Grow Your Land Business In 2024 Through Texting

Dan: Welcome to the real estate investing podcast, where we help you unlock your potential freedom through land investing, real estate investing, and entrepreneurship. Hey everyone, welcome back to the real estate investing podcast. Today’s topic we’re discussing scaling your land business through texting in 2024.

I’m your host, Daniel Apke, joined again by my brother and business partner, Ron Apke. Texting leads has been, you know, a really big topic for many years now. And obviously it’s work, it’s proven to work. And in this episode, Ron and I are going to discuss how to scale your business through texting and what actions to take to get started if you’re not texting.

So how to optimize and then how to get started if you’re, if you’re not currently using them. But Ron, let’s start on the topic. Why texting is so powerful.

Ron: Yeah, I mean, you can reach a ton of people. There’s a few reasons. One, you can reach a ton of people pretty much instantaneously. Um, text might roll out over a couple hours or something, but you can get 235000 text out in a relatively short amount of time for relatively cheap.

Uh, so you can get. From that, you can get a lot of leads, um, whether it’s cold or warm. I’m sure we’ll get into that, but I think what makes it so powerful and so scalable is the ability to reach a high number of people in a very short amount of time.

Dan: Exactly. And it’s more of a direct controlled faucet, I think.

So you think about your lead faucet. sending mail. It takes two weeks. You don’t know how many calls you’re going to get back when you’re texting. Generally, when you have everything in place that we’re going to talk about and you have your initial text, you, it’s, it’s, you’re going to get a set return almost from that and not always it’s going to differ, but you’re going to get this a certain response rate that comes through.

That gets you a certain amount of leads and it’s, A direct, it’s a more controllable faucet. I think there are pros and cons of it. We’re going to get into that too, but it’s a very controllable faucet. You need more deals. You have to, you can do the formula and work backwards. You need to send 3000 more texts and do this.

It’s, it’s very controllable. You open that faucet when you want and let the water pour in and get the leads and close it when you want. And it’s like Ron said, instant leads, very, very powerful. What, what are some of the big reasons why one should consider texting if they’re not?

Ron: I think budget is one, like let’s say you’ve sent mail and.

I don’t know your budget’s tight, whatever it is, or you haven’t sent mail, but you want to get into this business. Texting is a, uh, lower entry point in terms of financial entry point. Uh, you, you’re going to need a little more time to do this, but I think that is the main thing, Dan. Um, also just adding another revenue.

Or another avenue for leads. If you’re sending mail, you’re sending 5, 000 mailers a month. You know what the operations are like for that 5, 000 mailers. You don’t want to go up to 10, 000 mailers. You want to try some other avenues, whether it’s warm follow up texting or cold texting. I think that’s a good place to be like maybe instead of going up 5, 000 mailers.

Uh, you want to be a little more finance that you want to be a little more lean with your, uh, spending and you send 5, 000 texts and 5, 000 pieces of mail. I think that’s a way to scale up your business for sure.

Dan: Yeah, exactly. And you want more leads per your data. That’s a key point there. So if you have, if you pulled 2, 500 pieces of data, you still have those data.

You sent mail for him, whatever the situation is. You can take those leads, which you paid for, which is an asset at that time and get more from them through texting also as the industry gets more and more competitive and people start entering it, it’s a way to differentiate yourself, touch more people, get more people on the phones and that’s, uh, which leads me right to some of the cons of texting, which we’re going to get into next round.

The first one that comes to my mind is it’s more of an operational strain. In your business, but most people want more leads and want more deals. So I wouldn’t worry about the strain until you want to become as efficient as possible. Mail has been proven to be the most efficient avenue for getting leads.

And it’s been proven over and over and over again from that. But texting is a way to get more. Most of you guys want more leads, want more deals and want more money. Maybe it gets to a point where you’re so overwhelmed with deals, you pull back. But that’s why I think the pros outweigh the cons. You want more deals?

Here’s an avenue to go get them.

Ron: I think it’s a fast way. It definitely is a fast way to get deals to like, if you are just starting out or like, you need a deal in the next seven days. I don’t know. Like, it could be a case. Like, I need to find a deal to be able to wholesale something like that. Um, you’re going to get deals faster.

It’s going to be a grind. You’re going to set up a bunch of phone calls. You’re going to talk to a bunch of sellers. It might be one out of every 20 people you get on the phone, you actually close and get a deal from, it’s probably one out of every couple of thousand texts. Um, but that being said, it is a very instantaneous thing where if I sent 5, 000 texts out right now, there’s a good chance I’m going to be working all afternoon, probably tomorrow morning getting on phone calls, but I will have a deal by tomorrow.

I have no doubt about it.

