Announcer:
Welcome to the global investor podcast, a show that focuses on helping foreign investors and, or the lucrative us real estate market host Charles Carillo, combined decades of real estate investing experience with a professional background in international banking to interview experts in all areas of us real estate investing. Now here’s your host, Charles Carillo.
Charles:
Welcome to another episode of the Global Investors Podcast; I’m your host Charles Carillo. Today we have Alicia Jarrett; a global real estate investor based in Australia. She owns; a land buying company, a real estate marketing firm and a coaching company for real estate investors. So, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Alicia:
Hey Charles, thank you so much for having me. It’s funny you, you saying that I’m in Australia is really interesting because I’ve got this zoom background done and someone said to me the other day, are you in long island? <Laugh> said no, still in Australia, but <laugh>,
Charles:
I didn’t even pick that up. That’s awesome. Yeah, it’s great.
Alicia:
So, so thanks for having me on.
Charles:
Yeah, no, it’s great to have people on. And obviously the the theme of our show is obviously people investing in us real estate and about 60, 60% of our listeners are based in the us, but 40% are foreign. So it’s great to have someone that’s based foreign that’s involved in real estate investing in, and this is a very active businesses that you’re involved with. This isn’t passive investing. So it’s awesome to kind of dissect what you’re doing. And but let’s start off with, give us a little background about yourself both personally, professionally, before getting involved in real estate investing.
Alicia:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So so I’m born and raised here in Australia, as you can all probably tell by the accent for your listeners. <Laugh> and my, my background, I actually grew up in the country and didn’t really know the much about business at all. Growing up. I was a country girl, but I moved to the city here in Melbourne Australia. Oh, when I was 17, I actually moved to the city and started my career. And, and my background is actually in a whole range of things. I’ve had a career in, in retail, in insurance, in it but my main career was actually in human resources and, and leadership and, and sort of organizational capability. So I feel like the, the Jack of all trades, if you like, but about a decade ago, child. So I was in a really great job.
Alicia:
So, you know, a good six figure income that anybody would’ve been crazy to walk away from working from a global it company. And, and it just wasn’t enough. There was just something in me that was like, nah, there’s gotta be more life than just working what I call a, a job, which is for me an acronym, which means just over broke. Now even people that I know that are on six bigger incomes always seem to never have enough because most of us, if we are in a job, we, we, we live within our means. Right? Yeah. And I was thinking, you know, maybe there’s gotta be something different to this thing called life and, and career. And so 10 years ago now I’m actually more like 12 years ago. Now I went and started my own training in consulting practice. And and again, that, that was fantastic.
Alicia:
Really working with organizations on that. A lot of that I’ve brought into our business, which has been great, but then again, about four or five years ago, my partner, Matt and I had that exact same moment where we’re like, you know, surely there’s gotta be something more to life. We regularly stop and ask ourselves that question, you know, what are we doing on this earth and how are we making the most of it and having fun with it. And we’d, we’d really, we’d, we’d explored quite a lot to do with real estate here in Australia. But as you just said before, you know, 40% of your listeners are, are often out of the us. So for those listening, what they might be interested to know is that doing real estate here in Australia as an investor, you’re really limited by the types of strategies that you can do.
Alicia:
And you also need quite a, a decent amount of capital mm-hmm <affirmative> to actually do anything in real estate over here. You know, the cost of houses over here is ridiculous. Let’s just put it that way. So, so we’d done some real estate over here and we were thinking, well, we both love real estate. We love putting people in houses when we, when we can. And we love the opportunity that real estate presents, but maybe there’s a different market around the world that might be easier to do real estate in. And that led us to the us. So four years ago, we started doing some fix and flips in the us, which I loved. We got bitten by the, the bug of doing that first fix and flip and loving the process and getting that income coming in and, and putting a family in a home, which was great. And and we got bitten by the bug, which was, that felt really good. How do we do more of those? So we did quite a few fix and flips, which we, we love, but the last one, Charles, and I’ve said this on quite a few podcasts, the last one was one of those ones that again, made it stop and go time out that, that wasn’t so much fun, that one <laugh>.
