How Andrew’s Generating 3,500 SEO Leads Every Month

Steve Trang: What is PPL?

Andrew Collaggi: A PPL is pay per leads. It's like no fees, no subscriptions, that kind of stuff. You have a set lead cost. You know what you're gonna be paying for each lead you get. Talk about the stigma on PPL leads.

People constantly try to find where their issues are in their business. And so, generally speaking, they will focus on the marketing rather than the sales and disposition process. The general offer we make to everybody is, like, hey. If you if you come back after six months or three months of working with us and you say, hey. These these leads suck, we're gonna give you big credit.

We're just gonna keep rolling the dice and stuff.

Steve: Hey, everybody. Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Real Estate Disrupters. Today, we have Andrew Collaggi with Property Leads and Andrew Flynn from Boulder, Colorado to talk about how they're generating 3,500 SEO leads every month, each and every month. Guys, I'm on a mission to create a 100 millionaires. Information on the show alone is enough to help become millionaire in the next five to seven years.

You'll take consistent action. You will become one. And, guys, if you get value out of the show, please hit that subscribe button. That way we can all grow together. You ready?

Andrew: Ready.

Steve: Alright. So first question is, what was your life like right before you got into business?

Andrew: Before in the business, I was working for the Navy as a software engineer, civilian, enlister or an officer. And I had a very w two, very corporate type job, windowless office, that kind of stuff. Definitely had a drive to to get out of that environment as soon as possible, and wanted to find a way to get rental properties. And and we bought one, and we're like, that wasn't the greatest deal ever. So we're trying to figure out how to get deeper and deeper discounts, and we kinda filled in the wholesaling rabbit hole and then cold calling.

And then we're like, oh, we're not gonna do that, And then ended up on the the digital marketing side.

Steve: So you did buy a property, though. You said it wasn't a good deal.

Andrew: Well, you know, it was off the MLS. I mean, it wasn't a bad deal, but it was a you know, so yeah. It's not something you would be able to flip or really wholesale. It was like a, you know, a buy and hold type property. But that's

Steve: not kinda how we start. Right? Because you were still working your w two at this point.

Andrew: Yes. That's that's fair. So at the at the time when I we were first bought that rental property, I was trying to transition out. And, Yeah. So I bought off the MLS.

We had 12 people living in it, including ourselves. And we live in, like, an eight by eight room shared with my my spouse. So we're we're slumming in that way.

Steve: When was this?

Andrew: 2020 is when we bought that first property.

Steve: 2020. So it's not even that long ago. No. Okay. So you bought the property off the MLS, had a realtor, blah blah blah.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Was this now a property that you were intending to sell or keep as a rental? What was the vision?

Andrew: Keep as a rental, and the and the the goal at the time was to just build this massive rental pro rental portfolio. Mhmm. But, you know, being in the DC, Maryland, Virginia market, it's it's more difficult to find deals on the MLS that are cost effective. You know, hit that 1% rule or whatever it might be.

Steve: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I hit the 1% rule over there.

Andrew: Yeah. No way. But if you're but if you're getting, you know, going direct to seller, you might have the opportunity to do that. And so that was our next goal was to how do we get direct to seller? How do we get that better deal?

Steve: So you buy your first property. You're not happy with the the numbers, and you say, okay. We're gonna jump right into direct to seller marketing.

Andrew: Absolutely.

Steve: It wasn't like there there was not like, hey, realtor. Do a better job. Find us better deals. You just went straight to

Andrew: No. There's I you know, look at we got a really looking backwards, we got a really good deal off the MLS at the at the time, and I don't think it was gonna get much better than that.

Steve: Gotcha.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Okay. And so you jumped down this rabbit hole for wholesaling?

Andrew: Yeah. So we we actually launched the Carrot site. I think it was '20, January maybe of 2021 or or or March. Mhmm. I think January 2021.

And we spent a long time trying to figure out the SEO game. And if if I were to start again, I would not recommend SEO being my first marketing strategy. Mhmm. Takes way too long to get set up. Too too intricate, not a great way to become a real estate investor, really good way to become a marketer, though, and learned learned a lot of really hard lessons, spent a lot of time, a lot of mistakes, a lot of money.

And then through that process, you know, we grew that site from zero leads a month to 60 leads a month, you know, all inbound, all organic. And that's where we started to, you know, pick up real momentum. And that that process for us took about a year, because of all the mistakes we were making. But towards the end of that process, we started bringing real revenue. You know, my my spouse quit our job.

I started to quit my job, and and the train tracks started rolling.

Steve: All from SEO?

Andrew: All from SEO. Yeah.

Steve: Wow. That's really impressive. Yeah. You said you made some large lessons or made some you learned some large lessons along the way.

Andrew: Yeah. I mean, the the first if you're going on the SEO rabbit hole, the first lesson I learned was, Google has a very strong perspective of what city pages you should have. And What pages? Like, what city pages you should have. So when you have a site, you have, you know, generally, like, your home page, your your header pages, like how it works, about us, our company, that kind of stuff.

And you'll have, you know, maybe your city pages and your state page. And what we found is that people were launching city pages willy nilly, and we we just did the same thing because we didn't really know any better. Mhmm. And what we found is Google has a very, very strong perspective of what they want for city pages. And and the way to figure that out is if you search every single ZIP code from like, search from every single ZIP code in your geographic area, search the same term.

Let's say, like, we buy houses. Different city pages will pop up from the generic search term, and they'll they'll come up locationally. Mhmm. So if you do that, you'll end up with, you know, a variety of different city pages, and that list will never map, the normal list that you think would would be there, if that makes sense.

Steve: So you're saying because the results would be dependent highly dependent on where the person's actually living?

Andrew: There's that element. Then there's also the element of, like, Google will change throughout the month, throughout the year what they believe are relevant city pages and what they believe are not relevant city pages.

Steve: So the constant evolution is kinda like, the way I felt for some time, like, you're playing this whack a mole game.

Andrew: For sure. Except you could in this way, you could you could map the whack a mole effectively, and you can determine what city pages you need and don't need. And so once we did that, I mean, we were able to strip away a lot of pages. And what what we found also, and this is the second evolution of that first site, was, if you have too many pages that are not ranking well, they'll end up they'll eventually get, deindexed. So they'll they'll show up in Google Search Console, like crawl or crawling on their name, like, for all the crawling not indexed or discovered crawling not indexed.

And then when that happens, if if about 50% or more of your pages in total end up in that boat, that boat, the site will just it won't do anything. And so most people end up in one of those two pockets. They'll put out too many city pages. They'll put out, like, a a really good example is, like, they'll have a Boston city page and a South Boston city page, and those are duplicatively. That doesn't exist.

It's just Boston to to Google. And so remove the city pages. You don't need to add the city pages. You do need to remove that level of of duplicate content or really and, additionally, the content that is getting filtered out Mhmm. And you end up with a site that can go from, like, zero to 60 really, really fast.

Steve: So, you know, one of the things you hear people say is you gotta create a lot of content.

Andrew: For sure.

Steve: Make a lot of pages. Right? Like a blog.

Andrew: Yeah. Right? Disagree. But yeah.

Steve: So you disagree?

Andrew: Yeah. The yeah. The issue is, you have to create the content that Google actually wants to see, not just content in general. And we saw this originally with the what people would do is they say, okay. Well, I'm gonna make an article on three ways to sell your house in foreclosure.

Well, that's not a keyword. That doesn't mean anything. That's poo poo. And so, you know, the the real article you're trying to write is, can I sell my house in foreclosure in Colorado? And if you search, can I sell my house in foreclosure on Google, from whatever state you're in, the first article is always gonna be the, can I sell my house, can I sell my house of foreclosure, insert state?

Right? So you're creating that article times 50 states or times 50 cities, whatever it might be. And and the delta there, though, is that, like, a lot of people are publishing a ton of content that's actually not relevant, but they believe is relevant. They're talking about the right topics. They're talking about real estate or whatever, but it's not, the keywords that they actually need to rank for.

That makes sense.

Steve: So you're talking about what, the intention or what someone's googling and what that website delivers is not there's there needs to be a lot more congruence.

Andrew: Yes. A 100%. And and what we often see is people people are doing things, not understanding why they're doing things when it comes to SEO. So they'll they'll hear, I gotta create content, and they'll just start creating content. I mean, we gotta do

Steve: it sometimes with, like, with YouTube. Right? Like, some people are like, I'm just gonna create content.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Right? And, the ones that do really well, I was like, what are people searching for? Yeah. And I'll make content about that. Yeah.

That's so it's the same thing here with SEO.

Andrew: A 100%.

Steve: So, like, I get these email, you know, junk mail Yeah. Which I'm sure you're surprised by. I say, we help you create AI generated content Yeah. So that you can rank.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: I'm not a very big fan of those services.

Andrew: Well, so we spent I mean, I spent, probably 30 or $40 on OpenAI at this point and and, like, direct API access type stuff. And we've we generate a ton of content in that direction, and and what we found is that, you can go that direction. You you have to change the first sentence of each paragraph. You have to change the first paragraph out of OpenAI and the last paragraph of open out of OpenAI. You do that.

You can still use OpenAI content. The issue, though, is that, at scale, once you go above 10,000 pages on the site, how Google looks at the site is very different than how a normal site would get looked at effectively. It enters, like, a different box in Google's land, and I would not recommend going above 10,000 pages. That's that's my general recommendation to everybody. Stay in that, you know, zero to 2,000 area ideally.

And then if you do that, you can tend to use more OpenAI type content. But even there, when you look at content, there's there's the three primary things. It's gonna be the the headers. You know, the the category one is, like, headers, alt text, file name, that kind of stuff on the on the pages. But also next to that is gonna be the keyword density.

Mhmm. You know, am I hitting 2% for the for the primary keywords I need to, you know, go for? And the final piece is the entities, which is both the breadth and the depth. Mhmm. And that's the entity piece is what people miss on a lot.

And the thing that OpenAI really, really struggles with is is the keyword density part and the entities part. And you can say, hey. You know, make the super keyword dense, but it'll always miss me on the entity part because the entity part is constantly changing in the Google SERP and OpenAI that was two years

Steve: behind. Mhmm.

Andrew: Does that make sense?

Steve: Explain to me what you mean by entity.

