Have you thought about creating a TV commercial for your real estate business? TV commercials help you build an automated marketing channel, target the demographic you want, and they’re not as expensive as you might think!
In this episode, Clint Coons, Esq., of Anderson Business Advisors, welcomes Tony Javier, founder of the Real Estate Masters (REM) 10X TV Program. Clint and Tony discuss the value of advertising on TV where you can reach 10X more people, faster and cheaper with less effort than many other forms of marketing. Tony can help you appear in your own TV ad within 30 days, and he’s proven that people who see you on TV may not want to work with a realtor, and will begin knowing, liking, and trusting you to buy their home.
Highlights/Topics:
- Tony’s entre’ into TV and real estate started with late-night infomercials
- First TV spot earned 10X Tony’s investment
- Go to remtv.com and get on tv within 30 days
- Tony explains who can benefit from a TV spot
- The cost of advertising with TV and your target demographic
- Should you appear in your own TV commercial?
- How many people you can hit with each $5 of ad spend
- Reaching a lower-income audience with TV
- Advertising on TV is easily scalable
- Doing commercials is only for those who know what to do with leads
- Limiting ads in each market
- Check out remtv.com to start planning your TV spot
Resources:
Get Started with the 10X TV Program
Free Asset Protection Workshops
Full Episode Transcript:
Clint: What’s up, guys? Hey, it’s Clint Coons here. In this segment, I’m going outside. I’m thinking about different ways of building your real estate business. We’re going to talk to an expert on how to use television.
You’re probably thinking, that’s way too expensive. Believe me, this is something you want to learn about because my guest, Tony Javier, is going to walk you through how you can harness the power of television for direct response marketing to create massive lead flow for your real estate business. All right, let’s get started.
All right, Tony, like I said, it’s really great to have you on. I know that people that are watching this right now would just like to know, how did you get started in this industry?
Tony: It’s interesting. I was waiting tables in college 21 years ago now. I saw a late night info product on TV, Carleton Sheets’ No Down Payment System. I ended up, as I call it, a broke college student. A couple of hundred bucks for a course was a lot for me. I think I had less than a thousand dollars in my account.
Interestingly enough, I used to buy a lot of stuff on TV. It’s just the weirdest thing. I’d see gadgets on TV and stuff like that. I saw this infomercial talking about how you could buy properties with no money down, and of course, I was a broke college kid. There were all kinds of examples.
If people remember Carleton Sheets—he passed away I think a couple of years ago—his TV commercials were on air for decades. He was talking about people who would come on and be like, man, I bought 50 properties with no money down, and now I’ve got $2 million worth of equity and $20,000 a month in cash flow. I was like, oh, that’s so cool.
I pulled out my credit card at that time. I don’t even think you can go online and buy it, you had to call in. I called in, a lady answered, and I took my credit card. Within a week to two weeks, I had the system.
In April of 2001, I remember specifically, I grabbed the course over the weekend. I just sat and I just studied it. I just read it, I studied it, and I finished the whole course within a couple of days.
It was September 2001, so 9/11. After 9/11 is when I closed on my first two properties. I closed on them the same month, no money down. I had my dad cosign on the properties for me. He put the down payment for one. The other one, I was able to buy it cheap enough, where I could find a loan that would lend me the money to purchase the whole property, and actually ended up refinancing and getting either $10,000 or $20,000. I want to say it was $10,000 back cash when I was waiting tables and not earning a whole lot of money.
Clint: You’re rich then, right?
Tony: Yeah. It totally blew my mind. Within two years, I was able to buy 10 properties like that, no money down, and have hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity. I was able to quit my job and go full time into real estate. The rest is history 21 years later.
Clint: You go into real estate, and that takes you on a different career path as far as what you’re doing right now, which I think is of interest to people. You’re taking this a different approach as to how you generate leads because for a lot of the investors or people that are out there, it’s where do I get deal flow? How do I find people who are interested in working with me, selling me properties, buying properties? Those types of things. So, that brought you to television?
Tony: Yeah. It’s a funny story behind TV. Things just happen for a reason. I feel like there’s a lot of synchronicity with what happens in your life, business, and that kind of thing. It was December of 2011. It actually might have been 2010. I might have the years wrong.