Alicia:
So you know, we, after a year and lots of headaches, we basically broke even. And and it wasn’t great. So then we, we paused again and thought, okay, well, we know that there’s a lot of opportunity to do business in the us. But why don’t we look at different asset classes? And so we changed the land. And here we are today, you know, a couple of years in, we’ve got a land business that we are wholesaling and doing lots of different strategies around land which is great. We’ve got a whole team in place doing that, that led us to build another business, which is a real estate marketing business on how do we do our acquisitions better. That also led us into building out some other products that we’re about to launch around how people do real estate when it comes to wholesaling and real estate investing. And we’ve also got another business, which is a, a data business that we’ve invested really heavily into. So, you know, we’ve taken this little idea of doing real estate investing in the states and it’s just kind of grown, which has been awesome. So we are pretty excited about where it’s heading Charles,
Charles:
So awesome. So I wanna come out just step back a little bit, because you’re obviously like grown you’re into the land investing when you were doing fixed some flips, because how did you, so you, you said, okay, us is the place I’m to invest in now. How, what were the steps that you took to pick your markets to pick the vehicle within real estate? Cuz we know there’s so many different ways of making money in real estate. Oh many. So and what did you do after that? Like did you physically come here and check stuff out? How did you build your team? Can you give us a little back? Cause that’s how we think people are like, oh yeah, that sounds great. You start all these businesses here. And like we were talking before the show about how it’s 14 hours right now ahead from where we’re filming right now. And so can you give us a little background of how you actually started started?
Alicia:
Yeah. Yeah, because here’s the thing, right. A lot of people look at and they’re like, we, we know a lot of our customers in the states that are just trying to do business from another state, from the properties that are in and they find that difficult enough, let alone the other side of the world. Right. So first of all, we are a little crazy, but I think crazy good <laugh> so when we started this and so coming back to your first question, where did we decide to, to do our market? So we, we did the research, we went and did the training that everybody else does. Like there’s loads of different real estate educators out there on how to do different types of asset classes and investing strategies. And we went and did that. We went and got the education. So that caused us to, to really start it at at level one, which is where, what are our markets and where are we gonna go after?
Alicia:
So we did the same research as everyone else. We researched growth paths, growth markets what different areas are doing the impact of demography. So how many people are moving demographic wise to different areas? Obviously, you know, pricing, supply and demand all of those things, but also weather. You know, we, we know that there’s this line in the middle of the us that above that line more than half the year, can’t really do a huge amount <laugh>. So we looked at at different areas and we landed in Florida. And then when it came to our first area in Florida that we wanted to go after we landed in Jacksonville and the very first thing that we did. So once we started that research, we just got on the phone to some local realtors and said, Hey, we’re investors from Australia. We’re looking to partner with some local realtors over there.
Alicia:
This is what we’re trying to do. Give us a call back the very first person. And might I say the only real estate agent that called us back is still in our team today. His name is Michael casidy and he is amazing. We love him to bits and and he partnered with us on our first few deals. He helped us find those properties and yes, we did jump on a plane and go over pre COVID. We would actually spend, you know, almost half of our, in the state. So we’d, we’d go over and spend a couple of months we’d come back, we’d go over. And we were in the process of moving over there and then COVID hit. So we’re still here in Australia. <Laugh> but you know, to come back to your question, we, we started with just building those relationships and really leaning on Michael to say, right, we know what a certain point in time that we are gonna need a probate attorney, a title come you know, where we go for title insurance, all of these things. And he started to introduce us to his network and a lot of those people are still in our team today. So that’s where we started just picking up the phone and finding and connecting with the right people. Nice. And I
Charles:
Think the referrals, just so one thing that’s gonna it’s the referrals, cause that’s always tell people. So you got all of your team from referrals from this one great agent. Yep.
Alicia:
A nice, yeah. And it’s because we built such a good relationship with him. And he was so open to working with us in creative ways. Whereas there was a few other agents that we spoke to afterwards that were like, no, I think it’s gonna be a bit too difficult to help you guys. Or, you know, you know, the time difference, isn’t gonna work a whole bunch of excuses, but Michael was like, hell yeah, this sounds like a crazy idea. Let’s do it. So every time we’ve gone over to Jacksonville, we’ve spent time with him. And the first time that we went over, actually he’s a really good tip for one listening. The very first time we went over, we hired him for a day, an entire day and we got in the car with him and we literally drove around to almost every emerging market in Jacksonville and explored it because we needed to put eyeballs on, on the types of properties that we were after.