Dan: Exactly. And. That’s the thing you got to get really good at when you’re texting is just figuring out who’s warm, who’s cold, and, you know, catering to that lead accordingly. Don’t waste your time on bad leads. You got to make sure the seller wants to sell and the land’s good.

Those are two questions we ask constantly. The seller is motivated and the, the land is good. So let’s move forward. Let’s negotiate. Let’s get them an offer, things like that. You can move down the pipeline. And there’s two types of texting that are primarily used. One is just a straight cold text. They’ve never heard from you before.

They’ve never received anything from you as a first outreach. You got there, you scrape the data, you bought a data list on, on online, on data tree, whatever it is. And then you just text them before doing anything. And that’s a cold text. And then there’s warm texting. Where you’ve sent mail to them, maybe you’ve targeted them before you sent mail two weeks ago and you’re going to text them now and they’ve gotten your letter and you’re kind of bumping them and reminding them, Hey, we sent you a letter two weeks ago.

I wanted to bump, bump this message and see if you had any interest in selling and then maybe get the conversation going. So you sent mail out warm texting, you sent mail out. It’s out in their hands. You text them to kind of remind them and try to get them to take some action to get more from those leads.

Which ones have we seen, if any, Ron, be the most successful? Warm versus cold and some of the pros and cons there.

Ron: I love warm texting because one, obviously, it’s combined with mail, which as we’ve talked about, mail is the Best return that you’re going to get typically in this business for the time spent and the money you put into it.

Um, and the thing is with sales guys It is multiple touch points to close deals in general in any sales multiple touch points are the most successful So you might get a deal one out of every 2 000 mailers if you just send mail What we’ve seen is if you also follow up with these people seven ten days after they receive your letter That’s going to decrease it to one out of every 1500 or so you’re going to drastically improve your efficiency of your mail in the high, like mail is expensive.

So you spend on 2000 mailers, you spend 1, on mail. Um, and you get a deal. If you can cut that down to every 1, 000 you spend on mail, 1500 mailers and you get a deal that is going to change your business really drastically over 12 months.

Dan: Yeah. So the way Ron’s talking for the warm texting is definitely the most efficient.

And it’s because mail is the most efficient is pairing it up with them and bumping that up to try to get a better rate of return essentially per mailer. But it’s also the most expensive because now you have your data price, you have the mail price and you have your texting price. So you’re combining all three of them.

The other options cold texting if you’re on a budget or even if you’re not on a budget and just want more deals and haven’t sent mail yet or whatever you your funnel lead funnel right now is weak and you just want more instant leads before you get your next batch of mail out, whatever it is. That’s where cold texting is.

And you, you start with an intro, pretty much asking them, uh, if they’re interested in selling their land. in the program extensively run, but that’s a cold texting. You’re reaching out, letting them know you’re looking for land in the area and you want to get that conversation started. That’s the goal of text one.

And then you got to take them down the funnel when they have our piece of mail there. They’re further down the funnel cause they, they read the mail and then our mail has a lot of information on it. And then it also has the offer price and there’s other things in there as well. So generally when they have that piece of mail, they’re much further down in the funnel.

So when you’re warm texting, you got to cater that lead a lot differently than cold texting. If they have your piece of mail, they already know the business and what you’re doing, what you’re offering and that type of stuff. But if it’s cold, you have to walk them through the process, how long it takes to close all that stuff.

And obviously deals are done over the phone. So you want to get them on the phone as much as possible. Deals aren’t done over texting. Texting is to get them on the phone, to get them their offer, to get them to close the deal essentially on the phone. But you want to get the goal of texting is to get them on the phone immediately.

And I want to go over what your systems and processes need to look like to really take this texting model and scale it. Cause it’s a lot. I mean, you’re talking about 15 percent response rate, 20 percent response rate, 12 percent response rate, whatever you guys get. That’s a lot. You send out a thousand, you’re getting 150 responses.

You send out 2000, you’re getting 300 to 400 responses. That’s a really, really lot of messages to go through. So there’s things that you can put in place like VAs and systems and have a really good CRM and funnel. And where they are in the process like this, this is a lot of stuff. This isn’t like mailing where you send out 22, 000 to get 15 calls back.

And then five of them want to sell mails. That’s why mail is so efficient. And that’s why people fall in love with it. Texting is different. It takes much, much more work. So let’s talk about systems and processes here.

Ron: Yeah. I mean, I think the number one thing when you’re texting a large volume is knowing how having a system for getting rid of people that respond to you and they have no interest.

Um, so like that is the. You have people who don’t respond and then you have the people who respond and they’re just pissed off. They don’t want to hear from you. All of that, um, like you not need to be able to get rid of that. And then you have like the next level of people who are showing some interest, but they don’t have an interest.