I may actually be on TV a year more than I thought, but it was right around 2010–2011. I went to a networking event. I wasn’t supposed to go. I was sick. I was like, I am not going, and I had someone talk me into going. I meet this guy and we become really good friends.
The next week or the week after, he invites me to a poker game. I go downstairs. This is Wichita, Kansas, we have a basement. I go downstairs, there’s a table set up for poker. There are 10–15 of us. I sit next to this guy and I’m like, oh, shit, that’s Chad from TV. I’ve seen that guy on TV before.
I started asking him. I’m like, hey, Chad, I’ve seen you on TV. How are those TV commercials doing for you? He’s like, we are crushing it. That is the only marketing we do. We do millions and millions of dollars a year in business just from TV commercials.
I started asking him about them and then he’s like, you know what? You’re asking questions that my media guy would know. His name is Drew. I’m going to give you his phone number. Why don’t you contact him and he can give you the scoop on TV?
I called Drew and I said, hey, Chad said I should call you, maybe this TV could be good for my business. Tell me about it. He’s like, yeah, for X amount of dollars, I think I could probably get you a pretty good amount of commercials. Let me go to the stations, let me negotiate for you. I’ll come back to you. If it sounds good to you, we’ll produce a commercial for you.
He comes back to me, I don’t know, a week or two later. He’s like, I got some really good rates. Here’s the ad spend. I was like, wow, it’s not as much as I thought it was going to be. That’s perfect. Then we shot the commercial, and within 30 days I was on TV.
This was back in, again, I keep saying 2012, but it could have been 2011. I’m on TV. Throughout many years, people are like, you’re on TV because of real estate investing. People don’t think TV commercials are going to do well. People think it’s branding.
The first month I was on TV, I was able to 10 times my investment that first month. Basically, I was almost able to pay for a whole year of ad spend from my first month on TV. Not only that, but it just built credibility in my market, it helped me with branding, helped me with raising private money, and it’s still to this day the number one lead source I have 11–12 years later.
Just like you said, it just evolves. I did the phone book back in 2003, I think it was, when the phone book was still popular. This guy cold-called me out of the blue, sold me on phonebook, and ended up doing really well with that. It’s interesting how time evolves, how things just fall in your lap.
Like you said, you have to find good sources of leads. You have to do it in a smart manner. In order to survive in a business, you have to have a good flow of leads. A lot of people don’t stay in the business just because they are not able to generate the leads that they need to.
Clint: Tony, if somebody is watching right now, and before we go on, if they wanted to get a hold of you because they’re thinking to themselves, hey, TV is for me and I’m intrigued, how would they do that?
Tony: Go to remtv.com. You’ll be able to see clips of my TV commercials or visuals of it. You’ll be able to see everything that we do and how our program works. You can simply go on there, fill out the information form there, and see if your market’s available.
We can talk you through what you could spend in your market, what we feel like the results could be in your market, and let you know if your market’s available. If it is, then we can run you through the process. It’s a very quick and easy process. We can take you through to get you on TV within 30 days.
Clint: Awesome. Guys, check out REMTV. All right, let’s get back into it. What you’re doing then is you’re advertising for people that are looking to sell their home. They call the number off of the ad. They call in, you go out, and you determine whether or not you have people go out there and determine whether or not this is a deal that you want to take. Is that how it works?
Tony: Yeah, motivated seller TV commercials. Hi, this is Tony of Professional Homebuyers. Are you looking to sell your home? We’ll buy your home as is for cash, no fees, no commissions, no hassle. If you’re thinking about calling us or thinking about selling your home, give us a call. We provide the phone number and the website.
Most people call the phone number. Some people will go on our website and research us. We’d like to have the phone number on the TV commercial so they don’t google us, which is going to happen every once in a while. Sellers reach out to us directly.
You look at it and you’re like, why would people just call a TV commercial? Why wouldn’t they just go online? Why wouldn’t they whatever? The great thing about TV is that you’re hitting them when other people aren’t. There are a lot of people that are on mailing lists, cold calling lists, and texting lists.
We’re going to hit those people, but we’re also going to hit people that aren’t on the list and that are just thinking about selling, maybe their mom they know is going into a nursing home in the next couple of weeks, or maybe their parents just passed away the previous week, and they’ve stuck with this house that they don’t know what to do with.