Andrew: Entity would be like so if if the keyword we're trying to rank for is, like, sell my house fast, for example, an entity would be like paintbrush or repair or cash or house, that kind of stuff. And when we talk about breadth and depth, the breadth is the spectrum of entities that we're talking about. So that would be like paintbrush

Steve: So here are the words that are related Yes. To what they're searching for.

Andrew: Yes. And so paintbrush would be like the breadth. Like, I need to mention, like, one time in your page, maybe twice. And then the depth would be know, you have to say fast at least x times on the page or have an x percentage of the total page say the word fast to really, have enough concentration to do well.

Steve: Gotcha. Okay. And we'll talk a little bit more about SEO. So as you're talking about all this, you know, I'm getting a little bit of, like, PTSD. Sales are becoming more difficult in this market.

You have more competition than ever before, and homeowners are less willing to work with you on price. More and more leads are coming to you that have listed their home with a realtor already or talking to a realtor. Because homeowners are pitting you against yourself, you feel like you have to pay more just so you have a chance. It doesn't have to be that way. Remember what it was like when you had little to no competition?

What if you could connect with a homeowner and build so much trust that they feel like nobody can compete with you? Would you close more sales? That's why I wrote active listening two point o. With our book, you can develop so much trust that the homeowner won't want to work with anybody else. If you want a copy by book, go to closemoresales.com/book and download it today.

Yeah. Right. Because there was, at one point, a right way to rank for SEO. Right? Like Yeah.

What appeared to be white hat tactics, right, which is like, hey, Andrew. Would you like to write blog articles on my website? In the exchange, I'm gonna write blog articles on your website. And in each one of our blog articles, we're gonna link to each other's website. Right?

Yeah. And you kinda have it's not like the wheel. We knew, like, the wheel was definitely unethical. Right? If you had, like, 10 guys that are creating quality content and, like, linking to each other, that was something that was supposedly approved.

Right? And then and also you wanted the the keyword to be, you know, the the backlink. Whatever. Right? Or the the the the link text, the anchor text.

And so everything was fine. Right? Then around 2012, sometime around there, Panda came out and Penguin came out. And, like, I was working up to, like, 01:00 in the morning, like, almost every other night to do my own SEO, and I was ranking for all my keywords. And then overnight, everything got sandboxed.

Right? Like Yeah. It was gone forever.

Andrew: Mhmm. Like, I

Steve: mean, it wasn't gone forever. You just have to go to, like, the twenty second page of Google to find it. 100%. Right? Which is basically nowhere.

Andrew: Yeah. And I would say a lot's changed since then. I mean, when when Google looks at sites now for penalties, there's there's two common things that drive penalties right now. One is gonna be a link velocity, which is really the number of links you're sending to a site, or really to a page, specifically not to a site in general. So you could send a million links to a site as long as they're spread evenly across all the pages, and it's there's enough pages on the site, it really won't run the link velocity issues.

And the second one is, anchor text. Mhmm. Pretty much all of the Google spam algorithms today revolve around anchor text. I mean, you you saw it back then. You you say, sell my car or whatever, and that's the exact anchor text.

And today, you know, you the thing with anchor text that's really interesting is, anchor text to me, I see is like an efficiency metric. So it's like, okay. If I'm trying to be really cost effective with my budget on SEO, or member marketing in in the SEO space that I'm doing, I'm gonna use exact match anchor text. If I'm trying to be not as cost effective, I'm gonna use naked. The difference with naked anchor text specifically is that the Google algorithm entirely ignores naked anchor text and brand and brand anchor text in the sense that, all the spam algorithms that they use do not facilitate with those those two types.

They're completely ignored. And there's a really good example of this when when the Yandex, search algorithm was leaked. This is, like, a year year and a half ago, which is the Russian equivalent of Google. They had the exact same type of metrics in their search algorithm. They're naked in brand.

They just completely ignored it. Mhmm. So the the the power of the page rank is still passed. And and in some ways, the anchor text is still passed because usually in the URL, you're gonna have the exact match anchor as well. So you'll say, like, a city page might be like, we buy houses, Los Angeles, California in the slug Mhmm.

Which is still in the anchor. But because of how Google looks at the algorithm, it doesn't it completely ignores that part. Yeah. And so from that perspective, naked is more expensive on a short term time horizon, but on the long term time horizon, which is the goal of SEO typically, it's a lot more cost effective.

Steve: So let's, expand what a couple of these words are. Right? Okay. So, anchor text.

Andrew: Yes. Go down the rabbit hole. Yes. So anchor text is like the the hyperlink from one page to another. So if if you're on a page and you see, like, that blue link, and it says, you know, cars or whatever, and it links to, you know, tesla.com, that would be anchor text.

The cars, that word would be the anchor text.

Steve: We buy houses in Colorado. If it was all blue and clickable, that's the anchor text.

Andrew: Yeah. Exactly.

Steve: And then you kinda slipped earlier the the the phrase or the word SERP.

Andrew: Oh, yeah. SERPs. Search engine result page. That's basically the when you search something on Google, that's the SERP. The SERP includes the ad section, the four ads at the top in Google, the four ads at the bottom, and then the, eight to 10 organic free results.

Sometimes it's like a Google Map result as well sometimes.

Steve: Sometimes. Yeah. Okay. So going back to this now, you learned a lot of lessons. So they're all mostly in the SEO space, those lessons you were learning.

Andrew: For for sure at the time. And we had a lot of, you know, for going to the real estate side, we had a ton of terrible partnerships. We had money stolen from us. I mean, you know, the the the classic stuff, which is why we don't do rev shares today, why we got to pay per lead. Yeah.

But, yeah, I mean, a lot of our lessons earlier on were on the SEO side. And the thing for us was, like, we we start one site. We'd start a rev share partnership. We start another site. We start another rev share partnership.

And by the time we're done, we had, like, eight sites, eight rev share partnerships going on. It was like it became a nightmare to

Steve: To manage?

Andrew: To me yeah. Manage and track and and keep people accountable. Because what we found too is that the best rev share partners, in terms of accountability are not usually the best real estate investors. Mhmm. And the best real estate investors are not usually the most accountable to paying you Yeah.

If that makes sense.

Steve: Makes a ton of sense knowing what I know now.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: There were I would not have known that early on in my career. Yeah. Okay. So then talk to me about the buying houses, though. Right?

So you bought your first one. It wasn't that so good. And you said you bought, like, 20

Andrew: in your

Steve: first year with SEO?

Andrew: No. No. No. We,

Steve: I mean, we we did a

Andrew: lot of wholesaling, probably 20 to 30 houses in in total for for wholesaling stuff. I wouldn't say we

Steve: So you wholesale 20 properties, though

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Strictly from SEO? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew: I mean but we didn't we don't have, like, a 20 single family, like, rental portfolio or anything like that. We we have one rental, one rental, home.

Steve: Was this all in the the DC, Richmond, Maryland area?

Andrew: At the time, yeah, for that for that section. We've done some stuff in North Carolina, and we we still do a lot of land stuff today. We've with, like, a land site going on and stuff like that. But, I mean, all of that is kind of a a temporary focus to

Steve: to property leads as a whole. So when do you figure out that SEO and selling leads made more sense for you as a business than wholesaling?

Andrew: The cash conversion cycle is a lot better, for us, and and something I found with wholesaling and and this is really my own lack of skill at the end of the day when it comes to wholesaling. Like, I could never nail down a really perfect sales process. And I think a big part of that for me came down to I didn't have enough times at that, effectively. I didn't come from, you know, selling, supplements or something and rolled into some real estate or cars or so it came in very fresh there. But, yeah, for us, the the big thing was the cash conversion cycle.

What we also found too is that the the customer, if you can find a really good you create really good leads, the person never leaves. Mhmm. And so that's what we focus on the most at property leads. It's just keeping a really, really low churn.

Steve: So how long from you buying your first rental property off the MLS to, like, well, we'll just do this ourselves to, like, you know what? Like, let's sell this part that we do ourselves versus let's do real estate.

Andrew: So I think we bought the house in, like, January 2020. I think we launched the first site in, like, March 2020 maybe, or or we started, like, doing real estate stuff. I can't honestly, the the earlier years are foggy for me, but I remember we launched property leads. They started working on property leads in in March 2022, and then actually, like, launched it launched it in July 2022.

Steve: Okay. So '22, this is a real business. You're getting money this whole time. '22 was like, this is the business. Yeah.

Effectively. Gotcha. Propertyleads.com. Yeah. Was that available, or do you have to buy that?

Andrew: No. It came in from another partnership we had. They happen to have the domain, so that got that kinda got rolled in.

Steve: Okay. So someone else that you that you were, working with already owned it?

Andrew: Yeah. Effectively. But if someone else wants to start another PPL company, there's tons of really good PPL domains out there. I don't incur you don't have to go spend a ton of money on PPL domains. Yeah.

Steve: Okay. But, I mean, property leads, though, is a pretty solid one.

Andrew: It's a great one. Yeah.

Steve: Alright. And the other one, I was looking at seller leads.

Andrew: Don't really.

Steve: That one, that one that one was a lot of money, and that was the other one I was looking at. Motivated, motivatedsellers.com. That was the other one. Right? That's a

Andrew: good one.

Steve: Like, there was a couple of them because, like, you know, I've thought about chinaabrio syndrome. You know?

Andrew: Yeah. I've

Steve: thought about buying some of these other ones to do, like, a nationwide, aggregator. Right? And there's one I was looking at. I was really, really, like, excited about it, but I couldn't get them down from $50,000.

Andrew: That's a lot of money for demand.

Steve: It is a

Andrew: lot of money for demand.

Steve: Right? So, what is your opinion today on the the URL the power of the URL? So for example, right, I I went on this kinda crazy run for a bit. You know, I own channelhomes.com, gooberhomes.com, tepeehomes.com. Right?

Like, because for my realtor days, it's like, well, it will do better on, it should it should do better on SEO, and it should do better on Google PPC. What is your experience with that?

Andrew: Are you talking about specifically for exact match domains or just domains that just include a variety of

Steve: Exact match.

Andrew: Yeah. Exact match are you know, it's it's it's tricky. Exact match is only useful if you can actually capture the entity. So, conceptually speaking, like, webuyhouses.com. Right?

Jeremy Brand owns it, and, he's had that site for forever.

Steve: He inherited it from

Andrew: some other people as well. And they've captured the entity for that site. So he'll he'll always rank for for webuyhouses.com. And that was because he started twenty five years ago, twenty years ago or whatever. If you try to do the same thing today for, like, sellmyhousefast, for example, or sellmyhousefast.com, it's a lot more difficult to do something like that.

