Welcome back to the Discount Property Investor podcast. Our mission is to share what we have learned from our experience and the experience of others to help you make more money investing like a pro. We want to teach you how to create wealth by investing in real estate, the discount property investor way. To jumpstart your real estate investing career, visit freewholesalecourse.com, the most complete free course on wholesaling real estate ever. Thanks for tuning in.

David: Alright guys, welcome back to the discount property investor podcast. I am your host, David Dodge. My co-host Mike Slane is in the field buying us some rental properties today. However, I am joined by a friend, a fellow mastermind member and a kick-ass rockstar of a real estate investor, Mitch Stephen. Mitch, welcome back to the show. We've had you on a few times but as always, we love bringing you back because you are just filled with information and value. How are you man?

Mitch: Yeah, I'm glad you said information and value, wasn't sure you were going to say it was filled full of, but that's good, I love that.

David: I love it man, I love it. Mitch, I want to dive into a couple things on today's episode. One, I want to talk about these ranches that I've seen you've been posting lately. I think it's the coolest thing ever that you are flipping big plots of land at this point, making updates to these things, increasing value and you know, you've learned along the way from years and years and years of experience flipping houses and then flipping other types of things and now you're up to flipping ranches. I'm so excited for you, I think it's so cool. Also, I wanted to dabble in a little bit of the storage unit business. I know you've been in that business for some time. I'm actually actively looking for parcels of land and/or buildings that I can use that strategy as well and then last but not least, I want to touch on LiveComm and this is the software that you have developed that helps you sell houses in less than a week and it is just a secret weapon. It's an amazing tool for any and all real estate investors who haven't tried it.

Mitch: It does a lot more than just help me with the sales of the houses but it's you know, it's all about technology and how- you know, staying up with what can be done and it saves me a lot of time, it saves me a lot of money and it actually cut my days on market down to four days down in the last 200 houses so my average-

David: Days on market to four days?

Mitch: Yeah, and it also increased- you know, I sell houses with owner financing, 30-year fixed notes so it also increased my down payment from 10% to almost 15% because I got that much competition looking at my houses to buy them.

David: Wow, 15% now.

Mitch: So it's been good all the way around, yeah.

David: That is awesome, that is so awesome. So number one, let's talk about these ranches man. I was fortunate enough to get to come out and visit your ranch, thank you for that day. That was so amazing, such a beautiful part of our country and lately I've seen you posting about a ranch or two that you've bought and that you're like- and making some improvements to and you're flipping and that's just awesome.

Mitch: Yeah. Well, which is why I'm in my truck right now is because, you know, we had a podcast, my model is adapt, overcome, you know, achieve. So we had this appointment and I had some place I got to be and they're a long way from civilization, some of them so like I thought well, I got a hotspot on my phone, I'll just get to the nearest town or stop at the nearest town and I'll make sure that we have some reception, we get this done. So that's why I'm sitting in the backseat of my F250 and we're getting this done, all right?

David: Hey, that's awesome. We appreciate you.

Mitch: I don't have a cool of a backdrop as David does but let me tell you this, I'm not here for the backdrop, I'm here to drop some content on you guys so that's what we're going to do.

David: That's right.

Mitch: If my content bothers you because I'm in a truck, maybe you need to move along.

David: Yep, that's exactly right.

Mitch: So you know as you mature, you can move into higher echelon stuff. I mean technically, if you're on the right mindset, you know, I could have went right to this from the beginning but you know, it's kind of intimidating when you don't have much money or don't have a lot of cash flow to venture into bigger deals, although there's ways to do it if you just bring on partners, your job is to find the deal and to clear yourself enough room to be in the middle of it and then have someone else bring the money. Could have done it, I  just you know, was limited by my limited beliefs, you know what I mean? So I got to it 27 years later when I can buy the ranch myself with my own money, you know what I mean?

David: Right.

Mitch: But so it's not any different than anything else, we find undervalued properties or properties that have problems just like houses and then we go solve the problems just on a much bigger scale. The difference is sometimes in these ranches, you can break big ranches into smaller ranches so like, we bought a 17 hundred acre ranch, we broke it into 100 acre or 50acre ranchette so we end up with 20 plus littler ranches. We call them- like between you and me and the fence post, we'll call them ranchettes, you take the ranch and break it into ranchettes, but when you're selling them, even if it's only 50 acres, you're still selling a ranch because you don't want to emasculate the man that's coming out there with his family and call his thing a ranchette, that would just be not right, you know?

David: Yeah, and 50 acres is still a good amount of land, you know?

Mitch: We're still calling it a ranch when it's for sale but between you and me and for the- and for this discussion, we'll call the smaller pieces ranchettes.

David: Ranchettes.

Mitch: So when you buy a big ranch and you break it into little ranchettes and then you know, when buying a ranch for 3.5 million, put in 500 thousand dollars for the roads and some surveying, cutting things up and then the sales price of the 20 whatever ranchettes will equal 7 million bucks so it's a- you know, you got 400 thousand in it and then if you can sell all your ranchettes for your estimated prices, then you end up with 7 million dollars in the bank minus your 4 million in bases and so you're left with 3 million bucks. That's the goal so we figured out how to unlock it. Now, I have to go out and I have to drag that equity in and that's yet to  be seen, but I don't- you know, whether I fall 50% short of my estimate, I still get-

David: Right, you're still going to be back to breakeven man.

Mitch: You wanna know I'm saying? The estimate is to make 3 million, if I only make 1.5, it's still a good day.

