Dear friend,

We’ve got a very special Marking Monday for you this week. Recently I interviewed my friend Rob Minton.

Some of you might be familiar with Rob, he was able to build a very successful real estate practice in the cleveland ohio market and he was subsequently able to sell that business recently for more than a million dollars.

Rob has some great insights on choosing a very specific niche market and then applying direct response marketing to that business to build it in an incredible way so that clients were actually applying to work with Rob and his team.

So we’ve got some great insights for you today and I hope that you enjoy this interview and tell all your friends.

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Hey Rob, thanks for joining us.

You’re welcome Dean.

Hey, where in the world is Rob Minton today?

Rob Minton is calling from his home office in lovely Cleveland Ohio, and I always say lovely before I say Cleveland, little, supposed to be a little joke because it’s not really lovely here.

Cleveland Rocks.

Go Browns baby, right?

There you go. Well Rob I really appreciate you taking the time to spend with us today, and I know you’ve got an interesting story about how you built your real estate business, so can you share a little bit about your career in real estate sales?

Yeah I’d be happy to, and just kind of a quick warning, I’m struggling with a little bit of bronchitis, so if I, I’ve got cough drops and all kinds of stuff, so I will do my best not to cough up a lung as we go forward. I got my real estate license in the mid 1990’s and I was working for a small company, you know this small brokerage, and I was working with buyers and trying to get listings, and I did what everybody else did, I was out there copying other real estate agents that I thought were successful, and at some point I started to read some books on business, and I decided to open my own brokerage, and this was about near 2000. My mean strategy at that point was I’d run a lead generation advertisement offering a free report, and a prospect that would be interested in that free report would call and leave a message, or maybe they’d go to my website and request it, and then I, the idea was we would return the phone call and in that phone call try to set an appointment with the person who requests the report and, so that was kind of the main approach, and…

Did you start right out of the gate, using direct response like that? Like were you familiar with it, and you started immediately applying it to your real estate business?

No actually, no. My original broker was old school, so we weren’t doing any direct response advertising whatsoever, but when I made the decision to start my own company and I started to hire agents, I realised that I needed to do something to be able to have new clients coming into the business on a consistent basis, and when I started research marketing, direct response seemed like to be the best approach to use going forward. But the problem is once you generate the lead, what do you do with it, right? How do you get that lead to become a client, and you know, so I start my own company and I recruit a couple of agents and the idea was “Okay I’ll generate the leads, I’ll hand these leads off to my agents and then my agents will make these phone calls” – you’re laughing.

Well I laugh because we always joke that it’s like, you expect and you think that you can generate all these leads and hand somebody the ball on sort of the fifty yard line and they can take it from there, but the reality is you’ve got to, you’ve almost have to hand it to them on the goal line and push them over the edge.

That it, nobody told me that right. I’d hand them the ball and they’d fumble it like Cleveland Browns would do, and so what ended up happening was, because I own the business, I’ve got to pay for all the expenses, I ended up being the one making the phone calls because I couldn’t get them to do it. So I’m on the phone in the evenings, I’m on the phone on the weekends, I’d set the appointments, then I’d hand the appointment off to my agents, and when they had the appointment they would do fairly well. But at some point I realised, you know this is not, this strategy is not sustainable going forward because I can’t be the one driving every sale for my brokers, and if I’m an independent agent – yeah that would work – but to try to feed your agents that way, just not a really good, not a good business strategy. I didn’t have the cash flow in the business to hire like an outbound call person or a telemarketer, so I had to figure out a different way to handle this because that strategy just didn’t work for me. Maybe it does for some other agent, but the way you laughed is probably saying that it doesn’t. So did you have something to say here?

No, no that was, I just think that was funny because it’s so, you know I work with a lot of agents who have teams, and the dream is that you can generate the leads and hand them off, and people [inaudible -cough] but it just doesn’t work out that way.

They don’t appreciate it I guess if they’re not paying for it, I don’t know. But, so what ended up happening was I’m like “Okay this doesn’t work, what do I have to do?” So I went back to books and I started studying sales letters and long copy sales letters which my original broker told me if it’s, if you’re writing something long people won’t read it, you’re wasting your time, and it turned out that is not true, right. So if you have a good sales letter with a neat story the people will read it, and what, go ahead.

The same thing applies to ads though, like a lot of times the advertising sales people, and your brokers, and people who aren’t trained in direct response think you got to have a lot of white space and you got to have short punchy things because people don’t read, but you know I always get a kick out of, our mutual friend Dan Kennedy always says “Nobody reads white space”. We know that for sure.

It would without a doubt, and actually Dan Kennedy, some of his books helped me a lot, like one of his books was The Ultimate Sales Letter. So this is where I started to learn about this approach. So I sat down and I was not, I’m not a writer or anything like that, but I sat down and wrote a long copy sales letter for my business, and the goal was to lead a prospect to the conclusion that I was an expert, I was really the best agent for their real estate, their needs, and I put a call of action in the sales letter because I just didn’t want to mail this letter and so I said at the end “If you’re interested in becoming one of my clients, fill out this application and fax it in to my office”, and so my goal was to pre-sell the prospect, get them to come, raise their hand and come back to us again, and so I, we start advertising for a, I would run a free report direct response ad, but the free report I sent was the sales letter that I wrote, and slowly but surely we started to get people sending in these client applications. They would come in via fax, some would come in via mail and some actually would drive to the office and hand deliver them to the office. So that was a huge turning point in my business because I was able to then hand off these applications, client applications to my agents, and my agents were able to convert 50-70% of those client applications into exclusive buyer contracts and then take them out and sell them homes and help them with their real estate needs, and so that one sales letter removed me from having to make the phone calls and believe it or not, it actually doubled my home sales from like 2004, I’m going forward each and every year, and the end of my story in selling real estate is that I ended up, I sold my small real estate brokerage for seven figures in 2007.

Wow. That’s some pretty impressive growth numbers, but what do you think drove the increase in the number of homes that you sold?

Well a couple of things. First off, to touch back on what we just talked about is once I realised that I could run a direct response advertisement, generate a lead and then mail them a sales letter and have an application come in, I had a predictable lead conversion type strategy in my business. So if I wanted to sell more homes, all I really needed to do was generate more leads. Because the sales final worked itself out where more leads would equal more client applications, more home sales. So once I had that little formula going, I could leverage it further by just, by more marketing, so that would be one thing.

The second this was when I wrote the sales letter I decided to target a specific niche in the market, and this is different than what I think a lot of agents do. A lot of agents want to be everything to everybody and I think that it’s impossible to do that any by selecting a niche you’re saving a lot of time, you’re able to offer maybe some compelling benefits to your specific niche, and when you do that you’ll see an increase in response rates to your marketing. Another thing…

How would you describe, what would you describe as a niche? Because I, we talked about that and I’m very familiar with it, but a lot of time, I’d love to hear how you would describe what a niche market is for people who maybe don’t have a crystal clear understanding?

Okay now, I don’t have a textbook definition, but from what I…

… It’s a gap, a possible gap in the marketplace where other real estate agent’s aren’t necessarily paying attention to, where you can dominate that specific area, and in my business I decided to niche with working with real estate investors, and at that time – this is back in 2004 – nobody was really paying attention to inventors. I’m not saying that working with investors today is the best niche because of all the problems with financing and whatnot here in the States, but at that point in time no one really wanted to work with investors, they were a pain in the neck. I decided to make that our entire business. So I don’t know if that’s a textbook, but it’s finding a pocket…

Yeah, no that’s, <crosstalk> like a definable market rather than just saying anybody who wants to buy or sell a home – that’s pretty broad, but when you can narrow it down to investors would be a niche, or first time buyers would be a niche, whatever. A segment of the market like that.

Definitely segment of the market, and then you have to be able to let all other opportunities outside of that niche go which is very, very hard to do. A couple of other things real quick on what I think helped drive the number of home sales because I think that’s probably important for your listeners, is that I finally learned or felt or recognised the real value of a lead which prior to that I don’t think I truly understood that, and lead conversion systems were huge for me. Obviously the sales letter, like we talked about, once I had a lead I could mail the sales letter, and I had a predictable result, a certain percentage would apply, a certain percentage would sign a contract, a certain percentage would buy. So that lead conversion system, and then I started to focus on creating sales assets for the business versus selling homes myself. So those would probably be the high points I would think that helped drive the sales.

