All Forum Posts by: Cornelius Garland

@Chris Roche If you have a good relationship with them then I'd get a durable power of attorney for this specific property and cancel the MLS listing with the current agent. It might be priced too high and they might have it listed for the retail as-is price versus the true cash value. If it needs updating, even if there were repairs done over the years, then this will likely be a cash transaction that needs to sell to an investor.

With the POA, you can list it on the MLS yourself without having to involve them in all the paperwork. Before you do this, you should have a plan of action and feel confident in your ability to move it. More likely than not, it's priced too high. You can post the deal here on Bigger Pockets and there might be a buyer for it. I've wholesaled several deals to community members on this site.

You can get paid a percentage of the proceeds from the sale either on the HUD or outside of the closing.

Great question, @Sergio Mosq. I've done several deals in the Hampton Roads area. I usually get a durable power of attorney from the seller, which allows me to list property on the MLS. I get paid a "marketing consulting fee" on the HUD instead of an assignment fee.

If you are using a purchase and sales contract, double closing should work. A similar law went into effect in South Carolina. Attorneys have wholesalers sign a disclosure form that they won't be held legally liable for closing the transaction. I suggest calling around to investor friendly attorneys to see if they'd be open to it. There's always a hungry attorney looking to bolster their business, while some attorneys may simply say "no". You just need one to work so I would find your guy and lean on his advice on how to structure your deals.

There's always a work around. Money is made in the grey area similar to how corporations exploit tax loopholes. It's the same thing here.

Texting brings in way more leads than cold calling. It's not even close right now. I'm in several virtual markets and primarily wholesaling. We're getting 5 solid leads for every 500 texts sent, which is a 1% lead rate. If you compare this to cold calling then you'll be lucky to get 1 lead a day per cold caller. 

Cold calling was my primary marketing channel for years and I managed over 40 cold callers at one point. To get the same daily production from cold calling as I do with texting, then I would need 3 cold callers at a minimum. At $5 per your for each cold caller, your monthly expenses would be $2,400 just for cold callers. This doesn't include data and dialers. If each cold caller generated 1.5 leads per day, which is what my callers are averaging, then you can expect 30 leads per cold caller over a 20 business day month - totalling 90 leads for the month.

Based on my metrics, it's taking us roughly 50 - 100 leads to get a property under contract with cold calling. The market matters a lot. If it's an affluent market then the number will be closer to 100. However, regardless of the market, we are experiencing long contract timelines across the board. It's taking 60 - 90 days for these cold call leads to convert to contracts. I can send off a text blast this week of 500 texts per day and have a contract by the end of next week. My contract timeline is 9 days - 45 days with texting.

The people saying that it's illegal have not thoroughly read through the regulations. Ask yourself this: If texting was illegal, would Launch Control have thousands of users? What about Lead Sherpa and REI Reply (the one I use)?

These companies have done their due diligence and understand the laws. The important part is that you become 10DLC / A2P compliant and you follow best practices. It isn't the wild west like it was before 2023. However, it can still be done legally and ethically.

Texting is a blue ocean right now because investors have trouble getting their accounts registered with the organization that approves 10DLC account requests. Additionally, they are blasting thousands of sellers at once, which is causing their accounts to receive 24-hour bans. 

Navigating through these issues was worth it for me because I can go in any market and target homeowners who haven't been marketed to at all by other investors.

Below are KPIs for a campaign I did in Savannah recently for texting. We averaged 6 leads per day and sent 337 messages. The daily costs for the texts sent and received were below $10. For cold calling, it would take me 1 week of dialing and paying a cold caller $200 for this same production, and that's being very optimistic about my cold caller's performance.

@Don Konipol You're very right, Don. This is a reason why I've been hesitant talking about this until after the election. I do think the tide is turning and the "social justice" extremism is correcting itself. I was flabbergasted when I saw a publication released by a university titled "Strengths So White" - essentially arguing that Clifton Strengthsfinder, a personality assessment conducted by Gallup, is racially biased. It irks me to no end. I value the truth and try my best to look at situations as objectively as possible. Here's the article if you're interested. I couldn't make it pass the first couple of pages.