Mhmm. But if you're trying to rank for, like, a local area, like a we buy houses in Delaware, for example, and there's not a lot of search volume, you know, you can kind of own the brand for that term.

Steve: Mhmm.

Andrew: It's still possible. I wouldn't really go out of my way for it, though.

Steve: Yeah.

Andrew: I think the the core thing that I'd be looking for, does does the domain contain some of the primary keywords that I'm trying to rank for? Buy, sell, house, fast, cash, are the things that I'd be looking for and stuff.

Steve: Yeah. So I I was in Oklahoma for a bit.

Andrew: Oh, really?

Steve: Yeah. And so I I bought we buyokay.com

Andrew: Okay. And

Steve: we bought we buyokayfast.com. Okay. Yeah. Would those be, like, desirable assets to have, or it doesn't even really matter?

Andrew: I mean, my immediate reaction is I would get rid of the state abbreviation. I would switch to a a regular state if you're if I were gonna go that direction. But when you say desirable, like, do you mean, like, do they contain inherent value?

Steve: There any does it bring any intangible value? For example, having a house on a mountain. Right? That's an intangible. Right?

Like, I can't, like, go buy another house and add a mountain to it.

Andrew: Right. You can go I I can't remember the domain. What's the domain you said?

Steve: Webuyokay.com.

Andrew: Webuyokay.com. We can go by webuyokay.co, and it's gonna have the same effect. Got it. There's no inherent difference between the TLDs at the end of it.

Steve: Okay.

Andrew: There's been a lot of testing on that, and, like, it's just it's all the same at the end of that.

Steve: Gotcha.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Okay. So, you go down this, this SEO journey. Has this this has been your primary focus then since 2020 up until today?

Andrew: We started doing a lot of other marketing. You know, originally, we wanted to be a purely search intent based, you know, PPL company. And what we found is, that's a terrible model because there's a limited number of search intent leads that can exist at any given time, and there's a lot more demand for motivated sellers than there is search intent leads that exist. And so, you know, there's there's probably about 67,000 SEO leads. There's probably about 67,000 PPC leads in in that scope.

To 14,000 overall, let's say let's say a person fills out four forms. That's 56,000 leads roughly. There's probably about 50,000 real estate investors out there. So it's like it doesn't numbers just don't add up. So we've done a ton of our marketing.

It's really everything under the sun. And the big thing that we focused on is how do we, you know, engage really high lead quality from other channels, whether that's forcing SMS verification or or inbound phone calls or, you know, the creative that we have to use to really kinda dial up the lead quality, if that makes sense. And that's that's been a big or or sometimes just removing leads that we're like, I don't think this is a good lead. We're not gonna send this out. We'll send this to eXp or something and have them have them go after it instead.

Steve: So you do the SEO thing, and then you obviously can't buy $3,500 3,500 leads worth of homes a month. Yeah. Right? So you have to start moving these leads. Yeah.

So how do you verify the quality of the leads?

Andrew: On the on on the SES side? Or is it

Steve: Or any of the leads that you guys sell. Right? Because, like, there's there's a a bit of a stigma at this exact moment

Andrew: Of course. Absolutely.

Steve: On PPL.

Andrew: Yes.

Steve: Right? And so, how do you verify that the lead you're you're finding is a worthy lead worth buying as a real estate investor?

Andrew: Yeah. So the the thing that it's a two part question. The the first part is we're we're looking backwards at our title transfer data. That's, like, the big metric that we look at. That's kind of our our golden our golden nugget.

And so we're looking at how many of how many leads that we sent like, if we send out 10 leads, how many of those leads are actually gonna end up selling their home within a six month time period? And we we shoot for about 50%, which is right around where PPC and SEO Mhmm. End to end up. If you use, you know, reasonable creative, you're not going for home value type leads and stuff.

Steve: That's what I started with.

Andrew: Home value? Yeah. Oh, just home

Steve: worth. Yeah. That was not Oh, no. That that was horrible. I mean, that was Yeah.

Fortunately, it wasn't too expensive. Like, in 2012, like, it was still really cheap. Yeah. You can learn a lot and, like, not get hurt by it

Andrew: Interesting. In 2012. Very interesting. And so, you know, with that, SEO and PPC, you're gonna have 50%. Other channels like YouTube, for example, is probably closer to 25 to 30%.

But if you dial up the creative, you add SMS verification, if you add an inbound phone call, maybe you filter out some of the leads that say, hey. I don't have a really fast timeline to sell, or maybe they'd say that, you know, they have some notification that they wanna list with an agent. Maybe you filter those out and send that to somebody else, not a real estate investor. And so I think there definitely is a stigma in the industry in terms of quality. I think there are previous players that have created that stigma Mhmm.

That some of the newer players are getting affected by. But, you know, I I look at our churn rate. I think it's it's very healthy. When and when people leave for for us, I I don't see them leaving for the reason of lead quality. It's usually for, short end funds or, like, I'm leaving the industry, that kind of stuff, which is more outside of our control.

Steve: Right. So you are qualifying the lead more upfront? Yes.

Andrew: But in in an automated way, we're not screening them via phone call or anything like that.

Steve: Right. But, like because there's these there's these things that you're in the risk of. Right? I mean, you're saying phone number verification. So it's not even like, did they put in a phone number, but you're verifying the phone number.

Andrew: Yeah. So we might send, like, an SMS, like, code that they have to put into the form before they submit the form, that kind of thing.

Steve: That's a that's a that's not an, an insignificant hurdle.

Andrew: No. Definitely not. Yeah. And then, you know, for example, let's say they're on a landline, we'll we'll force them to, like, call in and, like, verify, if that makes sense.

Steve: What is the mechanism you're do you're using to do that, to get them to verify?

Andrew: When you say mechanism, what do

Steve: you mean? I'm on I'm on the website. Right? And I type in my address. Yep.

I'm gonna type in my phone number. You have to put in, like, a code to verify, like, this is my real number?

Andrew: Yeah. Twilio has, like, a an OTP type system that they can use. Yeah. And then for the phone verification, we it's just a custom build, but it's all built in Twilio Right.

Steve: At the

Andrew: end of the day. Yeah. Be really cool to build a custom phone, like, a VoIP system. But I don't think we're that cool. Sure.

Where are we?

Steve: Sorry. Well, just just how do you verify, like, you're doing a good job. Right? Like, so, like, the leads you're selling, like, I put my stamp. Like, I am proud to say this is one of our leads.

Andrew: Yeah. I mean, without getting, like, too too in the weeds on that part, it's it's really coming down to what has worked in the past and and, like, can we model that towards the future? So, like, these are the leads, and these are the form fill ups, and these are the verification levels, and this is the credit data that they have and stuff like that. You know, what does it look like in the future? And then if it looks like that in the future, then, like, we'll, you know, model it the same way, and we'll direct some leads to paper close-up companies like an eXp or whatever.

Mhmm. We'll direct some leads to, you know, the real estate investors that we believe are are higher quality.

Steve: You said credit rating?

Andrew: Yeah. Like, you know, credit rating or, consumer demographic data. Mhmm. How many kids are in the home? Are they married?

That kind of stuff. There's a lot of data points there you can go down the rabbit hole on.

Steve: So you're pulling that data point

Andrew: after

Steve: you submit the data and and and and you're comparing or, like, you're having them fill it out on the website?

Andrew: We we pull it, like, in real time kinda thing.

Steve: So you pull that data.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: So I go on your website. I put in, you know, my address and this and that. You can extract from that. Biometric data or I'm a biometric story word, like, all those data points.

Andrew: For sure. Well, I mean, it's not you know, credit data is kinda funny. Like, e x p you can't get it from not e x p. Yeah. Like TransUnion or anything like that.

But Right. Not without certain requirements. But there's other companies that that build models based on that data, and they're effectively getting the data from TransUnion.

Steve: Right. And it's funny. Right? So, like, I can't give you TransUnion credit data.

Andrew: Yeah. But

Steve: I can model it and sell you the model.

Andrew: Yeah. And where did the model come from? You know? Yeah. So, yeah.

Steve: Yeah. We reverse engineer

Andrew: it. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. It's funny because I've because, like, I've I can't remember who I was talking to. I was like, hey. Look. If you can sell me everyone that has, their credit score went from a a 720 to a 620 within two months.

I will buy that owns a home. I will buy all that data. They're like, we can't sell you that data. Like, violates every terms of service agreement that we sign.

Andrew: Interesting. Yeah. There's definitely that data available out there.

Steve: Yeah. But they can only sell me the models. Like, I don't want the model

Andrew: of it.

Steve: I want the actual people.

Andrew: Yeah. Right? Yeah. Another thing

Steve: too which which is interesting what you're talking about is there's elements of machine learning. Right?

Andrew: For sure.

Steve: Right? Because, like, that's that's why Audantic has been good for so long is they they pull all the people data. It's like, okay. What do all the people that sold to a cash buyer have in common? Yeah.

And then they reverse engineer that. And what's the word? Regression modeling. Right? Mhmm.

They keep running that model and just say, okay. This is the most optimal model. So these are the people that are most likely sold to a cash buyer.

Andrew: Yeah. That's very expensive to do over time.

Steve: Very expensive to do. You have elements of that. Oh, for sure.

Andrew: Yeah. I mean, you have to you know, to some extent, you can look at the form fill out to kinda determine title transfer rate, but then you also have to look at we're just talking about the consumer demographic data, credit data, that kind of stuff, to to kind of filter out. And, you know, in theory, the long term goal is to kind of figure out, okay, which leads are investor leads, which leads are agent leads Mhmm. And then kind of direct them off, you know, directionally. Because then we can expand our marketing pool as well.

We could say, okay. Hey. Do you just wanna sell your home? Mhmm. But then we can tell based on, oh, this person has a tax on their home.

They're probably pretty likely to sell off market. We'll just pat you know, pass that to the investor anyway. Yeah. And I wouldn't say we do that today by any means, but, you know, I think that's a long term goal.

Steve: And then how are you are you automating the title search?

Andrew: We we just run a manual report every six months or so. And and the other thing that I would say we do, you know, related to that is, like, if we you know, people you talk about the stigma on PPL leads. Mhmm. People constantly try to find where their issues are in their business. And so, generally speaking, they will focus on the marketing rather than the sales and disposition process, which is, you know, interesting, fact sometimes.