Now isn’t it amazing though, because we talked about a lead conversion system and for me, that’s what’s so, that’s why I believe we have so much in common, I like everything that you’re doing because everything that we do is really based in systematic results and the value of system is knowing with predictability what’s going to happen. Like you know if you generate a bundle of a hundred leads and you send out this sales letter, the start of your lead conversion process, and I love how you call them sales assets, because that’s exactly what it is. If you’ve got an add or a postcard or any type of lead generator, or a website that predictably creates a result when you drive people to it, that is an asset. You don’t have to, you put in the work, you’ve done the, you’ve done all the hard work about it, and it can continually be deployed.

Oh without a doubt sales assets are probably the most, creating or building these for your business, are the most important thing you can possibly do, and like you said an ad is a very big asset. So like in my business I had one advertorial ad that I referred to as my million dollar ad. When I would run this ad, I would generate two, three, four hundred leads, I’d mail two, three, four hundred sales letters and we would end up with twenty five new clients – clockwork.

Like clockwork, exactly.

Month after month, month after month, month after month.

Well based on what you’re saying in the market place today, what do you think is the best niche to be in right now? We’re talking here in the fall of 2009.

You know, I know probably listeners aren’t going to want to hear this, but I think foreclosures have to be something that anyone that wants to drive home sales has to pay attention to. Even though the media’s saying “We’ve hit the bottom” and you’re hearing all kinds of competition, and foreclosures in certain areas, I still firmly believe based on everything I’m seeing in the market, that foreclosure home sales, the number, the volume is going to continue to be at a very high level for the next two or three years, and so if you take the 80/20 principle and you apply it to where the money’s going to be at, it’s the twenty percent that were all that, the twenty percent volume [were all] 0:13:58.5 eighty percent commissions, or it’s going to be in foreclosures. There’s a lot of reasons for this – one, obviously our employment rate is continuing to escalate, which means more people are losing their jobs, that means more homes are going to be foreclosure. I think we have a pretty big issue headed our way with all the option arms that are going to be resetting. From what I’m reading ninety four percent of people that have those option arms, they’re only paying interest which means they’re going negative in their monthly payment, on top of the decrease in value. So I think there is going to be a, there’s going to continue to be a large number of foreclosures coming into the market over the next two or three years, and even though you might not be excited about foreclosures, I think that’s where the majority of the home sales are going to come.

Either, it’s certainly, you see all of the, like you said it’s all over the news, you know it’s got, it’s coming. There still continues to be more and more of them, and that’s way, I guess there’s some momentum in it, in that the buyers who are buying, it seems like that, to them seems like they’re getting a deal. I mean it seems like that’s what they, that’s what the buyers are really interested in, is buying <crosstalk>

Oh yeah, no. In, you said the media has trained anybody thinking about buying a home that foreclosures is, they’re trained to think foreclosures, and another reason why I think foreclosures is a niche here in the States for people to pay attention to, is because the cost per lead to generate someone interested in buying a foreclosure is very, very, very low. Like when I…

Well there’s momentum.

… Yeah because you’re riding in the wave of what the media’s telling everyone, and that drives your marketing cost down dramatically, and to give you an example; When I was running my business, and running my advertorial ads, my average cost per lead was probably about fifteen dollars, and very profitable for me and I would be happy to pay that every day because I had that sales lettering system. But today agents that are focussed on the foreclosure market, they’re generating leads sometimes for thirty, forty fifty cents, in many cases free on Craig’s list, or if they’re running an advertorial they’re generating high quality leads for a dollar, two dollars, three dollars, which where I was paying fifteen dollars on average for a lead. So that whole media, all of that exposure of foreclosures is really driving costs down on the marketing side.

See it’s kind of interesting too that you, when you have an asset like your system, the conversion system that you were talking about, you don’t, you’re not afraid to spend money to generate those leads, even though, you talked about generating two, three, four hundred leads a month, and on an average cost of fifteen dollars, you’re spending four, five, six thousand dollars in generating those leads, and a lot of people just don’t have the confidence to do that because they don’t have a system that would convert.

And rightly so. If you don’t have a system converter, you may be wasting your money.

That’s exactly right, but here you are, you knew that you’re going to spend that money, but then at the end of the day you’re going to have twenty five new clients, and you’ve got the value of that is way higher than the money that you spent to generate those.

