upwork is you pay 5%, you pay your people, and they take a 5% cut, but they take it from the platform. You pay through the platform, they take it out of the platform, and that’s how they do it. In other iterations of my career, I’ve used hiring companies. When I’m hiring in Mass or in India, for instance, running a call center there, you’ll have a recruiting agency that fills your entire call center. They’re 100% responsible for hiring everybody. That agency is taking a finders fee and a cut of your hourly wage. They say, We’re going to provide you these people for 7. 25, and you just pay the 7. 25 per head and not worry about anything else. They split the money on their end. I was never in accounts payable. I just know I paid 7. 25. I paid X amount per head, and then sent it out to them, and somebody took their cut. As long as that per head price was less than a certain number that I had for my budget, I didn’t really care.
As long as the work was good, which generally was real… When you’re hiring in mass, John, you’re not getting high quality. Just like when you’re getting 100 leads, you’re not getting high quality. You’re usually getting 100 not Not great people and a couple of really good ones. That was always your job at the top of the stack was to find that handful of good people and assign them to more elite call center jobs, like confirming stuff, verifying transactions, stuff like that, stuff that was really high caliber that required a lot of diligence on your call center services team.
So if we start the first one, Summit VR, VA Solutions. Well, the research I did was just looking at other people’s reviews and their articles, because I haven’t got any experience of hiring people, but they seem to get good reviews. They don’t publicly tell you how much they’re going to charge. The other thing I was going to ask you is this summit, they seem to have quite extensive list of services that they do because they also include… I’m not sure you’re going to be that enthusiastic because in the article that I’m looking at, they list SEO optimization and social media management. Their list of services that they’re going to do is quite extensive, but I couldn’t see what they were charging, or they don’t publicly say. So the question I was going to ask you, do you think it’s better just to have a narrow set of requirements to start off with and just go with one of these companies and just have one or two things that they’re going to do rather than let them at it with literally this very long list that I’m looking at?
Repeat the question one more time, John.
Sorry. Yeah, sorry. I rambled, didn’t I? I was saying, if you’re hiring one of these companies like this summit, they seem to have good reviews, but they got a very extensive list of services that they provide. And I was thinking, if you’re starting out, wouldn’t it be best just to choose one or two areas and then in thinking you’re going to hire them and just let them add everything in your company?
Yeah. I mean, so for one thing, they’re advertising VA solutions for stuff that doesn’t make sense, like lockout, HOA, utilities, repairs, and a virtual assistant isn’t going to handle most of those. There are things that they could do inside each one of those processes, but they’re not very specific. Video creation, SEO-friendly content, Somebody took, copied and pasted the summit VA solutions list and then threw it on a website. Website’s not very good. However, what is interesting is they do have a good set of pictures that make me think that the company is legit because what they’re doing is they’re highlighting teams of 20 and 30 from four different countries on their photos, which makes me believe that they probably have teams in Sri Lanka and the Philippines, and there’s somewhere in Latin America as one of their teams. And that’s interesting because really, you can get a lot of great service from virtual assistance or overseas assistance, and Another thing that makes me think it’s legitimate is one of their pictures, especially from the Philippines, is all women, and that’s very, very accurate. Most of my people are women, and they work from home while they’re raising families.
And That is a very true thing that you wouldn’t know unless you hired a lot of VAs. You don’t know what you’re going to get unless you’ve done a lot of it. You do get a lot of women in a lot of different countries, which is I’ve always found fascinating, but it’s true. Anyway, I don’t know if that really answers your question, but Summit does look relatively legitimate. There’s four people stating Stacey obviously started the company, and Birdette Canero and Ciscio Animes and Hannah Desbita are all Filipino, which makes a ton of sense. Stacey is running his company using nothing but overseas resources, which is brilliant. Because you’re doing what you said you would do by building the company that way. I really like it. He’s got nine people listed here that work for him, a marketing person, all his support people. They’re all obviously Filipino or Latin American hires. I think that’s incredibly relevant in terms of a VA solutions company.
The next one, Virtual Desk, does have their prices, a $450 set up fee, and the hourly rates go from 9: 55 to 13: 30. They seem to have a smaller list of services they’re providing. What do you think of them, Robert?
Well, I think that these guys, number one, in terms of their actual pricing, they’re insanely high. That’s why they’ll publish it. Require $450 setup fee in a three-month lock-in period so that they can teach and train their people, the scripts and everything else. Customer service for 1060 an hour, that means that they are pricing this at a minimum where they’re making 100% profit on the hourly. Most of the people in the Philippines work for $2 to $5 an hour. So something like this, they’re going to be really banking a lot of revenue. I don’t know if I trust that or not. I don’t know if VirtuDesk is going to have as good of reviews as everybody else does. But who knows? It’s also a Russian that owns it. And that makes me suspicious, too, to be really honest with you.
Don’t blame you. On to the next one. So if you thought virtual desk, because my out desk starts just slightly below 2,000 a month. But it’s Similar to the first one, it’s got more, not quite such an extensive list, but more than virtual desk. But what do you think of these people?
Well, one thing I like about virtual desk is that they actually have-Not virtual, my out desk. Yeah. Number one, they’ve got a picture on their my business profile that is thousands of people, which they obviously flew in or flew to. Either they, the founder flew to the country of origin or they flew them in. Probably they flew to the company of origin. I think that that’s… And they have a mod con. They’re big. They’re big. I like that about them. They’ve got a good size. They’re probably expensive because they seem to have infrastructure. A lot of Anglo-saxons are in these pictures. That just means that most likely they’ve hired certain US resources to build structure so that you can get proper value out of a $1,988 per month resource because that’s what it requires. You have to have a lot of organizations, somebody running them, managing them, things like that. I like it. I like all that. They’ve also got some cool little clever tools on here. They’re leveraging it on their website. They’re giving you a job description tool for free. Not that you couldn’t just fire up ChatGPT, but still, they’re making an effort.
I like them. They look completely different than the Russian company.
The Mafia, sorry. On to the… I’m not great fan. Well, I shouldn’t say that. I know Russian people are fine. It’s more their government. Taskbullet. This is a bit different because they are offering a price for European VA, but they also got a price for US VAs. Because they’re all offering similar services. But I thought this was interesting because they’re showing USN. What’s your thoughts about that?
Well, I think that they’re doing… Number one, I like their pricing buckets, the way that they’re doing it. I’m liking how they’re call to action, which is literally you can just buy off their website. I could buy a $3,900 resource. Now, nobody’s probably going to buy a $3,900 resource directly off the website. But I do like some of the stuff. Task Bullet looks like another startup that’s probably US It’s a website that’s a little backwards. They’re not as big as Modcon, that third company on your list. They don’t have reviews, which the third company on your list did. The website is so so. So I’m not as excited about these guys now that I’m looking through the site, but I will say this, they look legit.
And the last one is a little bit different.
Is it Oh, Brevity. Brevity. Which is the only company I ask you a question about, because Brevity is Ben Kinney. So Ben Kinney, as he has done so good of a job in, every single time… Ben Kinney has basically been building out companies for every single part of the real estate process. He bought CRMs and customer service people. He bought active rain. If he is buying everything, building up a process, and then he raised a billion dollars for a place because he keeps taking over every single part of the real estate process because I think he sees the weakness in the entire real estate industry, John, and he builds out little companies that service it. Now, whether or not that means that brivity VA Virtual Assistance is any good or not is another question. But of everybody on your list, I’d start here for sure. No doubt about it, because if Ben even has a half-asked, decent real estate person at the top of the stack here, then this company is going to be really successful.
Well, fair enough, because it starts… They got onboarding fee of 3. 50, and then part-time is 1,250 per month, full-time is 1,750. And then they project base that starts at 350.
Well, yeah.
All right.
