David: Alright guys, welcome back to the Discount Property Investor podcast. This is your host David Dodge with my co-host Mike Slane. Mike, what's up!

Mike: David, what's up yourself, man? We are on the Corona lock down.

David: Corona lock down. Crazy times what we are living in these days.

Mike: It's tough to keep a positive attitude, you know? It's tough to maintain that-- you know, happy go lucky and all that when the sky is falling out there, right? Some serious stuff going on.

David: I know, man.

Mike: You can let it get you down, again, it does, I am not saying I am 100% positive all the time. This is serious stuff, but we have to remain optimistic and positive best we can, right? And we have to continue with the long game, right? Real estate investors, we are not in this for the short term. I mean, for the most part we get into wholesaling as a little bit of shorter term, but then we kind of have along term outlook, right? Our goal is 10-15 years for the most part. Buying rentals and fixing them up, adding them to our portfolio. We don't have a short term outlook. With that said, what does that mean, Dave? What are we doing differently in our business? For one, we are wholesaling, right? What are we doing different, Dave? That's what we're going to talk about today, right?

David: Yeah, what are we doing differently? We just re-recorded a new radio advertisement this morning. It is-- basically telling people that we will work with them in this new virtual world that we are all moving towards. That means buying properties off of photos, that means buying properties off of videos, that means doing walkthroughs with properties, with people that have face time, or even Zoom. We are going to go to the extent to even offer a service to drop off an iPad at someone's house, basically hand it through the door and wait outside while they walk through it, and we can be outside, then we will take it as we leave. But just going to that extent where somebody doesn't want us in their home right now, that's okay, we can work around these issues. That's-- that's the world that we are in right now unfortunately, and hopefully it only lasts another couple of weeks, but it is very possible that this could last a couple of months, right? Or a couple of quarters. We just really want to put ourselves in a position that we can capitalize off of this new life that we're in, new era.

Mike: Exactly, and that's just one example, right? Is the-- doing more of a virtual walkthrough like we mentioned, where we are willing to bring and drop an iPad off for a few minutes while they walk through the house and we can walk them through it and say, hey would you go downstairs and take a picture? Or go look at the HPAC system, take a picture of that, I want to see the age on that. Vice versa, keep going down and try and do it, if there is something missing we will ask for more pictures and more video. Or, like you said, we will do a Zoom call with them, and they can basically go and listen to us and ask them to walk around the house and do exactly what we just said. We will record that like you said, so we can go back and look at the house again. It's actually really kind of nice to have a video walkthrough of every house, if you can get them to do that for you.

David: Absolutely. Hey, Mike, let's play the new ad, I just got it back, they remastered it.

Mike: Cool.

David: From the place-- I'm going to go ahead and play it for you guys so you can hear it. I will move my mic so--.

Mike: Turn it up.

David: Yeah buddy, here goes.

                             ** ad plays **

David: Oh right, what do you think, Mike?

Mike: I love it, man.

David: I think it sounds great too, I'm pumped about it.

Mike: It's one of those things where mindset is everything. Again, some people would say, you guys are trying to capitalize on this situation. No, we are just trying to continue our business. Again, we have to buy and sell houses and fix houses and flip houses and rent houses-- to keep making money to pay-- to earn a living and feed our families. That is what we have to do. Again, I don't want anyone to feel like that's what they are doing if they are marketing-- the new reality, this could be going on for two weeks, two months, two quarters, like Dave said. We just don't know. So that's really what we are trying to market towards right now. We understand your concern, and we respect your concern. We are not trying to spread this anymore than it has to. We want to be done with this as fast as we can as well, but get through it as safe as we can as well. Kind of neat stuff. What else we got going on Dave with the social distance thing? Obviously we are both trying to work from home, you can see if you're watching this, and not just listening that we are working from home offices-- we have some virtual backgrounds. We are--.

David: This isn't a real background.

Mike: That's true. Dave has a lot of backgrounds in his home.

David: Yeah right.

Mike: We are using Zoom right now, they have virtual backgrounds so it's kind of fun to place with those. Yeah that's pretty much it. Obviously we are not doing any of our large meetings in our office together anymore. Everything we are trying to do is in this virtual new world.

David: It actually works pretty well for us though. We don't necessarily need to be-- I prefer to be in person, but we don't necessarily have. I am sure this will get old. It's working out just find for now.

Mike: You know Dave, that's something interesting. For us it is working well, and we are able to do well. Just off the top of my head, I am kind of putting us both on the spot, because I don't have an answer to this. New guys, networking events. We promote networking events. What's going on that we can do right now for a new investor, what can they do? I think I've seen some online meetings that people are hosting.

David: Yeah, we have one coming up on April 15th. I don't know if I have even told you about it, but I wanted to host a virtual REIA for individuals that are looking to learn about wholesaling. I already have it set up on Zoom. I have the meeting set up, April 15th at 8pm. I would like to push that out. It's limited to a hundred people. Basically there is not going to be any topic, just going to be a place to get together and chat, and we will chat about a couple of different things that people vote on from the get go, we will talk about those things, do a Q&A. There are a lot of virtual events that are happening right now in the real estate space. I don't know if you have been combing through any of the Facebook groups lately, Mike, but there has even been a couple of new ones that have been created lately that I have been invited into that are just talking about having virtual events. Check out the local virtual events in your area. A lot of them are even on Meetup right now, and they are easy to find. We are going to be having one as well. This should air before April 15th?

Mike: We will get it out before then.