A lot of people think that TV is just for branding. Branding is one of the top benefits of TV, 100%. Your brand is getting it out there and making it credible and relevant, but direct response TV gets people to call you, gets you a good volume of leads, gets a good consistent volume of leads, and has just provided a really good return for us over the last 11–12 years.
Clint: Who should consider using this type of direct response? The wholesalers, flippers, buy and hold, all the above?
Tony: The perfect client is someone that is experienced in real estate, doing a good volume of deals, already spending money on advertising, has a good sales team that’s dialed in, and is able to work the leads in a bunch of different aspects. They will buy and hold, they will fix and flip, they will wholesale, they will wholetail. That is the perfect avatar.
We have everything from that, that we’ve helped get people on TV, that avatar, all the way down to someone that’s just doing a deal or two a month, that is looking for more consistent leads, and maybe wants to help get their name out there and really make a splash in their market.
You have the perfect avatar that no brainer, they should be doing TV commercials 100%. Then you have someone that’s a little bit newer in the game that may be doing just a couple of deals a month that is good for as well.
People will ask me, 21 years in real estate, what is one thing that I would do differently going back 21 years ago knowing what I know now? There are two answers that I have. One is I would have gotten into a mastermind, which at that time, maybe there weren’t masterminds, but gotten in a group, a meet up, gotten a coach, got support starting out the business because for the first 10 years, I just put my nose down and grind it away without asking for help. The second thing I would have done differently is found TV commercials sooner.
We do have some new investors or newer investors that we’ve helped with TV commercials. That’s the thing about TV. It’s very non competitive because people think that you have to be a big business and that you have to have a big budget in order to do TV commercials, and that is totally not true. If you know what you’re doing or have someone on your side that’s willing to help you with it, there is a way to do TV commercials efficiently, effectively, and not just for branding but actually to get a good return on your investment.
Clint: That’s immediately what comes to mind. If I was going to do television, what is it going to cost me? I can imagine, people are watching this and this is what I’m thinking, too, is I got to come with a big wallet in order to go on television. I’m going to be turning three, four homes a month if I was flipping or buying two or three properties with sufficient cash flow to keep this thing rolling.
Tony: The great thing about real estate investing is we have high profit margins. On the low end, people are making $10,000–$15,000 on a deal. You have some investors that may not be great at negotiating, that only make $5000 on a deal. But a lot of real estate investors that we work with are making anywhere from $20,000–$50,000 on a deal. It doesn’t take a lot of those deals to get a good return.
A hundred percent, any marketing channel you have, you want to get consistent deals. You probably want to do at least a deal a month from every marketing channel. The great thing about real estate investing is we have high profit margins. On top of that, with TV commercials, we’re going after an avatar that is older and lower income, maybe middle income. For that reason, TV is perfect because that’s who’s watching TV.
Think about when TV started coming around. It was decades ago. People that grew up on TV are still watching TV to this day. In fact, people that we helped get on TV, I say, when you go to listing appointments or seller appointments, do you notice their TV on? They’re like, actually, yeah, I do. Later, the report would be like, hey, the last five appointments I went on, four of them had their TV on while they’re on the appointment. I feel like it’s a perfect marriage of hitting the right avatar and then also having a high margin business real estate investors that makes TV super effective.
Clint: Let’s say that I was considering this because to me, it’s really appealing, and it’s intriguing that you get yourself out there on television. I assume, when you cut a video or a commercial, is it a pre-canned commercial that you’re speaking on? Do you have the individuals doing the ad spend about the commercial?
Tony: When we run TV commercials for real estate investors, I run it like I would want it run if I was the client and like I did when I first started. We have our clients in the TV commercial. It’s not me, unless they want me to do it. There are some clients that are like, I don’t want to be the face of it. You’re good at it, you do it, and that makes it a lot easier for us.
The part of the benefits of having a TV commercial is personally branding yourself. What that does is when you are in your market meeting with contractors, meeting with realtors, and meeting with private lenders, you have the credibility of being on TV. They feel like they already know you.
Think about the people that are on TV that you know of. If they were to walk down the street, you would be like, oh, wait, that is so and so. You’d be more likely to have a conversation with them, and you’d be more likely to interact with them if they came up to you and talk to you, as opposed to some stranger that comes up to you and you’re like, who are you? What are you trying to sell? It’s super powerful.