And so in that

Steve: I've never heard a salesperson say the leads suck. I know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew: And so in in that process, if someone says, hey. You know, your leads suck. Like, let's let's this this place sucks.

Steve: Right.

Andrew: You know, we'll take a look at their title transfer report for leads we've sent them, especially they've been around for three or six months or whatever. And, you know, 99% of the time, like, 50% of leads are trying to they've transferred title. And they're like, oh, well, I didn't see this one was this, and this one was that. But, you know, at the end of the day, like, they're selling their own. Sometimes it'll be innovation.

Sometimes it's seller finance, but then they might say, oh, it's, you know, it's the three two. I can't I can only buy four twos or whatever. That's that's a tough one for me. But, you know, the the general offer that we make to everybody is like, hey. If you if you come back after six months or three months of working with us and you say, hey.

These leads sucked, and none of them transferred Mhmm. Like, I can't do any of these, and we we see the same results on our title transfer report, we're gonna give you big credit. We're just gonna keep rolling the dice and stuff. Because the goal at the end of the day is, like, cancel a shitty product. We gotta, you know, we gotta sell something that's legitimate.

Steve: So you're saying that you're having 50% of the people that you sell the leads to investor, that they will sell their home?

Andrew: Yeah. So if we if we send you 10 leads post refund, so after the refund policy Mhmm. 50% of those will sell their home in some form. Usually, it spits about 25% off market, 25% on market. Mhmm.

And there's there's other variances there with urban cores, typically a lower title transfer rate, rural is a little bit a little bit higher.

Steve: Yeah. But,

Andrew: yeah, in general. And then the tricky part for us was, like, we had 25% are off market, 25% are on market. But if the ones that are on market, how many of those are actually innovations right now? Because a ton of people are doing innovation.

Steve: Mhmm.

Andrew: The biggest teams that are buying leads right now, they're pretty just doing invasions. Alright. So that's pretty interesting to watch.

Steve: Gotcha. Okay. And so then it's pretty remarkable, like, that that you guys do that. Again, like and then that resolves the stigma issue Yeah. Of PPL.

Andrew: For sure.

Steve: Right? And then I I actually posted a video because we have Brandon Bateman here with Bateman Collective.

Andrew: Okay. Right?

Steve: And we we we're we're in the middle. I think we released two out of the five in the PPC master class series, and each one's, like, forty, fifty minutes. Really? Pretty intense. Awesome.

And one of them, there's, you know, an opinion on PPL

Andrew: Mhmm.

Steve: Other PPL providers didn't really care for. Alright?

Andrew: What was the what was the opinion?

Steve: The opinion is that most or yeah. Like, the history of PPL providers generally is that they start off hot and they build a brand. Mhmm. There was a, hey. Use them.

And then as more and more clients come along, demand continues to go up. And in order to increase supply to match that demand, quality eventually diminishes to meet the demand.

Andrew: The two things I would say to that, the the first one is, we're still small, so you can buy leads. The second one is, how much you can spend on leads is really a reflection of your business model. Right. And so if you can't spend much on leads, then at some point, you could basically say you're not a very good real estate investor. And that's okay.

Right. But when people say quality drops, that just means that somebody else is paying more for shittier leads Mhmm. Than than you're willing to pay. Yeah. And so that just means there's somebody else in your

Steve: market who's doing a better job than you. Mhmm.

Andrew: And

Steve: I think it's Well, I think the perspective really was, like, let's say you had, 10 clients in Denver market.

Andrew: Okay.

Steve: Right? How can you fulfill 10 big players in the Denver market?

Andrew: I think to some extent, you can't. If they're truly if they're truly 10 big players where they have no budget, they'll spend whatever they want on leads. At some point, they have to either tie their bids and all work together to buy the same price or someone's not gonna get leads Right. 100%.

Steve: And I think that's kind of what the the that's kind of direction. Right? It's like Yeah. If I got 10 big operators in Denver and I got two more clients that wanna spend money in Denver

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: How do I satiate all of them? And the only way to satiate all of them is to provide more supply. Yeah. Right. And that's that's that's the The the direction we're going with that.

Andrew: For sure. I got you now. I I think the, the big thing that we see with PPL companies as they grow is they start to switch over to SMS inbound leads, which I I don't really consider to be inbound leads. I mean, we only do inbound, but Mhmm. Some people would consider a lead to be inbound if you send it in an SMS, it has a link in it.

Someone clicks on the link, they fill out the form, now it's an inbound lead. Mhmm. And I think that's where you can get a lot of volume really, really fast. Mhmm.

Steve: Because

Andrew: you can directionalize it. You can generate it same day kind of stuff. Right. And in the past, when it comes to quality PPL companies, that has been the detriment for for a lot of them.

Steve: Yeah. So just to elaborate for everyone, what is PPL? Because we just jumped we just jumped straight into

Andrew: yeah. PPL is pay per lead. So there's it's like no fees, no subscriptions, that kind of stuff. You have a set lead cost. You know what you're gonna be paying for each lead that you get.

Typically, there's a refund policy. And, you know, it depends on the company and stuff. But, you you're you have a lot more control over your marketing budget in the sense that you can usually pause and unpause your account.

Steve: Mhmm.

Andrew: You can, you know, change your your target as much as you want, unlike kind of like a PPC or direct mail campaign where you once you start a PPC campaign, you can't really stop it. You gotta keep it rolling Yeah. Without causing issues.

Steve: Right. Okay. So pay per lead. So who should not use PPL?

Andrew: Someone who doesn't have enough funds doesn't have enough nickels to rub together in the sense that they can't put together enough funds to to buy 30 leads. Mhmm. You know, 30 is not really a a sin we talk about a a significant, in stats. I can't forget the word right now, but, 30 leads is not even enough to really show a significant difference when it comes to when I show success with this marketing channel. Mhmm.

But 30 leads is a good start. You can usually get a really good feel for lead quality, and I would hope that someone closes more than one in 30. Mhmm. It really should be. But that's a really good place to start.

And the other person is someone who doesn't have, you know, the very well defined acquisition or disposition process, or they're, you know, not working with a coach to help them, you know, kind of put one together. Yeah. If you're if you're in that boat, you know, at least in my experience, it'd be better to do something that has a higher repetition count Mhmm. Cold calling, cold texting, that kind of stuff. Otherwise, you can burn through money very, very fast.

So

Steve: was it I think it's the law of big numbers. Right? The idea is, like, you need enough data to verify, like, whether this is viable or not.

Andrew: 100%.

Steve: And so you're saying if you can't buy 30 leads

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Is that within, like, in a month? Three months?

Andrew: Yeah. You know, you can have a a good time period to it. The concern is come someone comes with $500. Mhmm. They only

Steve: have $500.

Andrew: And that's all they can that's all they have. And they're they're you know, they they wanna buy leads in Maricopa County. Mhmm. And leads in Maricopa County might be, you know, a couple $100.

Steve: You might buy two.

Andrew: Yeah. You might buy two. And that that's not enough significant, statistical significance is what we're looking for earlier.

Steve: Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. So because what's in the past has been, you know, if you're just getting started, right, there's cold calling, cold texting, or PPL because you can just kinda spend your weight in, as you're as you're growing. But you're saying, like, if you have $500, don't start with PPL.

Andrew: If you only have $500, yeah, I would not. I would I would definitely do a different marketing channel, potentially cold calling or cold texting or driving for dollars or something like that. Something where the the the money time equation is a lot more geared towards time than than money.

Steve: Gotcha. And then why should someone do PPL versus, for example, just do PPC? Most business owners waste their time and money on solutions that never fix the root problems. They'll address all the symptoms due to slow revenue. And because they're only fixing the consequences, the real problem stays hidden and the cycle of wasting time and money continues.

It's like having a lingering headache that won't go away despite trying every over the counter medicine, when reality should've just gone to the doctor and had them figure out exactly what was causing the headache. And that's what's so difficult about business. You can see and feel the symptoms and yet struggle to find it. Now imagine you can find a prescription that doesn't just mask the symptoms but actually addresses the root cause. Where would your business be if you address that right now?

That's what our sales event is about. Your marketing doesn't suck. Your leads aren't bad, and your operations aren't terrible. It's that you haven't addressed what actually makes you money in wholesale, which is the conversations you have with homeowners. It's critical that you build trust with sellers, demonstrate that you fully understand their situation, know exactly what's keeping them up at night, and paint the ideal outcome that leads them to a better future by working with you.

That's what it takes to get signed contracts and keep your business going. Simply put, at our event, you'll walk away with the framework, phrases, questions, documents, and process to close more sales and buy more houses. Join the hundreds of others who have come to our live event and dramatically grown their business. Our event is happening soon and is available for you to join only if you're willing to take the pill.

Andrew: It's an interesting question, and and I think, it depends on what stage of the business that they're at. And I I don't think PPC is ever a bad option except for when you don't have a very big budget and you need time flexibility. So, for example, someone who's just just getting started in real estate, they still have a w two. Maybe they only want, like, you know, buy leads on the weekends or at night. PPC is a really bad fit in that center, you know, situation because you get leads during the day and you're at your job.

How can you call it? Speed the lead's critical. Mhmm. What are you gonna do?

Steve: Right.

Andrew: Versus, you know, a pay per lead company, you can, turn on a 5PM. You could turn off at, you know, 9AM when you go to work. Turn on on the weekends. Lead cost is typically lower on the weekends and not, you know, overnight and stuff. So there's a lot more flexibility there.

And then what we've also found too is that, this is where it gets tricky. It's like, at some price, PPL works for everybody. And so you I mean, you control it. You you set your price. Mhmm.

So there's not a reason to not do PPL. It's more about finding what price works for you with PPL. Okay. Everybody's price is different.

Steve: Can you elaborate on that when when you say everybody's price is different?

Andrew: Well, like, you know, Steve training might close at a crazy rate. So he can spend $500 per lead on PPC or PPL or whatever it might be, versus a new investor just getting in the market. Doesn't have huge buyers list. Doesn't really know how to do everything just yet. Might only be able to spend, you know, $1.25.

Gotcha. And so the discrepancy in their business is what's causing their marketing dollars to have less power.

Steve: I see. And so if we're in the same market, my biz at 500, their biz at $1.25, they're not really gonna see anything either. Right?

Andrew: Unless you hit your budget. Right.