David: Right now the domain is my full name, I haven't got around to doing anything else at this point, but I am sure in the show notes we will add the updated link, but if you are listening to this since we are recording it right now, DavidAllanDodge.com will actually forward you straight to that link. Virtual REIA's are huge, especially in this time, while we are going through this craziness that we are going through.

Mike: That's awesome, man. I love it. You're two steps ahead of me, man, I love it.

David: That's right, that's right. Really the name of the game, and the reason we wanted to record this episode today is-- you have to be able to adapt. Just because there is a pandemic going on doesn't mean that everything has to come to a stop. I was talking about this with one of my mentors this morning, Mike, you were on the call. There is actually-- there is opportunity in these times, right? So all of a sudden everybody has a whole lot more free time. Some people might not think that they do because they are maybe home with their children, but they have a lot more free time, because they are not driving too and from work, and they are not having to be at work, they are at home. Take this time to learn something new about real estate investing, maybe learn some new creative real estate investing strategy. There are a lot of different ways to invest in real estate. There may be a strategy that works really well for you that you don't even know about. I love promoting-- always educating yourself on the-- on different types of things that you can do with real estate. Now is the time for that, definitely, now is the time. Also, just because you have a lot of sellers that may be weary about selling because they don't know where they would go right now, especially because of the pandemic, it doesn't mean that you can't start building a lot of relationships with sellers who would be more comfortable selling in a month or two months, or even three months, right? So what if you-- I had this conversation with our virtual assistant this morning, I said, hey so what if we can't get a bunch of appointments right now. So what? We are still going to keep this marketing train going. Anytime anybody calls in and inquires, let's save their information, let's try and set an appointment, but if not, and they are weary about it, let's make sure we have a kick-ass followup system in place to get into these people's homes and properties once this is behind us, right? Or, let's sent contracts, but let's use very long inspection periods so if we can't get in right away then we are protected. Basically what our conversation was, we realized that because an pandemic is happening right now, sales are going to be down for everybody, right? Everybody is going to have a dip, right? That doesn't mean we have to stay there. When this is over it would be really great if I had 20, 30, maybe 40 different properties or deals lined up that the seller is then ready to sell. You can use this time to prepare and expand your business, even if you're not seeing results immediately, right? You have to have patience in this business, Mike and I preach it all the time; this is the marketing business, you have to be doing marketing. But just because you are not getting appointments or contracts right now, doesn't mean that you should stop marketing, or that your marketing isn't working.

Mike: I love it, and I like that sentiment. You got your sound effect machine, man?

David: Somewhere around here.

Mike: It is a speed bump, I am not going to pretend like we haven't seen a little bit of a slowdown. We definitely are a little bit slower-- not bad. So let it be a speed bump and not a brick wall like you see behind Dave if you are watching us.

David: That's right.

Mike: It does not need to be a total brick wall for your business. It can be a speed bump, so what? It's another challenge. The entrepreneurial mindset, challenges, fixing, solving problems is what you need to be doing. Again, you have to be putting deals together by solving people's problems. Yeah again, just find a way to blast through this like Dave said, it's a huge pipeline of deals that you're going to go out to, because you can't deliver a little iPad or something, or a camera for people to walk through the house, then yeah line up tons of appointments. Like Dave mentioned as well, maybe want a little bit of a longer inspection period, that's huge. Maybe you really do need a get a [00:14:14.06 - inaudible] that we are taking down personally.

David: Every seller that we are working with currently, Mike, there are probably five or six of them that we have contracts on properties, is okay with our extended our inspection periods. It's not like we are the only ones watching the news, right? They see that there is a craziness going on too, and they realize that the title companies and the inspection companies, the appraisal companies are not working properly either. Yeah just trying to reiteration what you're saying, just throw in the mix here, we are getting sellers that are basically saying, we get it if you can't close on the date we had originated. That was then, this is now, let's work this out. They are giving us more time. One guy just gave us an additional 30 days, e will get more if we need it. You just have to be able to adjust.

Mike: Awesome, man. Well any other closing thoughts then, Dave? Want to wrap this up?

David: Sure. I would just say, guys, keep it simple. Marketing must continue. You have to be able to adapt, right? So if something changes in your market, on in in the environment in this case. That's okay, things will continue. Allow people to communicate the way they want to communicate. Allow them to show you their property the way they want to show it to you. Maybe in these current times that means that really speaks boldly. Allow them to close when they want to close so that may be later. That might mean you just make a bunch of friends in the mean time and build some contacts and build that follow up funnel. When things start to get back to normal then you can hit that funnel hard. Regardless, do not stop. That's my message today. Do not stop. Keep plowing forward. If you have been thinking about putting a little bit of money into marketing and you haven't done it, now is the time to do it.

Mike: Do you know what I was thinking about? Another thing for new guys, or anybody really. What a great time to be out on the roads driving. Less people are out on the roads driving. More people are at home if they live at home. Dave, you know where I am going with this now. Yes, sir. Go out and do some driving for dollars. If you are stuck at home and you're bored. Drive around, man. Go drive around and check out DPIPodcast.com/DrivingForDollars, I think.

David: I am not sure what that exact link is.

Mike: Awesome awesome tool for basically driving for dollars. If you don't know what that is, you are out looking for vacant houses. So this is another great time to do that. You are maintaining your social distancing. There's less traffic, so hopefully it's safer to be doing something like this. People will be home so you will be able to identify the houses that don't have people living there.

David: That's right, guys, check that out. DPIPodcast.com/DrivingForDollars. Until next time, we are signing off. Thanks for listening. Do not stop marketing, now is the time. Later.