In this discussion, the speakers emphasize the critical need for real‑estate investors to keep their buyer database clean and high‑quality, especially when planning to sell their company in 5‑10 years. They explain how to avoid contaminating the buyer list with renter leads by filtering quote leads from AppFolio before importing them into REI BlackBook, ensuring prospects have watched the rent‑to‑own video and been qualified. The conversation covers automatic tagging of qualified buyers who are not a fit for a specific property, so they remain in the buyer pool for future deals. It also highlights the challenge of a single website phone number that indiscriminately tags callers as sellers, proposing solutions such as dual numbers or an IVR menu (press 1 to sell, 2 to buy) to correctly route and label leads. Overall, the talk provides practical workflow and technology recommendations to preserve lead integrity, improve operational efficiency, and protect the future valuation of the business.
Chapters
A lot of you in here are building, are building your companies to one day potentially sell it 5 to 10 years from now. So you want to make sure you're keeping your buyers list super high quality.
Rick and Nick, you were brainstorming something a little bit earlier, and if you can share like 10,000-foot view, Rick, what you guys were talking about. I think there's some nuggets in there too. Nick told me like a little tidbit, but I know you want to talk about something.
Yeah, yeah, Nick, feel free to jump in. Um, so in REI Black Book, you know, we've got the buyer processes in there, but what you don't want to do is you get all of the quote leads from AppFolio, you don't want to put all those in REI Black Book as buyers. You don't want them in there until they've seen the video, you've talked to them, they've seen the video on how rent-to-own works. And then you track them in REI BlackBook and you tie them to a property. The only difference to that is if somebody is on your website and they inquire about a property, it'll automatically go into REI BlackBook, in which case you'll just have to filter them out if they're— if they don't qualify.
Yeah, and the reason you don't want to be downloading every single lead that you get from AppFolio is 80 to 90% of them are renters anyway. So A lot of you in here, this is a higher level thing. A lot of you in here are building, are building your companies to one day potentially sell it 5 to 10 years from now. So you want to make sure you're keeping your buyers list super high quality.
And the other thing that we have implemented in the latest revision that I had just released yesterday, um, or the day before, was the, uh, buyers. If you're talking to somebody and They are a legitimate buyer and they are qualified, but the property is just not a fit. Either they don't have enough down payment or whatever. It will automatically tag them onto your buyers list, so you'll always have them.
Any questions on this, guys? Especially if you have properties, any questions at all about what Rick and Nick just chimed in on? Again, it's a little efficiency thing that would screw you up. No questions? Clear as mud?
There is one other thing, and it's more of a discussion, I think, is a lot of us have our— on our websites, a main number to call. Well, when somebody calls in on that number, it automatically tags them as a seller, an organic lead. However, you'll have buyers that may see your property, and instead of calling the number that's listed there to— for your 24 information line, they'll call that main number and it'll automatically tag them as a seller. So we need to figure out how to differentiate that, you know, whether we have your main number be a 24-hour line and then they press 1 if you're looking to sell or 2 if you're looking to buy.
But be aware of it, Rick, you're saying, and take a course to either correct it or direct it ahead of time.
It's just how we want to implement it, whether it's 2 numbers or 1. And Nick said that you've had 1 number.
Yeah, I don't have a preference, you guys, on the tech side, but I think the point is the awareness to handle it.
Yeah, and I think that's mainly why, Rick, I wanted to— I wanted us to at least talk about it for 5 minutes just so everyone's aware of it, because I don't want everyone to be building their buyers list of a bunch of renters and Section 8 people. There's no value in that.