Alicia:
But really get to know the areas, you know, just to, to be able to speak with some credibility when someone says, oh, I’ve got a property in orange park and we’re like, we know where that is now <laugh> so we hide him for a whole day. We went around and looked at a whole bunch of things and, and it just grew from there. So we did the first couple of fix and flips with him. Interestingly enough, the last one that we did that nearly broke us, he will, wasn’t on our team with that one because we went to a different agent and we changed our strategy. We’d gone from, you know, pretty crappy houses in some, not so nice areas that we, we flipped fixed and flipped and put families in because we’re very passionate about affordable housing and everyone having the right to have a roof over their head. So that was our strategy. The last one we did, and I think there’s a lesson in here, Charles, we deviated from our strategy and we went for a property that was in the half a million range. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> tried to do that more problems than we could poke a stick at <laugh> and it ended up not being great. So I think the lesson for us there was when you’ve got a strategy, this strategies working stick to it.
Charles:
Yeah. No, that’s, that’s great. And when you say you hired him and did you, you paid them for, he paid them for the day to kick
Alicia:
You around. Yeah, we, we tried to, we, we said we wanna pay you for your time and he, he wouldn’t take it. So we, we paid him, we, we took him out for lunch. We, we met with him a few times when we were there and made sure that we, you know, know gave back where we could and, and gave him our business, which was the main thing. But we did offer to pay him for his time for the whole day, but he wouldn’t take it cuz that’s the kind of person he is. He’s just amazing. But I think it’s good in business to at least make that offer because we want your time and your expertise. Right. And we’re willing to pay for that. And and don’t just expect that people give up their time for free because everyone’s busy these days let’s face it. Yeah.
Charles:
I also say too, is that if you know, you did a great thing you found, cause you can find your market from anywhere in the new world, you know, using these data, you like, okay, Jacksonville, Google, but you really, yeah. You need to really though find inside the neighborhoods. Cause when you’re back at home or you’re not there for one reason or another wherever you are, you know, like you said, orange park whatever neighborhood, whatever this 10 block RA this neighborhood is where it is. And then you’re gonna know, well that’s on that side of the tracks, literally that’s on that side of the highway, that’s on, that’s on beach side. That’s not on beach side and all these different factors that go into choosing a market. The other thing too, I really like is I’m a big proponent is like even people that are starting. And I was like, listen, especially if you’re flipping houses, there’s so many people that want to do it. Right. So if you have contractors like, oh no, no, it’s their job. Don’t pay them for a bid. And I’m like, listen, pay them for, to come in and give you a bid because unless you’ve bought the property already, I mean, you want to get a call back from these people. What’s 50 or a hundred dollars if you’re penciling out to make $20,000, you know what I mean?
Alicia:
Exactly. You’re just getting,
Charles:
And it’s like, if you’re talking to a realtor pay them for their time to pull the lists and maybe you don’t have to sign the non exclusive or whatever, or the exclusive agreement, I’m sorry. Right off the bat, let a lot of people do want and just say, Hey, I’ll pay you to pull these lists and let me research what you’ve closed or what’s closed in this area and let me follow up with you. Right. And it was great. You didn’t waste any time you went with him, but yeah, these are it’s is you, you fantastic way of sourcing properties and sourcing markets.
Alicia:
Yeah. Yeah. And he, he was great. And then even now when we’ve gone to, to land, so the last few years we’ve been focusing on, on land wholesaling and land investing and Michael is still on our team and he’s become our joint venture partner on our bigger lots mm-hmm <affirmative>. So we, again, we pivoted our strategy, but we looked at how can we still utilize the same team to make sure that we’ve got all these great networks and relationships in place? How can we still make them a part of that? So, and now that we’re doing land wholesaling, we will often, you know, wholesaler deal or we might sell a finance a deal. But when we, we look at some of our, our parcels of land that have been more either buy and hold strategies or really amazing opportunities with land, rather than just doing a quick wholesale, we actually get him involved now as our joint venture partner where he’s actually, so our agent on the deal and working with us in a, in a different way, not in a typical agent relationship in an actual joint venture relationship where we’re paying him now a lot more.
Alicia:
So we are, we’re giving him and I’ll be very open with this because I think it’s a good strategy for people to consider rather than here’s your three to 6% commission cuz on land, you know that that’s, that’s not great. We’re gonna give you 20% of our profit. Nice. And if it’s a good deal, you know, cuz if he puts the work in and helps us to, to be able to get rid of that property and we’re all winning, then that’s gotta be a good thing. So if everyone wins
Charles:
<Laugh> yeah, no for sure. And that’s, it’s similar to a model we would use with like syndication where you’re doing a 70, 30 or an 80 20. Yep. And you have to, there you, there has to be enough meat on the bone for the person that you’re working with. Cuz people always, we would send out some syndication deals and you have some potential investors that look at it and they’d go why are you getting 30% and stuff like this? And you’re like, well, you know, if you’re investing in something don’t you want to know that just first of all, standard, but second, like don’t you wanna know that I have some, our team has some, you know, we’re we have some skin in the game, well we have skin in the game, but we also have this this pot at the end of the rainbow that we want to get to when we achieve that goal, when we hit these marks of returns and people just get really, they get really kind of cheap ingredient in these different areas. And that can be a recipe for disaster. I think when you’re building a business. Cause I think you realize, and a lot of people don’t realize, I think in fix and flip is that it’s a very partners setup it’s partners business when you have to grow and you can do one flip here and there by yourself. But to really scale it, you need to bring partners on, especially in the situation that you find yourself in, where you’re 14 time zones away.