Biggerpockets has been a tremendous wealth of information joined in 2015. The posts that have been the most helpful have been the ones where others have shared their experiences, so I'd like to share a story of when I had a virtual assistant steal $3,000 from me. Hopefully, it can help others from making the same mistake I did. This is not to dissuade investors from building a team because I wouldn't be able to virtually wholesale in several markets without one. Recently, I've noticed investors are often too black and white in their viewpoints in the forums, and this imbalance can lead to some being overly cautious and not taking action or taking action without conducting proper research.

In 2018, I hired an executive assistant from Upwork who had a great resume, said the right things during the interview, and had impeccable English.

From the day she joined my team, I found myself limiting her role and tasks because her skills were limited. Eventually, it got to the point where I reduced her role to part time and then had to let her go. It felt like we parted ways amicably, and I never once expressed frustration with her. I just told her that "I didn't have any tasks for her and I will let her know if something changed. Let's keep in touch.".

I thought we ended on our working relationship on great terms. Two weeks later while I was up at 3 AM working on my business, I saw that my PayPal password was changed and I was locked out of my account. I received emails that $500 was being transferred to her. I felt completely helpless. This happened every 5 minutes 6 times. She could have drained my entire account, as I had a significant amount of funds in there.

Luckily, I was able to lock my account by using my main email, but PayPal was not able to be reached this early. I called them the next day, and they wouldn't give me my money back because they said that whoever accessed my account was given the password. I lost $3,000, and it could have been much worse.

This is the cost of making bad hires. From this point, I decided to create my own framework for hiring executive assistants, cold callers, lead managers, and acquisitions managers so I would never be bamboozled again. I look at two variables: Their MBTI (16 Personalities Type) and their birthday. These two variables tell a lot about someone. I have grouped each birthday into what roles are best for my company and which ones I would never hire.

Pro tip: People born in late-March, April and early-to-mid May make the best employees for an REI business. ANYTIME I deviate from my process and make an exception for someone, thy never work out.

The key takeaway is to ensure you have some way of vetting people and they have the right character and cognitive skills to succeed because you have a lot of people who are great at selling themselves.

ENTJs and ENFJs are the most common personality type you'll encounter when you're recruiting employees. See the image below of my hiring spreadsheet, with over 70% of them being ENTJs and ENFJs.

ENTJs often lack attention to detail and can be cut corners if they do not like the job they're doing. So if you need an operations manager or administrative specialist where attention to detail is paramount, I'd advise not hiring them for this role - barring certain birthdays (August 26th to September 4th).

ENFJs are great communicators but not great negotiators, so they make excellent cold callers but not lead managers or acquisitions managers.

Are there exceptions to the rule? YES, so please do not take what I'm saying as the absolute 100% truth. But for the most part, what I'm saying is accurate. When you layer the birthday profile with the MBTI, you can get 95% accuracy.

Let me know your thoughts.

I used Smarter Contact last year, and there is big issue they need to fix. When you upload a list, it'll state that over 70% of your phone numbers are invalid. I know this is not true because I've used IDI data since 2019 and it's the best on the market. Some people I spoke with think it's their attempt to push their skip tracing  packages on you, but I cannot confirm this.

Also, the text to lead percentage is .5, on average. An optimized texting campaign should be getting 1% lead rates - meaning if you send off 500 texts, you should get 5 leads back. This may not seem like a big issue, but if you're paying for premium data, like I am, it can drive up your cost per deal drastically.

I switched to REI Reply last year and can send off over 2000 texts in one drop. I don't need to drip them, and it's perfectly within the regulations. I just use the "workflows" feature instead of the campaign feature.

I am glad the regulations were created, as this is the first time in years that experienced investors have a marketing competitive advantage. It took a lot of testing to figure out how to optimize my text messaging campaigns, and now I can do it without any issues.

If the process is frustrating, please do not give up on it because you can position yourself as the sole investor solution to many homeowners in your market. The people who reply to texts are different from the ones who pick up for cold calls, so you could potentially be the only one speaking to the sellers on your list.

Best of luck! @Bryant Arria

@Agnes Shin Always use opt-out language. It's required now with the new regulations. If your opt-out percentage is too high then it may look suspicious to the carriers; ultimately, affecting your delivery rates.

