Knowing As Much As Possible About Your Real Leads Is Crucial
Episode 260 Mail Right Show Podcast with Special Guest Sean O’Toole, a successful career in Technology entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Sean combined his technology and real estate experience. After purchasing and flipping over 150 residential and commercial properties, he could exit the market before the credit bubble burst. He also launched ForeclosureRadar in 2007, which was quickly recognized as the nation’s best foreclosure information source. His mission to continuously help the little guys succeed in real estate inspired him to launch PropertyRadar.
How It All Started
Sean has had 3 startups as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He flips houses, commercial properties, and industrial properties with over 160 transactions in his portfolio. By the end of 2005, he began to track foreclosures in California and saw the alarming increase in numbers, which made him realize the need for ForeclosureRadar. In the beginning, it was frowned upon by most realtors, but as the tool proved, it solved a specific problem in the real estate niche, users began coming into the platform. By early 2008, billions of foreclosed properties were sold using his platform. When the foreclosure market was coming to an end, Sean launched PropertyRadar, an expanded service of the ForeclosureRadar but dealt more with property information services. In 2014, customers were using the platform to build a variety of marketing audiences.
How to Build An Audience with PropertyRadar
In general, most realtors doe geographical farming, which is primarily a long term strategy. PropertyRadar leverages public records, title companies, title history, and title insurance, which are all based on readily available data. Still, with the PropertyRadar platform, the information is made available for realtors in an easy-to-use platform. The market is broken down into segments, from their raw geographic location into more specific filter options. Rather than just generally targeting a large area, realtors can get very specific in their targeting. Sean also said that the platform has short term leads for people who need to sell fast.
How to Retain Your Audience
When Jonathan and I said that 80% of the customers don’t use the same agents again, Sean said that following-up is critical. Agents need to create a client list, follow them around, and regularly show them ads. With the platform data and information, realtors can watch the current and past customer life events. Through these events, they can determine the right time to reach back out to them and restart the conversation. Other ways for realtors to leverage follow-up is to have due diligence on deals, monitor the properties, as well as going and finding off-market properties for clients with specific needs.
Proofs of Success
Sean stated that he has a friend who is doing commercial real estate in Tahoe, North Tahoe Region. Thru PropertyRadar, he was able to figure out his total potential commissions. Another client, who called Sean to tell him he closed a $23M deal because he stopped by the house that the client wanted, used the platform, called the owners who happened to be in the house, then they were shown around, they had it negotiated, and they closed the deal.
Cost of Service
PropertyRadar is a subscription service of $59/month or $79/month. Marketers signed up for the $79/month plan get information such as phone numbers and email addresses in their audience lists. For those folks who signed up for $59/month, they can use it for information regarding property history, including its sales history, how many foreclosures have happened, and other details. To protect people’s privacy since it is a public record data enhanced with phones, emails, and other personal details, the database is only made available to real estate professionals.
PropertyRadar and other Platforms
PropertyRadar is a go-to tool, especially if you want to talk to each person about ready to list before they list if you wanted to know about the person holding onto those properties or how long they have been holding onto them. And maybe you can combine this with a redundancy tool, Spokeo. You can also make use of a brilliant email marketing system that does AI-generated sending. Jonathan also features tools on Facebook that combine various outreach services, which are pretty interesting.
For more on, Sean O’Toole:
Website: https://www.propertyradar.com/
Email: sean@propertyradar.com
