Revolutionizing Wholesaling: An In-Depth Discussion with Oleg Donets

Recently the REsimpli Podcast’s host, Brandon Barnes, was honored to interview Oleg – a successful serial entrepreneur, digital marketing and technology strategist, co-founder of Real Estate Bees, proud business mentor at SCORE, and what’s not!

In this podcast, Oleg Donets shared many insightful thoughts about his sensational journey and how to leverage real estate investing fully. He also shed light on REsimpli and other real estate tools and much more!

Want to kickstart, grow and scale your real estate business for free? We can help!

So bear with us!

Show Notes

The real estate business is a complex endeavor requiring meticulous planning and wise decision-making. But only some know how to do these things. That’s where an expert (like Oleg) can make a difference and guide you about all the important considerations.

Do you know why? Scroll ahead! 

Oleg Donets has a strong history of assisting startups and established businesses in achieving growth and success. With a focus on innovative technology solutions and progressive marketing strategies, Oleg has helped entrepreneurs from various industries launch, expand, and scale their ventures.

Throughout his career, Oleg has founded and co-founded multiple digital brands across diverse sectors, including real estate, technology, and home improvement. He has personally led the development of enterprise-level software platforms, ensuring their success from conception to completion.

As a co-founder of Real Estate Bees – a cutting-edge technology and marketing platform for the real estate industry, Oleg has been instrumental in its outstanding reception since its public launch in 2019. The platform has received numerous accolades, recognition, and media coverage. 

His dedication to helping businesses thrive, founding successful ventures, and giving back to the community showcases his exceptional leadership and entrepreneurial skills.

Want to know many other useful points that can help you in your real estate business? Check out the conversation between Brandon and Oleg! 

Key Takeaways

• The inspirational real estate journey of Oleg.
• How to leverage SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? 
• Reasons why real estate investors should focus on one thing? 
• How to acquire off-market deals?
• How do tools work with property investors?
• How Real Estate Bees and REsimpli are helping many real estate investors? 
• What’s the importance of the real estate agency launching on Facebook? 
• How many Ballpark users are on the platform buying and selling or wholesaling properties right now? 
• What are the major pains in the real estate business? 
• Can we push leads into our CRM?
• How to join programs offered by Oleg?
• Where to find Oleg? 

Transcription

Brandon 00:07

Hey, what’s up, everybody? It’s Brandon here with the REsimpli podcast. I want to welcome you to another episode. Today we have Oleg with Real Estate Bees. Oleg, how you doing today?

Oleg 00:18

I’m doing well, thank you, Brandon.

Brandon 00:21

Yeah, it’s great to finally connect. I appreciate you being on. I’m excited to learn about some new stuff today.

Oleg 00:26

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Brandon 00:28

Yeah. So, Oleg, where are you located?

Oleg 00:31

I’m currently in Cleveland, Ohio.

Brandon 00:33

Got you.

Oleg 00:34

Yeah, I’m going to move in throughout the country like a no man Texas to California now in Ohio.

Brandon 00:42

Got you. Okay. The home of LeBron James. So real Estate Bees is a platform you started? Tell me a little bit about what Real Estate Bees is.

Oleg 00:52

Yeah, sure. So real estate business, basically, it’s online platform for real estate professionals of all kind. It’s just at this point of development of the platform, we concentrate mostly on real estate investors and in particular on wholesalers. So we provide all types of solutions for wholesalers and investors in terms of basically, we take it from the acquisition of a deal all the way to the disposition. This is short description of what we do.

Brandon 01:23

Yeah. We can dig into a little bit more. What was kind of the thought for you on starting this platform, and how long has the platform been around?

Oleg 01:31

Yeah, so it’s kind of an interesting story. I almost occasionally stumble upon this whole real estate investment, real estate marketing in general. You know like other guests on your platform, I’m not an investor. I never closed any deal. I’m more on the marketing and technology side. So, again, I love the marketing piece of it.

