Tim Bell explains how to hire bird dogs, people like delivery drivers and mail carriers already in your target neighborhoods, to find vacant properties. Pay them $5 per geotagged smartphone photo and send money through Venmo. It's a simple sourcing system that turns everyday workers into scouts.
Okay, so our next method here is to hire bird dogs to find vacant, ugly properties for you. Now I want to tell you that my perception, my idea of bird dogs is different than some others ideas of bird dogs. For me, a bird dog is a person whose job takes them into the neighborhoods, the areas where I want to have properties. That's who I'm looking for to be a bird dog. It could be newspaper delivery people or milk delivery. Is there even milk delivery anymore? I don't know. UPS, FedEx, mailman, lawn care, pest control, sprayers, garbage collectors, all those types of people typically work regular routes and they're out in the neighborhoods where you want to be. Now we're going to talk later on in a future session about how to target neighborhoods and how to figure out what your target neighborhoods are. Okay, but once you figure out what those are, now you can recruit those bird dog people, the people who are already in the neighborhood anyway by virtue of the fact that their job takes them there. You're going to recruit them to find properties for you. Okay, I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but every iPhone and every Android phone since version 7 has the ability to geotag a photo. In other words, if you adjust the setting on your phone, it will put an address on every photograph you take. Well, all the kids that are running around delivering for these companies and doing pest control and all those types of things, they all have one of those phones and they all know how to use it. So they will take a picture of a rundown beat up or a vacant property and they will send it to you. Now, I currently pay them $5 for each digital photograph with the address of a property. Okay. For a while that if you don't use an electronic means of paying them, I can tell you it will get to be a logistical nightmare. So what do you do? You use Venmo V E N M O Venmo. That's a method of paying people from your cell phone. Now that's not the only one. There are others, but that one is a good one that a lot of people like. And that one may even be out of date by the time you watch these. So you need to go out and find something else. There are several others. Okay, all right.