David: Oh right. Exactly, exactly.

Mitch: The reason why I went in to it was because what's the chances I can't sell all these things and just break even? The answer was basically-

David: Zero.

Mitch: Zero, so-

David: Yeah.

Mitch: Since there's- in my mind, that limit of a risk, then I'm in.

David: Yeah me too, always.

Mitch: So you know the worst case scenario, I break even, I waste time and I learn something, you know? So I go in, that's the idea, other ranches might have a problem like we bought one ranch, 822 acres and you come in the front gate and you're looking at this super huge jump in elevation, 1900 feet jump on one peak to the left and 1800 plus jump to one peak in the right. They're pretty close together and they have a saddle you know, that goes between them. To go in the front door of that ranch in a four-wheel ATV with four people in it, you know, a four-seater, to go over that saddle between the peaks and get to the back where the camp was, takes an hour and a half and there's at least three places in that journey going up and going down that you're afraid for your life.

David: Wow.

Mitch: And so what we did was we got a rock grinder, it's a massive, massive equipment. Looks like a 18-wheeler, you know, as far as length and it's 14 foot wide, the grinding wheel in the front, it has all this teeth. This ground is solid rock and boulders and all this stuff. It just grinds a 6 to 8 inch into the ground and it spits out the gravel about the size of your thumb and you know, half your thumb and as it's going it makes like a county road and all this rock is hilled in a concrete little bucket because it ground down into the concrete- into the rock about-

David: Into the rock itself, right.

Mitch: Yeah. So it's kind of contained, you know, in there and by the time you get to the other end of it, 1.5 miles, you've spent 80 grand but you change that hour and a half and that life-threatening journey of an hour and a half, you change it to nine minutes, 35 miles an hour in your truck. So you know, more or less, 30, 35 miles an hour, you know. So effectively the problem with the ranch was just these peaks in the middle, this rise in elevation, cut the ranch in half and you couldn't really get to the back half without a monumental effort and rattling your teeth out of your skull and so we went up to the saddle, you know, where you start to go over between the two pieces and then we make a right and we make a left and go up to the top of those two peaks and grind a 50 foot square pad at the top of each peak so as you go up-

David: That's what I was just going to ask, where's the house going? Up on one of the peaks hopefully?

Mitch: Yeah. This place was called the double knobs which was reminiscent of the two peaks called the double knobs. We nicknamed it Dos Chi-Chi's because it looks like two boobies, you know.

David: Hahaha.

Mitch: And then we found another 1.8 miles worth of road that we decided to spend another $80,000 to make right and it just makes this ranch huge. Before it was like one road open over the top and that was about it.

David: You had a lot of woods but you didn't have a lot of access, right?

Mitch: Yeah. I mean it had 822 acres. Now it feels like you know, 1500 freaking acres. It just, you know, it just feels huge. Then we put some water wells in, brought in a 3-2 mobile home, hooked it all up to solar so it's self-contained and made it so that when the person buys the ranch, they can turn on the electricity and turn on the air conditioner and have coffee and eggs in the morning, spend the night and have coffee and eggs and take a shower and everything, you know what I mean? So we moved it from a very, very rough treacherous place to like turnkey, I mean like move in, we're ready to go, start hunting tomorrow, you know? And that's where we added value to that. So you have bought it for 1.- 1 and 1/4, going to put 300 thousand in it, as always went over budget. We were planning on putting 250, it'd probably be around 350 when we get done, you know, and then put it up for sale for a million dollar profit which has already dropped to you know, 750 or 800 but still a good day. And the coolest part about all this stuff is I get to hunt these places until they're sold, so I have like a new a new place to explore, I'm learning lots of stuff. I don't want to make it sound overly easy because there's a lot to think about.

David: Yeah, so like mineral rights is like a big thing down there. I never even heard of mineral rights until I was in Texas.

Mitch: Yeah, you buy the rights to the oil or the minerals or the water or the surface, I mean there's all kinds of rights you sell and in New York, they have them air- you know, sky rights or to the sky rights, you know. You can sell what's above you, you know like someone could add on to the top of my building, take that, you know. So I don't know. You can- I guess you can sell just about anything if you can figure out how to describe it you know?

David: You figure out a good way to package it. Yeah.

Mitch: Yeah yeah.

David: Right.

Mitch: So you know, part of what got me here is my house business is still running. It runs- I finally have a real business, you know I haven't seen the last 400 houses I bought. I haven't seen the last 400 people that bought my houses, leaves me kind of, as an entrepreneur, well a lot of time, not to mention the fact that I quit drinking and smoking 2 years ago, that freed up 30 hours of freaking week. So I have all this time so what do I do man? I go explore some other avenue and I landed in raw land, subdivision and ranches and all this stuff.

David: I think it's amazing. I love hearing your stories, keep posting. I love looking forward to or seeing those posts man. I look forward to them, I think they're really, really cool. So, let's switch gears for a second here Mitch and let's talk a little bit about the storage business. I saw a video or two again, a post that you had made. I think it might have even been within our mastermind group of one that you had just finished building. This is probably, you know, two, three months back.

Mitch: Yeah, yeah-

David: I mean it was beautiful and it was huge.

