Even The Pros Can Get Poor Response Rates—What You Can Learn From Them

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek, with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and on this week's roundtable podcast, the first roundtable of 2019. Grr. We got bear land. Aaron with us. What's up, Bear land?

Hey, Happy New Year, everybody.

Happy New Year, my friend. Good times in Indiana.

Yep, good times. Partying with the Amish.

I love it. I love it. And then, of course, we've got the most feared woman in the country, Mimi Schmidt, the terrorist hunter. Mimi, how are you?

Great. Happy New Year. How are you?

I'm good. I'm good. And then, of course, the Technician. You know you love him. Eric the Technician Peterson. Eric, how are you?

I'm good. Happy to be here.

Happy New Year. It's gonna be a kindler, gentler 2019 for the technician, because we're definitely gonna be going all in on picking on the Zen master, Mike Zaino. Breathe out the marketing.

I'm the new target. Well, I'll take it willingly. Love being here. Love seeing you guys. Rumor has it's still 2018 for Aaron, though.

It's the latency.

Yeah, it's still. Right. Exactly. He'll be catching up. And then, of course, the Big Papa. I love it when you call me Big Papa. Tate Litchfield, how are you doing?

Great.

Happy to be here, everybody.

Happy New Year. And then, of course, the. The brain, the professor, the Sherpa. What's another nickname for Scott Todd from Scott todd.net landmodo.com and most importantly, you're not automating your Craigslist and your Facebook postings. Posting domination.com thelandgeek Scott Todd's in a surly mood. Scott, how are you?

I'm good.

Matt, how are you?

I'm good. I'm good. Why so surly? I don't know.

I don't know that I am nothing. Nothing's standing out right now.

Well, we had to mention that you made a surly comment about the long trip to boot camp.

I will tell you, it's funny, because the other night, I wasn't necessarily over the weekend. I wasn't, like, sleeping that well. You know, like, all kinds of noise around the house, you know, teenagers, all that stuff. Right? And so I told my wife, I'm like, I am so thankful that, like, boot camp is around the corner, because I am going to sleep well. Like, I want to be exhausted. I'm going to be laid out flat in a hotel. No teenagers waking me up in the middle of the night.

Gonna Be great.

I was thinking the same thing.

Yeah.

With a baby. No, it's true. It's like, you know, boot camp is special. And for those of you who are listening and you haven't been to boot camp, by the time this is, you'll be listening to this. Boot camp had already been done in San Antonio, but the next one is going to be in actually Scottsdale, April 26th, the 28th. And even the Zen master is pumping his fist, excited.

Gonna go there in April. That's amazing.

That's awesome.

That's like, it'll be snowing.

It'll be snowing here, but not there.

It's gonna be so nice. That's a good point.

It's always been super hot, Mike, when we've been to Scottsdale.

Yeah, but that's August. Usually. This is April.

Yeah, 2016 was the last April. This is like Scottsdale.

Yeah. So if you got those unused boot camp tickets, email supporthelandgeek.com and pick your spot, because that room is going to fill up very, very fast. So let's go to our first topic. Poor response rates. Tate, tell us what's going on.

So I'm mailing to a new area, sent out around 200 offers. It's been about five and a half weeks, and I have received exactly zero accepted offers, zero hate mail, zero nasty phone calls, nothing. And it's leading me to believe that I have totally botched this, this mailer. And it's. The reason I'm bringing this up is because I feel like we get a lot of people who enter into coaching or flight school and they find themselves in similar situations, and they say, well, my mailer was a waste. I didn't get any accepted offers. I wasted $200 on stamps and mail, and now what am I left with? And I had written this off until early this week, and then of a sudden, the flood came in and it wasn't accepted offers, but it was a lot of angry voicemails. It was a lot of rejection letters, you know, you're crazy kind of situation. But I learned some valuable information from this mailer. Number one, I learned that, yeah, my pricing might be a little low, but I also learned that, hey, this time of the year, when I mail at the beginning of December, I'm probably not going to hear a response back until January. So I kind of sharing this example just so that people recognize that even in your quote unquote failures or shortcomings, there's still something very valuable to learn from it. And if you haven't Had a bad mailing. I mean, you're probably not mailing enough, right?

Yeah, it's like the old saying in skiing, if you're not falling while you're skiing, you're probably not skiing hard enough. Right. Barryland Aaron, have you had a similar issue with the mailing and response rates? And, and if so, how did you pivot?