You know it’s funny you bring this up because I, like I shared earlier, my niche was working with investors. So we would help investors invest in real estate, by getting investors buy properties, and I’d crunch the numbers. So let’s say I wanted to make an investment, I could go out and buy real estate and I knew what my return on investment would be. Or I could run an advertisement for my business which I viewed as an investment, and when I crunched the numbers, running an ad for my business and buying new clients, which is essentially what I was doing, was far more profitable than investing in real estate, investing in any other traditional type investment, was putting that money into the marketing. It was by far the best investment I could have made.

I just did the numbers, just recently, because that, to illustrate that exact point. Right now the, everybody’s pretty happy, I think the Dow is up sixteen percent over the year. Stocks are really doing, kind of rallying a little bit, and look to see, if you had the foresight to pick the top performing mutual fund that’s going right now, it’s running at about a hundred and twenty five percent, and so when you look at that, it’s like you know we’re talking about when you’re doing, running a lead generation system that we’re talking about, you know, four, five, six, ten times the amount of money that you invest as your, as an ROI…

Oh by far. But once you have, the key though like you said is you’ve got to have that system in your business, and if you don’t have systems, you can’t get those returns obviously. But <crosstalk>

You mentioned seeing the real value of a lead, and so what did you mean by that?

Well you know, when I started my brokerage – like I said – I would run an ad and I’d pick up the phone, I’d call someone, and I would use some kind of script to get them to agree to an appointment, and if I couldn’t get them to agree, or if I couldn’t get through to them, boom it was next, I was onto the next one, making the next. You know I was kind of churn and burn mentality and I didn’t, I just thought if they didn’t sign with me now, that they’re no value to me, and that was a massive mistake because I learned that just because someone didn’t sign an agreement with me now, or didn’t respond to something I did or call, didn’t mean they weren’t necessarily valuable, and how I found this was, this is what ultimately led to me focussing on investments was we found a very good investment property and I think we sent out an email to all of our leads, and most of these people hadn’t replied, or hadn’t come in for an appointment, and we had a pretty big response and we were able to sell that investment property to one of our unconverted leads. And when that happened I was like “Wow this is, there is a lot of money in the database, even if I wasn’t able to get the person to sign a contract to buy a home when they initially responded to my marketing”.

Right, right. That’s interesting. So you had that, that’s an asset as well. Having a way to communicate with people who at one point indicated that they were interested in buying – that’s an asset in itself.

Oh without a doubt, and that led to, like I’d survey the database and a lot of these people, the majority of these people aren’t converted leads. So I’d survey, asking them what are their challenges, what are their needs and identified a lot of opportunities for products and services, a lot of them I didn’t pursue, but there are several back end businesses that a real estate agent could have that could be marketed to their database whereas a person doesn’t even buy a home but you’re generating income from that lead that you have bought through your marketing.

And so what kind of things, you’re not just talking about buying other types of properties, you’re talking about other types of services even?

Oh without a doubt. Like in my specific niche, I’ll give you a few examples – property management is obviously very easy add-on service if you’re working with investors and someone doesn’t want to manage a property. If you want to have property management, or you can hire somebody to do it, or you can refer to a property manager and earn a referral fee, and so not only are your clients potentially interested in property management, but if you’re running an advertisement that attracts investors, even though they don’t use you for your services, they still might be interested in property management so you can offer that service to your entire database and generate a nice recurring monthly income from it. So that would be one example from my niche, but in, but say in the foreclosure niche, you’ve got to think about a foreclosed home, in most cases it’s going to need some painting, it’s going to need some remodelling, it’s going to need some landscaping. So I’m not saying the agent needs to go out there and swing the hammer, but the buyer is more than likely going to be hiring someone to do these things, and it might make sense for the agent to be involved in some fashion.

Even if it’s an advertising fee or something to send their contact, or their offer to your list.

Like you create this special trusted list of contractors and maybe charge a fee to have someone, whatever the case might be, but there are all kinds of opportunities outside of specifically selling a home that I think is smart for agents to pay attention to.

That’s a great idea. Let’s talk about lead conversion a little bit. Can you explain what you did to convert leads in your business?