Mitch: Now you can go to bigunitselfstorage.com and watch the video on the homepage and you can see what we built out of thin air, you know. I mean, we bought the land for 650, we put 283 units on it that you drive up to. Some of them are climate controlled and I don't know if you can play the video on here, if you can get it up, but you know, the day that we finished it, we had 2.8 million in it, the day that we finished, it was worth 5.3 with zero occupancy. When we get it occupied, which I'm already over two thirds of the way occupied so I'm over 200 out of 283. So I'm well over 200 occupied and it's worth, I'm going to say 6 to 6 and a half to 7 million, I don't know, maybe eight million but it took me two years to do. The lesson I learned was I should have hired a company that's all they ever did was build storages and I should have paid them instead of learning how to do it myself on my first one and taking two and a half years to get open, you know, like-

David: Mitch, I love your transparency. You remind me of me in the way that you lead with your mistakes, you own them, but those are such valuable lessons for incidences like today when we can share this value with the audience man. Thank you for coming on man, I really, really appreciate it.

Mitch: Sometimes I feel like my cojones are like a tetherball court man, it's really kicking [inaudible].

David: Hahahaha, hey me too. Man I make mistakes all the time and it's like, you know what? That's a really good lesson. I'm never upset whenever we go over 50 grand on a rehab, it's like okay what do we- what did we screw up? Let's not do this again though, you know.

Mitch: I mean you spent the money alright so just make sure you take the lesson.

David: Take the lesson.

Mitch: Because you already spent the money. Make sure you figure out why.

David: So let me- I'm gonna use this opportunity to get a 60 second coaching call in with you real quick. I'm looking to get into the storage space. You know, I flipped 700 houses at this point, I have about 60 rentals, I have about 40, maybe a little less than, about 35 doors under contract to add to the portfolio, starting to experiment with some owner financing. With that being said, I'm not your brand new investor but I'm looking to get into the storage space and at this point, I've just been kind of looking for you know, small parcels of land next to busy areas, right? That's- it's that simple. If you were me, what would you do to speed that process up?

Mitch: If I was you, I'd kind of skip the step that I would start with as a beginner or a novice, I mean, I would have- you know, I started personally since I didn't have a lot of money and didn't quite understand that you don't need a lot of money to do big money things, you just need to orchestrate it and then partner with a guy with money. But I started out with a small mom & pops around the lake. I actually bought my first- it was just 15 little boat stalls in front of a state park at the lake where I live.

David: Okay.

Mitch: And if you went in or out of that park, you saw my storages because they was- I was right across the street from the entrance to the park.

David: Nice.

Mitch: And it was 1991, okay? They were just corrugated metal roof and corrugated metal sides, chicken wire dividers and doors that just opened up on a hinge and it had dirt floors and I bought 15 units for 8,000 bucks. I didn't even have 8,000 bucks so I bought them on a 0% interest credit card.

David: Love it, love it.

Mitch: I figured you know, they were renting them for $25 a month. I did my research, they were worth just say $50 a month for easy math, 45 or 47 but let's say 50 for easy math. So I had 15 units that I could get up to $50 a month, 15 times 50 is 750 dollars a month. Hell, by the end of the year, I could pay off my 8 thousand dollar credit card and have a free and clear little place making 1500 a month, 750 a month, you know what I mean?

David: Do you still own that one?

Mitch: Well not anymore, I just recently sold it because I started selling off my littler ones to add onto my big ones and kind of consolidate, you know?

David: Sure, absolutely.

Mitch: But my point is you can start small in the storage business, 15 units, 18 units, 35 units, 50 units, you know, you don't have to build a monstrosity and just get some cash flow coming in and get acclimated and because if you start trying to buy these big box, multi-story, climate control-

David: Yeah facilities essentially.

Mitch: Facilities in the middle of the town, you know, in the middle of San Antonio or Austin or Dallas or these big cities. I mean, they're selling those things for 4% cap rates because these rates with billions of dollars are parking their money there.

David: They can afford to do that, right.

Mitch: Yeah and making 4% on you know, 10 million dollars for this complex or whatever is okay for them. That's not okay for you and me.

David: Nah.

Mitch: Do you ever stop and slow down to buy something that makes a 4% ROI? Not me.

David: No.

Mitch: I mean, I won't even start looking unless it's 15 or 20.

David: Yeah.

Mitch: I start buying at 20, 25, 30, you know? And hopefully trying to get 30 or 40% you know?

David: Right.

Mitch: So I'm not buying anything with a 4% cap rate and same thing with apartments, RV parks, mobile home parks. If you're going to do this stuff, get out in the country and that's- you know, if you're going to build something, you're not going to get a 50% discount on materials or labor today, especially not today, but you could buy an existing mom-and-pop kind of off the beaten path that's struggling because they don't even have a website.

David: Right, and there's lots of people like that. We're buying a 23 unit right now and like you know, how they lease it is in the newspaper. That's it, they don't even know about how you can use the internet to leverage that simple message of for rent, you know like they're putting ads in the paper. They don't know. So that's kind of where I'm leaning is try to find one that has additional space to grow on it because then I get my feet wet while being able to add value at the same time.

Mitch: And I like little places that have extra land so that if I do a good job and I get full, I'm getting calls for certain sizes, I'm turning them down because I don't have anymore but now I know what to build.

David: Right.

Mitch: And the cool thing about those little mom-and-pop stores with extra land is I can build- I can build two units extra or I can build 10 units extra, you know, I get- whatever amount of money I have I think I can scrape together, I can go ahead and add in little bitty chunks, you know what I mean? Of course, you do get some price break for building 25 or 30 better than if you're only building 2, you know. There's a little, what do you call it? A- you know, you get a little discount for doing more volume, you know. It's a little less expensive to do it but my point is you could grow small. So I started with 15 doors, today I have 1300 doors that owe me a hundred a month, average. That's a 130 thousand a month.

