Three Ways You're Not Using Facebook (But Should Be)

If you're a millennial like me, you're probably extremely comfortable with technology and with social media. In fact, you probably kill a few hours a day on them, specifically the clubhouse leader: Facebook. And if you're an experienced investor you probably know to talk about your real estate dealing on social media, so that you build your network, keep people thinking about you, and potentially even get some deals coming your way. You add your contacts from meetups, REIA meetings, deals, and BP to your facebook/twitter/instagram/linkedin pages. You're a savvy internet veteran who doesn't miss a trick!

But there are always power users out there, doing things with the websites we use that we didn't even realize were possible. I definitely don't claim to be one, but I've picked up a few tricks that I think might be of general interest.

Facebook, in addition to being a place to play games and post pics of babies and pets, is an absolute juggernaut of data collection, and has an active user base of over a billion people (or, basically everyone who owns a computer). It would be completely horrifying if it wasn't possible to use it to our advantage. Here are a few ways I've found to do so.

1) Using Facebook Ads to market your properties

Facebook Ads is an unbelievably powerful marketing tool that lets you target exactly the demographic you want, whether you're a landlord looking for tenants or a flipper looking for buyers. You don't need to link the ad to a profile or business with a fb page -- you can link it to a postlets page, for example, for a rental property. Yeah, that's cool, but we've only touched the surface.

As a landlord/property owner with buy and holds, placing tenants is the trickiest, scariest, importantist part of our jobs, besides actually acquiring a property where the numbers make sense. And obviously to maximize the size of our tenant pool, we have to market those properties for all we're worth! Unfortunately, traditional marketing (craigslist, signs in the yard, bulletin board posts, etc), don't give us a great way to target those potential tenants. And since fair housing laws are very specific about the classes against which we cannot discriminate (and rightly so!), we have to process applications fairly and in a consistent fashion. In some cases you might have 2-3 times more unqualified applicants than qualified! And then it's up to you do careful disqualify and DOCUMENT DOCUMENT DOCUMENT.

What we need is a way to market that returns us not just more applicants, but more qualified applicants. Facebook ads is a hugely powerful tool for this that I've not seen many people using. With fb ads, it's possible to target who sees the ads (and since it's a PPC [pay per click], that directly affects how much money you spend), meaning you have more qualified applicants to choose from. The demographics you can specify are overwhelming, frankly, but here are just a few of them:

• Area (big city, market to your neighborhood; rural area, market to users within 50 miles)
• Age (want college kids? Want 40-somethings? Want retirees?)
• Education (high school/college/tech school/post grad/cosmetology school)
• Marital Status (tired of boyfriends wrecking your property -- rent to married couples!)
• Employment (want to rent to a cop/lawyer/teacher/electrician? Anyone in healthcare? Bartenders?)

That's just the tip of the iceberg, and already we can see that we can take that vision in our mind of the perfect tenant and target it specifically to that demographic. FB will tell you as you narrow in how many people are in the population you're targeting, so if you've gotten too narrow or too broad you know how to dial it in.

If you're in a really hot market, have a high end rental, or are in an area of high population density, you can and should target even further. You can target people based on their interests (I have a SFR with a huge backyard; I can target people who are interested in gardening and make that a marketing point in the ad). You can target based on their income! You can target based on their buying habits. You can target based on what languages they speak (got a rental in a hispanic area?), or what kind of car they drive, or whether they give money to charity, or whether they like the bars and restaurants nearby (want to live next to your favorite restaurant?!). Seriously, log in to your account, say you want to create an ad, and just go crazy seeing how many people you can reach that fit every one of your exact criteria. 

SOUNDS GREAT, JT, BUT HOW MUCH?! Well, it's pay per click. Properly written and targeted ads won't get shown to anyone who isn't your exact demo match. And fb lets you set a price for the campaign, either daily, or total price. When you do, they'll tell you about how many people you can expect to reach with that ad. But with a daily budget of $5, an ad targeted to reach my perfect tenant would hit from 700-1900 of them a day. Wow. And you can pause or stop it as soon as you have a stack of those qualified applications on your desk.