Another fascinating thing is that the only company, one of their people, that they have on here is Calleigh Moulton. So you look up Calleigh Moulton and get transferred to her Instagram page. And honestly, she has much less to do with her business there than others. She’s focused on her lifestyle. I like that. I like that. That says a lot because if you’re going to hire a Virtual Assistant and build a business and process it, John, you will give up some of your income. You could do every job that is to be done, make a little bit more, and work a lot more. That is not how I would build a business. I would build a business to work less and make a decent amount. Hiring a virtual assistant is about working less and making a relatively good income. You need an assistant if you’re driven and want to make a million dollars. That’s 100% for sure. You could hire a virtual assistant because you’ll save a lot of money over an in-person assistant, unless you hire somebody with a real estate license. Then that person is running around helping you show homes and do the mechanics of your business, and then it makes sense to pay them 60, 80, $100,000, whatever it’s going to be.
I would start with brevity, though.
All right, so we wrap it up. What’s your final thought?
My final thoughts are where we started. This is a brilliant subject. Anybody looking to build a great business in today’s economy and world. You’re going to want to look over the shore. You’re going to want to outsource your assistant work, video, social media posts, writing blog posts, local marketing, and thumbnails. I can go on and on. I could think of 50 to 100 tasks, assuming that you don’t even want to get them into the transaction process because you could do that, too. You can get them in there. A lot of this work, John, will be done by AI relatively soon. One of the ways that I would hire virtual assistants, everybody listening to the show, hear me on this, I would find somebody who’s experienced with AI, who is already proficient with ChatGPT. Do not be scared to let somebody implement AI into your processes. That’s what I got, Jon. What do you think?
No, I was thrilled because you’re the one with the experience in this. I’ve got much more limited experience in this area. But I thought it was something different to discuss, and you would enjoy it. I think you’ve been…
I did enjoy it. I did. I love talking about ways to improve the quality of somebody’s life, and if you get good at this, you’ll make much more money with much less effort. All right, so I’ve been Robert Newman. If you want to learn more about me, you can visit inboundrem. Com. Look at my About page or Services pages. If you’re interested in what we do, we build websites, do local SEO, help real estate agents generate leads, and do it all without signing you up for stuff that is outside your control or that you don’t own. John, how would you like people to research you, get in touch with you, and so on?
Yeah, thanks, Rob. Could you go over to Mail-Right.com? Could you have a look at our feature list? I think you’re going to be blown away. It’s a consistent feature list of great tools that will help you market yourself online. You can book a free chat and demo by going to the Melright website, right in the top navigation. It’ll probably be me who will do it. We can talk about it if that works for you. Like I say, it’s a great, easy-to-use CRM that costs under $50 a month. So great value. Back over to you, Rob.
Beautiful. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your time today. We appreciate it. Please feel free to tune in next week when we have another interesting subject to propel your marketing forward.
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In this insightful show, we explore the long-term nature of content marketing, emphasizing that success is not achieved overnight. Learn why patience and persistence are crucial in building a sustainable strategy that fosters audience trust and engagement. We’ll share practical tips on creating valuable content that resonates over time. Don’t miss out on these essential insights—watch the video now to elevate your content marketing game.
#1 – How to Build Your Real Estate Content Marketing Strategy
#2 – Tips for Creating a Killer Real Estate Content Marketing Strategy
#3 – Finding the Smaller Wins within the Larger Goal
#4 – Are You Appealing to All Stages of the Buying Process?
#5 – Are You Accurately Tracking All Stages of the Lead Lifecycle?
#6 – Final Thoughts
It’s just that I’m half asleep. I got to fake it till I make it. Here we go. We’re live. All right. It’s episode 469. Hard for me to forget that number. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. It’s episode number 469. I’ve been up all night and into the day because it’s been a crazy couple of days, and I’m overly caffeinated and carrying on the show. John will have to be the voice of reason in today’s podcast. Are you ready for that, John?
Well, that’s what the show finished.
Well, for those who don’t know, my English co-host is Jonathan Dinwood. Jonathan is a long-time veteran of being an entrepreneur and designing and developing on WordPress. He owns or is the founder of a creative lead of a podcast that talks a lot about this. He created a second service specifically for realtors, and he’s been maneuvering this second service to try to find the magic sweet spot with real estate agents, and he may have done it. I don’t know. But right now, we’re much happier where we are.
Much happier.
Currently, he’s got an interesting… I just wanted to let you finish because I’m trying to sizzle you up here.
Sizzle, sizzle.
Yeah. John has an interesting thing going on, and he’s decided to take the opposite approach and offer an almost unbeatable doorway into a service. It’s $50?
Did I get that right? $49 a month.
$49. It’s not unbeatable, but engaging with anything in today’s market is a reasonable price point. So he’s taking a nod to things being a little more complicated for all of you. And it’s a marketing and all-in-one service with a website attack. Anyway, without any further ado, though, John, why don’t you introduce yourself to the audience? Based on your performance during today’s show, they can decide if they want to call you.
All right. There’s no pressure. Thanks for that, Rob. That’s no pressure. Cheers. All right, folks, I’m the joint founder of Mel-Right. We’re a CRM and a lead generation platform. We offer an excellent service. Like I say, it starts at $49 a month. For that, the value is fantastic. If that’s piqued your interest, go to Mail-Right.com. Please look at the feature page and what we’re offering, and then maybe book a demo and chat with me. We would love you to come on board. Back over to you, Rob.
All right. Well, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Robert Newman, and today we’re going to dig deep into one of the areas that I do consider to be one of my core competencies, both as a person and as the founder of a company. I found Rob, put no pressure on Rob.
Rob is a well-known expert on content marketing. So if you don’t get real value, complain to him.
I open my door. We’re going to talk about content marketing, which is always a cornerstone of most inbound marketing strategies, because inbound is oftentimes about educating or giving out knowledge, and a very popular way to give out knowledge is through the written word or content. It’s also often done through video and other methods. Content could be a term that covers many different things. However, one way or the other, Jonathan selected this topic today. It’s content marketing. It’s a marathon, John, not a sprint. Love the title. So on board for today’s show. Without any more ado, I think we should be able to get into it. Well, let me give a little more credit where credit is due. John has done, once again, the outline. He’s got seven different places where he collected some information. You would do yourself to look at his show notes and find, I guess, our show notes, at this point, and find out what he’s got to say, where he looked, and so on. I do that some of the time myself. He’s picked two of our mutual competitors, Sierra Interactive and Luxury Presence.
It is on this list. So he’s been very, very fair and even-handed. I loved his view on that because another thing the inbound marketers and the content marketers do is that to be valuable to users, you must be equitable and separate yourself from any personal interest. So, without digressing even more, how do you build your real estate content marketing strategy, John?
Yeah, I just want a quick comment before observation. I just want to see if you agree with this, Rob. As I was doing the research for this show and I was looking at the results that I have sent to you, I observed this. I’ve heard the information is very high tier, very high level, or it seemed to me very 101, very basic, and they didn’t seem much in the middle that really would give much value to a real estate agent that wanted to learn a bit more than 101. Or like the video link I gave you, that conversation was very high level. It’s just something I observed. It didn’t seem to be that much in the middle. How would you respond to that?
I think there’s probably some truth to that. You’ve got two camps, and both camps are right. On the one hand, you’ve got 80% of the real estate industry are absolutely extremely novice marketers, many of whom I run across, John, who have never even heard the term content market. So when you haven’t even heard the term and you look at some of these posts, I consider them to be quite good, like the one on Luxury Presence. It tells you what content marketing is. If you’re looking for any type of actual, well, how do I do it? No way. It’s so basic. No, you’re not… Anybody like me or anybody who even took a marketing class in school is going to be like, No, this is super basic. I could have answered these questions myself, and thus this content for me is a waste of time. I really That middle ground person you’re talking about, like that, I’ve been doing it for a year or two and just want a little help. I don’t know anybody writes for that guy or girl.
