All Forum Posts by: Trevor Mauch

@Rauph Souleimanov Hope you're well man! Catching up on this thread. 

Great convo here! 

I'll weigh in from the perspective of a guy who's helped more people pull in motivated seller leads online than any other person in the industry over the last 12 years on what to look for when you dial in your site. 

First, I'm reminded of something a fly fishing buddy of mine said years ago when we were fishing together. He didn't make that much money but he always had the best equipment. The best. He could have gotten the cheaper $125 fly rod that looked similar to the untrained eye... but he bought the $700 fly rod (the top of the line on durability and performance), etc. 

He said... "I don't make enough money to go cheap". 

I had to think about it for a second but he paid more upfront for the best but will save a ton of money over the long run vs. replacing broken rods more often, losing fish because of an issue in the equipment, having to spend more time maintaining the equipment, etc. In the end, investing into the best is saving him a ton of money vs. trying to go cheaper quality up front. 

On the website side of things, quality comes out in a few ways:

- Site speed: We're moving a client back over to Carrot from a custom wordpress site they paid $3k for last July. They hired a new marketing leader at their company.. the leader thought they could save a few bucks long term and "control" their design better... what happened is they lost 3 of their 5 top 3 Google rankings... their page speed went from loading in under 2 seconds to 5 seconds (a Google performance score of 98 to one of 78 on desktop)... and the web designer got the site to look close... but missed some key elements on the mobile design that were for sure lowering their conversion rate. The company they hired was a reputable marketing agency in Baltimore who has been building Wordpress sites for 10 years... they just aren't experts at building websites that truly perform at the highest levels. 

That website switch last July likely has cost them minimum of $50k in lost deals just from the lower conversion rate... likely up into the 6 figures when you consider the lost Google rankings after the switch too. So they're bringing it back to Carrot for performance but are also getting the ease (they never have to worry about updating wordpress plugins, or wordpress versions, or upgrading servers, etc). 

Chris above is 100% correct that you can go to Upwork and get something quick and cheap... but I do disagree w/ him that it's not the website that brings leads... that it's the advertising. 

It's actually both. Great advertising with a mediocre website will leak leads and deals costing tens of thousands per lost deal. We see it often where someone who does a lot of direct mail or TV advertising had a website up... it got leads from people going online... but then they switched to a high performing Carrot site and with no extra traffic... their website converted more leads and deals because it was built for performance. The website can make offline marketing perform better if it's done right... or it could cost leads and deals if it looks close but isn't quite dialed in. 

- Reliability + Security: Last month I was talking with with a client who moved over from a competing solution that had a security issue pop up that compromised the clients website. This happens all of the time on people with their own custom Wordpress sites. The challenge w/ Wordpress is it's a much bigger job than the initial build out + $10/mo hosting. Hackers are always trying to exploit Wordpress since it's the largest website platform in the world... so they tend to look for exploits in plugins, outdated plugins, outdated Wordpress files, etc. Really consisently we get people coming over after having to go to someone on Upwork to try to get access to their custom wordpress site after a hack again. This is something we take care of for our clients so you as a client can just focus on being an investor... not a techy or security guy. 

- Hosting: One mistake I made years back was thinking that all hosting is the same. So I'd buy the lowest cost hosting I could find on hostgator or godaddy ($6/mo - $10/mo). I never fully understood why people would pay $30/mo or $100/mo just for the hosting on a virtual private server or similar. Until I started to realize that the large "shared hosting" plans in that $10/mo range were shared w/ thousands of other sites... in any different topic / niche... and several times my site load speed was dragging down big time... so I reached out to their support and on a shared hosting platform that isn't tightly controlled (like Carrot) on the quality of the sites on the network and the type of sites... one bad site can drag down the whole group of sites on that network. The support at hostgator told me there was a single site that was taking up immense resources in the cluster my site was a part of and they apologized. It even went offline several times over the years. So I moved up to a VPS (virtual private server) to have more security, performance, and control... and I wouldn't host any website that was an important site for me on a shared account again. VPS alone on hostgator is between $35/mo - $89/mo just for the hosting (not including anything else).  Carrot takes care of all of that for you, we upgrade our servers many times per year to keep them crazy fast, secure, and we have redundant backups on backups on backups (which most other hosts don't backup with as much redundancy as we do). 