I had a county that we'd mailed consistently for a long time and had a pretty consistent response rate. And then a few months back, it just kind of stopped. I mean, I was getting nothing. Tried raising the offers. I went up 10%, still nothing. So at that time, I made a decision. It was the, I replaced that county for the time being with another county. So obviously not stopping mailing. We're just shifting somewhere else because, you know, I think sometimes there's cycles, you know, and I'm, I'm gonna remail to that county again. I'm just kind of giving it a little bit of time. We'll, we'll go back through and reassess everything and try to hit it again. But, you know, sometimes these things just like sales, they go in cycles. So, you know, some parts of the year you might have a really high response rate. Some parts you might have a low. I don't know exactly why, but, you know, and unfortunately, sometimes you could also be, you know, hitting your first mailing to that area when people just aren't responding for, for some reason, too. So sometimes you gotta, you know, keep pushing forward and see, you know, what happens. But, you know, at the same time know when to stop or, you know, fully readjust when the time comes to. Because you don't want to, you don't want to invest too heavily or you don't want the, what is that? Sunk costs, you know, in a county, it's not working because there's so many counties, too. So if it's not working, try another one.

Yeah. Yeah. Mimi Schmidt, what's your take on poor response rates?

I love when I hear when people I look up to or my mentors, when they're, they have, when they struggle too, because then it makes me feel like, okay, it's not just me, right? And I think it's important when you do find a good spot where you are mailing well, to still continue to test the market and send out low offers periodically, too, to see what you can get, because I've always found you can get some good treasures. Right. But I'm kind of struggling with something similar where I'm having a hard time pricing my mailers Right now I'm sending in a new county, and none of the land platforms have this county's land, and the county itself doesn't offer sales data. So I'm just kind of going off the assessor's value, and I figure I'll mail, and if I get a poor response rate, I know I'll need to raise it up. Right. So I'm starting to get some responses, and I just. I always learn something from mailing. Right. I just have to keep doing it, and I'll learn right over my mailings where I need to be with that county. So.

Yeah.

And, you know, being as analytical as you are, Mimi, are you still shooting for a 3 to 5% response rate or has that.

Buy one. I want to buy one per hundred.

Yeah, one per hundred. Okay. All right, great. Eric, how about you?

Yeah, so I think it's definitely. I've run into those types of situations where, you know, the response is, is nothing or very small. And kind of what I've learned over time is that when I go to a new area, I like to kind of test my pricing by taking, say, 200, 250 offers and varying that price by maybe $100 or so for like, four different tiers. So we might go offers at 900, 1000, 1100 and 1200, just as an example. And sometimes that can really help me kind of see where the sweet spot is. You know, offers might come back at 900, but they might also come back at 1200. It allows me to kind of look at that and assess, you know, where the next set of offers should be in terms of pricing. So that's one way that I try and I guess get some extra data with a small mailer.

I love that strategy. Zen Master, how about you?

Well, I think there's a lot of great lessons to be learned here, and I think that one of them being Tate, Mimi, seasoned land investors. So this is not going to rock their boat. They're going to adjust accordingly. When people are new, that's why they should try to go to areas where there's an overabundance of land investors and people and known comps. Because if you were working this in the beginning, it might be disheartening to you. Right. And you may think, well, this doesn't work. Right. Well, it does work. Sometimes you just have to know how to read the signs. So I think that's a good lesson. Like, for people listening that are new, this is why you choose an area that is, like, full of comps, full of Other investors that we know, there's no saturation. We know, as you always say, Mark, we'll run out of money before you run out of land. So go where those people are. But when you get seasoned, you know, then you go somewhere else. And because you want to explore, like we've done that recently, we got, we got the opposite. We got flooded with accepted offers. So we know we were offering too much, so we adjusted accordingly. So I think that, you know, you definitely have those things that happen and you learn from them, but probably in the beginning you'd want to really stick to something like what Scott Todd shows, like the model in flight school of going to where the people are and using those people as your source for comps and, and so on and so forth. So that's. This is a really great topic.

Yeah. I mean, wouldn't it be great, Mike, if there was a way to have like a seasoned land investor, maybe someone who's done like over 700 land deals, you know, take you by the hand and just kind of walk you up that land investing mountain like a shepherd.

That's why we were talking the other day, Scott Boss and I went on the Facebook Live. We said that's how you start halfway finished. You start like, you know, like you're already halfway done. When you start with light school, because you skip over all this beginning stuff that gets people muddled up and confused.

You.