No. So to get back to your original question, I I think it’s having some pre-planned strategy on a one page. It doesn’t have to be something really detailed. I think the reason why this is so important subject is that if you’re a real estate agent in a local market where you can still be very effective by going super local, but through your website content, and especially through using social media platforms, being super local is still a very effective strategy to counter platforms like Zillow, reata. Com, some of the big regional real estate brokerages, franchise, you can get still some of very effective results, but you do need a plan of action, not just push stuff out when you got a spare moment. What do you reckon, Rob?
Well, your number one thing on here is how to build a content marketing strategy. And I think that if it was me and we weren’t worried about making our content, your content, understandable and more broad, because to me, that title is broad. Why? Because every content marketing should actually be this. How do I figure out what I’m going to talk about? How do I know what I want to talk about? And I’ve always… The way I coach my clients and the way I coach myself is I just desperately… I really try to stick to things I want to talk about. Before the show, Ladies and gentlemen, I briefly wanted this rift about this stuff happening with Zillow, and I’m going to talk about it later on my own YouTube channel. And is it going to be the best thing to talk about from traffic perspective, keyword perspective? I have no idea. I just know I’m hot under the collar about it and I have something to say, so I’m going to say it. This is the same thing I recommend, and it does fall within the category of stuff that I talk about broadly. It does.
I really recommend that people find That’s something that they’re passionate about, John. I took a call earlier today. I’ve been on a lot of calls in the last two days, and the call I took earlier today was one gentleman who is really mystified about where he wants to focus on in the Miami area. Just two hours of conversation later, we discovered that he has a love of mid-century modern homes, that there is a small but select amount of that inventory inside the areas he services. He had never really decided to talk on it because the price point is lower and everybody’s interested in condos where he’s at. Well, I was like, but we started talking about mid-century modern homes, and it was the first time in that conversation with him where he perked up, enthusiasm, lit his tone up. He was obviously passionate about the inventory. And because all of a sudden it became clear that he was really excited about that particular inventory, I was like, Dude, this is what you talk about. It doesn’t matter that it’s less inventory or the price point 30% less where you live. Talk about mid-century modern. You obviously love it.
Now you have a category in a home type that’s very specific. Since the inventory is limited where you’re at, you also actually have a very defined target. That’s how you develop, how I would develop a content marketing strategy. We’re going to give tips about how to do this, by the way. That’s going to be what we talk about next. But, John, for me, the first things first would be, how do I figure out what I want to talk about? That’s it.
Yeah, I totally agree with you. A couple of other things, especially when it comes to social media, that I think you’ve really got to understand. Number one, especially in my other business and around the WordPress crowd, as I call them, there’s a lot of spiteful comments and engagement because the community in that area is very passionate. But I’ve kept out of it because I adhere to these two things, Robert. Would I want my mother to read something? Secondly, if I was the end user, would I find it useful? And they’re the two things I appear to. Would I want my mother to read this and then talk? If I read this or on social media, on TikTok, on YouTube, would it be of any use to the target audience Would they find it useful? And if it doesn’t, so much of the canned stuff that comes from brokerages and templates and whatever, it’s not very useful. It’s It’s not very educational. It’s not very useful. I think the first point probably does… I think the first point is I’ll be very reluctant unless I’ve really done it on purpose. And I do know a couple of agents in Las Vegas that have gone down this road in purpose is not to go down politics.
Do not engage in comments in a political element. But I do know a couple of agents that done it on purpose in Los Angeles. I would advise normally, unless you’re really conscious you’re going down that route to keep off that I feel like this is a little off topic, and we should have its own show on social media, like actual social media philosophy.
I’m just going to add this.
I see it as all content as well.
All content. Okay, well, here’s what I will say about online, both for better or for worse. Anything you say is going to be there forever. And I think that people should really think about that. Whatever you say will be there 10 years from now, 20 years from now. You have to understand, if you type it on a keyboard these days, it’s in a server somewhere for sure, no doubt. So be careful. We’re going to go on in number two. We’re going to give you some tips for creating real estate content marketing strategies. And John, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to jump in here and take the lead on this one. For me, tips in creating content is, once I know broadly what I want to talk about, there’s all sorts of ways to refine that strategy and make it easier to understand. I use VidIQ and I look at YouTube strategies, and usually I’ve got… If it’s a subject, right now, I might very well go on to VidIQ and go Zillow. I just might put in the broad keyword Zillow and see what VidIQ or other tools spit out because they’ll rip off the things that people are creating or keywords people are searching.
And the same thing is true with Google, except their Google search trends, which is part of their algorithm. You can go in there and list keywords, and you can see in a very broad way what keywords are going up or down. Once I have some I have some signals, some smoke signals is what I call them that I like, I like the way the smoke signals are going. They match something that I want to talk about. I then use more specific tools like Ubersuggest or Semrush or AREFs to find out what the keyword subgroups are that I might cover that have volume. All of this gets into SEO strategy, but a better way to think about it for all of you listening to the show is imagine this. Google is going to give you points for telling a good story, and you want to make sure your story is really answering people’s questions. You want to make sure that you’re being helpful. So the way to make sure you’re being helpful is to find out what people are searching for and make sure that you answer those things as if somebody has asked a question.
So like, Homes for Sale in Tacoma. Well, make sure that you answer some questions about Homes for Sale in Tacoma. Just treat every keyword like it’s a question. And then make sure that you talk about it in the large group that falls under your main subject. So for me, it’s going to be Izzillo the enemy. That’s the name of my… That’s the title of my video, which is all I figured out so far for today, John. But I’m going to talk about… Before I go in and turn on the camera and my assistant is here, I’m going to make sure I know some subgroups. That’s how I’m going to do it. I’m going to look at subgroups, and then I’m going to talk about those subgroups, and I’m going to do actual keyword research to make sure that I understand what I’m talking about. That’s how I would do tips for creating killer real estate content. Now, that’s only killer. The tips I’m giving everybody right now is tips to make your shit rank and make sure that people are engaging with it. It’s not necessarily… It depends on what your definition of killer is, John, because a lot of stuff you could do that’s killer, that’s a lot of sizzle.
And that’s never been me. I’m always informationally great. But sizzle, like sexy, with little robots.
I don’t agree with that, Rob. You’re a sexy beast.
How would you do it? What’s your tips? What tips would you offer? Because you do a lot of content now. You’ve upped your content game so much in the last couple of years.
Shall we go for a break and then I’ll answer that question in a second?
Yeah, so we’re going to come back and John’s going John’s going to knock my delicately served question straight out of the park. So everybody, stay tuned. I’m putting so much pressure on him today. I’m going to hear it after the show It was over. We’re going to go to break. We’ll be right back wherever you’re at, however your listening is. Do us a favor. Give us a thumbs up. Give us a little attaboy. We always love that. Talk to you. We’ll be right back. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. John is still wiping the tears off his eyes. He was shaking and crying. I put so much pressure on him. We’re talking about content marketing, and John, who I just have let everybody know, he’s really increased his volume and attention to content in the last couple of years since I’ve been paying attention to his output. I feel like you’re going to have some great things to tell the audience.
Yeah. Well, I, because of AI and other factors, rejected the traditional SEO model of looking at particular keywords and trying to rank for those keywords. What I’ve adopted is a bottom of funnel approach. I tend to select using certain SEO research tools and see what other people rank, what their most popular posts and pages are, and they’re making a determination, are they bottom of funnel? What do I mean that bottom of funnel? Terms and information that people are probably searching that are close to a buying decision. That’s what I mean by bottom of funnel. So I I tend to select topics which are probably connected to the two companies that I run that are looking at competitors, that have probably done some research and doing some other research around a buying action. So that’s what I concentrate on. And then I utilize a bit of skyscraper when I’m looking at the competition. And skyscraper came from a guy called Brian Dean. That’s well known.
