Off Market Real Estate with Brandon Bateman

george grombacher 0:00
Come on one lepa This is George G. And the time is right welcome today’s guest strong a powerful brand new babe and Brandon, are you ready to do this? Yes, I am. Alright, excited to have you on Brandon is the founder of the Bateman collective digital marketing firm empowering clients by leveraging a data driven creative paid traffic strategy. Brandon, tell us a little about your personal life more about your work and why you do what you do.

Brandon Bateman 0:37
I’ll be QUESTION So, a little bit about about me. So I live in Utah, I’ve got a wife and a little baby. She’s about nine months old now. So you know, kind of entering that phase of my life. And it’s been fun. So far. This business is something I’ve been writing for about four years. When I started, I was a sophomore in college just kind of eager to learn about digital marketing. And since we’ve kind of gone a few different directions, more recently, we’re specializing in the real estate investment space. So working with a lot of real estate wholesalers, real estate, flippers, motivated seller lead gen, and that’s kind of where we found our best growth and you kind of place that we want to stick around. So that’s, yeah, that’s sort of the journey of the company about 10 seconds. Nice. Why?

george grombacher 1:26
Appreciate that. So what what we’re as as you got fascinated by this, in college, which I think is awesome, because too few of us actually are in college around that age and find something that we really enjoy, and you turn it into an actual business. So I think that that’s great. Congratulations on that. What what is the problem that you saw that you said, you know, what, I think we can really put a dent in this.

Brandon Bateman 1:55
So yeah, I guess you could say it’s kind of good timing on my side. Because the I mean, if you look at the real estate industry, I don’t know how much you know about the off market real estate industry. So this topic may be lightly covered in this podcast. But the idea is, is investors are the one to make investments, the best investments are found off market. And historically, a lot of people go through foreclosure auctions, you know, stuff like that. But specifically, the direct to seller marketing space has blown up in the past few years because foreclosure auctions have stopped, and inventories at an all time low. So right now, the problem that’s bigger than it ever was before is that investors are looking for deals, and there’s fewer deals than ever before. And those that are the best at finding them are those that are more or less controlling the market because they’re getting them for significant price discounts. And you’re making larger fees by selling them to other investors, or they’re taking those pieces equity in their own properties, or whatever the case it is. But the point being, if you’re a buyer, in the residential real estate side, right now, your choices are essentially, one to overpay, because everybody else is overpaying. We’re number two, to get creative. find better ways to get discounts by negotiating cleverly with sellers on off market properties. And because what we do is help people find those properties, then it’s become very valuable recently.

george grombacher 3:20
Nice. Yeah, I’d imagine that between the two options of just simply overpaying or getting creative and figuring out new ways to get in front of new opportunities and to position yourself that people will be more interested in that option.

Brandon Bateman 3:34
They are but let me tell you, it’s hard. There’s like a, we have, we have a whole bunch of clients that I mean, our average, to give you a little bit of context, we work with probably 100 real estate investors. Now, our average client probably does maybe 75 houses that they purchase a year, which in the world of real estate investing is generally larger investors that are very savvy at this, and they’ve gotten really good at it. And we have a lot of people that are really well run great businesses that we work with. But I can tell you, there’s a lot of people that have tried to do this stuff and fail because it is a hard business. It’s competitive. You have to I mean, you have to build out a excellent acquisitions department, you have to have strong marketing, and you have to have the stomach to kind of work through it. And be consistent with the business while you work out those kinks. And a lot of people just don’t have it in them.

george grombacher 4:23
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. All right. So when somebody comes to you, and you said you have let’s say you have 100 investors, they say you know what, I were interested in buying upwards of 75 properties this year. We buy more, but we’re just not getting the opportunities. And here here we are. How do I get more opportunities?

Brandon Bateman 4:48
Yeah, so I mean, when it comes to digital imagery that you can do in this industry, there’s there’s lots of stuff people are doing direct mail, cold calling TV advertising, radio, door hangers, like there’s there is all kinds of different stuff. Digital side, the reason people value it, and by the way, I’m not damaged with other marketing channels, I think I just like marketing that works and, and you know, we just work on one channel that happens to work. But you know, whatever works for business works for a business. But the reason people that love digital marketing is because it’s a different kind of lead. Specifically, we love to do a lot of marketing on search engines. So if you look at that stuff, like for example, if someone searches on Google, sell my house fast for cash, or something like that, they might be likely to be a distressed seller, at the top of the page, they might have paid ads from Google, they may have organic listings lower, there’s kind of two ways to be on that page with PPC and SEO. But if you can capture that lead from there, basically, this is someone who typed into Google that they want to do this thing. They looked at all the options there, they decided to click on yours based on what it says or its position, then they went to a landing page. And then they decided to read that and they decide to input that information in order to get a cash offer based on what it says there. But suddenly go through all those different layers. They are a true inbound lead, meaning they came to you to them in a lot of our clients are spent a lot of their time chasing down sellers trying to find properties. And the idea of turning on a string of sellers that are instead of them chasing them, going to the investor and looking for a solution completely changes the business, because now you don’t need nearly as much effort or help on the acquisition side. Deals tend to be bigger people tend to be more motivated, all that kind of stuff.

george grombacher 6:35
Yeah, that certainly strikes me that the better job on the front end you can do of qualifying prospective sellers, the easier your job is on the back end as as an investor. But that’s easier said than done. Because I imagine that there’s, if you’re working with 100, there, there must be 1000s and 1000s of people trying to get the same deals.