- Conversion and SEO: We've focused exclusively on helping investors and agents dominate online in this space for over a decade. We created the standard on what performs in this industry and we're still innovating on it today. We've seen many people hire someone to "copy" a carrot site... and many of them look really good. The challenge is, you're copying the site in that snapshot in time... but also not knowing why certain elements are the way they are on the site. For instance, we changed 5 words on a site in a big test years ago and it almost doubled the conversion rate on the website. We tested it across many other sites... it did close to the same... so we rolled that out to our clients. So if someone gets someone to create a site on upwork today... unless they're continually upgrading the server, upgrading the code when new mobile phone technology comes out, upgrading the site from a speed/conversion/and seo perspective... you have to continue paying that person (and hoping they have the expertise to know what performs the best right now. 

End of the day we're in the business of saving our members time and saving them lost deals. 

If we can save you a a few hours a month vs. messing w/ tech stuff... and your time is worth lets say $100/hr... that's $300/mo or $3k+/yr just in your time savings. 

But where we get most of the bigger guys switching to Carrot (who can afford custom WP sites), is performance. They realized that even if they lose just 1 $30k profit deal a year from under performance... that's too much. 

You can tell I'm passionate about this my man because I've worked with soooooo many people over the years with the same question.

And it's a GREAT question by the way. I think people would be crazy not to ask that question. 

I've just seen too many people think they can save upfront but end up losing tons of time and money by trying to go cheap. 

We're here for you man! Let's get you dialed in. 1 extra deal pays for Carrot for 10+ years. DM me or ping me on IG and we've got you! 

@Michael Ruark awesome man!! Sweet! Ya happy to get you some guidance man! 👊🥕

@Michael Ruark Great question man! 

And @Thomas Goggin has some solid advice. 

I'd take a bit of a different perspective on it that may give you something to think about. 

Like Thomas mentioned, for someone willing to roll up their sleeves and do the work and who has the time... doing what Thomas mentioned is spot on. SEO in and of itself... about 80% of it is pretty formulaic and well prompted Ai chats (or using an Ai driven SEO tool) can help give guidance on 80% of the SEO things. It can help analyze pages and content and give tips on optimizing the page / content, it can map out a plan for building back links, it can analyze competitors sites that are ranking well and give you tips on updates to make on your site etc. 

Again, there are some Ai tools that are starting to specialize in SEO and are really helpful. 

The challenge though is... if you don't have the interest to do those things... or have the time... but want the outcome (higher rankings, great leads, more deals, higher ROI)... I'm always a fan of outsourcing things to people who do the craft every day to accelerate things forward.

Where the expert comes in is in that final 20%. It's when you're stuck in the middle of page 1 for your keywords and you really need to get into the science of SEO which requires diving a few clicks deeper. It can totally be done utilizing free online training and Ai tools... the challenge is in my opinion that'll only really work if you have an interest to learn the strategy/skills... do the work... become an expert yourself. 

Across our client base (at Carrot) I'd say it's probably split down the middle... half of our clients want to use our tools, learn SEO, use our community to ask questions/get help, and over time they become proficient or an expert... it's an amazing and valuable skillset to grow. But the other half just don't have the interest... the time... the skillset... and if they want the outcome of ranking high in Google... they'll need to trade some money to buy someone elses expertise. 

For good SEO who specializes in this space we see it anywhere between $1500/mo - $3k/mo. 

I'd suggest never signing up for an SEO service without mentally committing to 12 months. SEO can take time and I see it all of the time where someone is investing that $2k/mo for 4 months... dropping $8k... seeing no real leads or big results yet... and saying "Man I can put this money into direct mail and get a better ROI".

SEO done well usually follows a pattern. I call it the 2-6-1 formula. 

Work your butt off for the first 2 months getting the site dialed in (built, content created, location pages built, optimized, getting citations created, initial backlinks, etc), then you can dial down your work each month to adding some solid content every week or so.. build a handful of solid backlinks per month... you should see what I call a "ranking spout" between months 4-6. This is where we usually see a site jump 5+ spaces almost over night... after months of things moving slowly. 

then if SEO is being done well... you should see the rankings increase over time... usually around 9-12 months is when (1 year) traffic and leads should be consistent now. 

Year 1 my aim is to break even or maybe get a 2:1 ROI w/ SEO.

Year 2 we usually see a 2-4x ROI

Year 3 we usually see a 5-10x+ ROI

If I can close 1 - 2 deals in year 1 (aiming conservatively to set expectations... but it could do way better)... if my SEO cost is $24k... my average deal size is $20k... I brought in $20k - $40k in revenue in year 1. Not amazing ROI... but the real ROI and momentum is in years 2 and beyond.

Good luck on your journey man! 