Actually, it’s Bruce Clay.
I thought it came from Brian, the original. All right, there we go.
Brian, everybody, myself included, all rifted from Bruce Clay, who’s a local guy to me here in California. He’s the guy who created and invented the term skyscraper, but it’s not… He came up with a brand It’s like whoever created the term evergreen content, which is just ridiculous that it’s so popular. Same thing with skyscraper. It just means looking at something that somebody already did and making it better. That’s it.
I use a bit of that. What that means is you look at the competition for a subject, like I say, bottom of funnel, and you just make it a bit better by adding video, by having a podcast, by whatever what mythology ‘same’ you think would add a bit more value to it. And I just repeat and rinse, repeat and rinse, repeat and rinse, and I just keep at it. But I don’t… Some of the top terms are… I just couldn’t compete. The only way I compete is to what the term, it’s not a real word. I just made it up nicheify. It should be a real word, shouldn’t it, Rob? Nishify. I just find a niche, and I just concentrate on that niche. And it’s exactly the same process that I suggest that you should do if you’re listening to this podcast. What do you reckon, Rob?
I love the nicheify, I love the skyscraper. These are solid, solid strategies. I don’t have much to say about that.
We’re going to-I hope you’re impressed, Rob.
I am very impressed. I’m very, very impressed. We’re going to talk about John’s next item, which is finding the smaller wins within the larger goal. I got to tell you, of all the things on this list, where I’m impressed, John, is that you picked up on, and remember to put this in here, because the number one challenge with content marketing, especially in real estate, it’s a long term strategy. It’s very, very rare that you do some amazing informational video and then everybody starts calling you the next day. It really doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t work that way for me. It probably doesn’t work that way for John, just a guess. It really doesn’t work that way for real estate agents. It takes time. You have to figure out some smaller, more achievable benchmarks that are going to give you a dopamine hit to keep you in the game. John talks about that that’s on the list, and I am just so impressed that you finding the smaller wins within the larger goal. For me, smaller wins, John, are checking, ranking, finding keywords that are starting to rank. Visibility is one of my main markers of a smaller goal.
Like, are we getting visibility? My next smaller win is looking at engagement. I really pay attention to engagement. That’s actually my benchmark, my hallmark for everything is, are people engaging? How much do they watch of it? How long do I keep them on this video? I look at how many minutes are consumed on my YouTube channel every month. And these things are more important to me than views and other metrics that a lot of other people follow. I barely follow them. I barely even look at them.
I think that’s the right thing because I think people… Unless you’ve got a very large website and you’ve got a large volume and you’re up against some really serious competition, I think it’s best to just have some key things that you’re monitoring and being consistent in just monitoring 2-3 things because that’s all the bandwidth you’re going to have. And the more things you’re monitoring, the harder it is to be consistent.
Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that. And that is like a I really enjoy the benchmarks that I look at. I really like… They’re almost as sweet to me as… By the time I get the result of somebody calling me John, honest to God, I am so enthused about so many other small wins that I’ve gotten before that moment. It allows me to not be overpressured by the rarity of calls with content marketing. I think I’m working on… I’ve had seven or eight inquiries so far this month, and only two have actually showed up for the call, which is pretty rare for me. They almost always keep the appointment, not this month. But the two people that have kept the appointment have been incredible, really great. But I’ve walked into the call super relaxed and super ready to engage, mainly because the small win of how engaged they were with the content and all the other things that they said that were nice. I already walked into the call thinking it was going to be a win, a victory, because of how well they consumed all of the content. And then one last note on this, everybody.
Something that 30 years of being a salesperson and 30 years of being a top salesperson has taught me is you scale your goals to the season, to the era, to the time. Really, really super aggressive salespeople always try to push themselves, and I appreciate that, but I’ve never done it that way. The way I do it is I look at where we’re at with the industry. I look at the people that are taking the calls with me. And I go, my God, I’ve had a huge victory this month because while everybody’s running for the mountains, I’ve still got people, not many, but a few, that are aiming for the sky. No, they’re not running into a cave.
They’re really-Well, I thought last week, I thought you said something that really stuck in my memory banks about really good quality sells people in do better in a difficult market because the competitions days and they’ve got a book of business and they’re just good at it. I haven’t got precisely what you said, but the drift of it is still there. And I thought that was so insightful, Rob.
It is absolutely a true thing that professionals Excel twice as fast inside their business. What I was saying last week was you keep up your ground game because you’re making twice as much progress even if you don’t see it. That’s what I said. You keep up as a marketer, as a salesperson, because honestly, most people are running for the hills, folding up their tents, acting with half the energy on the call. And when things are rougher is when you actually have to really kick everything into high gear. It’s crazy, and it works really beautifully. Did you have something like… How did you want to… Did you want to talk about smaller wins?
No, let’s go on to the next one.
Are you appealing… I’m going to let you… Let’s let you take this one.
Yeah, well, it’s It’s a bit linked to what you said about content takes time. Well, this is the other thing, which I think a lot of people don’t understand, and it’s, are you appealing to all stages of the buying or buying buying or selling process? We’ve gone on about this consistently during this podcast, haven’t we, Rob? Is that people are at different stages of the buying or selling process. It’s very… Unless you got a a lot of volume and you’re paying for paid traffic, you’re going to pay for traffic organically or not. It all costs time and money, folks. Social media, organic, website traffic, paid traffic. In one way or another, it costs money and time. But these people, unless you’ve got an enormous amount of volume of traffic coming in, only a very small percentage of those people are going to be selling and buying the house there and then. But it’s getting them on an email list. It’s getting them to sign up to social media, your YouTube channel, TikTok, it doesn’t matter what it is. So you can keep in front of them. So when they are ready to buy or sell, you get the phone call, not the competition.
And I don’t know what it is, but there’s a lot of real estate agents that don’t grasp this concept, Robert. They find it very hard.
And that is, I think, just a lack of education on a lot of realtors’ parts. And to be fair to those realtors, so 80 % of all realtors are basically referral realtors working off something called the circle of influence, which we’ve talked about countless times. When we do, you generally bring up some of your people that have influenced you more, which is the Bafinis. I think he’s legit.
That’s why I think they’re It’s legit, people.
No argument. You mentioned them quite a bit, which is fair because they are legit, in my opinion. I happen to agree with you. The thing about that is, though, 80% And of all, realtors do their business off referrals or life cycle or circle of influence. In other words, they’re not really influencing. You can’t really influence. Hear me on this, everybody. It is very difficult to really influence a decision as major as real estate, no matter how good your sales skills are. What you’re really trying to do is be a better fisherman with a better net with less holes, catch more fish than the other guys. That’s what you’re really trying to do. The ones that are out there that are already in the pool, already swimming around and there to be caught. Are you really creating the fish, nurturing them like a hatchery? Not generally. What you’re doing is you’re really wanting to make sure that you just acquire, capture people’s attention. Then hopefully, if you’re a really incredible realtor, staying in touch with them and staying top of mind for the 10 years between home purchases. Because if you’re a good realtor, you get them the first time.
If you’re a great realtor, you get them the second time. If you’re a one-of-a-kind realtor, you get them for a lifetime. Joyce Ray talks about that quite a bit. She acquires clients for a lifetime. When you think about your customer relationship in perspective of a 50-year career. Now, all of a sudden, John, if that once every 10 years is correct, one client is worth five transactions. Now, if we say the first transaction was 1 million, second was five million, third was 10 million, which is Joyce’s math. By the time everything is said and done, that one client is worth $50 million. What people don’t realize, though, is that if you want to catch them, market to them, capture them, you’re trying to capture them somewhere in that 10-year life cycle. The conversation around real estate changes a tremendous amount depending on where you are in that 10 years. If you just bought a new home where you’re going to capture somebody who’s talking about home improvements, in the middle of their cycle, you can start to capture their interest with how much their home is worth because they’ve had it for five years, they have a little equity, and now they care.
