Welcome to The Accelerated Investor Podcast with Josh Cantwell, if you love entrepreneurship and investing in real estate then you are in the right place. Josh is the CEO of Freeland Ventures Real Estate Private Equity and has personally invested in well over 500 properties all across the country. He’s also made hundreds of private lender loans and owns over 1,000 units of apartments. Josh is an expert at raising private money for deals and he prides himself on never having had a boss in his entire adult life. Josh and his team also mentor investors and entrepreneurs from all over the world. He doesn’t dream about doing deals, he actually does them and so do his listeners and students. Now sit back, listen, learn, and accelerate your business, your life, and your investing with The Accelerated Investor Podcast.

So hey, welcome back to Accelerated Investor. Hey, I just wanted to hop on. I just got done recording some podcasts with some other hosts and some different guests and the topic kept coming up about how to remain and stay the top of mind reference for passive investors because often we’ll talk to a private lender or private investor. We don’t necessarily have a deal right now for them to invest in. Like how do you keep them warm? How do you keep them hot until you have a deal for them to invest in, whether it’s a multifamily deal or your fund or a single-family investment or a flip or something like that. So this really applies to all investors. We’re all looking to build relationships, we’re all looking to raise capital. And so I just was thinking of back, I don’t know that I’ve ever strategically done this, but there’s five or six things that I do on a consistent basis to stay in touch with investors, follow up on a regular basis.

And so that when I have a deal and I’m ready to do a massive recruit of private capital, let’s say for a multi-family deal or a big apartment building that I have their attention, like I’m not ignoring them over the next, you know, week to six months. And then all of a sudden it’s like, Hey, I have a deal why aren’t you attention to me, right? So here’s just some quick tips and ideas. So number one, I started back in 2011 shortly after my surgery for pancreatic cancer, came back, started raising a lot of capital. I sent out a physical newsletter. I actually sent out a physical four page or a two page newsletter in the snail mail once per quarter. And it was essentially a brag book. It just bragged about deals that I was doing or money that I raised and talking a little bit about the market.

And so if you just write a simple letter or create a simple newsletter that you send out to your contacts, friends, family, business associates, people from REIA clubs, people that you have, you know, business cards from people that you’ve gotten to meet, people that you have had appointments with anybody and everybody who could potentially be involved in real estate. Whether they can sell you a deal, whether they can buy a deal from you or whether they can be a cheerleader for you or whether they can raise capital or bring you capital or deals. All of those people should be getting some sort of physical newsletter, right? Just so that they stay top of mind. So now we’ve got over 1,500 people that receive our physical newsletter every quarter, costs us about a dollar per piece that includes postage for us to send out a physical newsletter. And if you’re interested in getting this newsletter, just email us at Support@StrategicRealEstatecoach.com and we will, we’ll send it to you. So one is a physical newsletter.

Number two, email broadcast. So once a week we send out what we call a funding opportunity. It could be a deal that we’ve recently closed or a deal that we are going to be closing soon or a private lender loan that we’re looking to sell or a rehab deal that we just closed. Every week we want to send them some funding related material of a deal that we just closed that’s no longer they can invest in or a deal that’s available for them to invest in in the future. We want to really focus on getting them something in their inbox once a week and they don’t have to reply to it. They don’t have to respond, they don’t have to engage in it, but we find is we get about a 40% to 50% open rate of our email broadcasts when we send out a funding opportunity because people just want to know, well, what kind of deals are we doing?

What kind of funding opportunities are out there, even if we don’t necessarily need their money right now. The only thing you have to do is be careful of these are people that we already have existing relationships with, so if we’re doing a 506B federal securities exemption, we have to have relationships with these people in order to raise money. If we’re doing a 506C then you can do a general solicitation. Frankly, you can spam everybody you want if you’re doing a 506C but they have to be accredited in order to invest. What I’m assuming is that these people have a relationship with you, so you’re sending out a weekly email broadcast. Just something about real estate, something about a funding opportunity, something about a deal that you did or a deal that you’re going to do or a deal that you closed in the past or maybe even a deal that you passed on so that they know that again, you’re top of mind.

Now, number three would be Facebook posts or Facebook lives. You have an opportunity using Facebook to friend and create relationships with people online where you can put a post about deals that you’re closing. Now just don’t solicit for private money. Just don’t solicit them for money, but talk about your deals. Purchase price, rehab amount after repair value. Talk about how you partner with investors on these deals and if anybody’s interested in learning more about what you do to direct message you, okay. So don’t say if you’re interested in investing or you’re interested in getting a 12% return direct message me. Don’t say that because that’s making an offer, but on Facebook or through Facebook lives or through Facebook groups, you can post about your deals post about deals that you did or didn’t do, post about deals that you passed on, comment about the market, talk about your story on Facebook and tell people if they’re interested in learning more about how to joint venture to just direct message you.

Do not make them an offer to invest in your deals, but make them an opportunity to quote unquote joint venture with you and direct message me, okay? That’s easy. Then once you have enough contacts in your database, number four, an easy way to stay in touch with them is to do a monthly or a quarterly webinar. Use Skype, use Zoom, use GoToMeeting and invite them onto a live webinar where you showcase a deal or walk through a deal or walk through what’s going on in the real estate market, but show them something. Now, preferably what you would do is show them something that you already closed. Because one of the very best things you can do to recruit private money is show people an awesome deal that they missed, that they got boxed out on, that they could not invest in a deal that they, that is an awesome deal.