Steve: So I would have to max out my I have to hit my total budget for the month. Yeah. And at that point, now they get opportunity

Andrew: Yeah. With the $1.25. Or if you pause, you know, like, let's say you're like, oh, we're turning off the marketing this weekend. I don't I don't want any more leads. Mhmm.

I'm off for the weekend. Suddenly, he's getting the leads at 01:25. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve: This is kinda like, I mean, a lot like, well, I guess it's a word. I was gonna say it's kinda like Google, but not not quite right. Because Google is like, I'm paying $1.25. Is it the second place is being $1.25? I'm bidding 500.

I'm paying 125.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Right? But with this right here, if I'm bidding 500, I'm paying 500.

Andrew: Yeah. It's a a a Vic Grey auction, I think, is what they called for Google. Yeah. We've actually looked at changing the model over to Vic Grey auction. I think it'd be really fun to do that.

I think people would have a lot less skepticism over what they're paying for leads. The the issue is the complexity of actually doing it in real time.

Steve: Really?

Andrew: Yeah. It's it's, I'm not sure how to describe it. Well, we look at the we we adjust our marketing based on what the bids currently are. Mhmm. But it's hard to tell what the bids currently are because they change so often.

And so when people start doing a victory auction, I I don't know how to explain it, but we when we mapped it out, it was like, you could one person could adjust their bid and all of a sudden, bids could drop, like, $400. Mhmm. Versus the current model, it's it's a lot more static relative to the

Steve: It's a lot more predictable as a business owner

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: To have it go on the highest bidder.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: I think psychologically Yeah. And I think long term for game theory and and customer satisfaction, the, the second bid

Andrew: Yes.

Steve: Is is is is better for long term.

Andrew: 100%.

Steve: Right?

Andrew: I wanna move towards that that towards that model. I think it'd be really fun.

Steve: I think there's been multiple papers, on you look at eBay. Right?

Andrew: Like Yeah.

Steve: There's a reason why eBay was so successful. Right? There's a reason why Google pay per click model is so successful. Mhmm. Right?

So be interesting to see, you know, if you guys go go down that journey to see if customer satisfaction goes up. I I see all your customer satisfaction. Right? Like, I see, like, Aaron Gaughn. Like, love that guy.

You know?

Andrew: He's worked

Steve: worked with me. He's worked with Zach Booth. He's working with you guys. Awesome. Right?

Like, love to see how successful he is. Yeah. Right? So, I think, I think, obviously, it's working, but it might be something as part of, you know, the customer or the the company maturation process. They but

Andrew: For sure. I think the big question there too is, like, how do you switch that model? Like, you send an email and say, hey. In four weeks, it's a Vic rate model. Like, what's a Vic rate model?

You know? Well, you don't have

Steve: to call that. Just call it the eBay model.

Andrew: Yeah. Well, That's a good that's a good idea. EBay model.

Steve: Everyone knows eBay model.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. Okay. So then, what are you finding as far as best practices goes for someone that's using a PPO provider like yourself?

Andrew: You know, if if they're a big, big organization and they wanna match when their sales team is available to when their leads are coming in, typically matching that time slot, so turning off their account at 5PM, turning it on at 9AM. If if they're able to buy leads on the weekends, we weekend leads are just a ton cheaper. Refund like, building into their refund sequence that, they need to refund the lead after seven days if it's not, responded to them yet. And the other two big things are, you know, we're seeing novations work really, really well for a lot of the biggest teams who are spending, you know, 70 or $100 a month.

Steve: They must have the same exact thing.

Andrew: Really? Yeah. Yeah. It's it's, like, I think, like, 7% of their deals are novations at this point, which which is funny because it's like a net listing. It's like a legal net listing.

But, anyway, yeah. This is yeah. And then the other piece is, triple dialing. Right now, iPhones block their first call on the first attempt if it's an unknown caller. The Hiya app blocks the first two calls if it's an unknown caller.

Hiya is getting preinstalled on Samsung right now. You basically have to triple dial to get through reporters of The US at this point. Yeah. So people who are not doing that that if if when we see that get adjusted, the sales process increases Yeah. A lot.

Steve: That's fascinating. Right? You gotta do you you gotta hit the triple dial. You gotta hit the, and triple dial in this context. It's three attempts Yeah.

From one number.

Andrew: Mhmm.

Steve: Right? It's fascinating because, like

Andrew: In rapid succession.

Steve: It used to be, like, uncomfortable to do two.

Andrew: Yes. Now Very annoying to do three.

Steve: Now when I see a call come in, a spam call, right, it says spam likely. Right?

Andrew: Yep.

Steve: And they do a second one. I was like, man, good for you. Like, you're you're doing it.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Right? But now two is, like, the standard. Yeah. So three. Yeah.

You gotta get to three.

Andrew: And speaking of scam likely too, that's the other big thing that that people are getting hit by. With the with the 10 DLC changes, there's a lot more, when your when your text message number gets flagged, often your phone will get flagged. The calling feature of your phone will get flagged. So scam likely is popping up all the time. And, there's three sites right now.

You can go fill out your your phone number on to get the the scam likely removed. I should probably put them in the show notes or something. But, I would definitely recommend people look at that and and put their test their phone to see if they're getting the scam likely. And if they're not if they are, filling out that form.

Steve: Oh, we've used, dnc.com.

Andrew: Oh, really? Is it, like, a paid service? Or Yeah.

Steve: It's a paid service. Okay. What what services do you recommend?

Andrew: I'll send you the links. They're not in this in this document right here, but we can we can put them on the show notes. But there's, like, three sites, and it's one through Hiya, one's through, Verizon Direct, and the other one's through, T Mobile Direct. Gotcha. I'm pretty sure.

Steve: And then bidding on the time of the month?

Andrew: Yeah. So, leads tend to get a lot cheaper towards the end of the month. As people start to hit their budgets, you know, there's only so much people can spend often. And so if you're if you're able, you know, set that low, what works really well for a lot of people is to set a really low bid or relatively low bid. Keep your account as wide open as possible on geography and on on when you're willing to accept leads, and you can typically get a really, really good cost per lead.

The guys who are able to spend, you know, $5.56 50, crazy numbers and stuff like that, they're typically doing really complicated deals where there's, like, people in Boston, for example, where they're, like, tearing down houses and turning them into 20 unit apartment complexes. Like, they don't care what the lead costs. Like, they just wanna buy and tear down. And so not everybody has that flexibility. And so just being able to extend when you're willing to buy and how you're able to buy, can provide a lot of

Steve: value. I think one thing that might be helpful for some, for the people who doesn't have confidence in the quality of the leads, keyed, jump into where the leads are coming from.

Andrew: Yeah. So, I mean, we talked about SEO earlier. I mean, we do a ton a ton of SEO. We do a ton of search intent PPC as well. I I'm very confident we're the largest provider of SEO leads in in the space, given that I we we see our sites covering up most of the SERP at this point between, you know, the agency or or or or property leads.

Mhmm. And, you know, search intent at the end of the day is the is the be all end all of of best leads. And, of course, we have to do other marketing to fulfill volume, but I don't see that as a negative because we're trying to match that quality back to search intent. And so, you know, if I were looking at PPL providers today and I was trying to figure out where I would be going, I would be looking at where, you know, where's the highest quality, where's the best refund rate, where's the lowest cost, because at the end of the day, it really is a commodity. And so you're just trying to match price to price effectively plus quality.

Steve: But, like, the the actual leads are coming in. Are are you doing your own AdWords? Your own SEO? Are you doing so you're doing AdWords.

Andrew: Oh, yeah. Right.

Steve: Is there a blend between Google, Facebook, Bing? Like, for example. Right? And I hope I don't get any kind of trouble with Z buyer for this. So a long time ago, we used to use Zebyer.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. $8 leads.

Steve: Right?

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is even before $8 leads. Right?

Andrew: Like,

Steve: it was, like, a monthly subscription at one point.

Andrew: Oh, really? Long Wow.

Steve: Like, I've been in this business too long. Right? And we would call these leads. And, like, I didn't go in any website. Like, okay.

Like, why do you think like, we have to figure out, like, why do you think we reached out to you? Like, where do you input this information? And I'm like, I don't know. Like, I posted my property on Craigslist a couple months ago.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Right? It's like, okay. That's who I'm calling. Old Craigslist list.

Andrew: Oh, jeez.

Steve: So Yeah. I'm not accusing zBuy or anything. Just sharing the feedback I got from a homeowner. So, again, just to give people confidence, like, where are the leads coming from, the blend?

Andrew: The the vast majority is gonna be that search intent, SEO, and PPC. We do it I mean, we do every marketing channel under the sun. And and the big thing for us is to make sure with what our mark with with whatever inbound marketing channel we do, we're driving towards the SEO and PPC quality Mhmm. Because that is our gold standard. That's why we're looking at title transfer rate.

We're not looking at lead source necessarily.

Steve: Mhmm.

Andrew: Because lead source is not always the greatest indicator of of title transfer rate at the end of the day.

Steve: Well, we know, like, with Facebook leads Yep. They want to sell Mhmm. But they tend to be a longer sell cycle. Right? Because they're a little bit early in the process because it's more disruptive.

Andrew: Yeah. Right? It's only about about forty five days, though.

Steve: Is this about forty five days?

Andrew: Yeah. It's not it's not a huge difference. Now versus, like, email, for example, it can end up being, like, nine months. You know, I think it can get them going a lot longer and stuff. But that's why But

Steve: you're fine. Facebook's forty five days. That's a lot faster.

Andrew: Forty five days than PPC. Forty five days longer than PPC.

Steve: I was gonna say, like, forty five that's not been my experience. No.

Andrew: No. Yeah. Yeah. No. It's not I mean, when you when you average out the cost per lead, I it's a cash conversion problem

Steve: at

Andrew: the end of the day. Yeah. So it drives the business model.

Steve: Okay. So if someone wants to go check it out, so we got disruptorsleads.com. Right? And you guys can check this out. Work with Andrew and his company.

Let's talk about, and we'll put that in the show notes as well. Let's talk about SEO. Right? 3,500 SEO leads Yeah. A month.

I've seen.

Andrew: It's a lot. Right? It's a lot of the space.

Steve: What are you doing to have that kind of success?

Andrew: Well, I think, you know, by the time we launched the the tenth site, I feel like we had a really good template process to know exactly what to do. And so, you know, through Properties, we've done a lot of that SEO. We have an agency as well. And, that has been really good for people who wanna have, like, the done for you solution. They wanna have their own brand on and stuff like that.