You have a Sherpa that can lead you. So absolutely, it is awesome.

Yeah. So that leads me to the segue. Today's podcast is sponsored by flight School. If you want to learn more about how to get into flight school and actually come out of the gate with a great response rate on your first mailing, do your county research correctly, get everything step by step, and have the best in the business teach you how to do it step by step as a class, go to landgeek.com forward/training and learn more about flight school. So that leads me to you, the professor, the brain.

Well, I mean, there's so much great advice on here, right? Like, how do you, how do you compete against, like, what everybody else is saying? I mean, you really can't really compete, but you can, I mean, like, I would, I guess I would just say that. Listen to what everybody said, try all these different things, but at the end of the day one, you have to have faith and a little bit of patience. It's a lot like fishing. You just kind of throw the fishing pole out there, the bait out there, and see what, what comes back to you. And if you didn't get anything, well, then you reel up the pole and then you look and you're like, oh, crap, the bait's been gone. How long it's been gone, I get, I guess someone stole the bait. Or in this case, it's like, well, I guess I didn't have the right bait because that happens sometimes too, right, baby? Offer price. I would just also question, because I see this a lot of times is that people, people make decisions from a very, and I know Tate into this, but people do make decisions based on a very economical approach. And what I mean by that is, is they try to choose, like the most affordable thing. Great example is standard mailmark. You know, like today, you know, I see people all the time like, I just want to mail standard mail because standard mail is like 50 something cents apiece versus 83 cents or whatever it is. But the reality is this is not the same thing. So you got to go back to the basics. You got to, you got to question everything. When you're not getting these response rates, you got to question everything. It's not just the offer. It's. I mean, did you use, did you use standard mail or not? I mean, I don't know. I mean, some people say that standard mail works. I think standard mail works. But you got to mail out a boatload more. One, it's not always delivered, it's not forwarded. If someone moves, it takes three weeks just to get the standard mail there, that's the delivery time versus first class mail, which is a week. There's a difference there, economically speaking, that it just doesn't make any sense to me from a business standpoint to save a few pennies, when in fact, I'm gonna make thousands when I sell this property. Second, continuing that line of question, everything you gotta question, like your offer letter, I mean, is your offer letter unique?

Does it need to be unique?

I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be unique, but maybe you should try something different. So it's that whole ab testing. You should try everything, tweak things and see what works for your business.

No, absolutely. I love it. And I couldn't agree more. I think what everybody said was really outstanding about the response rates. I know Tate loves the fishing analogy since he's like a professional fly fisherman. So, Tate, do you think the fishing gives you a advantage in land investing?

I don't know. I mean, yes, I should tell my wife that I need to fish more because it'll make me better at work. So, yes, I would. 100% agree with that. So, yeah, fishing. If you're an angler, you're going to be a better land investor. Proven.

There you go. There you go. So I think it's interesting. Let's go back to Mimi on her case study. So, Mimi, you're working in New county, is that right?

Yep. And I started just with general ads to the area to see what kind of response I would get. And I was overwhelmed with. Literally, I'll put up just three general ads. Hey, I'm land. You know, give me a call. And I'm getting five leads for every three ads. I'm shocked. And so I thought, okay, so I'm gonna check this county out. Looking on land and farm land, Century Land Watch, Lands of America. I can't find any comps. I'm looking on Zillow. There aren't many comps. And I've called the county. They don't have sales data. I can get the whole tax roll, the delinquent tax roll, but I can't get sales data. So I've been talked to an appraiser yesterday, and she says she has a hard time, so I'm just winging it. Right. I'm just gonna go with the appraised value. And my first mailer went out in December. I'm starting to get the response back, and so maybe I'll give it a couple more weeks, maybe two or three more weeks, and then I'll. I'm still trickling mailing there, but I'll probably raise it a little bit and see what I get. So I'm really excited because I'm even getting some calls in. I have one today I'm excited about, but. So it's just trial and error. Right? I'll just. I'll do another mailing next month and see how it goes. So I'm excited about the area. I can tell people want to buy and sell. I just have to determine what the dollar amount should be, what the offer should be.

Yeah, no beerline. Aaron, what's your takeaway about that?

A couple things. One is the assessor's value. It's usually a percentage of what they deem to be a fair market value. And, you know, obviously it's assessed for taxation purposes. You may be able to find out through the assessor's office, like, what their percentage is that they, you know, of retail value that they assess a property at. You know, it might be 20% or 30 or whatever, and then they tax on that value. So maybe you might be able to, you know, figure it out with some math based on that. They may not give you that information. I don't know.

