Talking Real Estate Leads with Andy

Video Transcription

Jared Wright: ... right here again with our dear friend, Andy Scherer, and Andy is a longtime real estate professional, real estate coach, real estate guru, and so we're lucky enough to have Andy with us. And Andy, I appreciate it, man, so thank you.

Andy Scherer: Hey, man, my pleasure as always, as always, buddy.

Jared Wright: Yeah. Little do people know, we talk a lot throughout the week. I was even telling Sean the other day that you and I are rapping all the time, so I enjoy our friendship and our relationship.

Andy Scherer: Same.

Jared Wright: And our business partnership, and that's why we are here today. So tell me a little bit about before the partnership with The Share Group, what were you doing? Where were you utilizing some data?

Andy Scherer: Being in real estate for as long as I've been, I was a loan officer in 2007 coming through. Even then, we were grabbing data from, what was it? Was it Sales Genie?

Jared Wright: Yeah, Sales Genie.

Andy Scherer: Yeah.

Jared Wright: Yeah, that's where we all cut our teeth from. Drew and I both worked at Info USA a hundred years ago.

Andy Scherer: Yeah. So we would grab cold call list from Sales Genie way back then. Obviously, internet leads side of it was a big piece of the mortgage business, especially in '07, '08, '09. '09 hit, 2013 starting with expireds, and it's the typical run, man. I'll drop names. So between Vulcan7, REDX, we used Coal Realty Resource to pull circle prospecting stuff. It's literally every no name brand of real estate data, and it was what everybody gets, it was what everybody expects, that you get name, number, and now there may be email but the quality of data just simply isn't there. It's all about the quantity when it comes to those data sources.

Jared Wright: Absolutely. Well, cool, man. So we met through one of your students that had utilized our list through a previous relationship.

Andy Scherer: Greatest introduction ever.

The Partnership

Jared Wright: Yeah, absolutely, right? And so yeah, talk a little bit about the introduction and then what we're doing now together with the projects we're working on.

Andy Scherer: Yeah, so as a coach been, obviously we look at different ways to generate listing business and that's really where a lot of the agents focus, is how do I get more listings? How do I make sure that I solidify the market? And I've been talking about absentee owners for a long time. And so when my coaching client, her name's Carrie so I'll give her a quick nod there. She's a freaking rockstar.

Jared Wright: She is.

Andy Scherer: So when she's like, "Hey, this is where I pull data from," I was like, "Hey, listen, I got to connect with these guys and see what they're doing, see what they're all about." Honestly, man, I thought when I was going to step in, y'all were going to be charging an arm and a leg for some of the stuff that I was seeing, because I think it was 60% of the people had emails come through. There was at least a 75% ratio of people that had phone numbers, and then some of the ancillary data as well, like the AVM stuff.

Jared Wright: Yep.

Andy Scherer: We're not seeing that. Typically, I wasn't seeing that stuff. We were pulling AO data from, what was it? Not Prospect Plus. I can't think of the name at this point. It's been so long.

Jared Wright: [inaudible 00:03:25] It was My Leads Plus.

Andy Scherer: My Leads Plus, and then I think Property Finder was another one, or Remine was another one. There were so many other ancillary things, but it was just all, no offense to them, but just lackluster data. So the introduction for you guys, it was such a huge thing. So we started on the AO side, on the absentee owner piece, and then it was with Sean, he was like, "Hey, we can do this other stuff."

Jared Wright: Right. Some owner occupied data, right?

Andy Scherer: Yeah. And then it just expanded from there, man.

Jared Wright: I love it. So talk a little bit in detail with some of the success we're having. You're a very humble man but you manage a pretty extensive team of some callers and some support for your students and some other resources that you're doing. Talk a little bit about how you're utilizing that data now. Drew's got a plumber here. Talk a little bit how you're utilizing the data now and some of the successes that you're having with it.

Andy Scherer: So right now, we have things going obviously on the absentee owner side. I still think that that's a huge market for real estate agents to be in. Circle prospecting is another one. I just actually pulled a list of my farms here. I hate to say it but it's so cost effective to do stuff like that, so the circle prospecting piece is huge. We're also doing some tri merge data, whether they're falling on distress, likely to sell, and they're falling on another third list as well, I won't give my secret sauce there.