Um, we, we’re not sure about the price. Um, If you were, if you go and look on map rate or evaluate every piece of land from someone who seems decently interested, it’s going to take forever. And you’re not going to be efficient with this business model. You need to have, I think the most important, one of the more important things is having a price in mind for different acreage ranges.

If you’re texting this person and you’re interested in buying their 5 acres, knowing when they respond, Yeah. About what you’re paying for five acres. So, Hey, Mr. Smith, I see you own five acres in X County. Um, I I’m interested in this parcel and potentially purchasing this parcel. They respond back. Yeah, I’m interested.

What can you offer? And then you telling them over text, probably maybe you get them on the phone. But you telling them we’re paying anywhere from 18 to 25, 000. Um, I’d love to talk to you on the phone. Um, if this sounds like we can make something work.

Dan: Yeah, or you can get them on the phone and give them that offer range and kind of gauge their interest.

But yeah, you want to get rid of, like Ron saying, don’t harp on cold leads. The way we have our funnels in. Launch control, which is the platform where you use launch control. I think it’s land investing online. com slash launch control, but that platform, the way we have it set up, you, you filter them out and tag them with, you know, are they cold?

Are they warm? 90 day follow up, all these different things to put them in a funnel and then automatically text them based on the tags that you give them. So if they’re cold, just put them in the funnel. They’re not interested. They have no interest in selling and it’s going to text them again in six months or something like that, whatever, whatever you end up developing.

And that’s the thing you got to get them in the right funnel because eventually You’ll have so many tens and tens or hundreds of thousands, even of data records in all of these different funnels, cold, uh, long term follow up, short term follow up, all this. And then some of these leads eventually will come back to life because yeah, they didn’t want to sell 90 days ago.

Now we hit them with a short term follow up 90 days later, and it brings those back to life. So having your funnel set up in the systems are very important because you will get a lot of leads that weren’t interested. Now that we’ll be interested as we see in mail, we remail after 90 days. If we have success.

And we get people that we never talked to the first time. That’s because they weren’t interested in selling the land. We’re selling a high volume of mail out of 2000 people. There’s going to be a few people who had major life changes or change their mind or financial situations, or just want to get rid of their land.

They don’t live there. So that’s how we look at it. But getting them in the funnel is, is really important where they belong. If they’re warm, short term followup. Get it in the CRM with the next follow up date, all that stuff. And, and I wanted to point that out, and that’s something you guys, if you guys are doing this without a program to teach you, which is completely fine, you’re going to have to trial and error it and really figure out what’s working for you.

What are some of the steps to take to get started? The first thing, obviously, Ron, is getting your data. Assuming that, let’s just assume, That they know how to pick a County. They know what they’re looking for, what land they want. If you don’t go to our past YouTubes and watch those, we have tons of video on County selection, but the first step is get your data and then skip trace your data around.

You want to touch on those too?

Ron: Yeah. So I think that’s an important thing, guys, you need to obviously, hopefully you know how to select a County. Um, so you choose an area, then you go from there in terms of getting your data. So to get. What you need for your data is obviously the owner name. You need the acreage.

You need all the information like that. And then you need that to be able to skip trace that. And what we mean by skip tracing is getting their phone numbers. How do we contact them? You can also skip trace for email. So there’s ways where you can put in your funnel where you have email follow up stuff like that.

Um, But yeah, that, that’s the main steps, honestly. And then may making sure you have your systems and operations. One of the main issues, Dan, I see with people getting into this business texting in particular, if they don’t have the money to send mail is they just don’t have their operations set and they get so bogged down by sellers that like we talked about are just cold.

Dan: Exactly. And let’s talk about that. So Ron touched on, get your data, then skip trace, and you’re going to have to buy a software. So texting is not free. Skip tracing isn’t free. And texting isn’t free. We use launch control. It’s like 500 bucks a month for 10, 000 texts. Essentially. It keeps you compliant with laws.

It’s a very, very, very solid. I’d pay more for this any day over the other ones I’ve used. I’ve used a lot of other ones that do work. If you guys are more on a budget, there’s like REI reply, some other options as well. Highly recommend launch control, great support. They’ll get on the phone with you.

Anytime walk you through your funnels, all that stuff. Very good. So you’re going to have to invest in a So get your data, skip trace. Buy a software. They’re using monthly charges, give you 10, 000 a month for a set price, 500 bucks a month. You can cancel anytime I think with launch control, but once you have your software, it’s going to give you a blank slate, kind of like anything you ever buy with software wise, it gives you a blank slate to work on.

You’re going to have to get your funnel set up. Like we talked about. So you text them, then what happens, they reply, they go into the inbox, then you tag them and you got to get them in the follow ups and the cold versus the warm, get them on the phone. You have to set up your funnels, uh, spend a lot of time thinking on that.