She was saying that they try to get within 5%, and the state expects them to get within 5%. But it's one of those states where you don't have to report back what you sold the property or that public information. So she says she has a hard time getting. So.

Yeah, well, my other thought on it, too, was that, you know, if you're. Whatever value you're using to buy the properties, if you're buying them for, you know, pennies on the dollar and you're selling them for a percentage that you're comfortable with, then I guess you're making the market. You know what I mean? Like, if, you know, if you're selling them for four times what you're buying them for, you know, even if it's not what a realtor would be able to get, you know, you're still. You're still working your model and it works. And I guess you can adjust over time. But it sounds like that county, to continue the fishing analogy, is like, almost like one of these little ponds that's so full of bluegill that you can throw a hook in without bait on and you can pull out a fish, you know, so it might be a pretty good find.

I hope so.

Yeah. Zen Master Mike, what's your. Your take on that?

Well, first, foremost, it's when we always talk about the inefficiency of the land. Like, we just. It's whatever you want it to be, number one, right? If you're happy, make. I mean, you're big, you're selling it, and you. I mean, you're buying it for whatever you're buying it for. You're making 4, 5, 6, 800%. Then that's. I don't. It doesn't matter to me what the current. You know, it's the inefficiency of the market that we work in. So it can be whatever you want. And if I've ever had a similar sit like that, I have employed the use of realtors while I call them up, like, hey, I got this property over here. I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about either buying or selling. And just wonder if you'd be interested in listening it, because a lot of times they'll go out and do a free analysis, right? It depends where it is. And if it's, you know, obviously it's in the middle of nowhere, tickland, as we say, or whatever, you know, they may not go. But. Yeah, but you can Call as a potential buyer or seller, and the real estate agents will definitely. Will definitely help you out.

Yeah, it's a good idea. Thanks.

Yeah. Eric, what's your take on that? Being the technician?

Mimi said something really important that I wanted to make sure our listeners didn't miss. And that was she mentioned she put test ads out for the county before she even mailed there.

Okay.

That's what helped her determine that she wanted to mail there. So, you know, that's. That's a key piece of county research. Right. As you're trying to decide where you want to mail, think about getting some ads out there on Craigslist or wherever, advertising that kind of land and see what kind of response you get, because that's going to tell you a lot about, you know, can you sell this property if you acquire it?

Yeah, that's really a great point. Absolutely. And, you know, even taking that a step further, when Mimi does acquire the land before she even closes, she could pre sell it because she's getting so many leads, so her ROI theoretically could be infinite. So that's always exciting. Big Papa.

I love it when this happens. I love it when I find an area where there's not a lot of details, there's not a lot of comps, because basically I can come in, like Mike said, and price it however I see fit. So, Mimi, whatever you can get people to buy it at, or whatever you can get it people to sell you to it at, then find out what you know, the. The market is willing to pay for it and run with it. I mean, you can be the boss, right? That's the best part about this land business is it's not like traditional real estate investing, where you can pull up the MLS and find all these details and these comps. You know, you learn, or you learn what you're able to glean from the data that's available. And a lot of it is trial by error. So I love this situation. Run with it. And, you know, if you're a new listener out there, this probably isn't the ideal place to start, like we said at the beginning. But, you know, there's definitely money to be made in these types of situations.

What it shows is that we are given a list of rules that are a little more safe when we start, right. Find a place two hours from a city, right. Where there's a recreational da da da da da. Right. But it kind of shows that you can, once you are familiar with the process, you can start to break the rules and still find success, too. Right?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, kind of like Mimi's, kind of like Neo, the Matrix, you know, like. All right, that was a very geeky, obscure reference. Breaking the rules. Anyways, Scott, Todd, you want the last word on this?