One last thing to think about... this industry has some nuances and more often than not when we've seen clients hire someone who hasn't already gotten clients ranked at the top for motivated house seller phrases (i.e. - an agency who doesn't specialize in motivated house seller SEO)... results tend to be poor. But those that really specialize in motivated seller SEO we've found get results faster with more confidence. 

I hope this is helpful!!! 

Feel free to DM me and happy to help in any way.  

Do you already have a website setup? I'd be happy to give you a quick audit and send it your way (I don't sell SEO services, so I'm not here to sell you anything. I've just helped thousands of investors get top rankings through my software company Carrot... which is where my experience comes from). 

Hey@Anthony Maggio! Congrats n tskkkg the leap! 

We rolled out a completely free version of our Carrot CRM a few months back that includes automated follow-up sequences and is really rreally robust. Includes the ability to pull property data (we call them "Property Reports") on properties and basic kpi reports too. The cool thing is as you grow there are paid plans you can upgrade to unlock functions for teams etc. 

We acquired InvestorFuse (a premium CRM for wholesalers) a few years ago and we decided to make a whole set of the features free to be more accessible for people getting started. 

https://carrot.com/features/crm/

with all of that said... the function is great, but the user interface as of today is a bit more clunky than we'd like. So within the next few weeks we'll have some major upgrades on ease of use, and we want feedback to keep making the free version better and better. 

would love your feedback! Feel free to DM me to connect and I'll hook you up with the free account link. 

@Gregory Schwartz ya reach out via DM and happy to add value any way I can! 👊

on being an agent wholesaling in TX, I don't know the specifics of the law in TX, but I know lots of agent investors in TX serving their sellers well who do lots of wholesaling. Biggie is just being transparent, always helping the client see the retail / on mls value of the property and guiding them towards listing... but having / offering a discount cash offer as a solution when they want speed and convenience. 

@Josef Bryan Gerster I can only speak from personal experience, but the 2nd largest lead source we see through our 8,000+ client websites are land sellers looking to sell. 

They're going online and searching things like "sell my land [state]" or "sell bare land [state]" or various other phrases (there's lots of them) related to land. 

Some of the top phrases we see searched:

I popped over into our system to look at some lead counts... here's a screenshot on the first land site I pulled up that I know does well. The top # is the number of land seller lead submissions... the smaller (bottom) number is how many of them filled out a step 2 form that further qualified them (also shows motivation). 

So, online works great... but it's just one of several great ways to get land leads. 

Now, if I were targeting a very specific city vs. casting a wider net... 

1. Pull the vacant land plots through public records that fit your buy box. 

2. Send them mail (our most successful clients who do this literally send the contract in the mail on that first mailing, where the seller can sign it and send it back. Many end up calling our client with questions). 

3. Launch a high converting website (that's what we do) and run some low cost ads for seller phrases like the above and do some basic SEO (much easier to rank for land phrases than house phrases). 

Rinse and repeat. Between the direct mail as the main foundation and the online as supplimental, that's a combo that has shown really good results for lots of our clients. 

Happy to point you to any resources that can be helpful! 

@Sam Shikiar Those 3 are some of the top ones. I've heard of a few others popping up as well. 

Like @Mike Kehoe mentioned, I likely wouldn't use PPL providors as the foundation of the lead generation plan long-term, but they're amazing for supplimenting a plan and/or getting leads quickly in a market that you're wanting to explore/test. 

If I'm going to start marketing for leads in a new market I would allocate a budget towards PPL in that market as a quick way to get in front of sellers to see what the overall market is like and how it compares to your existing markets. Then I'd scale my marketing with an "owned" channel... i.e. - a channel where you control the lead gen process start to finish and can leverage your credibility, leverage your brand, etc to stand out. 

I know the owners behind ML and PL well, they know what they're doing, I hear good things about results w/ their leads... but as w/ any PPL provider... there will be good leads and bad leads so it's a matter of quickly calling those leads, putting the unconvergted leads into long-term followup sequences (we usually have our InvestorFuse members "resurface" the leads as a new lead every XX days until the property sells or they buy it). 

@Gregory Schwartz 

I love your question man (the one you kicked the thread off with). 

I'll give you some direct thoughts/answers that are hopefully useful in dialing in a plan. And I'll walk through how I think about dialing in a lead gen plan in a market.  

For that budget, $1k-$2k/mo... there will be some give and take. It'll either be you'll need to roll up the sleeves and do more of the grunt work to keep cost down... or you'll need to expect a deal every 3-6+ months. 