And so started back to 2013 when I first launched the agency, the Digital Marketing Agency, and we were primarily focusing on SEO (search engine optimization) for all types of businesses. So we were like a generalist agency that one day can take a bakery business, another day can take a plant, or next day we take a real estate agent.

So from there, it kind of started being too much of time consuming because in order to deliver good result, you need to really concentrate on the industry. You need to understand the pinpoint and all of that. Right? So we kind of started thinking, okay, how we can transition somewhere and specialize in certain industry.

And so my partner at the time, so Marina, she was friends with one guy from Houston, Texas, and so he was real estate investors. And back then, I didn’t really understand that. So he always came to her and said, listen, let’s start some start running traffic to real estate investing related kind of businesses with the keywords, like sell house fast and all of that.

And back then, I didn’t understand it. I look at the keyword research and all of that as so low volume because as an SEO professional, we kind of look a lot on the volume of the keyword search and so I kind of didn’t want to get there, but over and over, she kind of brought him. And we slowly started kind of doing it right on the side from our business.

And suddenly we kind of created little website there, started driving traffic through search engine optimization. And next time you see, we receive a check from him for like $3,000, $4,000. And this is our split of the commission. Basically, we can be charged 20% of the closing. And from there, we started another website, more on the commercial side. And he also did the same thing.

He just wholesaled those properties to somebody else, another investor. And suddenly we started receiving five figure cheques. And this is like, okay, this is interesting. And so from there, we kind of transitioned into the real estate investing more, and we created the Real Estate Bees brand. And in the beginning, we kind of created this as real estate focused digital marketing agency.

And then we kind of looked at there is a lot of competition, so let’s kind of go away from that concept. And so eventually we transitioned it to a platform, right? So to be kind of unbiased on the industry. And so we stopped doing all types of digital marketing services. We became really the platform for real estate professionals.

And we have a bunch of stuff that we do really for free for all types of real estate professionals. For example, we have business directory on the website, which is it features all types of professionals, starting from real estate agents, brokers, builders, property managers, investors. We have close to 40 categories right now. So this is one of the ways how we help professionals. Just you create a profile and then we drive traffic from search engines, mainly also from Facebook a little bit.

And so people come to this platform, and for example, if they look for real estate agent, so they go to our platform, they see, let’s say, top ten real estate agents in certain area, they contact them and they get lead for free. So we don’t charge anything for that.

Brandon 05:44

Oh, wow, that’s cool!

Oleg 05:47

Yeah. So this is one of those features that we have for free. So any real estate professional, if you is licensed or it doesn’t require license, so you can register for free on the platform and just utilize it absolutely free.

Brandon 06:02

That’s really cool. So you saw or your friend or this gentleman from Houston saw an opportunity with SEO, probably before SEO was super popular. Is that based on kind of what you said the search looked like for those words?

Oleg 06:19

Yeah. So it was back to, I guess, 2015, something like that. There was already decent competition on search, but still, it wasn’t even close to what we have right now. He used to do it in the traditional way, mailers and all of that, direct mail. And so he was doing really nice, right?

And so he always understood that there is kind of way to also supercharge it through search because as we know, the search engine optimization is completely different intent, where it’s an inbound marketing when somebody comes to you and asking for information. Right? So, yeah, it was really good advice back then, but in the beginning, we really didn’t see it like that.

Brandon 07:09

Yeah, it sounds like when you started your business, you started it a lot like a real estate investor where, hey, I’m going to help everybody. You mentioned you’re going to have a plant, and then you’re going to have, I think you said maybe a bakery. You’re going to have all these different businesses and try to SEO optimize them, which is really difficult because I know as somebody, SEO is my favorite lead.

I love when people, they find me, they know I can trust me. Then they reach out. It’s a much easier conversation. Well, the company that helps us, I mean, they’re writing blogs, everything’s very specific to that niche of us. So I can imagine how difficult it was, which most real estate investors start that way.

They’re like, hey, I’m going to wholesale, I’m going to flip. I’m going to buy rentals. I’m going to do all these marketing channels. And then they realize, hey, I’m kind of scattered all over the place. This is really difficult to maintain. So when you transitioned to this platform, Real Estate Bees, did you cut off all the other stuff or stop doing it or slow it down?