Then if you’re at the end of the cycle, you can stay at home improvement all the way. Because now it’s about capturing maximum value out of your investment as you get ready to leave it and move into the next thing. You want as much rocket as you can get to launch you into your next part of your real estate trajectory. That’s what people don’t understand, John. Are you appealing to all stages of the buying process? Think about what I just said. It’s 10 years of that. Ten years. Are you even trying to have a conversation with somebody who’s not within a year of buying or selling? Probably not. And you should be, in my opinion.
You should be if- I think it’s even more important. That’s pretty bold, but I just put this, and I’m not sure if you’re going to I agree. If you are giving really good service to your customers and you keep in contact with them, it’s that when that person is asked, Do you know our agent ‘Do you know an agent? Do you know somebody that can help me? ‘ That person is going to recommend you. But if you don’t keep yourself in the top of their mind to some degree, they’re going to forget And that’s how it’s also the building up this free referral network that’s outside of this really close group that Perfini goes on about. But it’s a concept. I can see by your reaction that I’m not off target here, but it’s something that a lot of agents or a lot of online resources don’t talk about, do they?
That Yeah, they don’t. They don’t, and they should because the actual best sales strategy that you can ever give a realtor is actually building the skills to maintain somebody properly for a lifetime. For that, I’d recommend for those who are looking for tips, there’s one book that’s head and shoulders above all others, and it’s not a real estate book. Even John will be surprised. I’ve never dropped this on the show before, ever. It’s Harvey McKay, How to Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive. It is the best book on relationship and network and referral selling that I’ve ever read because it deals with the mechanics of building up a long, very deep relationship-based connection to somebody. It is technical. Harvey McKay is one of the best salespeople that ever walked the face of the planet as it relates very specific Specifically to long term account development. And that’s what makes it so good for realtors is that you should be thinking of, John, if I was your realtor, I’d be looking you at… Yes, you’re an older dude. Who knows? Are you going to move? Maybe not. But I don’t know that you’ve moved two or three times.
You are an investor. If I’m looking at you, the possible upside far outweighs any downside to me trying to develop a robust relationship with you. Far outweighs it. I want to build up that relationship. I want to know when your birthday is. I want to send you a card. I want to know what your alma mater is. I want to send you a joke about fugilists every once in a while. I want to do all of that while inviting you to go to a place that I have a lot of information about, let’s just call it improving your home’s value, what real estate investors are maybe paying attention to today, right now in 2025, It’s shit that you might be curious about. Maybe, maybe. I’d send you there so that you were looking at me and going, I’m top of mind. If you’re thinking about another investment at some point, you’re at least going to call me and ask me some questions. That’s how I would view it. A lifetime client. That’s more valuable to you than new clients, new client acquisition. John has some great… God, everybody could tell, including John, I’m just so into this subject.
Are you accurately tracking all stages of the lead life cycle? Do you actually track your leads, John, or do you think that’s something specifically for realtors?
No, because I’m not in I’m not into the high figures. Some of the clients, we got… Some of my clients are very big, and they’re on big retainers. It’s my other business. I’m aiming in the male right at a smaller figure individuals. We have built some websites, but I’m purposely aiming it at the not so much handholding because I’m on the brink. I’m a bit pushed, producing all the content in my other business and blah, blah, blah. I think it’s linked to the things that you said it monitored. Keep it simple, but keep it sustainable. Have some measures that you religiously monitor, but you don’t have to go enormously complicated, because I see some things online, YouTube, aimed at real estate agents. And the training is ridiculous as far as I’m concerned, because it would be fine if you got a brokerage and you got somebody in in-house as the analytical Marketing Manager or whatever, and that’s their full-time job. But I think most agents just haven’t got the bandwidth, so it’s better just I would look at 2-3 things.
I agree with that. I’m going to do two things. Say how I do it right now, and then how I apply this to real estate. Right now, I do it with Inbound R EM because I have a conversation with somebody, and my entire lead generation strategy is inbound. I make no efforts whatsoever to have any pre-conversation with anybody. I take appointments that are scheduled through a calendar. Once I’ve talked to somebody, they get no follow-up, no email threads, and nothing from me. They get added to my company’s newsletter mailing list, to which we often spend as long as a year building out a single piece of content, doing things like case studies and deep client studies that we then pass that data along to all the people on that list. They care or they don’t. But we spend a lot of time doing the work. If somebody reads it and is interested, they will find something valuable. Then I have my team scrub all the people who didn’t call me back or touch me once a year. Some people on my team run through the list and call everybody.
The only thing they’re saying when they’re calling is, Do you want to have another conversation with Robert? That’s it. That’s the whole pitch. Nothing else. No sales, not really. More like diligent follow-up. That’s it. That’s how I do it for Iram. How I would do it if I were a real estate agent is that I would do it quite differently. I would do a very robust lifestyle email list. I would manage and monitor text messaging, and I would be very event-focused if I were a real estate agent. I would send people to events and text message invites to events I found interesting, especially ones that I was going to be at personally and that had a lot of value—wine tastings, golfing events, things that were really relevant. I’ll give you one last example, and then we’ll move on. I live in Vanuys. It’s not a very sexy city at all, but there is a high school near me, and now and again, I hear this high school going insane with, like, they’re having big football games. It’s a massive racket in terms of bands.
I can hear the drums like they’re right next door. I would invite people to these games, mainly if I worked in my neighborhood. Hey, will you be at the game? I’ll be there. I’m going to do a tailgate party. I’m going to grill some hamburgers, grill some dogs. Please feel free to join me if you like. When I was there and talking to these people, I would not be salesy. I would just be building relationships because if they were on my list and they met me there in the first place, shook my hand, and said, You invited me, I’d already know they’re qualified. That’s it. I don’t need to know anything else. I would say, Lovely to have you here. Do you like mustard or ketchup? That would be it. So, here are the last few of my final thoughts. John, do you want to lead us off, or do you want me to do it?
My final thought is that we’ve provided great value in this podcast.
I think that we have, too. And for those, again, John has done an incredible job of going out and finding some good content marketers that have done to varying degrees, simple stuff or high-end stuff in the content marketing space. And I strongly recommend that you check them out. Now, whether or not you… And failing that, you can check either one of our websites, Mail-Right.com or inboundrem. Com. We both have some great examples of what we feel is good content marketing because we do it on our sites. But I like this list, mainly because John and I constantly plug on this podcast. This list is complete of people that we don’t plug. So you should check it out if you’re trying to get value for your time. I’ve been Robert Newman. If you’d like to contact me at all, you can do so at inboundram. Com. You can check out the services or About page if you’d like to dive deeper into who I am and why you should read my blog. Or John, how would you want people to do that same research with you?
Just go over to the Mail-Right.com website and look at our feature page. We’re going to be putting up some video. I got close to finishing the final part of our revamp of the system. We’re close to adding a library of starter websites. When we get that done, I’ll be putting some video walkthroughs of the product, and we’ll revamp the interface of the basic system and increase the speed. I’d love you to go there and book a demo, and I’ll walk through the system with you.
Beautiful. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. John, take us offline. It’s been a great show. Could you let me know if I can get off?
Hang.
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Agents need to do more than blogging to get results in 2016. We discuss this during this show with our two Read more
Greg McDaniel literally began his career at his father’s knee. It would not be an exaggeration to say he has Read more
Personal agent photography is really important but usually semi-forgotten. We have a great guest "Preston Zeller" on the show who recently Read more
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Redfin bought by Rocket Mortgage: Uncover the implications of this major acquisition and how it could revolutionize the home-buying process.