Well the first, obviously the first thing I did was we tried the outbound call thing, and it obviously works if you’re willing to make the calls. So I’m not saying that’s, it’s not effective – it is effective – but it’s not necessarily sustainable if you don’t have a tonne of cash flow, it’s just a hard thing to make work – at least that was my experience. So the long, my first sales asset I guess or my first lead conversion tool was the long copy sales letter where the prospect then filled out this application, sent it out to our office, and we started to get a certain percentage of those who applied, and we shared, turned into clients and sales – so that worked. The next thing I did was we, I created this free class, and it was, the class was for my niche and so then I started to market this class via email, I would, I marketed it in a newsletter, as an insert, or I could just send a regular old letter, a promotional piece about the class to my database, and I’m focussing on unconverted leads so I’m inviting them to a free class, and that class is really engineered to give them helpful information, but it wasn’t necessarily – I’m not teaching them everything they need to do. The goal of the class is to lead them to the conclusion that they really need my help as an agent because there’s some cost and mistakes they can avoid, and obviously in the whole foreclosure thing, there’s a tonne of mistakes that a buyer can make that would be costly. So I think that there’s a really good opportunity for agents with regard to that, but. So we market this free class to our database and people would register for the class, they’d come attend the class and at the end of the class, we would offer a free private consultation, and the numbers were that we were able to sign half of the people that attended our class into exclusive buyer contracts, and then obviously we’d be able to turn many of those into home sales, and so what happened was I wrote the class as like a Powerpoint presentation, I taught the first couple of ones and kind of worked all the bugs out, and after that I could have my team do it. So that, the free class was one, another one was…

If I could stop you for a second because I want to talk a little bit about this class – I know you’ve got others – but the class, just my listening to you describing that, I want to point out a couple of things that you did that maybe sometimes people skip over. You talk about your class, you said you wrote the class, and you worked out the kinks, and so what I know from hearing you say that is it was in itself another asset. That you weren’t just showing up and doing a different class every time, you weren’t just getting everybody in a room and saying “Hey does anybody have any questions?” You had everything I’m assuming you said in that was said for a reason, and all leading to the single purpose which was to make them want to get together with you for a private consultation, and measuring the result that you actually got at that seminar.

You are dead on correct. That class is a sales presentation, that’s really what it is. It’s, yes you’re giving content, you’re giving useful information, but the goal of that class is to lead the person sitting in the class to the conclusion that they need you, or they’re going to make a mistake, that you’re an expert, that you’ll save them money, you’re help, you’re leading them to the conclusion that they need to hire you as their agent, and so you’re right. So we, when I say work the kinks out, I’ll give you one specific example – My first class we have, everything goes well and at the end I start taking questions, and so when these people are asking questions I want to help them. I’m answering all these questions, and at the end everyone, I had answered everyone’s questions that they felt they didn’t need me, and so I wasn’t able to turn, everyone walked off saying “Hey it was a great class”, “High Five”, “Thanks, this was awesome”, and I think maybe we got one client out of the class because I just gave them all of my knowledge, they didn’t need me. So the next class I didn’t take any questions and we were able to sign, we are, it was half the people at that point in time then signed. So we did a couple of different things, tested a couple of things, worked things out, but you’re right – the whole focus was something…

So you totally see it now, the lesson that you learned from that was if “You probably have questions right now, so it’s getting late, but what I want to do is I want to make sure you have a chance to get your questions answered, and we’re, I’d love to set up an appointment where we can get together – offer a private consultation for you” <crosstalk> Everybody’s getting their questions answered, that was it.

I turned the problem into an opportunity, into a… So no, that was a dead-on. So that was one, I’ll give you one more which might be applicable to this whole foreclosure thing, is we would market mini open houses, or specific tours of homes for our niche. So my niche was investors, which I don’t know if it is the best niche right now because of financing but, so we’d say “Hey tour the five best investment properties on the market today” and so we offer that to our database of unconverted leads, and slowly but surely we’d start pulling people out of the woodwork. They’d attend these tours and we were able to build relationships and sign them a contract and come home. So it was, once I got one thing working, it was “Okay what can we do now?” and the goal is to try to, over time continually increase the number of clients that you are able to sign from your marketing. So you might not get them at the first crack, but if you keep working at it you’ll eventually sign more and more clients from all of your advertisements.

And that’s, so you slowly just building up your sales assets?

That’s it, that’s the mission. That’s the focus.

What else can you say about that concept of sales assets? Because I think if people can really get that, that’s a deep thing for them.

Well for me, a sales asset is something in your business that converts prospects into clients, and here’s the key – without your manual labour, okay. So that’s the key, and first I’m making outbound calls, that’s my manual labour. So for me that did not qualify as a sales asset. Had I had someone else making those calls and it worked, that would be a sales asset. So it’s lead conversion without your manual labour, and the problem is I think, most real estate agents are using, or are focussed on manual labour for lead conversion, and what that does is it dramatically reduces the number of clients that you’re going to sign, and the number of homes that you’re going to sell. So like my sales letter, once I wrote the sales letter, I could run and ad, or I could give a series of ads to my advertising rep, have those ads go in on scheduled dates, leads would come in, and I could hire – this is actually what I did – I hired a high school kid to come in after school, part time, I paid him $8 an hour. They would mail the sales letter to all the leads that were generated on that day or the last twenty four hours, and next thing you know, client applications are coming in via the fax, or in the mail, and all of that happened without my physical involvement, which allowed me then to just hand those off to agents, and home sales would eventually come back into the business, so that would be one. Now the free class which is a very, very, very valuable lead conversion tool, sales asset for your business – I hope your listeners really make a note of that – because if they’re not doing free classes, they are missing the boat. But, so like I, I wrote the class which was a sales presentation, and I, like I said, I tested it, I got the bugs worked out and then after that point forward, I made my agents give that, teach that class, and we did it on a rotation basis, and so once I handed off a class to them, I could run the marketing for the free class. The class would be taught, clients would be signed, and homes would be sold. So with the sales asset, your time and effort is involved in creating the asset, working the kinks out, and then after that you’re manual labour is not required for that system to go forward.

There are a couple of, you know how I always talk about the difference between Siegfried and Roy, and the Blue Man Group? When you’re doing the actual class, you’re being Siegfried and Roy, but when you teach someone else to do it, it’s more like the Blue Man Group – you just plug anybody in and they can get the same result.

One thing about the class, you talked about it, and it’s something that I always mention to people is that a class is a much better lead conversion tool than a lead generation tool. Has that been in your experience, like did you, you were talking about you using your ad to generate the leads, and then you were inviting those people to the class. You weren’t using the class as the lead generator. Is that accurate, or were you doing that, using the class as a lead generator too?

Right, well here’s, first off I’d say this – if you have a free class, you will always have a better response rate and a better client signing ratio, if that’s what you want to call it, when you market it to your unconverted leads. Because they are warm leads, they know who you are, they hopefully know your story. So that is by far the most profitable strategy with your free class. So what we would do is I’d generate the lead, I’d send the sales letter – if the person didn’t apply to be a client then I would market a class to them as my second lead conversion strategy that was layered on top of the first one, and then what we started to do in addition to that – so I’m marketing the class to my unconverted leads, is I did start to market the class to the public via advertorial advertisement and the ad did not generate leads at a very low cost per lead, my cost per lead went up with that advertisement, but what we found which was interesting, was the quality of lead was super, super high. Because this person, if you think about it, they’re responding to a class which means they want to learn more and the lead quality was very, very high, and so you are right, that it’s more profitable to run it to your own converted leads, but if you have a class that works, I would suggest you leverage it and run some cold advertisements because you’ll be surprised at the quality of lead.

Oh that’s good advice, that’s good. That’s inside information really, something that you have tested and proven for yourself.

Oh yeah and don’t tell anybody [laughs].

It will just be our secret – and the thousands of people that are listening.

Just kidding.

Well Rob, you’ve obviously, you’ve shared a lot in our interview here, but let’s assume that you were just starting out today as a new agent. What would you do right now if you could summarise to build your business, or to rebuild your business if you were going to move somewhere sensible with [inaudible]0:36:19.7 climate somewhere?

That question brings up all kinds of issues. But moving, we won’t go into those. But what I would do, and here’s a mistake, I made this mistake myself is I, when I got my real estate license, I didn’t know what the heck to do so I looked around our marketplace – who, I was trying to see who were the top agents, and I simply copied them. Now someone might look like a top agent, but might not be making a lot of money, so that’s probably not the best strategy. So what I think might be a better approach, is to go to your multiple listing service and study the data, and the data I want you to study is not what’s listed, expired – I want you to study what is selling, and I want you to look for trends in what’s selling, because if you can see where the pockets are of actual recent closed sales, that’s where the money’s at in your market, and that is telling you in advance that if you focus on that specific area, you have a much, your likelihood of success is dramatically higher because you’re filing the money in your specific market place. And so that is what I would suggest someone do – is study recent solds because that’s where the money is. So once you study that, then you can build your niche around that finding, and what I believe you’ll probably see, depending on where you’re at is that foreclosure sales are probably going to be a higher percentage of recent closed transactions, which would lead you to believe that maybe you should think about focussing or specialising on foreclosures over the next couple of years, and if that’s the case write a lead generation ad, write several lead generation advertisements that would attract foreclosure buyers or investors to you, and then work on your own long copy sales letter explaining why you’re the expert, what benefits they get for being your client, and then copy my strategy – put an application on there, get them to apply to be your client, then once you got that sales asset working, then maybe add a free class around that niche. So your class would be around “How do you buy a foreclosed home without losing your shirt” or something like that, and just continue to build and layer these sales assets on top of each other. But the start has got to be studying where the money’s at in your market, not copying other agents in your area.

That’s interesting so, I mean you know that’s totally applicable to most areas of the country. If you look at it it’s, foreclosures are the story right now aren’t they?

They are.

It’s certainly where everything is, unless you’re, live in North Dakota, or something.

Exactly.

Well that’s kind of cool. Now I know that you’ve got some, that you’ve written a few, that you’ve written some books and, is there something where people can get more information to stay in touch with you a little bit?

There definitely is, and I’d, what I’d like to do is I’d give my book away for free to your listeners because I’d like to make that offer to them, and I’ve got a go-to website – it’s freeforeclosureboombook.com and at that site you’ll be able to request my book, go through the various strategies I use to build my business, how I recruited agents, how I managed my time, different things like that, and I even, at the end of the book start talking about selling your business, and much of what I shared in the book is what I actually, the thought process I went through for selling my business. I know that’s probably not on the top of everyone’s minds now, but you start the process of selling your business way, way before you actually get to it, so it’s something to think about now.

That’s a fantastic, what, that’s a great model, is to, because there’s not many people who have been able to build something that they could sell. Most people if they were looking at selling their business, they’d have some sign frames and lock boxes that they could sell, and if they don’t really have any real value to it, the interesting this is, I teased you about moving to a more sensible climate, but the truth is you, the asset that you have is something that would give you that freedom. Really you could move anywhere in the country, and transfer those assets and start using them right away.

Well it’s funny that you say that, is because back in 2006 my wife and I, well mainly me, I wanted to move to North Carolina, so I had two options – one was to keep the business and run it remotely from North Carolina, or the other option would be to sell it, and I had my business down where I was working one, was probably one day a week from my home office, well actually it was two days a week. I would go into the office, have a team meeting and handle any broker related issues. But I was working from home, in my jeans and a t-shirt, and so I had those two options, and low and behold, one of my clients heard that I was thinking about relocating, and stepped up and ended up buying the business, and the reason why he was attracted to the business was because I had all those built in sales assets that were working systematically, and he didn’t have to have a tonne of experience running a real estate brokerage, because it was like a machine that was in place, and so those sales assets are very valuable for current home sales, and current commissions, and they’re also very valuable because I think they drive the value of your business up if you were to sell it eventually in the future to a buyer. The sad part of my story is that my wife changed her mind at the last minute, and we never moved to North Carolina.

So, stuck in Cleveland?

Yes for now at least. I’m not done, I’m not giving up yet, but I’m still here in Cleveland.

That’s funny. Well Rob, thanks so much for spending your time with us here, and I think we’ve got a lot of really great ideas. It’s really, you’re totally in alignment with everything that we talk about at Marketing Monday, in that direct response, and using your knowledge, using systems rather than using your physical labour, manual labour of doing things. So I really appreciate you spending that, and your book offer is very generous. If people want to go and get Rob’s book, which I would highly recommend, they can go to freeforeclosureboombook.com, I like that – crystal clear.

Thanks again Rob, I look forward to maybe we can have you on again as a, and do another interview here.

You are welcome, and I hope your listeners got some value out of it.

Thanks Rob.

Thank you.

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