Alicia:
<Laugh> exactly. And, and I would say it’s not even just the fix and flip market, I would say in, in any good real estate asset class that you are working, having that team in place, how those partners in place and giving back to those partnerships where everybody wins it, that’s, that’s gotta be the mindset that, that everybody needs. And the minute we go into a scarcity mindset where we’re like, you know, it’s all about what, what can I take versus what can I give? We start to see a difference in, in our business results. And, and I can tell you time and time again, people that I’ve seen that how up and to so yeah, yeah. Abundance mindsets where it’s at <laugh> so,
Charles:
So you were fix and flipping, you kind of went outside of what your target was and then you went to land. What was the reason now from transitioning from fix and flip to land other than this last deal, let’s say this deal never happened that you did. What was be the big reason for it?
Alicia:
This, the main reason Charles, I think was it was also at a time in the market. So if we go back to, you know, three years ago, there was a huge, almost shift in that market that thanks to HGTV and, and, and all the fix and flip shows out there. So many people wanted to do fix and flips. It became this trend, right? So we saw in the space of a couple of months, we saw the market really compressed with how competitive, all of a sudden it was becoming to find a good deal, how competitive it was becoming to get a good contractor team in place and keep them because people, as you said, people are now bidding on contractors. You know, here’s a really good roofer, great. I’ll pay him twice as much. And all of a sudden he’s off my job and on an another job.
Alicia:
So the market was getting really competitive and we were seeing this squeeze with the ability to extract value on, on the the sales side, when we were selling those properties. So that’s the time, you know, markets go through cycles. They all do mm-hmm <affirmative>. And we were seeing that cycle shift when it came to single family homes and fix and flips. And so part of our strategy is always to be looking at what’s happening in the market and the market cycle and being prepared to change. So that was the, it wasn’t just that last property. That was a bit of a stressful one. It was also noticing the shift in supply and demand in the market and then being prepared to pivot with that. And I think pivot is a word these days it’s a bit overused, but it, but it is, it is the truth.
Alicia:
It’s like, okay, pause. Is this strategy still working for us? If not, what’s our next strategy or our next asset class and how do we explore that and go after that. And I’m so glad we did because our land business is absolutely booming and we’ve got a, a, a team of four full-time people that help me with that business. And and that has actually enabled us to branch off into some other businesses, which has been really exciting. Yeah. I think to never be never be afraid to kind of change, I think is the message there.
Charles:
Yeah. I think land is just it’s untapped because you have a lot of transactional, real estate investors are focusing really on single family homes and that’s where they do it, where they can find distressed buyers or sellers and where they can find people that are, whether they’re gonna renovate it for their own home, whether they’re gonna flip it whatever it might be. That’s just a, I mean, that’s a huge market, but I think there’s so many people in there and I think land is something that’s, there’s people limit, but it’s not as I think just saturated as other, yeah. Other one to four year typical fix and flip renovated properties, one to four units.
Alicia:
And if I could give you an example of that. So, you know, I mentioned before, we’ve got some of our other businesses, so one of our other businesses is called supercharged offers. And we, we purely built that for ourselves to have a marketing acquisition model for us to get deals. So now with supercharged office, Charles, we’ve got a number of customers and supercharged offers that are land single family, home multifamily. We’ve even got self storage mobile home, a lot of asset classes where we’re actually building out their entire marketing model and the acquisition I can tell you because of our customers telling us, and, and we monitor all of their marketing activities as well, those that are doing land you know, they will send out thousands and thousands of offers and probably for every three to 400 offers, they send out, they’ll get a good deal houses.