And so, I guess, what's the direct question? Like, what are we doing? Or, like, what's the

Steve: Yeah. What are the specific strategies and tactics you're applying to win SEO?

Andrew: Because there's three core elements. There's there's the on page side, there's the off page side, and then there's the, the branded traffic side. So on the on page side, it's it's some of the stuff you I think I can't remember if we talked about this before the podcast or after, but, it's the keyword density entities, which is the the primary thing that people miss, and then the normal stuff like headers, alt tag Mhmm. File name, stuff like that. And so on do we talk about the keyword densities that we did?

Okay. Alright. So let's skip that part. So on the off page side, it's it's the links, the naked anchor text, and that kind of stuff. We went over that.

You typically have to have enough you know, you typically have to have about three to four links per page to get any kind of momentum at this point. But it it does become a game where where you're trying to go one standard deviation above everybody else on the link side. And then on the brand and traffic side, this is the big piece that is tripping people up right now where, Google is looking at sites in terms of which ones to filter in terms of how much brand traffic they get. It's a really good real test. It's like how real is this site?

How real is this is this company? Because a a really, you know, strong SEO site with no brand traffic is just an SEO guy in his basement Mhmm. Versus a site with no SEO at all with a really good brand traffic is a real company and he's not on SEO. So that's that's the delta right now on that side. And so So

Steve: Google's looking at how much traffic are you getting Yeah. Just by people looking up your company name.

Andrew: Yeah. Brand traffic plus brand click. So brand traffic in general, not including clicks. Brand traffic into clicks, direct traffic on the site, referral traffic on the site. I mean, traffic from all different angles.

Because in Google Analytics, they have the the key the,

Steve: Google tags.

Andrew: Google tags. They have the fonts API, which is on literally every single site in the entire universe at this point.

Steve: What API?

Andrew: Google Fonts.

Steve: Okay. Gotcha.

Andrew: Every site runs in Google Fonts. Nobody knows about it. It's like this tiny little thing, but every single like, they know when every single site gets hit or every single IP address via Google Fonts.

Steve: That's a great backdoor. I didn't even

Andrew: realize Yeah.

Steve: How sneaky that was.

Andrew: That's the that's the Google specialist. It's all it's all the back doors. Yeah. Yeah. So

Steve: just having Google Fonts so they can tell how many how many people are Oh, yeah. Are going there. Fascinating. Okay. So so I wanna go back to the branding thing.

So for example, we've got, we had, our our house buying company, Onward Financial Solutions. Oh. Right? So if people are googling Onward Financial Solutions, that tells Google that this is a company Yep. That they that is reputable because they're googling it.

Andrew: Mhmm. It takes about ninety days. They do an entity reflect refresh about every ninety days. It's called the Google Knowledge Graph. Mhmm.

When you have, like, a GMB, that's part of the Google Knowledge Graph. It's the thing on the right side of the panel. Mhmm. Publish a book. You get a Google Google Books thing.

That's the Google Knowledge Graph. And so the goal is to get your information inserted into the Google Knowledge Graph, and then you end up getting a machine readable ID, m r a m r e I d. You, like, right click on any GMB, and you go into the, or if you actually just right click on the Google search page Mhmm. You search for m r e I d. Mhmm.

You can find it in there and see this little long, hex tag.

Steve: Mhmm.

Andrew: And, that's getting generated every single time. So they're constantly tracking. They're constantly saving every single search result page as well to see, you know, what's getting searched, what's getting clicked, etcetera.

Steve: So then for people that are doing direct mail

Andrew: Yep.

Steve: TV and whatever It's

Andrew: a crush on SEO. So much easier.

Steve: You've got to Yeah. Really lead with the brand.

Andrew: Yes. Because

Steve: that's gonna affect your your your SEO later on.

Andrew: Oh, yeah. People who are people we I mean, we see this on the agency side, but, like, people who are, spending on the gold standard we've seen is, like, $10 a month on any kind of brand type traffic, which is TV, direct mail, etcetera. If they're spending that kind of and they get that, you know, around a 150 to 200 searches per month on the brand side Mhmm. It is just it's so much more cost effective to do SEO for them, than for for other people. At this point, we try to turn away people who aren't doing don't have other brand traffic and stuff because it's just, there's so much more of a randomness factor Yeah.

To getting inserted, and you have a much much less competitive market to really get, momentum. And that's not to just wait on SEO. And I think I think SEO in this space is incredibly easy compared to other spaces, but the brand traffic is, like, so critical.

Steve: So is it even more important to build the omnipresence?

Andrew: Yeah. From the perspective yeah. From the perspective of SEO. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. So because, like, I knew it was important to build a brand. Right. I didn't know the brand affected the ranking of your SEO or or how how you how you performed.

Andrew: Oh, directly. I mean, it's ninety days. Do it. Ninety days. Boom.

You just if you even just search your brand, like, let's say, like, 10,000 times Mhmm. Don't even click, and then you check-in ninety days, I mean, you'll see a huge increase in rankings for a brief period of time.

Steve: That's it. So okay. So I mean, going back to before I interrupted you. Right? So your brand or how many people are searching your brand?

Andrew: Yep.

Steve: And after that, how many people are clicking on that?

Andrew: Yep. So those two yeah.

Steve: Separately. Those are two data points Google's looking at

Andrew: Oh, for sure.

Steve: Whether to rank your page or not.

Andrew: Yeah. And then just direct traffic in general. So, like, you know, this is why when people run, like, PPC or Facebook traffic, we try to have them run it to a landing page on their primary domain or ideally the home page if they can if they're willing, and not like a subdomain. Mhmm. Google looks at subdomains as a separate unique domain, so it's

Steve: It's completely different, Yeah. URL.

Andrew: Yeah. So it's it's it's irrelevant at that point.

Steve: It's annoying, but that's how they work it.

Andrew: I know. I know. And so if if Right.

Steve: So it's just still live for everyone listening. Right? So, like, go.stevetrain.com is a different completely different completely different URL than stevetrain.com.

Andrew: Yes. 100%. And so so, if you're gonna run ads to a site, ideally, you're running that traffic to a landing page or the home page or something like that so you can get the direct traffic to the site. Mhmm. And then you can be able to click around the site and do all those other factors.

It could be very helpful. And if you do have a landing page, ideally, you have internal links to other pages on that page so you can get the, so there's page rank or talk conceptually. There's page rank, which is the, like, the flow of link juice around the site. Mhmm. There's traffic rank, which is, like, the flow of traffic around the site.

So when you have direct traffic to the site, Google's gonna be modeling how likely is that traffic to click over click over to other pages even if they don't actually click over. Mhmm. So if you have, like, a ton if you let's say you have a thousand people going to one page every month and you link from that page to, you know, this other page, that other page will be stronger than the rest of pages on your site.

Steve: Right.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: That kinda goes against the practice of what we heard before of, like, you wanna have a landing page where they can't get distracted and click elsewhere.

Andrew: Yes. I'm not saying I'm not saying it's good practice, but from an SEO from a purely SEO perspective, that's what you wanna do. From a purely PPC perspective, You wanna sub them in. You wanna be able to click off. You wanna, like, you wanna know exactly You wanna capture

Steve: a 100% and they can't get distracted.

Andrew: Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's a it's an impossible task to you're either going for omnipresence or you're going for perfect drafting at tracking, I think, at the end of the day.

Steve: Right. So something's got there's trade offs really. It's what we're talking about here.

Andrew: Yeah. For sure.

Steve: You mentioned a moment ago, you just want me to one standard deviation better than everyone else.

Andrew: Yeah. So stats, standard deviations, which really just means, like, what's the statistical significance you are away from the the the median or the the mean, actually. And so, let's say this the search end result page, the SERP, mentions the word fast on average 65 times, and, like, there's the the quartile differences there. You wanna be in the 75% quartile Mhmm. On the other end of that.

Same thing with word count, same thing with pretty much every entity, available, same thing with file names, how many images you have on the site, all text, etcetera. That's you know, you can't match what your competitors are doing to rank better than them. You have to go the step you're on.

Steve: Alright. So for everyone's listening, standard deviations. Right? The bell curve. Or Yeah.

Bell curves. Right? And then the mean is

Andrew: the

Steve: middle of the bell curve. Yeah. Right? So if everyone on that website is saying, has a density of, like, 10%, I should be looking for a density of, like, 13%.

Andrew: Yeah. Right.

Steve: So just a little bit more than everyone else. We're not a little bit 20% more Yeah. Right, than everyone else.

Andrew: Yeah. Generally. Yeah. The average is up to that. Yeah.

Sometimes there's, like, really big variations, and where you can run the real problems is where real problems is where, the SERP is serving two different unique interests. So, like, a good example is, like, there's a crack in my foundation. Mhmm. Okay. You could be talking about houses or you could talk about makeup.

Mhmm. And the the SERP is completely mixed. And so, like, you have to figure out which one you're trying to rank for. If you try to rank for both at the same time, you don't rank at all. Right.

So that's that's the classic example.

Steve: So, again, I go back to, a lot of complexities here.

Andrew: Yeah. SEO is not SEO is not simple. That and that's why I would not recommend people start with SEO

Steve: Yeah.

Andrew: When first getting into real estate.

Steve: So, like, I wanted to do my own SEO. I need to go see what I gotta go Google the word. I gotta go Google the words. I gotta go look at what my competition's doing. Yep.

And then I have to, like, use, I imagine, software to capture Yeah. What they're doing, and then I can score myself against it. You used to use something. I can't remember what it was. It was SEMrush.

I think it's what we were using, right, to kinda see, like, how we're doing on our SEO versus our competition. Yeah. Are you using tools like that? Or are you using

Andrew: try try to stick with the free tools as much as possible. So there's one called SEOquake. It's a free Chrome extension. That's just for, like, pure keyword density. So if you're trying to go, like, level one, you're just looking at trying to get your file names, trying to get your reach ones, etcetera.

Level two is keyword density. SEOquake is free. Literally no cost. You're a low competition market. You could stop there, and you can do really well, really, really well because nobody else is doing it.

And then the third level is the entities. There's a tool called Textraiser. They have an API. It's very, very slick. And that'll help you extract all the the entities on the page, and you can kinda get a word, a volume count of each entity.

And that's what I would do for the entity side. Got it. It's usually the easiest.

Steve: So headers, alt text, the the specific keywords

Andrew: Yep.

Steve: And then the the related keywords.