There’s videos that we’ve gone over on that. We teach it in the program. There’s YouTube videos on REI reply or not REI reply on launch control, tons of videos. So get your funnel set up so that you have a system for them going down from cold all the way to warm to getting the contract, all of that stuff after that.

I mean, you, you have your data set. You got to import your data set, get it in there and you can start texting pretty much immediately with, with launch control. And that’s why texting is so great. That’s all you need to do. Get it set up, do your funnels. I mean, you’re talking one to two days of. If you want solid funnels and don’t rush it, but spend a couple of days on setting everything up, thinking through it, watching videos, getting comfortable, and then just start ripping them out.

Ron: Yeah, I think texting and that’s why I like launch control so much. The legalities that they follow. I’m really optimistic about that software as a whole and being a very scalable software. Um, and texting, like Daniel said, like it’s something don’t send texts out until you have those funnels set up. Do not just send.

5, 000 text, expect to get 500 responses. And then how are you going to do it if you have 500 responses? So you need to be able to put them into different buckets, different funnels, like Dan was talking about, which is really important. I want to talk Dan, cause we just had Matt on the other day. Matt said his biggest deal ever was from texting.

He said that 60, 000 deal he’s about to close, um, is from texting. And like, that’s, it does not just have to be texting for small deals. Like you can get, I think Matt’s was a buy for 50 and sell for like 125 or something.

Dan: Yeah. I’d look at texting just like anything else, right? We’re going after bigger deals.

There’s no limit to it, right? You’re just starting a conversation with them. Essentially. There’s no limit to the deals. You don’t need 10,000 other deals. Go after six figure deals, go after $75,000, a hundred thousand, $150,000 deals. There’s no reason not to at all. The thing is, guys at the upper eschelon of everything at the higher side, there’s not much competition in land.

Like you start bumping the price up to 500,000. It’s harder to get, it takes more scale. If you have funding lined up and you’re a good manager though, you can get funding for 500. 150 is easy to get funding for. Once you get up to 500, it’s a little more difficult and you got to know what you’re doing.

But that’s what I’m saying. Go after those hundred, 150, 200, 000 deals. That’s not a problem to get good funding with at all. Ron and I do it. Tons of others do it. And just don’t be scared of the top game. There’s such a little competition there. If you guys are actually catering to these leads, have a good funnel set.

You’ll get them. So stop. Cutting your things off at, you know, 20, 30, 000 acquisition. Go after some real money. I mean, you make six figures off one deal. That can change your life instead of making 10, 15, 000, which is great. That’ll keep the bills paid, but trickle in 20%, 40 percent of your mail and leads, make them high offers, like get, get expensive properties under.

And I’m talking more acreages to where we’re talking bigger parcels of land. Generally, when we talk about this, Ron.

Ron: Yeah, for sure. Um, and kind of finished off, Dan, we have a lot of members who talk and like, I think for newer people, especially like mentally, it’s tough. Like I sent 2500 mailers out. I only have 1015 leads.

Five of them are hate me and they don’t want to do anything with me. Um, but, uh, I think texting, like, even off the bat, when you’re first starting, like, if you want to get some leads, texting is going to do that. You want to have some phone conversations. Texting is going to do that. If it’s mentally, like, Exhausting for you or like mentally tough because you’re not getting enough leads from mail.

And that’s a real mail is the most efficient thing. Like at scale mail is the most efficient thing. But if you want some more leads, send 5, 000 texts and you’re not going to have a

Dan: lead issue. Yeah. I mean, especially if you’re aggressive for these aggressive people who don’t mind to work texting straight for the people who are a little lazy, not willing to get after it, you know, really busy, whatever the situation is, texting is not the best for you.

But if you want leads and deals, Go text. There is no reason you can’t lock up a deal this week if you want to text like there is zero reason. Start putting it on you. Don’t blame the mail. Don’t blame all that. Start texting. Get leads. And it’s literally a formula. And start tweaking it. There’s just too many resources online with texting and our program and everything else, Ron, to not get it done, I think.

I think it’s just very, very doable. Very scalable. If you want a deal this week, you can literally go after it and get it, I think.

Ron: Absolutely. We’ll link the, uh, we’ll link the launch control, the texting software down in the description then. But, uh, yeah, I don’t have anything else to add.

Dan: Perfect. The launch control is in the description land, investing online.

com slash launch control. If you guys are listening and not watching as always, thank you for joining. Please do us a huge favor and like, and subscribe our YouTube channel and share this with a friend. It really means the world to Ron and I, but more importantly, it could help change the life of someone else.

Thanks for joining and we’ll see you next episode.