Alicia:
It’s more like two to 3000 offers need to be sent out to even get a look in for a deal. And so, you know, the, the numbers don’t lie and data doesn’t lie. And so the, the, the housing area, when it comes to single family homes is getting so much more competitive. Yeah. So much more to the point that we’ve even said to some of our customers, you know, maybe you need to think about your approach to, to that market or think about is that market from a supply and demand perspective, where’s it at cause for some of our customers and some of the areas that they’re working there really, isn’t a huge amount of distressed homes left and the ones that are, they’re literally getting 50 offers a month. And so, you know, how do you stand out that? Yeah, no,
Charles:
I totally agree. And I, I, I don’t wanna be caught inside the, the shiny pen penny thing, but the thing though is that when you’re in real estate and it’s so cyclical, I mean, it’s one of these things where you have to, you know, you can follow any of these large private equity firms that are investing into real estate and they’re, you know, they’re changing their model as the cycle progresses. And so where you had a huge private equity firm buying thousands of single family houses five, seven years ago and they offloaded them. And now they’re looking for other asset classes because it’s not saturated yet. And not saying that, you know, you just, just, you, like you said, you’re going from fixing and flipping to land and who knows, maybe they’ll be saturating years to come. And maybe you’re, you know, who knows what you’re doing next? You know? So yeah. Might developing, we’ve already
Alicia:
Already planning that, you know, that, that’s the thing we we’re always thinking about our business and if this was to happen, what do we do next, if that was to happen? What do we do next? And, and so we’re already building out other systems and products to, to be ready for that, because, you know, we’ve noticed a, a very interesting shift even in the last six months, just for our land business, where huge amount of people wanting to liquidate assets, festival, and a huge amount of people wanting to buy land. So land’s been super awesome, but the, the difference is, is a lot of our buyers now, rather than wanting infill lots in, in more urban areas, they’re wanting acreage outside, thanks to, to COVID and political unrest. The buyers are wanting different things, and there, there will come a point where the buyers will have bought what they want. And that will slow down. So you’ve already gotta be thinking ahead of what’s the behavior telling you about what’s going on and where do you anticipate that that might slow down?
Charles:
Yeah, it’s amazing too. It’s like, we’ve been, we have two assets, one assets we’re selling this year, and then we have one more that’re possibly selling and what we were buying properties for two years ago. I mean, it’s almost doubled, you know what I mean? Yeah. It’s so we’re like, you know, it’s getting up bumping up up into one of my partners as a developer and getting into that. And we, we have land that we’re gonna be planning out building small multifamily complexes on, but the thing is like, you know, you have to change with what’s going on with what’s happening. And I just it’s, it’s great with what you’re doing with land. I, I wanna talk a little bit about how you structured your team and your business to operate. Obviously you have this rockstar real estate agent that is a joint venture JV partner with you. How is the other, how does your other, how does your team look like now? And and then what do you, what is your role currently?
Alicia:
Yeah, yeah. Good question. So my role is, is more of the background at the moment. So, you know, we we’ve gotten our business to the stage for our land business, where it almost kind of runs itself from a customer perspective. So in terms of our team, we’ve got our, our customer service team. I don’t like to call them virtual assistance, cuz they’re not because we love them. We’ve got four of them. They’ve been with us for over a year and they’re amazing. So they are based offshore, but they work us hours. So when we send out all of our marketing, they answer all of our buyer calls, all of our seller calls. They do all of our due diligence. They get involved in every single deal and we really, we really charge them with the responsibility of your part of this business. And we reward you every time we, we get a deal and we’re able to, to sell that deal too.
Alicia:
So we’ve got our, our customer service team that does all of our support. So therefore my role, I only seem to, to get involved with buyers and sellers, when something gets escalated to the point that my team can’t make a decision. So I’ve empowered them to be able to make decisions, even financial ones for us because they know the parameters that they’re working in. So we’ve got that team. My role is, is to obviously manage that team, but also be the point of escalation on on things with buyers and sellers. So I do get involved every now and then, but it’s almost at the point like we are sending out on average about 20,000 mailers a month, as well as doing online marketing for our acquisitions process, which, which is a supercharged office piece. So we get a fair amount of calls that come through Charles and a fair amount of inquiries, but I’ve got my team to the point now that they’re handling those really, really well.