Let me give as direct answers to your 4 questions as possible then I'll dive deeper. I'm going to assume the higher range of your budget ($2k/mo) for the sake of my answers below. 

1. What’s working best for you at this budget?

For me, it's all about the math. The answer is in the math. Pick a channel, commit to it for long-term, then let the math work in your favor. 

PPC you'll want to expect $3k-$5k budget before you should expect a deal. Could be sooner, could be longer, but that's the range. It works in your market as well. But w/ that budget it may turn into... that's a possibility of 3-6 deals a year from that channel. 

Tips: w/ PPC the prospects are often more motivated at that point as they're actively looking for a solution, so they tend to hit multiple websites, so w/ SEO and PPC leads answering them live and/or calling back within 1-5 mins increases your close ratio dramatically. So you'll have to be ready to answer live and/or have amazing followup in place to squeeze out the best results possible. If you're going to hire out the Google PPC management... that'll be min $800/mo for anyone who knows this market well and is any good... so that leads $1200/mo for ad costs... at prob $150-$350 per lead... that's 3-6 leads a month... at 1 in 15 Google PPC leads close into a deal... that's a deal about every 3-5 months on average. 

Mailers would be similar type math... response rates on direct mail has gone down in the past 5 years, but it still works to pull out great deals. I can't say for sure in your market with the right list how many pieces you'll need to send, but our clients are reporting it being normal to have 5,000 pieces to close a deal. If a piece with postage is around $1 (plus or minus depending on the type) that's an estimate of a deal about every 3-5 months (rough math). 

Other methods though like Cold Calling could possibly be lower cost, but you're generating a lot of unqualified sellers and leads... so the game then is to be really good at creating / stacking lists, managing the VA cold calling service to hit their connected call and qualified lead #'s, and getting really solid followup systems in place. It works, it's just a different type of marketing vs. people coming to you. Not my preference but some of our top clients still do really really well cold calling.

2. Should I stick with mailers or explore cold calling, PPC, SMS, etc.?

I'd avoid SMS for sure, especially as an agent with more regulation oversight. SMS is getting pretty sticky these days. Still work? Yes. Sustainable and put you in legal risk? Yes very possibly. My rule of thumb is always... to "Scale the bright spots". 

I always look at what has worked for me in the past (because that has less risk since it's a known thing to me), and I ask... "Can I scale this? Does it have room to grow?". So I'd start and scale what worked for you in the past UNLESS you hated the type of leads you got and/or it created pains in your business you don't want back. 

The challenge w/ scaling driving for dollars is it requires time... you or you'll need to hire someone (uber drivers, delivery drivers, etc) to drive for you and incentivize them to add properties to DM for you. It can work great, it just takes time so the leverage is low for you unless you get help w/ the driving part. I know DM has great list building features now that they didn't have in '20, so that's a way to pull data on properties/sellers that may have more likelihood in selling soon... and cold calling or sending mail to them. PPC I answered above. YES it'll work great in your market. The challenge is budget especially if you're going to hire the PPC management out (which I'd highly suggest). We can help guide you here if you need any help. Happy to be a resource. 

3.  What lists have been most effective for motivated sellers?

I texted some of my top investor/agents who are doing direct mail who are closing deals every month from it... there are so many data points... but they all said "probate and tire landlords" are among their top type of prospect they target. 

4. Any lessons learned from your experience?

Oh, boy! Tons. But like Jerryll mentioned, it's more of a mindset thing vs. a tactical thing. Tactics and marketing channels change over time... but the marketing strategy and mindset really don't. 

At a high level... after working w/ literally thousands of real estate investors and agents generating millions of motivated house seller leads the past 10+ years at Carrot (and 4+ years prior)... for marketing... the one who is able to pay the most for the lead will have the advantage. 

I've been working directly w/ execs in the biggest brokerages in the US the past few years... and they all say "We want our agents to get these good seller leads you guys get!". 

The challenge is... it is very difficult to make motivated seller marketing work well on real estate agent commissions. 

Motivated house seller marketing works well when you can what the marketing world calls... "liquidate" the advertising cost quickly... ideally within 60 days max. Meaning... if I put $3k in advertising cost in for March... I need to at minimum get all of that $3k back within 60 days from a deal closing... and within 6 months that $3k needs to turn into a min of 4x that ($12k in revenue) or the numbers don't work out very well. Most agents run on the model of listing a property, which can take 2-6 months to sell and receive the commission... then I see most agents turning that paid marketing channel off 4-6 months in because they're in $8k deep with no revenue to show for it yet... so they say "This isn't sustainable... I need to kill this". 