It was an awesome opportunity. It’s an awesome return or it’s an awesome multifamily deal, but they are boxed out of it. It’s already fully subscribed, it’s sold out, right? And then they’re going to be like, well, dang, is there any more deals like that available? The best thing you can do is to have some exclusivity, some scarcity to your offers, right? So some sort of Zoom, Skype, GoToMeeting, whatever kind of online marketing or a meeting platform you want to use. Invite everybody, showcase a deal and then tell them that that deal is not available for them to invest in. It’s a super, super powerful strategy for recruiting capital.

Finally, number five. Finally number five is to send them personal emails once a month with just some sort of hello, a personal email from your personal Gmail or your personal business account or your personal Outlook account. Send them a personal email just saying, Hey, how are you? I hope you’re doing great. I hope you’re doing well. I just wanted to touch base, see how things are going. We have some incredible real estate deals that we just closed. Here’s an example of a deal that we just closed. I’m not assuming that you’re ready to invest. I’m not assuming that you’re liquid, but I would love to jump on a call with you, a one on one call and walk you through this and tell you a little bit more about what we do one on one, okay. Just the offer of telling them, I would like to tell you more about what we do and they get to do it through again through like a GoToMeeting or a conference call or some sort of bridge line, FreeConferenceCall.com where they don’t have to travel.

See, I don’t take lunch meetings anymore. When people call me up and said, I’d like to buy you lunch. I’m like, dude, timeout. Let’s just do a cell phone call. I don’t know if I want to do business with you yet. I don’t know if I like you. I don’t know if I like the color of your hair. I know if I like the size of your feet, I don’t know anything about you, so why would I spend a half hour to get to a location, an hour or an hour and a half for lunch and then a half hour 15 minutes to drive back two hours out of my day, to let you buy me lunch or for me to buy you lunch. Like the world is so much faster now and people are so much more comfortable. I can turn on the GoToMeeting and open up the webcam and have a personal conversation with someone through a webcam and be almost as effective as being with them face to face one on one.

So my personal email is also with the purpose of getting them on the phone. So I love getting on the phone with people. I don’t even care if they have any money. If they have money, don’t have money. I don’t tell people, Hey, I’ll get on the phone with you if you have $250,000 to invest. I don’t do that. I tell people, Hey, you’ve shown interest in real estate, you’ve shown interest in me and my companies. You’ve kind of raise your hand and said, you’re potentially interested in being an active or a passive investor. Let’s hop on the phone for 15 minutes. And that’s what I do. I set up a 15 minute cell phone call or a 15 minute GoToMeeting or a 15 minute webcam call. That’s it, 15 minutes and right when I hop on the phone with them, I asked them, what are you more interested in doing?

Are you more interested in being an active or a passive investor? And that will tell me right away what bucket they fall in. Are they an active flipper are they an active multi-family investor? Are they a passive investor? Do they have a retirement account? Do they want to do both? And then after I’ve gotten to know them for 15 minutes, we can hang up the phone and then I can jump back on the phone with them maybe a week or two later and maybe do an hour long discovery call, right? So all of these different techniques, the physical newsletter that you know, once a week email broadcast, the Facebook posts, Facebook lives, the Zoom call, the GoToMeeting, the personal emails once per month is all for the purpose of getting them on the phone for 15 minutes. The purpose of that call for 15 minutes, the purpose of that call is to get them on the phone for an hour.

And if they’re a passive investor during that hour long call, the purpose of that call is to do a discovery to find out if they’re accredited, non-accredited, to build a relationship with them. Then when we build a relationship with them, then the next step is to potentially show them a potential deal. So there’s all this top of funnel marketing, there’s all this top of funnel branding that we’re doing to get them to work down through the funnel. Just to open up our emails, just to get on a 15 minute call just to get an a one hour long call, do the line of questioning, do the discovery, and then potentially make them an offer in one of my deals, okay.

I spend way more time and effort and energy with the Facebook post, the Facebook lives, the physical newsletters, the email marketing to go to meetings, the personal calls. All of that is the secret sauce to finally getting a commitment from an investor to invest in one of your deals, right? So those five things, use those five things as often as you can. Physical newsletter, email, broadcast, Facebook posts, and Facebook lives. Use Zoom, GoToMeeting, and Skype to do group calls and personal emails once per month. Follow that and you will build up a massive pipeline of potential active and passive investors that can joint venture and invest in your deals.

You’ve been listening to Josh Cantwell and the Accelerated Investor Podcast. Leave a comment on our iTunes channel and let us know what you want to learn next, or who you’d like Josh to interview. While you’re there, give us some five star rating and make sure to subscribe so you can be the first to hear new episodes. Follow Josh Cantwell and his companies, the Strategic Real Estate Coach and Freeland Ventures on all social media platforms now and stay up to date on new training and investment opportunities to start your journey toward the lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of. Apply for coaching at JoshCantwellCoaching.com.