David: That is awesome. I love that. So are all yours managed by a company that you run? Do you third-party outsource it? How does- how does that work? Because I love the real estate business because it gives me freedom and that's a big thing Mitch is that a lot of people come to the real estate investing, you know, business which is a super broad definition of all the different things that we could do in this business of course, but when they come in here, they're looking for freedom and they essentially get the opposite of that. They're working their butts off. So if I was going to do this, I would want somebody that I could hire to manage it. Is that how you do it?

Mitch: Well no because I started off grassroots and I was doing it myself because there really wasn't money to pay a manager.

David: Yup.

Mitch: And I had the bandwidth, I was managing other properties, it wasn't that hard and then as we got more and more units, you know. Now today, all of these units are pretty much around the lake where I live but getting to the north side of that lake when you live on the south side, it's like two different communities and it takes a long time to go around this lake. I mean, if you could just drive across, you could have one manager but since you got to go around the lake to get to the other side, could be 30, 40 miles.

David: Wow, wow.

Mitch: So I had to have a north side manager and a south side manager and we just manage the managers, you know?

David: Yeah sure. So you have enough units to justify having on site managers at both of these, right?

Mitch: Well, I have multiple locations on the north side of the lake and I have multiple locations on the south side.

David: Got it. So you have a north side and the south side regional person.

Mitch: One facility has a manager on site on the north and one facility has a manager-

David: Got it and then they can bounce around to those locations. Okay. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So you know, if somebody was doing you know, something like 20 or 30 units, something like that's extremely small, right? I guess it's relative of course how big they are and everything else but uhm.

Mitch: Yeah but no it's also relative like what do you need to make a month to get free? What's your freedom number? You had a job, it's paying you $3,500 a month. I mean, how many units do you got to get to make $3,500 a month come in and now you just freed up 2,600 hours a year and you don't even have a job.

David: Now look at- look at it that way. Wow, you just freed up 2,600 hours, wow.

Mitch: You can worry about getting fancy later, just get the 3500 a month coming in so you can fire your boss.

David: Yeah.

Mitch: And now, you know, now we go to a whole 'nother level, you know.

David: I love it. All right Mitch, section number three. We had a three-part section today. We talked about the ranches and these large plots of land and ranchettes. I love that, that's such a great little word, and then we talked about the storage units. And then last but not least, LiveComm. So when I had you on the coffee with closers livestream probably two or three weeks ago, maybe four weeks ago at this point, you had given us a little intro to this and I want to just kind of you know, talk about this again. So this is a software you've developed and it has a lot of use cases. It's- well, I'm going to let you explain it because your- this is your thing so yeah, tell us about LiveComm.

Mitch: On the surface-

David: And this is an L-I-V-E-C-O-M-M guys, LiveComm, double m and then .com that's exactly where you're going to go to learn more about this.

Mitch: LiveComm as in communication. Communication has two M's so make sure you get that second M. L-I-V-E-C-O-M-M.com. You can also go- all these features I'll talk to you about, you can go to YouTube and look up LiveComm, L-I-V-E-C-O-M-M, and find my channel where I describe all the features of this.

David: Nice.

Mitch: Because we don't have time [audio cuts] features.

David: Sure.

Mitch: And how I'm using them to make money. You know, me explaining the technology is one thing but you also have to explain the strategies to use the technology because a lot of people are not just born or gifted marketers, you know, so I like to explain them. That's what that's good for. So on the surface, it's nothing new. They have- you go to LiveComm to buy phone numbers, okay? And there's other companies out there like that. And these phone numbers are smart phone numbers and what I mean by that is every phone number that you buy from LiveComm has a text distribution list attached to it and anytime someone calls your LiveComm phone number from a cell phone, this smart phone number captures the cell phone number and puts it into the text distribution list for you. So any business person in the world should have a smart phone number or a LiveComm phone number as their business, you can forward it to whatever you want but it should run through the system because what business wouldn't like to capture the cell phone number of everyone who ever called their business? It doesn't store repeat phone numbers, it'll only store a number once, so if someone calls 10 times a day-

David: It's not re-adding them to the list if they already had opted out or whatever, right, right.

Mitch: Yeah. Now the- what's cool about this text distribution list is it's only two cents per recipient of a text and they've already raised their hand. They already said they're interested in your product. So for two cents, I can send them a text message so I'm hitting my target right between the eyes, no wasted- no wasted- like if you put an ad in the newspaper. There's people reading the newspaper that you're paying for that circulation but they have no intention of using your product or your service, but you're having to pay for that distribution because it's going to, you know, a million people or whatever. This is not like that. You got five- you know it only takes 3 thousand people in my list to cut my days on market to 4 days.

David: That's not- that's not a lot at all.

Mitch: So let's go through some of the features because why I invented this was because there was other services out there but they didn't have features that I wanted and they were charging me way more than I felt like I wanted to pay or that they should charge. So, I'm about half of everybody else last time I checked and so what happens is, I buy these phone numbers and say like I had- this is my problem, this is how it all got started. I had 15 houses for sale, how I was selling my houses with owner financing was I would put 20 bandit signs around the neighborhood for each house and one in the front yard. That's over 300 signs I would have out. If I had 15 houses, I had 300 bandit signs out. I would assign a LiveComm number to each- well before, my problem was all of them had my salesman's phone number on all of those signs. He was getting a 150 phone calls a weekend and 3/4 of them were bullshit calls and by noon, he was burnt out, he wasn't even answering the phone at 1 o'clock because he couldn't take anymore.