Alicia:
So my time now tends to be spent more on managing the team, managing the, the disposition side, which is liaising with our title company liaising with our joint venture partners, liaising with our probate attorney. So when we’ve got deals that we’re now working on the disposition, that’s where I tend to spend most of my time, my partner, Matt, he’s also our systems guy he’s in the background, making sure all of our data is working properly. Probably our CRM is, is functioning and he’s is looking for ways to, you know, improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our, of our business. So that’s kind of with our land business, how that’s all set up internal team, external team, and I’m kind of in the middle. <Laugh>
Charles:
Nice. So when you’re sending out, what are your mail pieces? Are they are they actually letters? Are they postcards and the,
Alicia:
The letters and an office. So it’s a two pager. Well, we, we send out a, a cover letter so that people know a little bit more about us and we send out a blind offer. And our blind offers are really well researched. We do a lot of stuff with our, our data. So as I think I mentioned earlier, one of our businesses is a data business. Now we are not a list provider. But because of some of the things that we’re doing with supercharged offers and helping our customers there, we, we needed to have access to every single piece of property across the state. So we’ve invested really heavily in our own data warehouse and, and building that. So where was I going with that? Charles? You were asking me about mailers <laugh> I was asking about
Charles:
Mailers and then yeah. What was
Alicia:
Offer? Yeah. So our offers that we attached to that we, we use a lot of our, our data to help us understand the market sentiment in certain areas, which is not at a wholesale level, but if this is market value, what are people actually paying at the moment within that market value and above range? So that we know if, if this is market value on, people are paying here, then we are gonna offer here and here, because if every other wholesaler’s offering here, because they’re not looking at the market sentiment, but we’re offering here, then we know kind of where we can position that once we do the disposition side as well. So, you know, typically you’ll see a lot of other wholesalers out there that if they’re not across the market analytics and really looking at market Senti they will be still offering deals at 30 to 40 cents on the dollar and getting rejections, just rejection, rejection, rejection, a lot of our deals because we are really across what the market is doing at the moment and where it is in the cycle. And most of our offers are going out anywhere between say 40 to 60% of market. And then we’re, we are selling them anywhere between say 80 to 95% of market. Interesting. So still enough spread in the deal, but as the market’s shifted, we’ve had to do this as well. Right. So, you know, always keeping ahead of that. So we send out blind offers and they tend to work pretty well.
Charles:
So on the blind offers, if you send out 20,000, what do you, what do you get back on that 10, 15 contracts,
Alicia:
Something like that? More than, yeah. So, so on average we would have about I’d say on a monthly basis, we’re probably getting about 15 signed contracts back where they’re automatically returned, but we probably have another 20 on average that we negotiate every month. And more half of those, we get over the line because if a number is close enough, if it’s just close enough, there, there’s a saying that Matt and I like to say, and that is that sometimes sell us. They just want a little bit of sugar on top. They just wanna feel like they’ve negotiated it some way to have some control. So we get a lot of people sending us contracts back or calling and saying, look, I’ve got your offer, wanna sell, but what more can you do? And because we already do our numbers within a range, we already know here’s our minimum, here’s our maximum. But sometimes we even have like a, a more increased amount to that maximum based upon what we know that market is doing. So our team, again, coming back to empowering my team, if they get some of those phone calls and they can see the range and the seller wants something within that range, they automatically send them an updated contract and we get it signed then in there. Okay. Awesome.
Charles:
The when, when they’re sending it back into you, first of all, are this is all in Florida, correct? All these it is. Okay. So it’s all in Florida. And on the disposition side of it, are you, you selling this, like you’re just selling land out, are you doing seller financing on it? Are you doing any interesting types of dis dispositions on it?
Alicia:
Basically the two that you mentioned, so we’re doing cash deals, we’re doing seller finance deals. And some of them we’re doing buy and hold because we we’ve got certain markets that we know that we we’re looking at that and going actually gonna hold onto that. The, the fourth strategy is we’ve got some really good partnerships now with some local builders and developers that we’ve become their, their land acquisition team. Which has been really exciting because I think it’s, it’s great to build those professional relationships and partner with people where you know, that you’ve already got an end buyer. And, and that’s been great. But speaking of end buyers, I think one of the other strategies that we’ve been really good at in our team and it’s helped us a lot is every time we have a buyer inquiry that comes through, whether that’s from Facebook, Zillow, land.com, lands of America, land of farm, they all come from a number of places.
Alicia:
Our team has a very set criteria list that we go through with our buyers to say, all right, well, this is the property you’re calling about, but let’s just say that this property’s not right. What are all the other things that you want? Where do you wanna, what’s your budget? What do you wanna use the land for? You know, we’ve got a whole range of things that we do. And in our CRM, we can categorize that really quite easily. So now when we get a property through, sometimes we don’t even advertise at Charles because we’ll go into our buyer’s list. Now buyer’s list is now quite huge. We’ll go into our buyer’s list and we’ll say, all right, clay county vacant, residential, it’s half an acre, it’s this let’s do a filter and let’s go out to all of our buyers and our lists that we know want half an acre in clay county done.