Brandon Bateman 6:58
Yeah, it’s absolutely true. So it’s competitive. And that’s, that’s what scares people away, is you look at it. And by the time you pay for leads like that, they’re very expensive. By the time you work them, that’s hard. You need qualified salespeople that are really good to work them in such a competitive environment. And you take like all those steps there. And that’s what scares people away. But our clients, by the time they do those things, and they pay the expenses, they have a higher margin business than most businesses. So it’s expensive, but not overpriced, I guess you could say probably our average client, if you look at the the amount that they’re making on a single deal, it’s usually going to be maybe around $30,000 on each one. It’s difficult to I mean, I’m just throwing out numbers out of nowhere here. So they vary a ton. But it’s typical to maybe pay like seven grand to where the marketing expenses, seven grand on leads in order to get that property, and maybe two to then pay, you know, three grand to an acquisitions manager who did the sale and all that kind of stuff. And you had it all together, there’s a lot of margin left in the business, even though you just spent seven grand on leads to find the house, because the amount that you get the house of a discount is where the true value is.

george grombacher 8:17
Yeah, well, it certainly makes sense. If I can, if I can invest $20,000 and get 30. I’ll happily do that over and over and over again as many times as I possibly can. So how has How do you see? Well, I guess there’s a couple of questions, perhaps first, how has digital marketing changed since you’ve been doing it? And what does the future look like? And then based on that, how do you counsel people to put together just an entire strategy?

Brandon Bateman 8:49
Yeah. How has it changed? So in this industry, probably some of the biggest changes that people talk about is housing restrictions. There’s Equal Opportunity housing laws. And certain things have happened maybe a year or two ago that, for example, Facebook was sued for allowing people with housing ads to target based on age based on gender based on zip code, because it was viewed as discrimination against those that were in those areas and not giving them an equal opportunity for housing. Which you know, how you perceive that view that is a little bit bogus, in the world of our online advertising works like to target someone with an ad is not discrimination against the person that you don’t target if you ask me. But anyways, that happened. And because that Facebook had to change their policies, Google had to change their policies. So you removed a lot of targeting options from from online advertising, and that’s when a lot of people gave up on it. Ironically, that’s when we started getting more traction than we had before. And I think the reason being we’ve done we’ve always been maybe it’s just a benefit of me being so young under us. Seeing the way the market is going or whatever the case is. But we’ve always been more focused on kind of the future of where the market is headed, and then trying to rebuild the strategies in the past. So one example with that is everybody with digital marketing just wants to target the heck out of everything. And they want to feel like it’s super targeted. And that’s, that’s what every single one of our clients asked us to do. The reality is, which is remarketing these days, a lot of targeting is very broad. A lot of advertising is more mass advertising, and a lot of the true magic of what you bid and who exactly the target and that kind of stuff is algorithmic. And these algorithms are a lot stronger and more powerful than anything that we can do with our own data. And feeding the algorithm, what it needs to be successful is our primary job seekers, advertisers. So that’s a, that’s probably one of the biggest changes, we provide a lot more and algorithms that in countless split tests have generally outperformed our ability to target, especially once targeting options are removed. That’s one thing that I think we’re a little bit more forward on compared to other agencies, because it’s a little bit counterintuitive, but that time you really understand how all of it works. And you know, things like Moore’s law, you know, the idea that every 18 months computing capacities are roughly doubling and machine learning algorithms are becoming significantly smarter, by timing takes into account all those different factors and kind of give up your ego of knowing what’s right for the advertising campaign and give a little bit control to the algorithm in the right way. If you get the right data. That’s where we found the best results.

george grombacher 11:33
Got it? Nice. So how do you how do you think about balancing or differentiating between paid ads and organic SEO type? Growth?

Brandon Bateman 11:47
Good question. I mean, sto if we look long term is, as you can probably expect the best return for our clients. paid ads are a more immediate return. And that’s, I mean, in almost every industry, that’s the trade off that you play between those two, SEO is going to be almost always a better return monitoring. So how we manage the trade off is we explained to the client the best can pros and cons of beach. And we kind of let them make a decision. But what I generally try to explain SEO is something that I would invest in as soon as I have money to invest in it. I’m guessing you probably believe that too, based on you have this podcast another form of organic marketing, that isn’t the kind of thing that you just started the podcasts. And then the next week expected to have tons of people watching the podcast and tons of traction with whatever you’re trying to accomplish. It doesn’t happen like that you grow slowly over time. But it’s an evergreen marketing strategy. Those advantages that come from it come a lot, it’s almost like you spend your money, trying to build a machine that now spits out leads at a certain rate rather than spending money on leads, it’s like instead of going to the vending machine, but dollars and get leads out, it’s like learning about the machine that just gets leads out once in a while. And that’s, I mean, that’s a complete change in a business, because you’re no longer on that hamster wheel just constantly needing to market and forget more money in order to stay alive. Instead, you’d have a flow of inbound leads. So I would invest in it as soon as possible because it takes so long. That said, If your business isn’t going to be alive, by the time you benefit, either because you’re not playing on this business long term or because invest in SEO is gonna put you out of business. Don’t do it. So it’s one of those things where it’s an investment, I would prioritize. But it does have the right time in the business. And it seems like a lot of businesses right at the beginning based on the uncertainty of the future are just not quite ready to invest in it yet. But it’s one thing that I see more sophisticated business owners doing more and more is they invest in sto early and maybe it’s because they have the capital to do so maybe it’s because they’ve seen the fruits of it before. But I think you asked me that it’d be something that would be my number one priority in terms of an investment. But over a multiple year time horizon.