Oleg 08:19

Yeah, we literally started firing our clients. It was really liberating because whenever you work as a generalist marketer and even though you do great job, people don’t appreciate it because you don’t really know their lingo, right? So whenever you come to somebody and says and say, I don’t know, you speak their language, they have the pinpoints, the pain points that they really kind of have in their day to day work, right?

And if marketer comes and speak their language, they appreciate it very much. So it was literally we were firing our clients. We did probably fire all the clients within two years, I would say, because our clients loved us, we did really good job, and so they sticked with us for years just for SEO services.

But yeah, it was kind of hard first, but very liberating, because whenever you concentrate on one thing, it becomes so much easier because it’s so much resources. When you need to learn a new industry every time some client comes to you, some bakery, right, you need to learn completely the whole industry in order to do a good job. And it wasn’t really viable for us.

Brandon 09: 49

And we were talking about Sharad before we got on this. Sharad’s favorite book is the One Thing. Every time him and I have talked and he’s like, I just need to focus on the one thing, which is where REsimpli come about. And yeah, he still invests, but his passion has become the tech side, for sure, for investors. So what did you notice when you got into this? Or pain points for wholesalers?

Oleg 10:18

Yeah, so this is we realized pretty quickly that two main pain points, right? So one is acquisition of those deals. How do you find those deals before they hit the market? Right? So this is how do you acquire the off market deals. And not just off market deals of I want to sell my house fast. But you really need to differentiate between those people who kind of want to sell fast because everybody wants to sell fast. Right?

But whether they are in the situation that will allow wholesaler come there and really negotiate the price. So this is one thing is to really identify in those hot leads and distress in distress situation. And the second one, first we thought, okay, we nailed it, right. We started generating these leads like hotcakes.

And then we realized that if the lead comes from a less popular area, let’s say not some of those metro, large metro areas where you have bunch of investors just waiting for this deal, but a little bit outside, right? So nobody jumps on it.

So here we are in a new predicament of how to dispose of this deal. And so this was the second pinpoint of wholesalers, how to do this position in an efficient way to sell it really quickly before their standard 30 day contract runs out. So, yeah, so these are two pinpoints that we really found out and we started creating solutions for those.

Brandon 11:55

Got you. And you all offer a way for them to get leads off market on your platform.

Oleg 12:03

Yeah, so we run several other platforms where we really generate those leads, even though we started kind of recently generating the off market leads through Realestatebees.com itself. And so we kind of collect those leads from multiple properties, and then we transition them into our system. So we recently launched Lead Marketplace, which resides on real estatebiz.com, where any wholesaler investor can come register for free and get access to those leads. And so basically buy them one by one.

Brandon 12:42

Got you. So they can register for the marketplace and then go on there, however much you want to share, what kind of information they get to see if they want to buy the lead, or how much information do you guys receive that you can then pass on to the wholesaler.

Oleg 12:59

Yeah, so we have really kind of scaled the conversion of a lead, right. So we have a really nice tech where we have very conversion optimized forms, web forms, where we kind of push the user through and we collect, I think close to 15 data points. Right? So for example, it’s obviously address, name, email, phone, reason for selling, what type of property. So we have close to between the 15 to 20 data points that we collect and then we share not all of those, obviously before investor can make a decision, right? We don’t show them obviously the contact information.

Brandon 13:46

Here’s a free phone number.

Oleg 13:48

Yeah. So some information of course we hide, right. But we give them enough information to kind of understand, okay, here is the city. We give them city, state, and zip code, right? So every wholesaler knows, okay, if this is the zip code, I definitely get this deal, right? So, yeah, there’s enough information for them to make educated decision and whether they want to purchase or not.

Brandon 14:10

Okay, cool. So then my question on that is as somebody who’d be interested in something like this, is it market specific? Can anybody, let’s say I’m in Charleston, can anybody in Charleston sign up or one person have a territory? How does that work?