Having our clients on the commercial I think is the best thing to do. It’s cool because we’ve tested different things now that we have over a hundred real estate investors running TV with us. Husband and wife teams have done really well. Families do really well, which is super cool. Having a husband, wife, and their kids in there, has performed very well and has gotten a lot of good feedback from consumers.
You definitely want not only your brand in the commercial, but if you are comfortable being in the commercial, which we’ve had clients that have been super introverts that are like, I don’t want to do it. We’re like, okay, you don’t have to. They’re like, well, I don’t want to be in it. We give them a teleprompter, we coach them through it, we do plenty of takes because sometimes they may feel a little awkward, but we can do magic in the editing room and make them look good on TV.
Clint: How long does it take? Let’s say I wanted to run some television ads. You cut the ad and then it starts running in your market. Once it starts running, when should you expect to start receiving phone calls? What does that look like?
Tony: It’s interesting because we launch people on Mondays. Literally by the middle of the day, Monday, a lot of our clients posted in our Facebook group or texted me and be like, we’re already getting phone calls. That’s pretty typical within the first couple of days of getting phone calls. As far as getting deals, most of our clients are getting deals in their first month, at least one deal, if not multiple deals in the first month. It’s pretty crazy how quickly it took off with our clients.
When I launched this a few years ago getting people on TV throughout the country, I was like, okay, my TV commercials worked really quickly. I’m wondering how long it’s going to take my clients to start getting deals. I’d prep them. I’m like, wait three to six months. You need to give it at least three to six months. Luckily, most of the people are like I did back in the day.
Luckily, a lot of my clients are getting multiple deals in their first month and doing really well with it. It works very quickly, it works very effectively. Lucky for us because it makes us look good. Lucky for our clients too because they start getting a return on their money pretty quickly.
Clint: When you throw up that phone number on the screen and you start getting calls, you already mentioned that it sounds like you have to have a sales team in order to make this work, or is that something I could just handle on my own? Let’s say I set up a phone number or Google number, and it’s just me. Or is this something, where I need to go and get some VAs to work in the backroom where we do an 800 number? Does that matter?
Tony: We’ve had clients do it in many different ways. I always recommend the phone to be answered. It doesn’t matter whether it’s you, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a VA or lead manager in the US. The phone, just try and answer it as much as you can. If you can’t answer it, get back to them very quickly if they call.
We push the phone number pretty heavily because we want people to call. We have their phone number as opposed to sending them to a website, and they could potentially get lost. We have I would say probably 70%–75% of our clients have a sales team, where the owner is the one that we talk to, that we take through the program, and then their team is answering the phone. I’d say about 20%–30% of our clients are answering the phone themselves and doing the deals themselves.
What I say is just be prepared to answer a lot of phone calls. Some of the markets that we get into, it’s an okay amount of calls, but sometimes the floodgate opens. We actually had one client. I think it was last year, actually. He literally canceled because he had too many leads. He was getting 100–250 calls a month and he’s like, I can’t handle the leads. That’s not super typical, but plan on having a lot of leads come in. If they don’t, at least you’re prepared for it.
Clint: That’s like saying I have too much money. Those are problems.
Tony: I know, right?
Clint: That’s really interesting. If you’re comparing television to direct response postcards or something like that, mail, how does it stack up?
Tony: I’m glad you asked that. Let’s compare pricing first. Direct mail. If you send out a thousand postcards, what would that cost you—$500 give or take? Fifty cents a postcard, give or take? For TV to hit the same thousand people, guess how much you pay per thousand people for TV?
Clint: I’m going to guess, it’s going to run you somewhere around $5000 just because I think TV is expensive.
Tony: Let’s say you send out a thousand direct mail pieces, you pay $500. To hit the same thousand people on TV just once, how much do you think that costs?
Clint: $5000.
Tony: $5000? Okay. Try $5. For every $5 in ad spend on TV, you’re hitting a thousand people once.
Clint: Really?