For agents to truly thrive doing motivated seller marketing I feel it's 1 of 2 mindsets (and I personally would only consider 1 of these mindsets one I'd choose):

1. "I'll set a monthly emotion based budget and over this next year, hope it turns into profits from listings. I'll put $2k/mo into this and see what it does". 

2. "I'll market based on math... and I'll be a hybrid agent/investor... making cash offers on properties... 80% will be retail listing prospects... 20% max will be open to a discount cash offer. Those ones I'll "wholesale" to my investor buyers so it's a win-win". 

A standard 2-6% agent commission on deals is really really difficult to make direct to seller marketing work as it's the big deals that make it all work. The agent commissions pay for the marketing to happen. 

I'd be happy to explain more deeply below how I would set a budget for a campaign... 

... but at a high level I'll ask... 

1. How much money do I want to earn this year? 

2. What is my average profit per deal? 

3. How many deals do I need to do then to hit that revenue goal? 

4. How many leads do I need to bring in to get a deal through the marketing channel I'm using? 

- SEO - 1 in 5-15 leads into a deal
- PPC - 1 in 10-20 leads into a deal
- FB ads - 1 in 20-30 leads into a deal
- Direct Mail - 1 in 40-60 "leads" into a deal
- Cold Calling - 1 in 50-70 leads into a deal

5. How do I spin up a solid marketing plan w/ that channel to bring in that number of leads?

6. Am I going to do that work myself or hire it out? 

Happy to map it out further in a post below! Short answer, is any of those channels will work, all will likely be somewhere between $3k-$5k per deal for a paid channel OR some real time for a channel like cold calling or SEO if you're doing the work yourself. 

So it all starts with your goal... how much revenue and/or deals do you want to do in '25 with your direct to seller marketing? Then we can work it backwards and pick the best channel. 

Happy to help ya make a plan man! Can hop on a call anytime. You don't need to be a client of mine. It's fun for me. 

@Andrew Erickson Great question. It really depends on what you're trying to get done with the software. If it's a simple email list software to collect email addresses and send emails and automated campaigns to that list, and to manage that list of emails, something like convertkit.com or aweber are great for that. 

If you're looking for more sophistication like to move leads through stages, to have built in tools that help you communicate by text/email, bring in team members to own leads, etc.. then more of a CRM may be helpful for you there. FollowUpBoss is a great system specialized for real estate agents but may be overkill. Another system is InvestorFuse which is specialized for real estate investors and their deal pipeline. 

Hopefully that helps a bit! Good luck man! 

@Rod Smith Great question man! 

Happy to help at no cost man! 

Pop over your URL and I'm happy to shoot back a loom video with some thoughts on ways to optimize it a bit more. 

But at a high level... there isn't a magic formula only the pros know... but the pros put in the work to learn how to make a website really perform well... which does take putting in the time and the work to learn it. 

It's like anything, there really aren't any secrets, just people who have put in the work to learn what makes things really perform well. 

That's one of the benefits w/ Carrot is we can help you cut that learning curve and make it easier and faster for you. 

The first step tends to be getting your website dialed in for credibility. Lots of people focus on "SEO" to get new leads first... but really the only SEO anyone should focus on first is ranking well for your company name and brand searches (like "[your company] reviews"). The reason for this is your sellers are researching often times before making a big decision like selling their house, and they'll go to google and search for your company name and search to see if you're credible. People wouldn't believe how many deals are lost at what I call the "decision phase" where a lead from an offline marketing campaign goes to research you, and doesn't find good credibility online (which includes the website). 

So that's where I'd start Rod. Dial in the credibility on your site. We did a series of youtube videos on how to dial in that credibility on your site here. Dive in there for free and we can help you nail it. 

But pop over your URL and I'll dive into it and we can help get you on the right path man! 

@Chris Seveney I agree everyone should focus real energy on building a stellar network. 100% agree. But I'm curious why you feel SEO isn't a good marketing channel to invest in? SEO according to data across thousands of deals we've researched with investors tends to have the highest lead to deal close ratio and highest average profit per deal, mainly because of the motivation. Yes there are pros and cons for sure and like any marketing channel, SEO takes work and investment to master, but it's among the best and most consistent lead sources for motivated sellers.  I'm extremely open to changing my mind though, SEO just keeps pulling such amazing results. I do advocate for mixing SEO w/ a strong offline strategy because they work together so effectively.  

;list=PLTngSzzM_XqUfClBfHQce0bjfZ3yEB2BQ