In this show, we delve into the significant acquisition of Redfin by Rocket Mortgage and explore its implications for the real estate market. What does this merger mean for homebuyers, real estate agents, and the broader industry? We break down the key details of the deal and analyze how it could reshape how we buy and sell homes. Don’t miss out—watch the video to stay informed.
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. Today’s episode is number 468. As you can tell, by my somber tone, we will talk about serious stuff today. We’re going to discuss Red Fin being bought by Rocket Mortgage. We will discuss some of Open Door’s growing problems if we have time. We’re excited to get into this conversation. Before we start, though, we’ll be sure to introduce you if you happen to be a listener who hasn’t met me or Jonathan Denwood. My partner in this podcast, Jonathan, is a long-time entrepreneur. He’s an import from the UK, and I talked decades ago about him. It’s not like this has been recent.
I’m going to be tarred pretty soon.
They’ve got a lot of rules there that aren’t the same as ours. He’s always had a bit of a feather related to Redfin in his cap. I have some things to say about yet another large portal acquired by another conglomerate. Before we go any further, John, why don’t you give people a little bit of your summary about who you are? Let’s continue to wind up towards the main event. Thanks.
Thanks, Robert. I’m the joint founder of Mail-Right.com, Mel-right. We’re CRM, a lead generative platform with a website and load functionality, and we start month to month at $49. We’re affordable, and it’s just a great platform with a load of functionality. Go over to the website, read what we offer, be blown away, and book a chat with me. Back over to you, Robert.
All right. My name is Robert Newman. I’m a lifetime sales guy, lifetime storyteller, and multiple founder, and I have started several companies. InboundREM, which I started nine years ago, is a nod to some things I saw in the real estate industry that needed to be addressed. A company that was SEO-first, inbound, Trading First, affordable in comparison to other SEO companies, and a few different things. But if you want to learn about real estate, part of inbound marketing is giving away as much of your knowledge as possible for free. And I’ve done that. Thirty-five years of experience, 16 of them in the real estate world, go to my website. I guarantee you will learn something you need to know about digital marketing. All right, without any further ado, we can walk into our main topic today: the acquisition of Open Door by Rocket Mortgage. My guy, John, has always done an incredible job on show notes. If any of you are listening to the show and thinking that there’s no value to going to somewhere where you’re writing, you’re wrong. You should see what John has written and where he got his research.
We will start with the history of Redfern and its founders, David O’Reacher, Michael Dauery, and David Saling. If you can do me a favor, John, I didn’t do the research. I have some knowledge, but I didn’t read up on this if you could start us off and give us your thoughts on these three founders in this company, in a summary way.
Well, a lot of them come from Stanford University. They were into tech. They built some functionality when they started Redfin. You could pass and comment about some of that tech, some like the Mac feature, and some other semi-revolutionary, I think, or semi-better than what was offered. Then they brought on a good old Glenn into the mix, who has been the President and CEO of Red Fin and the public face for quite a long time. I call him the laughing Harina myself. He’s always got a grin. And that’s it—Techie people who provided some great tech and a very flawed business model.
Yeah. So I agree with most of that. So Redfin has always been… A group of tech guys started it. Here’s my hot take. Started by a group of tech guys. They correctly said there was a huge hole in the real estate market for services. And the guy you mentioned said, ” Oh, hey, you can add more. He was a data mining guy. And so he probably thought correctly that data could be used so much better. He also thought that because he had come from Amazon, data could most likely be collected and used for the betterment of the brand much better, and that he saw very few people doing that correctly with real estate. Unfortunately for him, a couple of other guys have these really big ideas that have been tried inside real estate countless times and have never really worked. That is the idea that real estate agents can be very salary compensated salespeople with a single standard of service across every marketplace for people who are buying and selling homes. And that might have worked if the idea of buying and selling homes hadn’t been established so well inside the market as an open field of opportunity for top sales reps.
And why does that matter? Anytime you give many markets, are actually dominated by small businesses. We just don’t think of it that way, John. We don’t look at it that way, but I’ll give you an example. There are a couple of fields of sales here in LA, in Beverly Hills, specifically, that have been dominated by some incredibly aggressive, talented, organized small business owners. We know them by their name. We think of them as agents like Joyce Ray. Joyce Ray has a staff of 13 people that support her. She is a small business owner. When one of her clients calls her, her team of 13 goes into action. You’re not going to take away her business based on a 1% model. There’s nobody that can match the speed, style, privacy that her team offers the right client. And therein we run into the challenges with these one % models. Everybody’s seeing… There are tons of agents out there that say, I can do the same service for one % of your commission instead of three, and the client will save that 2%, and since they’re getting the same service, they’ll love me. It’s just not true.
It’s just not true, unfortunately, for those one % You need profit to add value to your business mechanism, or at least great salespeople, great business owners do that. They take the money that they make and reinvest it into the business. Sound familiar, John?
Yes.
Okay. And so for some reason, everybody, the second you start treating a service like a commodity, flat rate it, you’re going to get a service that is a commodity. And Redfin, nobody figured out that model yet. And so there’s a lot of brokenness inside the model. Doesn’t surprise me that Redfin has been acquired for 1. 75 billion? It’s basically, which is a pittance in today’s world. It’s a pittance. Red Fin has been raising money, doing, flipping, doing all this different stuff for years. So 1. 57 billion, it would be the baby of all the deals that we’re going to see as the real estate industry continues to consolidate. I don’t have much to comment on, except that I use Rocket for my finances. Rocket is a very smart tech-driven company. I think this deal is great for Rocket and completely terrible for anybody and everybody that’s ever been involved with Redfin.
That’s my- Well, they haven’t done too bad in the sales. The major stockholders, and I’m sure Glenn’s done, and some of the founders have done okay. I just think that they were having problems with their business model from day one. The website, you’d probably be better off. I think there’s the figure of 50 million uniques to the website, but their business model, it was failing. So then they got into wholesaling, didn’t they? They got into the same craze as we’re going to be talking about, Open Door and Zillow got in iBuyer. They all pulled in on the COVID years into wholesaling, and They were doing really great because everybody that palled into wholesaling were doing nice. But when the damn broke, they’d been slaughter, basically, because it’s back again to a broken business model, as you so clearly outlined. They had nowhere to go, really. Their hope was that interest rate were going to be slashed, and it was back to a boomy market that would… And they could go back to their old wholesaling days. It looked like it’s not happening. And Glenn, Mr. Smiley, as I call him, always got a grin on his face as he’s cutting your throat.
It’s just a really broken business model. But maybe we can discuss in the second half Really a totally different company. Both Red Fin had a broken business model. Rocket has had its ups and downs with the regulators. But obviously, Glenn wasn’t a founder, but they couldn’t, in my mind, be two different individuals than Glenn and Dan Gilbert. But whatever you think of Dan, and I have different thoughts about Dan Gilbert, he didn’t start with nothing, but my God, he didn’t start with much. To say that he achieved a lot in his lifetime, he’s still alive. I still think he’s reasonably active in the business to some extent. It’s a story that could only happen in America, really. But he’s a very controversial businessman, isn’t he?
Yeah.
But you got to respect him in some ways, don’t you?
You do indeed. We’re going to open up the subject. We’re going to stop a few minutes into it, but we’re going to talk a little bit about what went wrong with Redfin’s business model, which is a The topic that John has included as part of the show notes, but guys, I got to tell you, everybody that’s listening in the show, this is a controversial opinion. The reason that I have this opinion, you can summarize everything that I thought was wrong with Redfin by the last and closing sentence on Glenn Kalman’s LinkedIn profile, which is basically, I’ve done everything there is to do at startups except for be in sales. That is on his It’s his own LinkedIn profile. And it shows people that hate salespeople are the people that create models that are one percenters. And the reason that they always do it is because they don’t understand sales. It’s very similar between democracy and commercialism and communism. And unfortunately, it doesn’t work. That’s the problem because great salespeople want to be compensated in great ways. The minute you figure out that you’re great or that you’re working five times as hard as the other sales guys on the same lot, you’re going to leave.