Tony: Absolutely. If someone has a budget, and they’re spending $10,000 a month, they’re hitting 500,000 impressions to people. It is a lot of commercials. The cool thing is that, when I got on TV, I realized that we were hitting a lower income demographic, which not a lot of people are hitting. Not only are there more people watching it, it’s less expensive because not as many people want to go after low income. They want to go after people with money that can spend money. We’re looking at people that don’t have as much money so they can sell the property to us, and we can benefit and obviously help them as well.
That’s one of the many reasons that we’re successful with TV commercials. A lot of our clients, we’re getting them seen a lot. In fact, in my market, I’ve got 1500 commercials a month being played. My commercials are being played 30 times a day to tens of thousands of people, potentially maybe a hundred thousand people a day. It’s insane how inexpensive it can be if you know what you’re doing.
Clint: How many calls do you get a day?
Tony: We average probably anywhere from one to three leads a day, somewhere in that range. But you got to remember, we’re hitting a small demographic. We’re getting people that have distressed properties, owned them a long time, most likely, and are looking to sell right now and don’t want to sell to a realtor because they’re embarrassed of their house. It’s pretty amazing that we can generate a lot of leads from such a small demographic with TV, but that’s just the way it is.
Clint: How about scaling it? If I started out and as I want to grow, is it something that’s easily scalable? You just start running more ads?
Tony: This will blow your mind. We have a pretty decent sized market. I’m not going to name what it is, but we have a client that is spending $115,000 a month on this market. He didn’t start there, he started much lower. We’ve got a client that started at $10,000 a month in one market and scaled it up to $50,000 in a market.
That same client is actually the one that came to us and said, hey, I tried TV commercials, I heard they’re great, but I’m not getting any results. We looked at his commercials. There were so many things wrong, the way the commercial was, the way the phone number and the website was. He did everything wrong, so he tried to do it himself. We took it over. He ended up increasing his ad spend to $50,000 in that market, and now he’s in five markets spending, I think it’s $150,000–$200,000 across five different markets.
It is something that you can go into a market and spend on the lower part of the spectrum, then scale it up, and then also take it and plug it into other markets as well. We’ve got multiple clients that are in multiple markets that have figured out how to virtually wholesale deals and are really creating a scalable business with TV commercials with us.
Clint: What would you recommend? If I’m a real estate investor, should I have a certain level of experience before I go to TV? Or can you just jump right in right away?
Tony: Here’s the thing. If you’re doing deals and you know how to do deals, it’s probably going to be okay for you as long as you can answer the phone, can handle the lead volume, can close on deals, wholesale them, or figure out what to do with the leads.
If someone comes to me off the street today and says, I’m a brand new investor, I’ve never done a deal, am I going to turn them down? No, but I’m going to be very picky because I don’t want to spend their money, then him or her or come back to us, and be like, I wasn’t able to do deals because they have to figure out how to analyze properties and negotiate, all that kind of stuff.
One story I’ll tell you about, we’ve only had probably between 5 and 10 brand new investors that we brought on, and we brought them on for different reasons. Either they had a sales background, they owned a successful business before, or they had a substantial amount of money that they were willing to put at it. There was one guy that worked a full time job, and he was a division one college quarterback several years before. He just begged me to get in.
He was like, I know you don’t take on new investors. This is the first new investor I took on. He’s like, you will not have to coach me, you will not have to teach me, I’ve already learned, I will figure this out. I’m like, dude, if this guy could play division, one college quarterback at a high level, I would imagine that if he gets a good lead, he could figure out what to do with it.
Long story short, he made $50,000 in his first couple of months or something like that, and it was off and running. If you’re a new investor, I would say there’s probably a small percentage of people that would be good for TV right out of the gate, but I think it’s worth the conversation to see if it’s something that could potentially work for them.
Clint: I’m sure there are some people that fail, though, right?
Tony: Oh, 100% yeah. I wish we could say we had a 100% success rate. Anybody who says they have that is probably lying. We do have a very high success rate. We have a very high success rate of getting people on TV. That’s one of the reasons we like doing the fulfillment and doing the whole process for people.
Typically, when someone comes to us and cancels, it’s usually a sales conversion problem. That’s why when I’m talking to them, I’m like, you need to be able to handle the leads and figure out how to monetize them. We can drive the traffic. We can get the phone ringing. But if you can’t monetize the traffic and monetize the leads, then it’s not worth anything.
We’ve had clients come to us and be like, hey, we got 90 leads this last two months, and we’re only able to do one deal out of it. We’re like, that’s probably not a lead issue, that’s more of an internal issue. Some of them just just go away. Some of them, we dig into the process and then after 30–60 days, they realize their team wasn’t doing what they were supposed to and turn it around.
Absolutely, there are reasons that TV doesn’t do well for people. Smaller markets are probably a little bit better than bigger markets. We have people in bigger markets doing really well. The thing about smaller markets is a small ad spend can go a long way and can get really good returns on it. I would guess our success rate is probably higher than almost any other marketing channel and any other company out there for real estate investors.
Clint: One thing I’d be concerned about. Let’s say that I started working with you, and we’ve picked a market. Let’s say it’s where I live in, in Pierce County, Gig Harbor area. I’m running an ad. Three months later, somebody sees that ad as a real estate investor like, damn, that’s pretty good, I’m going to do the same thing. They call you up and say, hey, I want that market that Clint’s in. Now I have competition. How do you stop that from occurring?
Tony: The way we run our TV ads with real estate investors is we license spots throughout the country. We don’t want to over saturate it. We do two to three investors per market. We could do a lot more in some of the markets we’re in and probably a lot of the markets we’re in. If you came to me and said, hey, I want to run TV in my market, someone else calls me the next day and says, hey, I want to run TV, too, we will sell another spot. We will not oversaturate the market.
Here’s the interesting thing. There are some really smart real estate investors out there. We have a lot of those come to us because they can’t figure it out. We’ve actually had some that said, we tried to do this on our own for three months, we called stations, we didn’t get returned calls, or we talked to a rep, we didn’t like the representative, or they came and pitched us this huge number that we just didn’t want to pay.
There are a lot of different reasons that real estate investors or even any business owner doesn’t get on TV, and one of them is it’s not easy to do. You have to know what stations to be on, you have to know what shows are right, you have to know what pricing is good. You have to have a good script, you have to have a good phone number, you have to have a good web domain. Those are all things that are part of what we call a TV launch formula that you have to have.
To answer your question, even if you have five, six, seven investors in some markets running TV, there’s typically half a million to a million people in most markets, compared to if you look at people that are texting, cold calling, and those kinds of marketing methods. There are hundreds, probably, in any given market. I don’t think there’s going to be too much saturation with TV. We’ll know when that point is and figure out how to deal with it.
We have three real estate investors in many different markets, and many are doing very well. In fact, that market that I told you about, we have one investor spending $115,000 a month, and we had another investor that started at $10,000 a month that has already scaled up to $50,000 a month. We know there’s one other competitor outside of our market spending over $100,000 a month on TV as well.
I wouldn’t worry about it getting saturated. If we don’t have somebody in our program, chances are, it’s not saturated. If we get to a point where we know that we have one real estate investor in that market and it’s a little saturated, then we’re not going to add another. We have ways to look at that and analyze it.
Clint: Correct me if I’m wrong. I’m thinking about this. If I wanted to go on TV, one of the issues is going to be, I got to be there available, as we talked about it earlier on the phone. If I’m still punching the clock with my W-2, I have to have some back office that’s going to help me here. Because if those ads are running in the middle of the day and I’m working at Boeing, I’m not available, and if I don’t have a VA, then they’re going to voicemail.
Can you time the ads and say, hey, let’s run them in this block here? Is that how you do it? Or you just tell someone, hey, here’s how you’re going to find the most success, and this is what you have to commit to?
Tony: We actually have one client now that I realized it’s one of our new investors. She’s been with me for a year-and-a-half now. I haven’t heard from her in a long time, which means she’s probably doing okay. She used to contact me when she first started and had a lot of questions. Anyway, I let her into the program because she was super smart, super educated. She’s some kind of engineer and something. You could tell that she’s just really smart.
She’s still, from what I understand, work a full-time job. She started her TV commercials and worked a full time job. The way she did it was she had someone she hired to answer the calls during the day. When she got off at night—actually, I think she worked from home, so she would take breaks—meet with that person and say, oh, that’s a good deal, why don’t you set me up for a Zoom call, set me up to go look at the property, or however she did it. She did it on the side. She was doing very well the last time I talked to her, and she did it with a full time job.