george grombacher 14:03
So how do you think about investing in SEO? Is it and it’s it’s it’s it’s money? It’s time? It’s all those things?

Brandon Bateman 14:13
Well, it depends on how you do it. Because let’s just say this podcast here, this is probably for you. This is time and money. And so you’re obviously here, I imagine you have some production costs and things like that. And in some ways, time is money. So there’s opportunity costs, the things that you could have done otherwise. If you look at one of our clients investing in SEO with us, it’s more or less just money because we do a lot of the time components. It’s a factor of we’re out there writing content and we’re building backlinks and we’re building that consistent reputation in the local area and like all that kind of stuff. And they pretty much just work out the money and and that’s pretty much it. So it just depends on how you do it. But they could also be sitting there like providing content. I don’t know and A business owner that imagines they’re best used to the business than sitting in some room reading a blog for their website. That’s just I just had, I find it so hard to imagine that that would be the best use of any entrepreneurs time, but they certainly could do it if they want to.

george grombacher 15:15
Yeah, yeah, I appreciate that. So it’s, it’s figuring out, okay, it trade off of what my top priorities are, because I only have a finite amount of resources. So I can sit there and write a blog, or I can have Brandon’s team write the blog, I can be doing video content, I can be doing podcast episodes, or I can be doing other stuff, growing my business and then investing lifestyle about priorities, isn’t it, Brandon? It is.

Brandon Bateman 15:45
It is in Yola. I mean, I don’t know what your experience has been my experiences as my business has grown. And as I’ve matured, the number of opportunities has increased significantly. And the level of pickiness that I have in choosing which ones are right, for me, has also increased significantly. I think everybody kind of goes through that through that same phase. So that’s where I think everybody gets to a point where anything you can pay for that you don’t have to spend time on is a whim. Kind of at that point. I can just pay everybody to do everything for me. I’m not about to go DIY something right. Hire the expert. Get it done, right.

george grombacher 16:22
Yeah. Especially now that you have a nine month old baby. So that’s probably helped to hasten that.

Brandon Bateman 16:28
Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Don’t ask for my advice on work life balance. Anything good to share?

george grombacher 16:35
I love it. Oh, Brandon, the people are ready for your difference making tip even though those are some good ones right there. What do you have for them?

Brandon Bateman 16:43
You know, honestly, depending on who I’m talking to, it seems like, overall, the value of a marketing system that works is I think undervalued. In business in general, especially for a lot of new business owners. This is something that I’ve seen, like, what’s my business found, predictable marketing system that we could use to acquire new clients. We’ve seen exponential growth. Since that point. I’ve seen that happen for our clients. And it’s one of those things where, like, people are always looking at the downside, like, what if it doesn’t work, this cost money, and always scared about it, but the companies that do hit something there, they then have the ability to scale it and then have the ability to do it for multiple years to then have the ability to get referrals from the stuff that organically comes from and all this kind of stuff. That’s completely business changing. So if I had any takeaway, just be like investing in marketing, I think is the number one investment for most businesses because all all else will follow if you can create the demand. And it seems like more, so many businesses just struggle to find the demand and yet they’re scared of their money. I see so many entrepreneurs that are just stuck in that cycle of just not really getting the investment it needs. And for me that’s kind of what turned my business around.

george grombacher 18:03
Well I think that that is great stuff that definitely gets come up. Brandon, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you and how can they engage with you

Brandon Bateman 18:13
so the you can you can find my company comm my email is Brandon Epping calm if anybody has anything specifically for me, or if you’re a real estate investor and you want to learn more about what we do, going to the website you can get in touch with with Noah who has our sales department and can you know help you see if it’s a good fit, but yeah, those are probably the best ways to get in contact with us.

george grombacher 18:40
Excellent. If you enjoyed this as much as I did so Brandon your appreciation and share today show the friend who also appreciates good ideas go to Bateman collective calm, it’s be a te ma N collective calm and check out the resources and it’s a great site. They’ve done a great job of breaking down all the different components and things that you ought to be thinking about and then get in touch with them. Thanks, Kim, Brandon.

Brandon Bateman 19:05
Appreciate it.

george grombacher 19:06
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai