Contact Rates for Deal Sourcing

[James Heller]

Has anyone noticed contact rates going way down recently? This time last year, I was getting somewhere around 6-8% fairly regularly. Now, I'm consistently getting 0.5%. This is really affecting lead count!

I've heard of some new spam blocking systems like Shaken/Stir, and I'm wondering if other factors might be at play. I use Mojo and sometimes buy DIDs from them, I've also scaled up my operation and we make quite a few more calls now. Any ideas??

[Mike Schorah]

I’m going to give you what you need to know to stay as legally protected in your real estate wholesaling business.

The Traced Act is the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence Act. This is basically a good thing. This isn't something that's going to destroy cold calling or SMS forever. This stuff is honestly pretty common sense. Your ROI will be the same. The Traced Act was passed in 2019. This Act basically had 1 sole purpose possible and that's basically to get rid of spam calling. If you have a phone in the United States of America, I guarantee you get 1 phone call a day or a week saying, "Please call back for auto warranty." It's the most annoying thing ever. It's a robot calling you with a prerecorded message. I get 3 or 4 a day. They're so annoying. I absolutely hate them. Those are the reason why Act is being implemented.

STIR/SHAKEN

We’re going to have to be compliant with the secure telephone identify revisited and signature based handling of assertive information using tokens. That means we’re going to have to register and identify our phone numbers. The Traced Act is going to be implemented by the FCC which is the Federal Communications Commission. Illegal robocalls are the top consumer complaint reported to the FCC annually. Do you think the FCC is getting complaints from you as the top one or the ones that are super super spam everywhere? If you’re a low level caller and you’re not doing millions and millions of calls every single day, you’re not going to be on the FCC’s radar here. I’m not a lawyer. You do have to do everything that is legally required by the government.

ROBOCALLS!

They’re going after robocalls and texts, caller ID spoofing, call blocking, and one ring phone scams. For something to be illegal, it has to be against the Telephone Consumer Protections Act of 1991. BatchLeads and Mojo are legal because there’s a human behind it. The stir/shaken confirms the phone number is actually yours and not a robot. This gets rid of RVMs. Google Voice will probably still work well for you.

They’re probably going to get rid of the 10 and 12 line dialer. With this legislation, it’s probably best to use a 3 line dialer. Less calls are probably better. It will be less spam. If you’re doing high volume, you’re going to have to register your EIN, business phone number you’re using which you don’t want to be doing. So having more phone numbers will definitely help you out and also less volume. If your tracking KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for the calling and texting is bad, you’re going to be flagged as “spam likely” as soon as possible and your results are going to go down like crazy. Our call lengths are going to have to be longer than a robocall. A robocalls is going to be 4 or 5 seconds. They’re going to hang up and say, “This phone number keeps getting called for 3 seconds. No call is going to be 3 seconds. This is spam likely. Cut it off.” We’re going to have to make sure our call length is over 10-20 seconds which isn’t hard if we’re having actual phone conversations with motivated sellers.

If you do it with the approach of you’re this big hedge fund that buys thousands of properties and you have all this money, you’re going to get attacked. You might get reported. Buying you act like a mom and pop person: “I’m just a regular dude just looking to buy a property. Are you looking to sell it?” That’s not going to get flagged.

This Traced Act is not going to affect wholesaling profitability at all.

EDIT: If your number is being seen as potential spam… If you’re using Google Voice, get a different phone number. It’s pretty easy to do. You might need to put a new email on there and then just create a new account. It should be pretty easy.

EDIT: The D.I.D.s I use are fine. The Scam Likely could be if you’ve used a phone number for cold calling before and you pop it up for another one. Call customer service. I usually have to sift through numbers all the time.