The goal is to keep you opt-out percentage low while maintaining compliance. This is how you accomplish this: You can change the opt-out language in hopes that your sellers will not respond with words that do not trigger automatic opt-outs. For instance, "STOP" will trigger an automatic opt-out. While, "NO" or "PASS" do not. I've had success using these phrases: "Respond NO to unsubscribe" or "Respond PASS to quit receiving these messages". You'll still get people who respond with "STOP" or "UNSUBSCRIBE", but you will get a large number of people who say "NO' or "PASS".

You still want to remove these contacts manually from your database to prevent them from inadvertently being messaged again. A low opt-out percentage appears like you have a clean list of people who initially opted-in to receive your messages. This will ensure your delivery rates stay high and you do not receive 24-hour bans.

Also, REI Reply is the superior texting platform right now. There's no red-tape, and it's not monitored as heavily as other tools. If I'm paying good money for a tool, the last thing I want is someone looking over my shoulder. We blast 500 - 5,000 messages a day from one number in multiple markets, and we never had an issue.

@Brenden StadelmanI found that agencies work well short term, but they are not a viable long-term solution. There's no workaround for bringing it in house. Firstly, you can save costs by paying your VAs directly. Usually agencies mark up the VA costs significantly. Oftentimes, they'll pay the VAs $3.50 an hour and charge you $12. Then when your VAs suddenly quit or not performing well, you wonder why because you're paying an agency so much. I understand they need to turn a profit and pay for overhead, but the minimum they should pay a cold caller is $5.

When I hired my first cold callers, I outsourced it to an agency, then I brought it in house. I use onlinejobs.ph for all my hiring, and I only hire cold callers from the Philippines. I'm entertaining hiring Egyptians because many of my colleagues have had great experience using them recently, but I've managed hundreds of VAs over my 10 years of investing with the majority of them being from the Philippines.

Having a hiring process will determine the quality of applicants you receive. I require all of my prospects to fill out a Google form that I link to my job announcement. I've had some VAs think they're doing a good job by messaging me directly on Facebook or emailing me, but they're automatically not considered if they didn't fill out the form. If they cannot follow that simple step, how do I expect them to take direction from my ops team or show up on time?

I have a system and process for everything in my company. You can make it work with an agency, but you'll need processes for auditing their progress. I worked with an agency back in 2019 - 2020 and found myself training their people more than they did. At that point, I was thinking "why am I paying them a markup?" Additionally, agencies can shut down on you in a heartbeat. It's happened to me a few times. I was using a company called Seller Snipers back in 2018 and they were delivering some great leads. However, I got an email on a Monday and they shut everything down abruptly. That really set my business back.

My suggestion is to use an agency short term, but try to always have a VA you're managing on your own. This will allow you to split test the results with the agency and also gain experience with managing a team. Expect to pay an agency $10 - $12 an hour. Ensure they're providing you with daily or weekly EOD reports with the campaign stats. Usually, there's a KPI sheet that they're using to track how many dials each caller is making.

Here's how you keep the agency accountable. I'll share some benchmarks below:

Dials per day: 800 - 1500. The dials could be closer to 2,000, depending on their dialer. If you're paying the agency full time, and they're not getting in at least 800 dials per day, the VA is not working full time.

Leads per day: 1 - 2 per caller. Most of my cold call leads convert to contracts within 60 - 120 days after we initially call them. Be prepared to aggressively follow up with the sellers to get the deals locked up.

Hot Leads: 2% to 5%. If you get 100 leads, about 2 - 5 will be "hot", meaning they'll be at or below 70% of ARV. However, they may not be ready to sign right now. Place all the cold leads on a 1 - 3 month follow up and follow up with the hot leads weekly until they sign.

Leads to Contracts: Expect 50 - 100 leads to generate a contract. If your list is more motivated, it will take fewer leads to generate a contract. However, I do think the conversion time frame of 60 - 120 days still stands, regardless of how motivated your list is.

I would ask if your agency can text for you. Since the 10DLC regulations went into place in October 2023, texting is my number 1 marketing channel. It's taking 30 - 50 leads to generate a contract and we usually get a contract a week, so the speed to lead is fast. It takes 2 weeks - 30 days to contract our hot texting leads. My assessment is that the investors who were texting heavily switched to cold calling after October 2023, so now it's oversaturated. 

There are other variables that can significantly affect the overall performance of your cold calling campaigns, like your MSA, zip codes you chose within your MSA, the dialer you use, the size of your list, how fresh your list is, the quality of the property records on your list, the quality of your phone numbers on your list, and if the phone numbers you're dialing from in your dialer are being marked as spam. 

It'll be unfair to place all of this on your agency if they aren't producing results. However, I do think these agencies should operate as hybrid consultants and be able to provide guidance to their clients. Too often, they lock clients in lengthy contracts and blame the clients when they don't get results, which is unethical because they're usually taking advantage of the clients' ignorance. Let me know if you have any questions or need me to provide clarity on any of the points I stated.

I wouldn't argue one strategy is better than another. When you've been around for a while, you develop an exit strategy "tool belt" of sorts. I wholesale some properties, and others make sense to take down as rentals. Also, novations are nothing new. This is a catchphrase that people started using a few years back.

I was essentially doing "novations" way before it ever became a thing, with a limited durable power of attorney, back in 2016. One of the first deals I did was take down a 26-parcel deal in a highly distressed neighborhood and listed it on the MLS. The POA gave us the ability to list it. I'm not a fan of novations where you don't get the purchase agreement notarized and filed at the courthouse. It's too flimsy otherwise. If you're going to go that route with listing it, do it the right way or else you may find yourself in legal trouble, or a buyer may snake the deal from you.

Again, novations aren't anything new, and most experienced investors are shying away from them these days because they're operating in a legal "grey area". I never want to place a Realtor in a compromising situation, so I always get a notarized POA and file it at the courthouse. This helps the process move much quicker on my virtual deals. In Cleveland, I'm taking down duplexes as rentals and Cuyahoga county requires us to communicate with 3 - 5 departments just to get payoffs. If I had to wait on the seller to do this, it would drag out my closings for months, potentially. There are multiple benefits of using a POA to list the property rather than getting a purchase agreement e-signed with a "listing clause" in it.

I highly suggest using IDI data. It's the only dataset I've used since 2019. The only downside is that you'll need an account, and they lock you into a contract. Consequently it's not accessible to most investors who are skip tracing fewer than 100k searches a month. Me and a few folks I met at a mastermind group all went in on a joint account a few years back so we could save money. Also, the credits are "use them or lose them" - meaning, if you pay $12k a month for a 100,000 skips, then you have to use them all that month. At least we know with 10 or so people using the account, all the credits will get used monthly. It's not the best arrangement, but it's worth it because the data is accurate. 

I've tracked my metrics over the years and I'm getting 99% hit rates with fewer than 1% wrong number percentages. I determine the wrong number percentage based on how many people text or call us back saying "wrong number". It rarely happens these days. Not all skip tracing companies are created equally, and I'm a stickler when it comes to data. I feel like most investors focus too much on the right side of what I dubbed "The Wholesaler's Timeline". Most investors focus on finding buyers first when it is all the way toward the end of the process. 

They spend so much effort finding buyers that they treat the areas to the left of the timeline as an afterthought. Every part of the wholesaling process is linear and sequential. If you do not do your market research correctly, it doesn't matter how great your list is because you will pull a list in a bad market. If your skip tracing provider is poor, it doesn't matter how great your list is. If your cold callers are the highly skilled, but your market, list, and skip tracing is poor, then it doesn't matter how great your cold callers are. Every step of the process is built on the previous step. Let me know if you need some assistance with skip tracing if you're doing large volume. We usually have unused credits each month.

For manual and one-off skip traces, check out familytreenow.com. It's free and doesn't require an account. I found that the addresses are highly accurate. I used it back in 2015 when I was first starting out wholesaling because bulk skip tracing wasn't available. I found that the phone numbers aren't always available or accurate, but it's worth a shot. If you want to verify the mailing address and send your sellers a mail piece, this data source works great. I hope this helps out.