Jared Wright: Right. I love it.

Flexibility and Quality of the Data

Andy Scherer: So there's, again, that flexibility of the data is freaking huge. But inside the ISA stuff, usually on a three-hour dial session, they're dialing 270, 280 numbers. We're setting two to three appointments per week easily on average. We're typically driving right around four to five other leads on top of the appointments, and then these are not phone appointments. These are true face-to-face appointments. So I think Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we actually had one this past week that we set eight appointments in three days.

Jared Wright: That's crazy.

Andy Scherer:   It's nuts. And I can't attest enough to the quality of the data, and I think that's really one of the biggest factors in how we're looking at the conversion ratios.

Jared Wright: Yeah, that's pretty cool stuff, especially with the market the way it is. There's no inventory so the hard work is paying off for these real estate agents that are out there proactively communicating, either through outbound calling or direct mail or door knocking or whatever that might be.

Andy Scherer: Can I tap into that real quick too?

Jared Wright: Yeah.

Andy Scherer: So this might be a huge golden nugget for your folks but a lot of the people, because they sit there, and you're absolutely right, the inventory, it's negative inventory right now. I think we're down 3.3 million homes give or take, and so we have 18 to 24 months in order to make up for that inventory. Foreclosures are going to obviously start to come back around but the thing that people aren't looking at is how to leverage their buyers to find off market properties. Where you guys can come in, where I've been pushing my coaching clients right now is take your buyer list, take what they're looking for, what neighborhoods they're looking for, bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, that whole thing, which you guys have all that info.

Jared Wright: All that info, yes.

Andy Scherer: And pull the houses in those zips or in those neighborhoods, get the data, go door knock, send yellow letters, send whatever, call, email, whatever you've got to do to start to get more inventory for your specific buyers. We have one coaching client that's done 13 off market properties just from letters.

Jared Wright: That's crazy, for very targeted specific requirements [inaudible 00:07:05] in hand.

Andy Scherer: And they use the buyers.

Jared Wright: Yeah, they have a buyer right there that's willing to pay full price for these properties that are not even getting to the market, and that's the advantage of the data I think, and then keeping it current and up to date to help. One other project that we're working on too is if a realtor goes after expired listings for let's say three plus years, let's pull the expireds three years ago and then rerun it and flag the homeowner sold flag, if there's a property sold in the last three years, then we'll flag that, but in the meantime, we can add a new phone number to those records and then you can run those right back through. It's just another point of contact and that's I think what we're really good at, is finding motivated homeowners or owner-occupied or non-unoccupied that the competition really isn't going after.

Andy Scherer: One of our newest ones took a $1.2 million listing within the first couple weeks. Again, when we're launching into something like the ISAs or they're calling or whatever else, they go in with the expectation like, Hey, we might get a few leads, we might see a few appointments, we might get something, but they're used to the, "Hey, we're going to guarantee you 10 transactions and it's $5,000 up front, and it's whatever else." But when they step in and actually have a sales team who's outbound calling, even if they were outbound calling themselves, their skillset is great so to solidify a listing within honestly the first couple weeks, that's really, realistically, that's what agents are looking at. If they actually get the data and they truly stay consistent and just have conversations with these people, and it doesn't have to be scripted.

Jared Wright: No.

Andy Scherer:   I think that's where a lot of agents tend to get a little bit nervous maybe. I don't know what to say, I don't know how to talk to them, whatever else, but if they just have a real estate conversation, man.

Jared Wright: It is. We were talking to Addie about this. It goes to going to get a shot. You have this preconceived notion that it's going to hurt so bad and you're like, "Oh my God, I don't want to get a shot." You'll get the shot and you're like, "It's not so bad," and it's actually just going and getting it done. And hard work does pay off and you're definitely a hard worker, Andy, dude, and we appreciate you as a partner for us. It's something that we definitely take for granted and appreciate wholeheartedly, so thanks for joining us today, my man.

Andy Scherer: It's my pleasure, my friend.