That is the problem. You can’t keep great salespeople in flat business models, and you want the great salespeople servicing your customers. Let’s talk a little bit about your hot take You linked an article that was what went wrong with Redfin Rocket Mortgage Acquisition. It was an article on HousingWire, which can occasionally be behind a paywall.
Yeah, I’m sorry about that. Sometimes it’s under the firewall, and sometimes it isn’t, is it?
Yeah, but why don’t you share your thoughts on this?
Start us off, please. Well, I can understand. What I would like to get your input from is that you I can understand why Rocket has bought it because of the traffic they’re getting. I’m surprised, even though Rocket is the second largest mortgage company in the US, I’m ongoing by my research and my memory, it’s still only got 4% of the market. It’s still a very diverse market. I’m going to say something, I’m not totally sure I’m correct, but normally them buying something like Redfin, and they’re going to get into the government is going to get heavy quick with them. But in the present political environment, I don’t think that’s going to happen for the foreseeable future. I don’t see the heat coming on Rocket that hard. So I can see the logic for Rocket doing this, because whatever you think of Dan Gilbert and his team, they’re not idiots. They’re far from it. I don’t think… I think what you’ve just said about Redfin and the attitude, the President and the CEO is correct, but they’re not They’re not idiots, but I think they fed on their own dog food, as I would put it.
The thing with Rocket, Rocket has had its problems, hasn’t it? It’s had its brush in. A lot of mortgage companies have had their brush with the government and the organizations of government. They look at the numbers that hit the website, and they think they can do something with Redfin, and Redfin’s agents will recommend Rocket as their mortgage company. I think Red Finns’ business model is so awful I’m not too sure about that. I’ll just be interested in your thoughts about that.
I’m going to share them when we come back from break. So ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to take a short break here. And when we come back, I’m going to go through some of the statistics and some of the things that this HousingWire article, which I just sped read as we were on the show. But full transparency, the article said what I basically said just in more detail and gave more numbers, more stats. Some of the stats I found to be really revelatory I didn’t know them. I didn’t know the stats. I knew the business model brokenness, but it led to some really interesting numbers. So stay tuned and we’re going to walk through those. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 486. Is that right?
Something. It’s 468.
468, sorry. Mental dyslexia. 468. And we’re talking This was about this acquisition of Redfin by Rocket Mortgage. Before we went to break, I was saying that I would cover some numbers. The article in HousingWire basically agreed with me. They said that effectively that this model was broken. Now, that model being broken led to some very interesting numbers. In 2021, Red Finns’ age and count fell by 22. 5% In the same year, the real brokerage went up by 11, 173%, Fathom Realty by 136%, Compass by 78%, eXp by 64%. All of these are newer companies in growth in the middle of their growth phase. But honestly, the number one reason that was listed by top performers at Red Fin for leaving was they felt like their income was capped. Exactly what I just said. And so they lost not just agents, they lost their best agents. That’s a problem for any sales organization. When you’re doing large scale sales, if you can’t keep your best people, that’s an antithesis for a mediocre company at best, if not just a downright massive failure. Another thing about their model was since everybody was on W2s, they created a much higher cost that had nothing to do with production.
The header for the way that this article says that there was no room for error, financially speaking. But honestly, compensation based on performance business models mean that all of your salespeople take the hit when the economy is slow. Generally, John, because I’ve done nothing but sales my entire life, you lose your top, your lower 80% sales agents. You keep your top 20%. So then you think about that because The top 20% figure out a way to produce. They take a hit in their income, but they do figure out a way to produce, which means both the business and the agents succeed. And you’re not pressuring the agents to stay. They are looking at the career that they built for themselves and saying, I can still make some money. And so they go out and they do it. The lower 80% can’t make money because they were never great salespeople and weren’t hustling to start with. So they leave and they really impact the business very little. So the thing that the business does by itself with these compensation models is it stays in operation, it loses its money, but its top salespeople stay. Does that make sense?
Yeah, totally.
W2 models Don’t do that. And they’ve got to support the cost of lower performing salespeople in bad marketplaces. And that’s what happened with Redfin. According to this article, and I agree, that’s what it basically said. Last Last but not least, and this is probably the most important part that the HousingWire article covers, lower commissions meant little to clients. I’m going to say that again. I know you know this, John, so it’s really for the people in the back seats of this podcast. Lower commission made very little difference to clients. That means at the end of the day, the 1-2% that clients saved did not mean very much to them, especially when it started to come into elements of service. But why? For that 1-2 % you’re paying a top salesperson, your experience could be as much as 80 % better. John and people like us break our fucking asses for your five-star review. We do, and it bothers us. It intellectually grabs us because we care. Whereas poor salespeople or even average for people either don’t pay attention, that I’m being kind, or they don’t care, and now I’m not being kind. And it doesn’t matter because somebody who’s vested in their business cares a lot.
John, Do you care? You’ve done crazy things for five-star reviews, right? I have. Have you?
I’ve written a pony for a five-star.
I’ve eaten thousands of dollars worth of business operating expenses to either get, keep, or maintain a good review profile. There’s no level, which means that the client who was legitimately unhappy or thought that they deserve something, they never would have gotten it from me if I hadn’t been paying attention to my online reputation. And this is the difference between maybe an average company or a low-performing company and a high-performing company. And it does make a difference to the customer.
So can we get on? Why do you think… It’s obvious. Why do you think Rocket bolts it? Because they’re not idiots, Dan and his crew. Obviously, they’re synergy, but also, I might be totally wrong. They think that in the articles I’ve read, they think they can cut the cost base down enormously as well.
Oh, they will.
But do you think they also feel, because they’ve done it in the mortgage, so they’ve managed to get people to buy mortgages online. I think they might also think that they can do something with the fundamental model. And then you can’t discount them, because if they didn’t got away from the particular restraints of the particular business model with Redfin, they do have the experience and ability, I would have thought, to do something.
Now, what I’m saying about Redfin, which is basically, listen, you’ve talked about it a lot. I’m going to give these guys the error of margin, just a margin of error. These entrepreneurs just started that were just inexperienced, didn’t know what the hell they were doing. I’m just going to say that they were woefully underskilled for the thing that they did. They still, they brought it to life and they did something, and that’s more than most people do. So I say that with a grain of salt. But the guy that runs Rocket is a beast of a different color. He knows exactly what he’s doing. I have a lot to say about Rocket that is all good.
Can I just interrupt? There’s a term in North London for people like Dan Gilbert. We Monster Mashes. He’s a Monster Mash. That’s a North London. It’s the endearment. It means that he’s a monster. He’s somebody that if you go up against him, you don’t really want to do you do it? You got to really think serious before you go up against Dan Gilbert.
There’s a few different things. Number Rocketbot in a perfectly-timed market acquisition. Let’s not ignore that fact. Redfin was in the middle of absorbing losses due to yet another massive shift in the real estate market, eating it, taking it on the chin. They had made some changes in the business that are likely we’re going to continue to see benefit from, such as Redfinnext, which is them going back to a traditional compensation model. The problem is you’ve got 12 years of history however long it’s been where they built a company up under a different model. And once you’ve got that pace, the only way to really shake things up is to start another brand or let somebody acquire you. That’s exactly what happened here. Rocket acquired the company is going to rebrand and probably drop everything into a regular compensation model. But on top of all of that, they got the company to steal, John. 1. 75 billion, are you joking me? Compass raised seven billion out of the gate. This is ridiculous. It’s a pittance. They bought the company with that pittance, and they now have a search portal. They now have a Salesforce. They now have market synergies with their mortgage company.
