I did a Facebook Live show today with Judah Hoover and Joshua Weidman. I had a blast, and I hope I provided some benefit for the listeners.
Big takeaway: “How the heck did you waste another day without moving to Arizona?!?”
I talked a little bit about how I got started in real estate. Afterward, I dug through some old stuff to see how we were marketing in those days.
I was licensed in May of 2001. I interviewed with a few traditional brokers and decided they were all in the business of fleecing agents – this is still the case – so I put my license with an apartment locator instead. I didn’t need to get bilked out of my one deal every six months, I needed to learn how to sell.
So that’s what I did. Apartment communities will pay big money for referrals when they’re vacant enough, but I also did leases that paid me $25 or $50. It wasn’t about the money, it was about getting a lot of experience very fast.
I built the first of the web sites that have fed us over the years, and I used wicked-simple SEO and very-cheap, very-basic pay-per-click ads to make my own rain – and to cultivate my own garden with it.
The broker was a sweet, smart guy, but he thought he was in the business of papering over the past mistakes of Grasshoppers, thus to get them a fresh shot at a new mistake. My thinking was that busy Ants need a timesaver, so that’s what I sold. I attracted supremely-well-qualified people who paid more rent in communities that paid more commission – and I collected referral fees, in many cases, for folks I never even met in person. Now that’s brokerage!
We have always lived by Jay Conrad Levinson’s “Guerrilla Marketing” – maximum impact from minimum spend by cracking the actual marketing problem. The image is of a promo piece we were using in those days. The file was laser-printed 4-up on an 8-1/2×11″ sheet. The sheets were trimmed, then the stacks of paper were turned into Post-It pads with a self-adhesive glue stick.
And then my wife Cathleen and I would get up at 5 am and cruise the parking lots of every motel on either side of the I-17 Freeway from Union Hills Drive to Thomas Road. We were looking for U-Haul or Ryder trucks – or over-loaded cars with out-of-state tags – prospecting for people who had moved to Phoenix without a place to land. I would put a sticker on the driver’s side window and we would move on to the next parking lot.
“Hey there, traveler. Do you think this little flyer sells the idea of urgency hard enough? Have you been watching your money fly away, day-by-day? Tell the truth. It’s as subtle as the dumpster-humping garbage truck that just woke you up, isn’t it?”
That’s as guerrilla as marketing it gets – and it’s also a great way to tell if you married the right person. Obviously, not many of those movers were our prospects, but the ones who were were ready to move in right away, where the bright line event that got me paid was the party moving in.
It’s not a great living, so you know. I did 30 leases in August of 2001 and grossed just $6,000 in commissions. But: I did 30 leases in August of 2001. And I made the dough to buy my MLS key. And I got my first two listings and started working with buyers. I had funds enough to take chances because I opted for high-volume experience over high-prestige bankruptcy.
We got more sophisticated in our marketing over the years, but it all still comes from the same place: The best guerrilla marketing is where your ideal victory condition is the unassailably perfect solution to the other guy’s problem.