It’s not ideal for that to happen. I’d rather someone be full time in the business, answering the phones, and being on top of things. But if someone works a full time job and thinks they can handle it, then we can figure out how to make it work. Again, she had someone answering the phone for her while she wasn’t available. That’s the way that she made it work.
Clint: If I was going to reach out to you, and I was interested in getting started on TV, but I don’t know what I don’t know, do you all take me through and say, all right, Clint, here’s what you need. You need a phone number. It needs to look like this. We need to get you a website. Do you have the resources?
Quite frankly, I wouldn’t want to spend my time and throw it up. I’d want somebody like you or you could direct me to people that can do it, so I know right out of the gate that the money I’m making investing to get this off the ground, it’s going to pay the highest dividends, the ROI.
Tony: Yeah, that’s why people hire us. Again, we have this formula that we work with. We know it shows in stations to be on. We have scripts that we’ve proven, that have worked really well, that we put together for our clients. We set them up to shoot the commercial in their market. We guide them.
In fact, I had a 30-minute phone call yesterday with someone that we signed up that’s going to be spending quite a bit of money in a market. He’s like, I want to make sure I do this right. I needed to talk to you because I want you to talk me through this. We went through probably 10–15 domain names. This is what I want to buy. What do you think about it? I’m like, you’re going to spend $1000–$2000 on that domain, let’s brainstorm some other domains.
We went through a bunch and then bam, we just came up with, oh, perfect, that’s the one that is very easy to remember, short and easy. That’s what you want to happen. You want, when people are watching commercials, to be able to remember the phone number. We coach our clients through that. And then a web domain that’s easy to remember as well because what happens is if they miss either one of those and they don’t have DVR, which is going to happen with a lower income demographic, they’re going to google.
Guess what happens if you’re not all the way at the top. Even if you’re at the top, they’re probably going to see the other competitors and go, oh, okay, there are professional homebuyers. But you know what? That ad looks good too. I’m going to go to these other guys and fill out their form as well, as opposed to if they go directly to your domain that you hopefully have them right there, or if they call you, you’ve got them, and if you can get out there quickly and service them well, then they’re much more likely to not go to somebody else.
I’ve pulled some of our clients and asked them the question, like are you typically the only appointment there? They’re like, we have so many other marketing campaigns and we compete with a lot of other people on appointments, but we noticed with TV commercials we are typically the first one out there and usually the last one, unless, of course, they can’t buy the property. That’s another great benefit of TV as being one of the only out there if again, they call you or they go directly to your domain and you service them properly.
Clint: I just started thinking about what you were saying about professional homebuyers. That may be something where you come up with Big Lou Homes or something like that, that it’s really easy to remember that name, Big Lou, so they would google that. That would probably cut out some of the competition because I can’t imagine there are too many Big Lous that buy homes in that market.
This is really intriguing putting all this together. We’ve all seen it before on TV. You got the Caveman Group out there that runs the ads, and it works. As you’ve proven in what you’ve done with your modeling and building up your real estate empire and those that you’re helping, I really think that this is one way to differentiate yourself because so many people are looking for those marketing channels as, how do I find more motivated sellers
You got to reach out to them in a way which they haven’t been hit because they’re probably getting tons of postcards in the mail, so you got to cut through all of that. I can imagine, some people may still drop postcards because what you stated with branding, they see you on TV, and if you’re still doing postcards and they see your postcard, that’s going to help you out a lot in getting someone to be receptive to want to reach out to you. Do you ever recommend that, hey, even if you have TV, you don’t need to abandon your other marketing as well?
Tony: The great thing about TV is, if people are doing other forms of marketing, TV helps those forms of marketing. Like you said, direct mail. If you are doing direct mail, and they see that we’ve had many, many deals that people will call us and say, hey, we called you from a stack of this direct mail, and we called only you or called you first, one of the two, because you’re on TV, we know you’re credible.
Websites, you can put as seen on TV, and you put your TV commercial on there. It performs exponentially better than if you don’t have as seen on TV. In fact, there are studies on that as well. Like you said, if you’re doing any other forms of marketing, even people have done texting and cold calling, and once the lead is warm, and they really feel like it’s someone that is actually a seller that wants to sell, oh, by the way, we’re Big Lou Homes. You’ve probably seen our TV commercial, and they’re like, oh, yeah. That’s you guys? That conversation is just so much easier.