It was a brilliant move by Rocket. Brilliant. It’s going to add so much value, not to mention, I don’t know that anybody else has noticed this, but the logo and branding between Rocket and Redfin is already similar. It was just a genius move on Rocket’s part. Then gives these guys like Glenn and other people like him, they can gracefully sunset out and become like all the other second-tier players in the tech space. I have half a billion dollars. Let me throw it into other things and maybe they’ll get lucky because they’re not, which is what happened to the guys, the PayPal Mafia. There’s a lot of second-tier entrepreneurs, and then there’s Elon Musk, who is truly driving innovation, no matter what you say about him, driving innovation, things like that. Glenn Kalman needs to be retired because he swings and misses a lot. So let the guy retire. Veroon needs some room to run, and he’s going to get it. That’s my overall opinion. He’s really going to get his room to run.
I think the other That’s great. I think the only important thing is regulation because I think Rocket with lending the two businesses, but it’s still a very fragmented business. So their market share But I think they would have some normally. But I think in the present climate, they’re not going to get it. Shall we finish off with Open Door? Another great success story.
This has been our primary podcast. We’re going to give you some bonus content today. John did. We had a lot to say about Redfin. For those of you who are watching this on YouTube, do us a favor, take a moment, take a beat, take a breath, and give us a thumbs up on if you liked what we’ve done, if you like John’s content, if you like the research, the show notes, all the things that we did, trying to just give you a little bit of information to apply here. Now, we’re going to talk about OpenDore. I actually know a lot more about OpenDore because I’m a member of the Motley Fool, and Motley Fool talks about OpenDore all the time. I’m much more familiar with what’s going on with OpenDore than I was with Redfin. If you’d like to reach out to you, though, John, how would you like people to do that?
I’ll just go to the mail-right. Com website, have a look what we got, you’d be blown away, and just book a chat with me, and I’d love to show you what MailRight offers.
Back over to you, Rob. If you’d like to know more about SEO long-form, like inbound strategies where people passively come to you, if you’re interested in to see how I think marketing is being shifted in the information age, Go to inboundrem. Com. Read any of our articles, or if you really have liked what you heard on the show today, if you want to just gab about these real estate portals, go ahead and schedule a call with me. I’d be happy to share my thoughts in more detail. We’re going to move on to OpenDore, which if for those of you that don’t know, is a company that simply acquisition homes and then sold them on a platform. That’s the really basic part of Opendoor. Everybody loved the business model so much, they jumped in on it, including Redfin, including Zillow, and then everybody, for the most part, has retreated out of that industry except for OpenDore, which is the biggest one. There’s still a couple of other players, but OpenDore is the biggest player. So with that opening, let’s get into, John, why did you even include them at the end of the podcast?
Well, I just thought it was just insightful. Over the last couple of years, I’ve had little comments about Redfin, haven’t I? I’ve been diligent in my kicking of them, haven’t I? But open door, every mother, I was going to swear there, has got into this model, wholesaling, where you got the convenience, but people, their biggest purchase, most people’s biggest purchase, do they really want to give you 30 plus of their equity in one of their biggest assets of their life. Unless they’re forced to, or it’s a secondary asset, they’re probably not, are they? But if the market’s going up every month by 2, 3%, you don’t need so much margin, do you? Unless something fundamental changes in the economy, which you can’t In the interesting times that we live in, you can have a discount. I really don’t see things fundamentally getting better for opened door. What do you think?
All right, transparently, everybody I own is some shares of OpenDore. All right, this is not investment advice. I think it was a disruptive business model. I think that there’s space for it. I think this is just a horrible time for OpenDore to be around. It higher interest rates, an uncertain market, inventory problems. If you’re looking for the highest priced car on the lot, John, of course, you don’t buy it off a website. Or if you do, you want to walk into it and look at it. When interest rates are this high, real estate is not commoditized, wow, do you ever… Even a crappy home in my neighborhood costs so much money. I can’t buy it off a website. There’s certain markets where you could maybe still, not many, though, Virginia, West Virginia, we could still buy something for $150,000. Sure, maybe OpenDore would there, but where most markets are so incredibly overpriced. However, having said all that, what do I think? I think there’s room, space, and I think just like everything else, I think that homes will be bought off a website as technology catches up. I think that virtual tours with headsets and things like that, I think we’re walking into an age where a lot of people want to buy sight-unseen or at least use, and if OpenDore really had Some forward-thinking members there.
They would do open-door showrooms where you could walk in and use these headsets and basically create a mechanism in which you could buy a lot of inventory online. I do think that And I think the model is there, and I think open-door is the leader. I don’t know that they’re going to survive. The reason I bought them is they’re dirt cheap and they have some momentum. I’m not even saying that it’s an endorsement. It’s probably one of the riskiest proposals for the I have vested like that, that I have in my entire portfolio because they also could announce it going out of business tomorrow. And I wouldn’t be surprised.
You’re a good salesperson because you always sold it to me. I follow the logic and admire your sales ability because I want to kick it in. I think it’s a race as we would say in London. It’s a rabid dog. It needs to be put it down.
I understand. I understand the thoughts. I know where it’s at, but I disagree with the… If it’s not them, it will be someone else. I believe that with all of my heart, John, or I wouldn’t say it on the podcast.
I would never buy a house unless I saw it. I would even consider it. But a lot of people, you’re right. You’re right. I wouldn’t do it, but I’m just an old geezer, so what do I know?
Well, age and wisdom tend to say that one of the most critical decisions you’ll make, you’ve got to do it. But you know what? Great salespeople always overcome those objections, such as a sometimes rock-solid guarantee, and if you don’t like it, you can give it back to us. We offer you $5,000 for the inconvenience. I can go on and on. There’s always a way to overcome somebody’s reluctance if you have deep enough pockets and are sure about your investment. I’m certain that the people running Open Door have some of that going on. But ultimately speaking, Open Door is probably something that most people, except for those of you who are most, whether it’s on the investment side or whether it’s on the I need to buy a house side. If you are a bleeding edge person with plenty of room for risk inside your home purchase or investment life, then this, I don’t know, maybe you do, look at it. I have plenty of room for risk, John, on both sides of my life. I don’t have a deep…
Depending on how low the thing is trading, there’s a 30 or 40 % chance that this is a 100 times investment. Regarding the real estate market, we only need one big upset, and the open door will be back. Like all we need. We need mortgage rates to come down. We need a little bit of it. We need the inventory to continue to spike up. And all of a sudden, anything that pressures people to buy homes, which we haven’t had since the pandemic, we’re seeing the natural deflation of need based upon an overinflation of need a few years ago. And so we’ll see, and we have a wild card running policy in the US.
That’s a very diplomatic way of putting it, Rob.
Are you looking to go into politics, Rob?
No.
Oh, no.
That was very much.
I love the fact that you put it here. For those of you listening and watching this show, listen, come on, man, everybody, engage with John and me. Could you call us up? I’d love to hear what you think about Open Door. For those of you who are listening to this show, you can’t go wrong with John’s offer. Call John if you’re looking to move inside your marketing and your budget has reduced, but you still want a competent provider on the other end of the equation. Call him, please, because you can’t go wrong with the offer he’s built for you. He’s built an offer and changed his offer for the market at large. For those of you who are more veterans and looking to shift your budget from things that are no longer working, such as direct marketing and advertising, InboundREM is a good place to look. And you can go to inboundrem.com and schedule a call with me. Having said all that, John, this is a good place to wrap it up for me. Was there anything else you wanted to add?
I’d come out with a good one-line as Monster Mash, Raby Dog. I thought it was exciting to Tatey.
Hey, you did it at the perfect time. I introduced you as English in this show.
We’ll see you later, folks. Bye.
Bye.
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