Oleg 14:25

No, there’s not really such things. So we accept as many people as there interested in. So there’s no specific areas that you can reserve. It’s basically a first come first, serve it first. And we do try kind of provide different alerts, right? When a person can go and set what we call lead alerts, basically they put their buying criteria and whenever these leads that match this acquisition criteria, they’ll receive an email.

Brandon 15:02

Okay, got you. So somebody comes in and say, I like to buy in this zip. A lead comes in, then they’ll get a notification, hey, we just got a new lead on the marketplace for 29407, or something like that?

Oleg 15:18

Yeah, correct.

Brandon 15:19

Got you. Okay, that’s cool! So a wholesaler can get the lead or flip. Anybody can get the lead, work it, and then let’s say they get a contract. You guys have a marketplace or a way for them to assign them or wholesale them as well.

Oleg 15:34

Yes. So we’re kind of working it out right now. We have already those services, they’re more or less separated. We are trying to do them to connect them together. Right? So it’s going to be smooth connection if, let’s say they purchase the lead through our platform, right? And so this lead goes kind of into several points, right? So first they need to connect to seller, close them under contract, right?

And then once they close them under contract, they need to immediately, as soon as possible send this property for sale, but under different status, right? Wholesale deal already. It’s not a motivated seller. So we’re working this out now to make it to streamline the process. But at this point, we still have, let’s say if a wholesaler purchased a lead so they still can take this property and list it right away on our marketplace, which by the way, syndicates.

There is a way to syndicate it to different marketplaces that we own and run, as well as different partners that we also syndicate with. And there are also different ways. Right now, as we speak, we work on the e-blast. It’s a separate kind of service that is going to be a paid service where we allow wholesalers and investors to send e-blast directly to our buyers list.

Brandon 16:56

Got it. Okay.

Oleg 16:58

Yeah. So even though whenever they lease the property on our marketplace, it automatically sends buyer list to our buyer list, but it sends it in listicle way. Right? So, for example, investor from one side, investor comes to our platform and says, okay, I want to buy properties in Houston, Texas, single family homes, provide us with acquisition criteria.

So we get this investor as a user, as a buyer to our buyers list. Now, from the other side, wholesaler comes and says, okay, I have a deal under contract. I want to sell it quickly. Right? And so they go list the property, it’s automatically sent to all those investors whose buyer criteria matches wholesaler’s property criteria. Right? But the investor who submitted the buyer criteria, he or she receives it in a list mode, right?

So they receive a daily notification saying, okay, you have today five properties that match your criteria. Right? When I say about the blast, it is an individualized blast for this specific property of a wholesaler, which only highlights the property of that particular wholesaler. So it’s a different style of blast. They concentrate on one property only.

Brandon 18:27

Got you. Yeah. So it’s not necessarily because then the other way, I guess it can potentially get bogged down or get lost in notifications where this would be blasted directly to their email or text or whatever it is. I got you. That’s really cool!

So it sounds like it makes a lot of sense for whether you’re a wholesaler or like me, mainly a flipper to be on the platform. Because even if I’m not necessarily there to buy homes, even though I’d love to, if they’re there, if somebody does get one under contract, then I can know that, hey, there are wholesale deals available.

Oleg 19:05

Yeah, absolutely.

Brandon 19:07

Got you. So I’ll be signing up after the podcast then, because I’m still always looking for more deals. What other kind of stuff does Real Estate Bees offer for the real estate professional or investor?

Oleg 19:21

Yeah, so we have mostly our main products are leads, the leads that we generate. And we generate not just motivated seller leads. Right? We have several categories, have loans of all types. We have different types of leads. But besides that, the disposition portion, right. Which is we released recently, relatively recently, what we call property marketplace widget.

So it’s basically an embeddable widget. How you have a YouTube that you can grab a YouTube video and embed it on your website and there you have the video. The same thing we created for our marketplace, the same marketplace that we have been discussing for the last few minutes, right?

Brandon 20:08

Yeah.