I mean, I think you just got to keep doing it, right? Like, keep doing it. Learn from the mistakes. I was watching a video, Mark. Have you seen these, These Masterclass videos? The masterclass.com. it's got, like, Gordon Rams people. Well, I was watching a preview of one today, actually, from Usher. And the thing about Usher is. And I, like, he said this, and I was like, makes sense. But I think that people forget this. And what he said was, I've made more mistakes than I've had successes. Think about that for a minute. So here's Usher, you know, world renowned performer, and he's up there saying, I've made a lot of mistakes, but. And those mistakes have out, like, I've made more mistakes than I have had successes. And I think what happens is people are afraid to make mistakes. And, you know, you learn from making a mistake. And if you're not making mistakes and you're not making bad offer prices or you're not messing up your mailings because you're looking for perfection, then you're not gonna. You're not growing, you're not. You're not doing it because you're going to make mistakes along the way. And ultimately, that's how we all learn is from the mistakes, not from the successes. We. We achieve the successes because we gain experiences from our mistakes. Think about when we. I mean, not that we can probably remember learning how to walk, but you've seen babies learn how to walk like that. They're like, they are making mistakes. They're doing missteps, they're falling down. And as much as you want to catch them, we all learn how to walk, really, and do everything else from falling down. So fall down, make a mistake, but take action and you'll learn.

Yeah, that's a really, really good point. And you know, it's true. This is really what's magical about our market is that it is so inefficient and that we can go out to these counties and, like Mike said, make our own market. When I first started out, that's kind of what I did in this area of Nevada, because I didn't know. I just thought, well, I'll just make it up. Here's a margin. And it's kind of ridiculous. And it sold. And then I just kind of kept, you know, trial and error. From there. But there are a lot of times on deals where I left a lot of money on the table, and there's a lot of times on deals where the pricing seems embarrassingly high. And I, you know, I was just making the market as I was going on, and Mimi's gonna do the same thing in this county, it sounds like, which is really kind of cool. So that leads us to our tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something actionable where the art of passive income listeners can go right now, improve their businesses, improve their lives. We're not going to pick on Eric in 2019, which means. I'm just kidding, Mike. Mimi said she'd take the tip of the week.

Hi. Okay. Tip of the week. So I notice in. So, like, in my Facebook ads, I'll put how far it is to get a beer or the grocery store, hardware store, and even on long ads on landmodo or zillow.com, i'll put the cool things to go see in the area. So there's this website. It's called Walkstore Calm. I know. I've listened to a lot of this podcast, so I don't know if you guys have. I haven't heard it yet. So you get a walkstore.com and you enter the address of your property, and it'll bring it up on a map. I'm doing Somerset Circle, San Luis. I'm putting money as we speak. 81152. And so if I say press the map button, it'll bring it up on a map, but then it'll show all the closest restaurants, coffee bars, bars, groceries, parks, schools, shopping, entertainment, errands. Right. So I can go see. If I zoom out a little bit, it'll show me all the locations. So what I've actually done is had my copywriter come out to Walk Score to learn a little bit about the area. Because I can press, like, on parks, I can get the 10 closest parks that are mapped closest to my property. And then she could get an idea. So if she's writing an avatar around hiking or fishing, something like that, she can see what's close. Right. So just something for ad content.

Okay. So this is walk score.com live where you love.

Yes.

Very, very cool.

Yeah. Enter the address, press map. Then on the left side, it'll list for you all the closest. Yeah, restaurants, coffee bars, groceries, parks, and all kinds of stuff.

Wow. You can put this on your website. They've got a widget.

Yes, you can. I just was looking at a real estate agent's website last week that she had integrated this into her website.

Very cool. Very cool.

This is really cool, actually.

Yeah.

Well, it helps you learn about the area where your property is and then. Yeah. So a resource to use. Because even if, like, if you press on parks in the area and I. Okay. Then I click on the park, then it goes to that park and it tells me some information about it even. So I'm learning a little bit more about counties that I've been in for a year and a half that parks that I didn't even know existed there. So, you know, we're always looking for things to help make our ads more unique, to help our stick rates and different in general. So there's some content.

That's a great tip.

I like this. We should send this over to the land geek vas and have them incorporate it into due diligence when they're looking at properties.

Well, they can definitely put right. Closest bar, closest grocery store, big box stores.

Yeah. Just more details.

Right, right.

I like it a lot.

I like it. Bear land. Aaron, are you gonna use this?

I am gonna use this.

I.

You passed, Mimi, you passed.

A lot of pressure, but no, this is great. This is great. So I want to thank all the listeners. Hopefully everyone is getting a lot of value out of these roundtable podcasts. And, you know, we're going to start off 2019 just hitting the ground running and in providing lots more content every single week. So please subscribe, Please rate, please review the podcast. It really helps. Send us a screenshot of that review to support TheLangic.com and we'll send you the passive income launch kit for free. Is it. My phone is ringing. All right, we'll send you the passive income launch it for free. The $97 passive income launch kit. So please do that. And you guys ready to do this? 1, 2, 3, let free. All right, thanks, everybody.