Charles:
Nice. That’s fantastic. You’ve got really narrow down. That’s the perfect, because if I’m on wholesale, I’m on tons of wholesaling lists for everything in real estate. And it’s just usually like a blanket email that goes out and you’re like, where are we know where this county is? And I live in Florida and which is great. I mean, I guess, I mean, but then you see something, hopefully that comes closer to where you are, but it’s not they don’t have, they don’t have it segmented, which is really the most effective way. Cuz then when you get something you’re like, whoa, now I’m gonna, I don’t get this email this much with what I want. Yeah. Versus just delete it, delete it. And then maybe I forward this to someone that I know wants this property or we call them, you know?
Alicia:
Yep. Yeah, exactly. So, so getting more targeted and being more personal with both your buyers and your sellers you know, we, we often have very personal phone calls where sometimes I’ll get the team. If it’s only 20 buyers that might meet that criteria, I’ll say let’s send them an email, but guys, can you jump on the phone and call every single one of them and say, Hey, you know, a couple of months ago you called us about a property in clay county. We’ve got one. We’ve just emailed it to you. Can you check it out before we advertise? And let me know if you’re interested. So it’s all about relationships, right? It’s all about how do we build trust and relationship and become the first person that our sellers and our buyers think of.
Charles:
Yeah. That’s all. That’s fantastic. So I wanna ask you, cuz you work with a lot of investors, what are kind mistakes, you see real estate investors make, whether it’s in land or whether it’s in other asset classes within real estate. Yeah.
Alicia:
Yep. I think most of the mistakes I see is when we, we lean into our supercharged offers business, where we’ve got all of our customers who are real estate investors across the number of different asset who are wanting to, you know, expand their marketing, expand their business and, and, and go about that in a systematic way, which is great. Some of the mistakes I see them make one, they don’t research their market enough. Mm. They, they will kind of do if I can be so crashes to go test the weather, it’s like, okay, which ways the wind blowing <laugh>. Yeah. And and they’ll do kind of a high level amount of research, but once they come to ask and we’re like, we ask them some pretty critical questions and it’s pretty clear to see the ones that research and the ones that don’t.
Alicia:
So I think not researching your market enough to know enough about supply and demand buyer and seller activity growth, all of those things that make up that market. The, the second mistake I see is nurturing. And what I mean by that is, is that good marketing these days, or let me take a step back, converting a deal. These days does not happen when we just send them out one offer and hope that they call it just does not. It’s too competitive. And it’s too dynamic out there at the moment to think that that’s gonna work. Now, it might work for some people, but if you are looking at getting, if you are looking at doing this business as a hobbyist where you just want one or two, one or two deals per month, okay. No problems. But most of our customers are looking at growing their business and having it as a full time business, you know, five to 10 plus deals a month ongoing.
Alicia:
If you don’t nurture your leads through a number of ways, then you are mini, you’re minimizing your conversion. And, and this is where I think what we’re trying to do is supercharged offers is we’re building out this engine where all of your data is, is really good and targeted and very clean, but then all of your online assets, your websites, your sales pages, your digital ads, how we use the data to know that something’s been delivered. And then we get on the phone to that person and say, Hey, Charles, we sent you an offer this week. We can see that us P S has delivered it. Are you interested in actually selling your property? You know, let’s have a conversation how many times you can touch that lead and nurture that lead is critical to, to how we do business. And that’s all about building relationship as well.
Alicia:
So that’s the other mistake that I see that that people do is they, they expect that doing one thing is gonna give them a return, but that’s not the case. And I think the third mistake Charles, that I see people making is I’m trying to think of the, the best way to put this, but, but the third mistake is not owning their numbers. When I say, okay, how many leads have come through? How many of those have you called back? How many of those have you sent second offers to how many of those second offers have you now nurtured? Like so many people I see don’t know the numbers in their business. And if I’m really honest, I was like that when we started, I was, we were sending out so much stuff and we were just hoping and praying that things would happen. And, and we, we weren’t really across the numbers. So I think really being across what your conversion is so that, you know, if that county or even that zip code is performing or not, is really critical. Otherwise just sending out more mailings to a, an area that’s not responding is not really the answer. Hmm.