Best part about it? More qualified applicants means more competition, which means you can charge more for the same unit. Supply and demand is a beautiful thing in the zero sum sector that is real estate. Also, you're staying all the way on the right side of the fair housing laws, which is always a good thing.

Worst part about it? You have to learn something new. I consider this a positive, though.

2) Communicate with motivated sellers without mailing a thing

This is a technique I've never seen anyone mention, so I'm pretty sure it's one I invented (although I'm sure others are doing it -- I'm not that smart). It's a mashup of driving for dollars and yellow letter campaigns, but for the digital age. 

When I see a distressed property in an area I like (for me, this means within a few miles of my house), I look up the property owner. This can be done online in a lot of places, and luckily I live in one of them (for those who haven't done this, it's typically via your municipal assessor's office). Once I have the owner's name, I'll look them up on facebook*. Depending on their privacy settings (most people show way too much info to anyone who can find their profile), I can determine what kind of seller they look like. Where they live, employment status, marital status, what they ate for breakfast, and all that info I as a buyer need. 

Next step, of course, is to message them. Now, if you message someone you're not friends with, the message goes into fb's spam folder (called the Other folder on your messaging tab). Two workarounds: you can friend request them first, and then message them, or you can pay $1 and fb will deliver your message into their main inbox. A shady revenue stream for fb, but potentially worth the money.

I've done this a few times in the past few months, and while no deal has come out of it, it's a "when" and not an "if". Response rate has been 100% (on a small sample size), and the owners have been very happy to talk to me about the property.

*Be sure when you search their name in the search bar up top, you click the last option that pops up. It'll say 'Find all people named [search term]'. This will give you a results page with little badges for everyone who matches the search. Those badges will often say where the person lives and works. See the one that lives in your town? That's your owner. 

Best part about it? When I talk to them via fb, they get a chance to click on my profile. They see my posts about football, my pictures with my dog, my pictures about projects I've built in my shop, and songs I've recorded in my studio. I'm not an investor; I'm a person. I have an advantage over every yellow letter sitting in their stack of old mail. I'm a guy who lives in their neighborhood who likes their house (true -- in fact, the initial message basically just says that). If they're long distance landlords, I offer to keep an eye on the place from afar for them. If they're local we talk about how our neighborhood has grown in the last few years. Hashtag rapport. 

Worst part about it? Sometimes locating the property owner on facebook takes some googling, to find the name they go by on facebook. And I could easily see someone getting a bad reputation if they were overusing this tip or were pushy about it. But that's true of any unsolicited owner queries.

3) Facebook groups

Saving the simplest one for last. If you're in an area that can properly be called a city, chances are excellent there are multiple facebook groups devoted to your area. In just my one corner of Nashville, there's the general fb group (10k members), the buy and sell group, the places-for-rent group, and the lost pets group. I'm an active member of all of them. When it comes time to market a rental, there's a dead simple way to get the word out to people in the right area. I've seen a ton of places get rented this way in the last year. In fact, when I stealth-evicted a roommate in my primary residence (by raising his rent high enough that he opted to move out), I located my new tenant for his room with one post in the neighborhood group. That post contained no pictures and no address. I just said "Room for rent in 3 bdrm house, available in two weeks. $500, message me if interested." 

I purposefully wrote a crappy post with little info, just to see what the response was like. I got 8 messages in 24 hours, and one of them was my current roommate (who pays on time, cleans up after himself, and mostly stays in his room anytime he's not at work). 

Best part about it? You'll get your message to exactly the right people in minutes, with no money and no work on your part. In fact, I've seen quite a lot of people reposting/sharing rentals near them because they want their friend to be their neighbors. 

Worst part about it? It's the internet, so expect people to chime in and comment on your finishes, curb appeal, prices, and location.

The internet, I'm afraid, is here to stay. But if you don't mind the learning curve associated with staying on the leading edge of the technology, I think the benefits can be huge.

Who else has facebook tips for REI? Share in the comments!