Andrew: Yeah. The yeah. Right. Related entities. Yeah.

Yeah. They're no they're no longer keywords in the sense that, like, they're not a term that someone's gonna be searching necessarily.

Steve: But they're related to

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: The keyword.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. Alright. And so if someone were to do this on their own, like, how much time does this take?

Andrew: Learning it from ground zero. I mean, there there's a Facebook group that I recommend joining. Estimates REI Facebook group. There's everything we talked about here is, like, in that Facebook group.

Steve: What is it?

Andrew: Estimates REI. Estimates real estate investors Facebook group. It's all in there for free. I mean, it's there's there's no pitch or anything. Yeah.

They're gonna put your email address in. And, but within that scope, I mean, I probably say twenty to thirty hours a week for the first couple months. And then after that, you should be off to the races. Right. There's probably about twenty hours of content you have to really, like, go through to understand it.

Mhmm. But you're gonna have to re go through that content. Because I talk like this the whole time, like, speeding through it. Mhmm. Just how I talk, I guess.

I'm gonna work on that one. But, once once you go through that two or three times, maybe four times, you'll you'll you'll get it down.

Steve: Is it is this one of those things, though, like, where you do a really good job and then it's just maintenance? Yeah. Or so this isn't like, I need to spend twenty hours in SEO every single week.

Andrew: Definitely not. No. I mean, for you know, a good example is like sellmyhousefast.com for property leads. We haven't worked

Steve: on that site in months.

Andrew: I mean, it's

Steve: been a

Andrew: very long time. Probably a year almost a year probably at this point. And that's how I loan those a ton of leads. So Gotcha. Very low maintenance after that.

Steve: You own someone else fast? Yeah. Gotcha. Very, very fortuitous

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Given the name of your competition.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Okay. So you also kinda, just, like, snuck in there the word, link juice.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. So, the common term from Google back in the day was PageRank Right. Which is really just, like, how strong is this site over here? And then when I or really this page over here.

And then when it links to this site, how much how much link juice is passed, which is really a reflection of another algorithm. It's all differential equations at the end of the day. It's all machine learning. And so it's it's like how many outbound links are on that page? How many outbound links are on that site?

How high up on the on the page are at and is my link on that site Mhmm. And and other factors like that. And so, you know, the goal is to see as much paid rank as possible. It's like one of the key elements, one of the one of the three key elements, but without the brand and traffic as well, you're you're kinda toast.

Steve: But, like, the way I look at it. Right? Like, if you created your own Tumblr account. Right?

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: And then you link to your site

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Versus CNN writing an article about you.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: One's gonna send a lot more link juice

Andrew: For sure.

Steve: Than the other.

Andrew: A 100%. Right?

Steve: And you wanna have as many I mean, obviously, you can't just get CNN to do it.

Andrew: Right? Yeah. But you

Steve: wanna have as many of those kind of sites

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Doing it versus creating your own blogs or tweeting your URL.

Andrew: 100%. Yeah. The the difficult there's there's two elements to it. One is the level of, like, seed sites that you have in the space. Mhmm.

So that'd be like a CNN type thing. And then the other one is just getting general enough page rank in general. It's really hard to scale seed sites because there's not that many. Mhmm. Maybe a couple 100.

You know, HomeLight would be a good example or CNN or New York Times. Things that are brand names, people you know, things that people really know. And then after that, it's really just getting links from other other sources effectively to Yeah. Kinda boost up the site.

Steve: I know for a while. Right? I I I like I said, my SEO dreams got crushed after Panda and Panda. Yeah. To hell with this.

I'm not spending any more time on this thing. I remember something that was really popular back in the day was being an iReporter for CNN.

Andrew: Right. Okay.

Steve: Right? So, basically, it wouldn't be cnn.com. It would be like, ireport.cnn.com or something along those lines. Right? Where you can say, I was on CNN, but

Andrew: It's like the old version of press release.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Same thing. Right? And you would get the the the page rank, the link juice, right, from that website.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: We were just saying, like, how, like, Google treats all these domains differently.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: So, like, you wouldn't really get very much juice for that.

Andrew: Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Once you're if you're linking off a subdomain, the same kind of I mean, there's not the page rank resets to zero Mhmm. Effectively when you're on a subdomain, so you need to not be using subdomains effectively.

Right. But there there is still power in links that don't have any page rank. Mhmm. Because every time a new page is added to the Internet, that page has, initial page rank effectively.

Steve: Right.

Andrew: If you use page rank, the the great divider is the number of pages that are on the Internet in general. So every time you add a page, you create new links.

Steve: Another practice, I used to use back in the day was Help a Reporter out.

Andrew: Yeah. Super common. It's called, like, Connectively now. There's a bunch of other ones, like Featured and, Turkel and there's some other ones as well. I can't remember what's on my head.

Those are really good free ways to get links. Mhmm. You're hard to scale from a time perspective. Yeah. I've done probably a thousand horror pitches myself.

Back when I first started, I thought that was the only way you have to do just horror pitches. Mhmm. I've done a I've done a ton of those. Yeah. Yeah.

It just becomes very difficult to scale. Well, I

Steve: went down that road for a bit, and what I found, a, there were a lot of questions that are like these these are obscure topics. Like, what are you talking about?

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Right? B, I was talking to your reporters, and I was like, what are you talking about? Like, the didn't seem like there was a lot of professionalism

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: In that component.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: And then third thing, which really killed me, is that I would do an interview with a reporter, and then they would never even publish it.

Andrew: Yeah. Or they publish it with no link. Yeah. And then you're there, like, well, that was a waste of time.

Steve: Right. Yeah. So do you still recommend going on that strategy? You spent countless weeks going back and forth with the homeowner only to lose a deal because the seller changed their mind. Another wholesaler made an unreasonable offer or what the seller needs from the sale, you just can't pay.

Now imagine you've got the ultimate control on a property that you just locked up, meaning you're on title and every decision has to go through you, eliminating virtually every external threat. That's why the installment method was created. Through installment payments, you have full control of the property as your name is now on the title. Any decision the seller wants to make now has to be approved by you. No longer can they pull out equity, go with another buyer, or change their mind.

And manage and combining the best creative financing with the flexibility of marketing the property on the MLS to collect the most amount of revenue possible, all while having total control of the property. This is just a tip of the iceberg. The concept here is simple, but implementing is challenging. So visit wholesale2024.com to learn more so that you'll never have another deal blow

Andrew: up. Yeah. I think to some extent, you still need our links, or or seed sites, which are really easy to get or or easier to get through, HARO or or other type services.

Steve: Gotcha. Yeah. And then so going back to what we're talking about earlier. So you you do your own AdWords Mhmm. To link it into your PPL service.

Andrew: Yeah. So

Steve: you're not you don't do for for example so you have your own SEO agency. Yep. But you don't have a PPC agency.

Andrew: No. No. Just avoided that one. Just avoided that one. Just avoided that one.

Steve: What was the the rationale behind that?

Andrew: We actually start the SEO agency before Property Leads existed. It was Mhmm. It was kind of a a predecessor to Property Leads. And then, a a great guy named Keith Sant, who loved SEO as well, and we're we're really good friends. He's in the real estate space as well.

Steve: He's in Seattle or or or Yep. In I yeah.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's crazy. No. I mean,

Steve: I met him I mean, this is back back in the day of, back when they used to have what was it? Real Estate Roundup. Yeah. Right? With Adam and Brent.

Mhmm.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. He he always liked to wear a really big hat, if I remember correctly.

Andrew: Oh, that's funny. I'll have to tell him that one. Yeah. So he ended up, so, you know, we we were we were Esmeritaria, myself, and my my my spouse was. And, about a couple months in, we decided to work in Properly.

And so he kinda took over the agency and started running that forward and stuff. And that was that was a really great decision because it allowed us to focus on one thing. Mhmm. So we kinda productized everything we do at Proper Leads on the SEO side and and kinda delivered it to SME Terr AI. So it's available on both sides.

We're kind of equal competition in that way. Yeah. You know, the PPC agency stuff is always interesting, but it's it's just another business at the end of the day. Mhmm. And so you're adding additional complexity.

Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. Got it. Is Keith involved in all this?

Andrew: Keith's involved in the agency. Not not necessarily in proper leads, but

Steve: very yeah, because we've we've we've gone back and forth on on on Facebook Messenger. Right? Just kinda like Yeah. Talking about I mean, it's not a lot. But Yeah.

Andrew: He's a great guy. Yeah. He's really awesome.

Steve: Fantastic guy. Really well grounded. Yeah. So okay. And is there, like, any particular keywords or, phrases that people use that you feel, like, are the higher intent than others?

Andrew: Yeah. So we we've done a lot of data analysis on, like, the title transfer rate for different keywords and stuff. And so on the on the low end of the spectrum, you have, like, the cheaper words like iBuyers, for example, which is a, like, 30 or 40% title transfer rate, but a lot of them go on the MLS. And then

Steve: So they're if they're searching, for example, Opendoor, It's probably a retail lead. Is that what what I'm

Andrew: hearing? Shocker. I know. But yeah. And then, you know, in the middle of the pack is that sell my house fast and we buy houses type keyword.

Steve: Mhmm.

Andrew: And those tend to, you know, transfer on the 50% mark and about half go on market, half go off market. We buy houses inches out somehow fast just a little bit. And then on the top of the spectrum is that we buy the houses type keyword.

Steve: Mhmm.

Andrew: And that is, like, a banger of a keyword. It's 65, 70% title transfer rate, and then, like, it's, like, 80% or 70 or 80% is off market. But your your cost per click is, like, $100. Your cost per lead's, like, $900. That one's really, really expensive.

And then in the middle two, there's different nuances there as well. Like, if people search in cash, that'll transfer off market tends to be higher than if they don't search cash. Like, cash is higher than fast, for example. Other nuances like that. And and the other big thing that we found out too is, like, we we spent a lot of time trying to figure out the Spanish seller game, and I would not recommend doing that.

They often go on the market. They do not like to work off market. Their their title transfer rate is lower. They tend to wanna sell within their community as well. You can say the same thing for everybody who has a immigrant or community really,

Steve: Non American.

Andrew: Yeah. Non American or community background in some form. Not a bad thing or good thing. Just it is what it is. So going for those, like, vendor Mi Casa, Rapido, and, like, Compramos Casas, like, cut it.

I would not recommend that.

Steve: Oh, I I bought, compramoscasas. Cash.