David: Yeah, he talked to 30 people hahaha.

Mitch: He couldn't remember the details on all the 15 houses, he didn't carry 15 files around with him all the time to look it all up. He should have but he didn't, and it was a problem. And so I said I'm going to- I'm going to buy smartphone- I'm gonna get smart phone numbers, I'm going to assign a phone number to each house. So now I have 15 LiveComm phone numbers, one for each house. In LiveComm, you can name your phone numbers so I named you know the first house, I named the phone number 123 Main Street, next house I named it 236 Jones Street and I name it accordingly so I know what this list is building, you know, it's building callers for this house, there's the address. So now I can forward- I can turn the LiveComm number on to do a recording and so instead of going to a person, it goes to a recording and I would get my property information sheet which by the way is as long as my arm of it's this many bedrooms, it's this many square feet, it was built in this year, it has a roof that's this many years old, it has a electric stove and a gas hot water heater and on and on and on, school district, taxes, size of the lot, how many acres the lot is, if it has any trees or outbuildings, you know, I'm just telling you, it's everything I can think of plus my terms, the sales price, how much I want down, how- what the interest rate is, what the PNI payment would be, what the PITI payment would be, what the PITIS payment is. What is the S payment? The servicing fee because when I sell my houses with owner financing, I also collect the fee that my servicing company charges being I don't pay for servicing fee, I make my buyer pay for it.

David: What's a typical servicing fee?

Mitch: I'm at you know, I have a servicing company, it's $35 a month plus the late fees which is a no-brainer especially when you can get your buyer to pay it.

David: Right.

Mitch: Servicing is a pain in the ass. I mean there's a reason why you hire a service company because you need it- that's our slogan, moatnoteservicing.com because you should be out buying houses, not servicing notes.

David: moatnoteservicing.com.

Mitch: Yeah, because you should be out buying houses, not chasing some people for payments and doing all that stuff and doing year end reporting and all that. So now, every house has this phone number, it's capturing the incoming caller cell phone number and it's delivering all this information and if you get the information right in one recording, it's right every time. And this recording answers at six in the morning and it'll answer at 12:30 at night midnight and it'll deliver the exact same correct message. And so what I did was I would give all this information and I would not give them a phone number to contact anybody at the end. At the end of the message after I told them everything about the house, I did this: I said look, if you think this is the house for you and your family or you'd like to see this house, let me tell you how you might own it. You get in the car with your family, you drive to 123 Main Street, you get out, you go look in the front yard, you walk around the house, you look at the backyard, you check out the neighborhood and if this is still the house for you and your family, and you definitely have x amount for a down payment or more, then call the phone number in the back window. Now, my salesmen are only getting eight calls a weekend and they're fighting over them and these buyers have vetted themselves, they are serious, serious people. They did- they can follow directions, I've warned them many times that they have to have x amount or more for the down payment. I've even trained them what they need to bring that there'll be a $2,000 non-refundable deposit which will go towards your down payment. If you're approved, it's non-refundable. If you're not approved, you'll get it back within 7 days. Here's the receipt and what it looks like, you know, and you need to bring me that check made out to so and so. So now we're training our buyers, we're also driving- well, so you see right now, I accomplished my goal. I lightened the load of my salesman, but I'm still capturing all the phone numbers of all those people that didn't show up. The other 142 people, I can- I still got their numbers and I can still contact them through text. So next time I have a house, I can send it out to all of those people and more because they you know, every day I was getting more and more people calling my signs and I can say, you know, homes to go down that has another house for sale with owner financing, click on this link and check it out. Alright let's go to the next feature. Every LiveComm phone number has a hello message, has a hello button. If you turn the button on, anytime the system recognizes a pristine caller, about 30 seconds after they hang up from listening to that recording, they'll get a hello message that says, thanks for calling, to keep up with our inventory daily, go to our Facebook business page and we give them all the information to get to that page and make sure that you like or follow our page so that you get a notification every time we post a new house for sale. So right now I have 10 thousand people that are interested in my owner finance homes. I live in a town of 2.5 million, let's get that straight, a lot of people. I've collected 2.- 10 thousand phone numbers and twice a year I'll send out a text to everybody that says, if you're no longer interested in a seller financed home, please reply to this text right now and stop and get the hell off of here.

David: Yeah, so I can quit- so I'm not getting billed basically.

Mitch: Yeah, I don't want- if you don't want a house, I don't want you on here. I'm spending some money, not much but anyways, why spend any if you're not interested.

David: Right.

Mitch: I still have 10,000 people that refuse to leave.

David: Hahahaha, after you ask them twice a year. Yeah, look at that. Wow.

Mitch: Okay so now it's to the point where- and I've migrated 6 thousand of those people are following me on Facebook now.

David: Wow.

Mitch: What I learned was as soon as I had 3 thousand people, even in my text distribution list on my phone or 3 thousand people following me on my owner financed website which by the way is a 100% in Spanish, just saying. I didn't need to put any signs in my yard anymore, I didn't even need to advertise my house. Out of those 3 thousand people, I would sell my house in 4 days. I now have 6 to 8 thousand and I don't remember, I haven't looked lately, it's probably about up to 8 thousand people following my Facebook business page right now. I don't even have to send out text messages now, I just have to post the house on my website. There's 8 thousand super interested people.

David: Cuz you're using the text initially to get them to join, so you can post there and hit them if you want to.

Mitch: Well you know, I use text for a different reason. Like let's say my salesman's going to go do an open house. No, let's say he's gonna show someone the house at 6 o'clock tomorrow, well he can send out a text to 10 thousand people saying that you know, 4 hours in advance saying I'm going to be at this house in 4 hours at 6 o'clock. I'm going to have the doors open, if you want to come see it, come by. He shows up to show his one person the house and there's 15 people in the front yard.

David: There's 15 people there haha.

Mitch: So not only did it cut my days on market down, but now I got people competing in how much they're giving me down, so my down payments went from 10% to 15% down because I got people competing for my house.

David: Man.

Mitch: So having all this text- so there's also another feature, it's called the instant call connect feature and I cannot get through all the features here with you, you know, but go to LiveComm, go to YouTube and search LiveComm, L-I-V-E-C-O-M-M, and I go through all the features and a matter of fact, I have to add 5 more features that we've added since then, so I'm in the process of adding those but watch- look at the features and understand how I'm using them and they can work for any business. It doesn't have to be real estate related, you know?

David: Right.

Mitch: If I was filling pools, you know, call for a free recording on the 5 major mistakes that pool buyers make, you know. They call to hear that message, obviously they're interested in pools. My salesman just got another lead because he could turn on- he could turn on the instant call connect button for that phone number and anytime someone calls to listen to the recording, my salesman or my sales people or me and my sales people get a text that says someone from this number right here is listening to the recording named 10 reasons why pool buyers mess up. And so they're engaged right now, they are listening to my recording right now. It poses the question to my sales person, you want to give them a few minutes to get through the recording and call them because they're engaged right now, they're obviously interested in swimming pools. Hey news flash, you're a swimming pool salesperson, you should probably call this guy, right?

David: Yeah.

Mitch: And then on the other end, at the end of the recording, if the instant call connect button is turned on for that phone number, it won't just hang up when he hangs up, it'll say at the end of the recording: if you'd like to be connected with a live representative, do not hang up and you'll be connected. So the caller has a chance to connect with my sales person and the sales person has a opportunity, a flag that says to connect with the prospect. So that button is on every phone number.

David: Nice, so that- if that guy wanted to connect, it would just ring that salesperson and if that salesperson didn't get ringed, he could know to ring in-

Mitch: He could dial their number.

David: After.

Mitch: Yeah.

David: Wow.

Mitch: And plus whenever you're having a discount day at your pool shop or whatever, you can say hey everything's 15% off and you could do it spur of the moment because these texts are real time. I mean, when you send out the text, how many text messages do you not read?

David: None, zero.

Mitch: Okay. So when you say, I'm about to discount everything for the next 3 hours at my store because I'm freaking slow as hell because of covid, you know, you can send out to all your customers, maybe you have 12 thousand customers, say I'm going to take 20% off of everything if you come in the next 3 hours. I think your store might fill up.

David: Yeah, absolutely. So this is not just a real estate investor tool, this is a tool that any business can use. I Love it.

Mitch: Think about a massage therapist or hair salon or nail salon. They got an appointment at 4 o'clock, someone calls in at 2 o'clock and cancels. They're fixing to lose whatever amount of money that is. It happens in an hour, you know, and the hair salon 150 bucks or 40 bucks or whatever. In the massage place, maybe it's 500, who knows what the hell's going on over there, but you know what I'm saying?

David: Right.

Mitch: But if you had a- if you had all your customers in a text distribution list, you can send out a text to your customers go: hey I had a cancellation at 4, it's an hour and a half from now, who's up for an impromptu nail appointment?

David: Yeah, who needs to get- who needs a haircut? Who needs their nails done?

Mitch: I can only take one, first come, first serve, please don't delay.

David: Right.

Mitch: I mean you gotta fill the spot. Maybe you have a Monday at your nail salon and half your days open. I mean run a special, send it to your people like I'm taking $20 off of whatever the hell it is, pedicure, manicure.

David: Yeah. Some sales is better than no sales.

Mitch: It's real time, you know?

David: Yeah.

Mitch: You're at the pizza delivery place, your pizza drivers are standing on- sitting on their thumbs because they ain't got any orders. You send out to 5 thousand of your pizza- regular pizza people a text that says, I'm giving away a free whatever when you order a large pizza. I mean the phone could start ringing in 3 minutes.

David: Right. Yeah, immediately.

Mitch: The problem is you might not want to send out that message to all 5 thousand, you might want to do a 150 at a time because you don't want to look bad because you could get more orders than you can fill.

David: Yeah.

Mitch: Then it had an opposite effect, you hurt yourself.

David: Yeah, but still though it's business, you know, if you don't have business or you want more business, it's a great tool to get that business in.

Mitch: There's an automatic record button for every phone number which means if you turn that automatic record on, whenever there's a conversation on that line, it's being recorded so that you can help guide or defend yourself against unscrupulous salesman, you know what I mean?

David: Mmm-hmm.

Mitch: You also- another good use for LiveComm and these smart phone numbers is everyone in my organization in a key chair, my 4 acquisition people, my 2 sales people, they have to use a LiveComm phone number on all their cards, all their remittances, all their ads, they have to use my number. Now it's forwarded to their cell phone number but everything they print has my phone number on it forwarded to their cell so that when that salesman quits after 5 years.

David: Hahahaha, that's a great-

Mitch: I unforward my phone number from him and I forward it to the guy I hired to take his place. I don't want to lose that 5 years of good will and all those people that know that number are going to disappear with him if he doesn't have my number. I'm telling you LiveComm, it just has features that a lot of don't have but I'm not only showing the features, I'm telling you how to use them to help your business.

David: Right, right. I like that last one. That last one's powerful.

Mitch: What about your sales people? They've been advertising, you know, my LiveComm number has to be the number on the websites. It has to be the number on the Facebook pages. It has to be my numbers so that when you leave, I'm still in control.

David: Yeah, you're not dialing out from any of these numbers though typically, right?

Mitch: You can, you can.

David: Okay.

Mitch: And then- so if you have, you know, you could use that to shield yourself from you know, you might want to dial out to talk to customers when you're buying houses because we know how angry people get when you call them to ask them if they want to sell their house sometimes. You hit- you hit- if you're doing any volume at all, you're going to hit some loonies and they're pissed.

David: Oh yeah, absolutely.

Mitch: And they're pissed. How did you get this information? You know, well shit, you have an address and I looked you up at the courthouse, it ain't rocket science you dumbass.

David: Right.

Mitch: But you know, they get- you might want to use a number to call so when they call back, if he's a problem, you can go in and block him in LiveComm. You can block any number you want from LiveComm.

David: Nice.

Mitch: So you say that guy sounds like- that guy's a lunatic. I don't think we want to deal with him. Let me just go ahead and find his phone number in LiveComm and block.

David: Just find his number and turn it off, right.

Mitch: Turn it off.

David: I love it, I love it. Guys, check out LiveComm, amazing features, especially for all of us real estate investors. The ability to capture all of these numbers, send them a text, shoot them over to a voicemail, into that call recording and then from there, if you want to push them to a live person, you can. You can actually get a text message when somebody's calling and listening to a number, text blast out all of these individuals that have called in, segment those lists in lots of different ways.

Mitch: Think about real estate agents.

David: Man, so many different cool features.

Mitch: Think about real estate agents. They should have a rider on top of every one of their signs and a phone number that goes to a recording for that house. How nice it would be not to have to repeat all that stuff over and over and over again, but you're still got the instant call connect button on, you wait for them to get through all that and before the days over you call and say hey you know, this is the agent for that house you called on at 123 Main Street. You heard my recording, I'm just checking in with you because I think it would be a mistake not to personally get in touch with them but I-

David: Yeah, but in real time though like I've had two phone calls since we started this podcast of just people, right? And it's going to my personal voicemail because they're calling my cell phone but if they were calling a business line, you could also tailor different messages which is so cool. And I agree though, you should follow back up, make sure they got the message. Make sure they don't have any unanswered questions but then again, why repeat the same 20 questions that everyone asked over and over and over again, you're going to lose your damn mind.

Mitch: So imagine as a real estate agent. Now you have these people's phone number, they've called on that house, maybe you have the hello button on and it says you know, I'm the agent for house so and- you know, for the house you just called on, because it has to be kind of generic because you probably have lots of houses that you're selling. You just called about my recording on a house that I have listed, can I help you find a house? My name is Margaret, call me, this is my number. Can I help you find a house? Do you have an agent? Can I help you? You know, it is working in the background while you were at lunch, while you were doing your grocery shopping and then you get a call from someone says yeah I really need an agent, I don't have one, you sound and look very professional because you're delivering, you know, you're professional but by no means- but you know. And we also have text merge. Imagine you have this list of potential motivated sellers and we have text merge just like mail merge where you can use the person's name and they have all these variables that you can put in a generic sentence. You can text merge where the text shows up and it says hey David, are you still interested in selling the house? Are you interested in selling the house at variable 123 Main Street? Because I'm still interested in buying it. If you've ever gotten- if you're getting closer to settling, call me. You know, I could send out a thousand texts using their name and the property that they're associated with and that all looks personal.

David: Yeah, that's really cool too. So not just on the sales side, also on the acquisition side, this is a useful tool.

Mitch: You could put it in your CRM and it does hook to CRM's. It has its own IP address. You can put in your CRM functions, you know. Every three weeks, I want this text to go out to this thousand people that have not sold me yet but I know they have a problem.

David: Nice.

Mitch: And it starts with their name and it includes the property that you're talking about with them and it looks personal.

David: Love it. Man, this is so cool.

Mitch: Yeah, it's- we spent a lot of time thinking about it. The trick is you and me, we would sit around all day long trying to think of ways to use this stuff and eventually we come up with some pretty damn good ideas, you know what I mean?

David: Yeah, right.

Mitch: Now we're developing- we're developing two things and I want you to hear this.

David: Okay.

Mitch: I don't normally like to talk about in the future but it's so exciting.

David: Yeah, let's hear it.

Mitch: One is, you know when you have your chat box on your website and people can get in the chat and start asking you questions but normally you have to be in front of your computer to do that.

David: Yeah.

Mitch: Well with LiveComm now, we can forward that chat box and their questions and your ability to answer over to text. So you could be answering the chat box one while your [inaudible].

David: Yeah. That is awesome.

Mitch: While you're in a [inaudible], you could be dealing with your chat box. That's coming in 30 days. Also, ringless voicemail. Now here's the trick with ringless voicemail, you can't fake your voice anymore so all of- your voice has to be generic. You know the voicemail that you're dropping is generic. So how to make a generic voicemail feel personal is you got to tie it to something concrete that has already happened, that's already happened. So like I can send out a hundred contracts to people that haven't committed to sell their houses but I'm going to send them a- I'm going to send them a signed contract. We've talked but I'm sending the contract. So I send out the contract on Friday and I know it's going to get there Monday or Tuesday, and then on Saturday, I send out that text merge text message says hey Dave, I sent you a contract in the mail on Friday, you should be getting it Monday/Tuesday, be sure to check it out. It was another touch, it sounded highly personal and it's going to be backed up as personal even though it wasn't because he's going to get the contract in the mail on Monday or Tuesday and it's going to be postmarked Friday. So that- so the generic voicemail would say hey, this is Mitch, I sent a contract in the mail out about your house, make sure you check it out on Monday or Tuesday. See that was generic, I didn't say anybody's name, I didn't- that was the voice drop but the text was personal with their name and the property information and it referred to a concrete thing so it legitimized my generic voice drop as being personal. There's a way to do it.

David: Right. No, I get that. Versus just being generic by itself with nothing concrete to assign it to.

Mitch: There's no way they'll say, oh he probably sent that out to a thousand people. There's no way he'll do that or you can do it after the fact.

David: Yeah because you're already in communication with them. Even if they're not responding, you hit them with the text message, they get that and the mail. I love it man. And you could even-

Mitch: Or you can wait till-

David: And you can even make that sequence keep going even too, right yeah.

Mitch: Yes. You could make it after they receive it and the generic thing, this is Mitch, did you get my contract in the mail? Give me a buzz if you're interested.

David: Yeah hey I sent you a text message a few days ago which you did and then I sent you a contract in the mail, I haven't heard from you. Yeah, call me. Something simple, I love it.

Mitch: And a thousand- that happens to 500 people.

David: Yeah.

Mitch: You could buy a house.

David: Wow. Man, if you sent 500 contracts on a Friday, I'm just thinking you'd have 20 or 30 contracts signed back on Tuesday without even talking to people, just signed and sent back.

Mitch: Yeah I mean, you know. So that's what it- you know, you got to keep up with the new technology, you know, smart phone numbers, there's other people out there. They just haven't kind of picked the features that I wanted. They have different features, you know. I picked the features that worked well for me that I could understand, that I thought would help me and I didn't look at anybody else's stuff. I just did what I wanted to do, come to find out it's pretty unique because when I started checking out other people like they're not doing a lot of this.

David: Yeah yeah. No, I haven't seen all of this stuff in one place. I've seen some of this stuff in certain places but not all in one place.

Mitch: And they're 5 cents and 7 cents a text, and 5 cents and 7 cents a minute for the recording. There are way more expensive.

David: Yeah.

Mitch: And get this, I have an affiliate link that every time anyone who signs up for lifetime, you automatically get an affiliate link and if you refer I think 4 people, your subscriptions doesn't even matter anymore.

David: Right, right. Basically it's covered by the affiliates. Yeah this is really cool, Mitch. I'm really happy to have had this opportunity to bring you on today. We're going in about an hour so let's go ahead and wrap this up but-

Mitch: Yeah, yeah.

David: Thank you so much man for telling us about these ranches and ranchettes. That was really, really interesting to me. The biggest takeaway I think flows over into the second topic as well, you know, with the storage units is you know, you had said it took you 27 years essentially to start doing this type- sort of the business, but there's really, it was all in the- it's all limiting beliefs that we all have and I am surrounded by self-limiting beliefs from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed, but at the end of the day, it's just in my head. It's not necessarily the truth of the reality guys so you know, this is another reason that I just love talking to Mitch because he's super down-to-earth and just such an awesome human but on top of that is he keeps reminding me that I have these self-limiting beliefs and whenever we have failures in our lives, it's not the end game, it's a temporary loss but turn it into a lesson. You just have such a cool mindset Mitch and I'm really grateful just to call you a friend man so thank you for being on the show, super grateful for you giving us an hour of your time today and then of course last but not least, LiveComm kicks ass. Wow, very cool. Guys, check it out for yourself, go to LiveComm, that's L-I-V-E-C-O-M-M.com or head on over to YouTube and type in LiveComm and Mitch has a ton of training videos and a knowledge base over there essentially to learn how to do all of this stuff within the software. Love it. Mitch, any parting words for us my man?

Mitch: Man, there's more of me than you'll ever want at 1000houses.com, I have all my books. I just put out a fourth book, you don't even know this 'The Art of Private Lending'. I show all my private lenders how they can bust their ass and make 14, 15% but if they don't want to bust their ass, they can loan their money to me at 8% in 15 years and I used the book to raise private money.

David: 'The Art of Private Lending'. Is that on Amazon yet? I'm going to buy that today.

Mitch: No, nope. This is the only copy in the world right now but a couple of days it'll be out or you can go to 1000houses.com. It'll take me a little while to get it on Amazon so I really want to-

David: Yeah, do you have a- do you have a- over at 1000houses.com, is there a way to get-

Mitch: Yeah, there's a way to order there.

David: Okay cool, I'm going to order there then. Okay cool, very cool.

Mitch: Yeah.

David: Mitch, thanks again. Guys, check it out 1000houses.com to learn more about all 4 of Mitch's books and all the cool stuff he's doing and of course LiveComm, one of the best tools there is right now out there for SMS, calling, recording, a ton of different features that we mentioned in this episode. That's all for today guys. Thanks for listening. Signing off.

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