Being able to brand it with everything else is very powerful. The thing about it is (1) when people know, like you, and trust you, they’re more likely to do business with you, and (2) it’s going to be easier to negotiate.
We look at our profit margins. I think our profit margins are bigger on TV deals compared to others for two reasons. We’re hopefully the only one out there, so we’re not competing with people. But even if we are, there are people that have come back to us and said, we got three or four offers, yours is $15,000 less than the next person or the highest person. We’re going to go with you guys because we know you can close. We know that you’ve been on TV for a while, and we just feel like you’re going to close. We just never heard of these other guys.
I could go on and on. It has helped us raise private money. It has done so many things for us. Once you have your brand out there, and you have not only your personal brand, but like I said, you as a brand out there as well, it just helps you to do business better and easier. People just like doing business with people they know, like, and trust. If you’re on TV, they feel like they trust you. It’s just weird how that happens.
Clint: That credibility factor is, like you stated, really important when you’re meeting people for the first time. It’s like when I wrote my first book. My wife’s like, why are you writing a book? I said, because it gives you credibility. If you put a book out there, you could be brand new, and you throw out a book. Now people think you’re the expert in that field. I think I am an expert in one field, but it’s important.
If you’re trying to grow a business in real estate and you want to scale, I would highly encourage anyone that is watching this right now to go check out Tony’s site, tonyjavier.com, right? There’s another way to get to you as well.
Tony: Yeah, you could go there. The better way to go directly to the TV information is remtv.com. It stands for Real Estate Masters. You can go there. You can see a visual of the commercials we do. You can go on there, fill out your information, see if your market’s available, and then schedule a call with me or my team. We can talk through it, so we can look at your market. We can give you an upfront idea of what you need to spend on TV and talk you through the whole process.
It’s pretty simple, the way we’ve done it. Anybody who wants to get on TV, we’ve pretty streamlined the process. Within 30 days or so, we can have you up and running on TV if there’s a spot left in your market, of course.
Clint: That’s great. I’ll have the links in the show notes. Just click on the show notes. You go down there, you click on the link, and it’ll take you right over to his site. Is there anything else you want to leave in passing to the people that are watching this right now?
Tony: I think the only thing I could say is it’s just been a game changer for me. If I wouldn’t have found TV 11 years ago, I don’t know that I would be in business. Could I have figured it out? Probably, but there are so many other marketing channels that have come and gone. TV is the one that consistently performs over and over and has built just a big name for me in my market.
In fact, I live in San Diego now. I moved from Wichita, Kansas seven years ago to San Diego. I get to invest in the Midwest but live in a warmer climate. Anytime I go back to Wichita, there are people that recognize me. They’re like, oh, Tony, you’re the guy on TV, or you’re the real estate guy.
It’s funny. There’s a guy in Whole Foods. I don’t think he works there anymore because the last couple of times I’ve been there, he hasn’t been there. He used to make a big scene. He’s kind of flamboyant. He’s like, Tony Javier, professional homebuyers. It’s embarrassing, but funny at the same time. It has done wonders for me.
Now I just love seeing it when we launch people on TV. I had a guy the other day. He’s like, dude, I need to give you my results for my first 30 days. He’s like, we have $150,000 of profit locked up in our first 30 days. I get those texts all the time and Facebook posts. I could show you dozens of those. It’s just unbelievable to be able to see that, to help business owners put them on the map, hopefully get them a more consistent lead flow, and to help them stay in business longer.
As you know, you’ve probably seen a lot of businesses come and go. The next thing comes, people are texting and cold calling, they’re doing really well, and then all of a sudden becomes really competitive or compliance shuts them down, and all of a sudden, they have to pivot. If they don’t have another lead source, then they’re going to go away. They’re going to have to figure out how to do something else.
I’m all in on TV. This is pretty much it. I’ve got multiple businesses. I do a lot of other things, but TV is the number one thing that I love to do and that I spend most of my time on helping other people.
Clint: I think it’s great. I want to thank you for taking the time to come on and share that aspect of real estate investing and how to create that lead flow. Thank you.
Tony: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Clint. I appreciate it.