Andrew: Oh, really?

Steve: Alright. And, and, that that did not go anywhere.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. We've got an SEO site in this management, like, vendor, Mikasa, Robbie, though.

Steve: Uh-huh.

Andrew: He's, like, 10 to 20 leads a month maybe. But the you look at the leads and it's like you I can't even read them. Like, I don't know what I'm looking at. So, yeah. That one.

Steve: So We Buy Ugly Houses does really well.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. They've got a great I mean, you They built a brand. They built a brand. They built a brand.

They built a brand. Yeah. And then, you know, within that scope too, we sell my ugly house as well. Actually, it's a really common keyword that kinda falls in that same category and stuff. But when we look at PPC as a whole, what I like to look at a lot is the title transfer of the words that we're actually trying to, you know, buy clicks on effectively.

It's a multipart problem because when you look at the when you look at Google Ads, you have the trying to shorten the the the feedback cycle back to Google. You're trying to be better conversions back to Google, trying to feedback the ones that were not actually conversions, etcetera. But at some point, you have to feedback. It's difficult to feedback which ones actually turned into deals. Mhmm.

Because once you stretch out that time horizon so far, Google is very lossy not very lossy in that way. Yeah. So looking at the keywords after the fact and adjusting what keywords we buy on based on the title transfer has become very, gratuitous.

Steve: You get any trouble ever with the We Buy We Houses guys?

Andrew: Not yet.

Steve: No? Avoiding it. So I did. Uh-oh. Alright.

And so I had to figure out. So I can't you know, like, I I did a lot of keyword match. If they googled this, my headline said that, Or I might have thrown some words into it. Right? Yeah.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: But generally speaking, there was a really, really strong keyword match on the what's it called when when when you use the the phrase?

Andrew: Phrase match?

Steve: Phrase match. Right?

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah. So I did I was always in phrase match. Right? Okay. But I wasn't allowed to do it Really?

Andrew: If they

Steve: were doing we buy ugly houses.

Andrew: Oh, interesting.

Steve: Right? Because now we're infringing on their trademark.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: So I if it was so my keyword group was instead of if they were in that keyword group, the result was we buy ugly homes. Oh, that's smart. To violate or not to violate, to to get around

Andrew: Interesting.

Steve: Their their their trademark.

Andrew: That worked?

Steve: Yeah. I had no problems after that. Right? Because they didn't copy they didn't trademark we buy ugly homes. They just trademark we buy ugly houses.

Andrew: Interesting.

Steve: So that was my workaround. So I had to get out of

Andrew: That's a good workaround. Really good workaround.

Steve: It's still when you went on the site, had the ugly red and yellow. Like Yeah. It still looked like that. I didn't have her caveman, but the brand feel on that website Yeah. Looked very much like a Yeah.

Like a home investor site. Yeah. And then the keywords and we didn't ever say we were ugly houses. Everything was ugly homes.

Andrew: Yeah. But it's tough to be a home investors client too, in that sense because the the leads are very expensive internally to the company. So I I love working with those guys because they're they're all in you know, they're they're franchise. They're they're ready to go. They're ready to do deals.

So I've enjoyed my experience with them.

Steve: They're they're good on the ground.

Andrew: Do you

Steve: work with home investor clients?

Andrew: Not officially. No. Yeah. Definitely not officially.

Steve: Yeah. Well, because I I I tried. I tried. I had serious conversations with them. Right?

Because, like, they they skyrocketed at some point. Right? And then when the when the recession occurred in o eight, o nine, they crashed. Really? Yeah.

They crashed so badly. They actually had to sell their company. Right? So, like, there were only two Homebuster franchises in the Phoenix market. I think there's still, like, 30 now, but there's only two.

Wow. Right? At that time, the owner because I was looking at the franchise stocks. Because I was really seriously considering buying one. And the only reason why I didn't was they're like, well, you have to pay us the the the our our franchise royalty on every house you buy.

It's like, but I already market it. Like, why would I buy a franchise? I'm already marketing. I'm already doing my own PPC and s and SEO for this and that. Why would I pay you guys?

So I didn't agree to it Yeah. Right, for that very specific reason because I didn't wanna pay on deals I sourced my own. Yep. Looking back, I probably should've, but that's besides the point. When I was looking at all the franchise documents, right, it was Subway.

It was a doctor and associates. Right? And that's the Subway umbrella.

Andrew: Oh, really?

Steve: Yeah. So the guys that own Subway Really? Bought the home buster. Now they've since sold it. Right?

Someone else owns a homevestor franchise branding now. Yeah. Yeah. But it was fascinating to me when I was looking at it to potentially buy. It's like, interesting.

Like, looking by a company that's owned by Subway.

Andrew: Yeah. No. That's super interesting. Yeah. Great.

Wow. I didn't know that. Yeah. It is for you.

Steve: Yeah. So I I've been I've been around been around the block. So, what have been some of the so we talked about how to find how how to work with you guys at propertyleadsdisruptorleads.com. Talk about SEO. So you're sourcing it from your own PPC and SEO predominantly.

Andrew: Yep. What

Steve: have been some of your biggest challenges in in in fulfilling your p p PPL service?

Andrew: We've constantly had a lead volume problem. I think that's been the biggest thing is, there's constant demand for more, and we're trying to you know, how do you generate leads that are not really crappy, and you fall into the same, problems that we talked about earlier. Mhmm. I think that's been the biggest problem overall. I think if I had, like, one if I had one regret, I I think it inevitably, like, quality does have to drop, and so you have to end up setting a lower price point.

Mhmm. And so if I were to do it again, I I might have set the barrier a little bit lower at the beginning. But at this point, like, we have to be the higher quality one because it's that's at this point, that's what we're known for. Yeah. And so we're we're stuck there.

We're gonna get we're gonna get limited to volume

Steve: at some point. That's the problem. So you're you're you're you're volume limited.

Andrew: Yeah. It's all fine.

Steve: The end of the world, though, if you're volume limited? Because you could charge more.

Andrew: For sure.

Steve: Right? I mean, like, what what again, what we're from what it appears on the outside, a lot of PPL companies, as demand goes up, let's go find more supply. But the other thing you could do is just raise prices to meet demand.

Andrew: Absolutely. I mean, I think I think the the pinnacle person the pinnacle lead buyers is gonna inevitably be somebody who doesn't even care about wholesaling. They just wanna buy houses. Right.

Steve: And

Andrew: they wanna hold on to them. And they don't really care how much it costs because they're comparing it to the MLS at that point. Right. Now the percentage of those people who we've worked with today compared to the the population in general is is relatively low. Mhmm.

But I think given enough time, that's where it ended up When you look

Steve: at, like, direct mail. Right? Like Yeah. Cost per contract, I think, is is not unusual to be at 10,000.

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Right. It's crazy. But, like, don't make, like, 70. Yeah. So, like, it's not a big deal Yeah.

To spend 10,000.

Andrew: Yeah. So We've also found too that people who are coming from outbound channels and coming into an inbound channel have got a lot of issues because they're not used to having to call back the lead right away. Which has been which has been fascinating. They're like, oh, I got a lead. I'll call tomorrow.

Like, we'll talk to them tomorrow. Mhmm. But, I think that's been a big challenge as well. I think the the finalized thing on that point is, we refund for for non response like, no response leads, and that is the most, like, tedious thing to nobody refunds for no response. Like, I think it's I think it's just us.

Maybe there's others, but I think it's just us. And, I would say about 30% of leads that get refunded from that channel, we end up having to decline because we'll contact them, and they'll say, yeah, Andy. I do wanna sell my house for cash. And I did not hear from anybody. What is going on?

And I'm like, this guy said he contacted you 28 times. Like, I don't know what you're talking about. And then you you talk to, you know, the person. They're like, oh, well, my grandmother was sick. And, like, they've, you know, a ton of excuses or or maybe something did happen and maybe their their phone was marked as scam likely.

But that's been a that's been a really big hurdle. I mean, we have to there's a lot of people who are refunding for no response. And typically, it's just an evaluation of their sales process at that point, their follow-up process.

Steve: We had, Scott Morris here. Yep. With almost all these. Are you familiar with him?

Andrew: Yeah.

Steve: Right. I mean, he has a policy. Like, if you're not in a mastermind or you're not paying for a coach, you're not allowed to buy my service.

Andrew: Really?

Steve: That's his policy. Right? Because what he found was, like, I mean, it's not cheap. Really? Right?

He's not cheap. He's not inexpensive. Right? But everyone that use him has a very high ROI. So he'd rather just limit who can qualify for his product

Andrew: Yep.

Steve: And then have happy clients then bring on more people, and now he's gotta babysit them, listen to their complaints, see how they're not getting the volume that they want out of it. Yep. And then he goes in there and says, well, what about this, this, and this, and this, and they're like, oh, we weren't doing those things.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. That's a that's a 100%. And I think the other thing too when I when I think about that is, like, we have a very, like, low barrier to entry. Like, we don't require, like, some $8,000 upfront deposit or seven months prepaid or whatever.

It's usually, like, two leads. It might be, like, couple $100, let's say. Yeah. And so that sometimes allows people in who are not necessarily qualified Mhmm. To buy leads yet.

And so we've been we've been working on that to Yeah. To clean those up. Yeah.

Steve: Sounds like there's a lot of opportunities to to to kinda, what's what's the word I'm looking for, make some tweaks and adjustments.

Andrew: Yeah. Oh, for sure. Tons of room. Tons of room for improvement. Lots of room for improvement.

Steve: So, again, guys, if you guys are interested in in in working with Andrew, disruptorslease.com,

Andrew: what

Steve: message would you like to leave all the everyone that's listening, what message would you like to leave them with?

Andrew: Oh my gosh. Please triple dial. Please triple dial, and please please make sure that your phone's not getting marked as spam likely. That is absolutely crucifying people right now. And if if everybody made that one change, I people would do a ton a ton better.

But, yeah, we'd be happy to work with you, happy to talk to you, and, excited to excited to catch up.

Steve: And someone wanna reach out to you directly. How could they get ahold of you?

Andrew: Facebook. I just searched for Andy Kolodzie from you on Facebook and give me a give me a message.

Steve: Yeah. Make sure you get that spelling right.

Andrew: Oh, a n d y k o l o d g I e.

Steve: Thanks so much.

Andrew: Appreciate it, man.

Steve: Appreciate you guys appreciate you guys watching. We'll see you guys next time.