Charles:
No, it’s, it’s fantastic information. The other thing too is I think you know, people that don’t know their numbers or don’t know the business that well. And it’s like when I say I was, when I was buying property in oh six and I bought property, you know, oh, eight or nine, the people that I was using right. In the business or working with in oh nine, completely different from oh six, cuz there are certain people that just didn’t make it. Right. You’re the majority of people that did not make it through a pullback because like you said, they didn’t know their business, they didn’t know the numbers, they didn’t know the market. And if you know all those things, you’re gonna have a much better chance of, of weathering any pullback. Yeah. And recession, whenever that happens and however deep it goes. But yeah. That’s that’s awesome. That’s great information. So what do you think are the main factors that have contributed to your success?
Alicia:
Oh, there there’s quite a few, but I think that the main things Charles is that we, we are not afraid to do the hard work. And I know there’s a lot of people out there that are exactly the same and you are the same, right. Because when I say do the hard work, it’s doing the things that sometimes scar us. I, I still remember that first time that I had to get on the phone with a, a seller when we first started out. And I was like, I have no idea. I’m about to say, but let’s just try anyway. And so it’s doing those things that challenge us all the time because when we can keep doing the things that challenge us or sometimes scare us a little bit, we grow. And, and Matt and I do that almost on a daily basis.
Alicia:
We’re doing things to stretch ourselves and get out of our comfort zone. I think the other thing for our success is we don’t listen to the people, people that tell us we can’t there’s a number of things that we’ve done in business that I know that people have looked at us and gone, you guys are a little crazy. Like you wanna do how many deals and we’re like, yeah, we do. And this is when it was just him and I doing the business. We said, we wanna get to the stage that we’re doing at least 20 deals a month. And people are like, how are you gonna do that? That’s huge. Well, work it out. So I think having the, the attitude of giving something, a go, having some big goals and working it out along the way is also critical to our success.
Alicia:
And I’d say the last thing is is never being afraid to admit when something’s not working and looking for a better way, which is how we got to supercharge offers. Right? We, we were looking at our business and, and going the way that we’ve been taught, how to do acquisitions from the data through to the mailing, through to how most people send their, their responses to voicemail or another answering service that just wasn’t working. So never be afraid to just pause and go. That’s not working. How can we make that more efficient and more effective because that leads to opportunity. So at the, those things and those mindsets that we have has certainly been pretty pivotal in, in how we’ve become successful. Awesome. Awesome. So how can our listeners learn more about you and your businesses? Yeah. Yeah. Good question. So they can, I I’ll give them two if that’s okay.
Alicia:
So they can go to landscapes.com. We’ve got a couple of landscapes sites. So sell.ls dot.com is one or just landscapes.com. Reason is we’ve got two different types of marketing campaigns going on for both of those. And they can reach me Atia, landscapes.com and I’ll spell Alessia because no one ever gets it right. It’s a L I C I a, or if they wanna talk to us about their, their, their business and their marketing. So from a supercharge office perspective, we’re more than happy to jump on the call with any other investor who wants to think about growing their business, how they’re doing their acquisitions, marketing, how they’re managing their data, cuz we do all that for them and how they can have those seven to 13 touch points that I mentioned. We’re more than happy to jump on a call with them, either myself or sales manager, so they can contact me there@aliciaatsuperchargedofficedotcomortheycangoontooursitesuperchargedoffice.com.
Alicia:
There’s loads of things on there, like eBooks and growth plan guides, which is probably the other thing to come back to your question before Charles, about where people go wrong. A lot of people I know don’t have a strategy. I cannot tell you how many people I see in this business that are like, I wanna do 20 deals a month. Okay, great. So what’s your strategy. And I get this blank stare <laugh>. So on our website on supercharge office.com, we’ve got a, a free it’s called a business growth plan. It’s actually called a no more excuses business growth plan where people can download that for free and actually go and build up their, their own business plan, which is an awesome resource or they can give us a call. So we’re on 8, 8, 8 5 3 8 5 4 7 8. And that will go to our supercharged office team and and they can get in touch with me that way.
Charles:
Well, that sounds great. I will put all those links into the show notes and thank you so much for coming on today and looking forward to connecting with you here in the new future, hopefully when you’re in Florida. Next.
Alicia:
Fantastic. Thanks Charles.
Charles:
Talk to you soon.
Charles:
Hi guys! It’s Charles from the Global Investors Podcast. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you’re interested in get involved with real estate, but you don’t know where to begin, set up a free 30 minute strategy call with me at schedulecharles.com. That’s schedulecharles.com. Thank you.
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