Oleg 20:09

So any wholesaler or investor who wants to present their properties to potential buyers, they can grab this widget absolutely for free. To generate this widget, for example, they say, okay, I want to have on my property marketplace. These types of properties, residential, commercial, we kind of separate them by four categories residential, commercial, multifamily, and land, right? And within those large categories we have bunch of types.

For example, for residential, we have single family, townhomes, condos, all of that. So they basically go through this very quick process of generation, this little short code that they can place on their website and then we’ll populate our marketplace right on their website. And so the cool thing is that this is also a disposition, it’s a powerful disposition model because whenever they can list their own properties there, at the same time they can also include our inventory of market properties.

So it gives wholesaler additional way of making money. And what I mean is by JV with somebody else, right? So if, let’s say, wholesaler from another state listed a property for sale and so you as a wholesaler come and you place this widget on your website. So your buyers who come to your website, they can also request information about that other wholesaler from another state, right?

And you will be the representative who can later on connect this wholesaler, say, hey, I have a buyer, my buyer interested in this property. So let’s JV and you split the commission at the end of the day. So this is one of the ways how they can make additional income and also, again, obviously by listing their own properties on this marketplace. But the coolest thing is that we allow through this process, through this widget, build their own email list.

So there will be a little button there on the widget that says join my buyer list, something like this. And so that wholesalers users come to that marketplace, they click this button and they basically fill out the same buying criteria form that I told you about previously. But at this point, they fill it out for that whole seller. Basically, we help them build their buyers list, right?

And then at the same time, whenever you have a property that matches that buyer’s criteria, that buyers who filled out this widget, when it matches their criteria, we automatically send email from your name, right? Not from ours as a real estate business, but from your as a wholesaler. So basically you become a resource for your buyers of market properties.

Brandon 23:13

That is really cool! So it creates this almost JV marketplace where people can see other deals without necessarily going around you and me. For an example, if I’m wholesaling and I have a house that I’m selling and they go to my widget on my website, they click on it and through that they see something that you’re trying to sell. Then they can request that information. And now myself, I can connect everybody, make a part of the assignment or commission or whatever it is there’s to be made. And then boom. Everybody makes money and does a deal together.

Oleg 23:56

Exactly. Yeah.

Brandon 23:59

And then the second part I thought I heard it right, is if they see something else, they like, you guys push an information from their email so it looks like, hey, they’re sending them more properties. That’s pretty neat. So it gives a lot of value to you as an investor for your clients if you have a good buyer’s list or you have buyers that buy properties that provide you with a lot of value.

Oleg 24:26

Yeah. And this is absolutely hands off because it’s done through our, as I mentioned previously, property matching engine. Right? So it looks from one side as a buyer, from another side as a seller. Right? And so they match both together automatically. You don’t need to do anything. Send emails.

Every time I see wholesalers send emails manually whenever they have a new deal under contract. Right? So they send it through some sort of email marketing system, which is not as efficient, I think, because this system allows you to do it absolutely hands off.

Brandon 25:00

Got you. That’s super cool. I’ve heard of definitely a bunch of people trying to create like an off market marketplace and do different stuff, but I’ve never heard it built this way. Everything I’ve always heard is like, hey, we’re just going to have a website. You go there and put your bids or offers in. It makes it more about the website and not about the investor, where it sounds like you guys are making it more about the investor. And your platform is just a way to connect everybody.

Oleg 25:31

Yeah. And this is because we want to provide real value to our users. Right? It’s all about, I think, what we call reciprocity. Right? So wherever you want to include other investors on your market, their properties. So basically it’s like a reciprocity thing, right? I include your properties, you include mine. And this way we do together we do more income. Pretty much how it works.

Brandon 25:59

That’s really neat that you found all this and you’ve never closed a real estate deal.

Oleg 26:01

Yeah. It’s literally working off of feedback of investors, what they need, and we just listen and implement.

Brandon 26:10

Got you. So how long has this is 2015, 2016 is kind of when you all started doing this?

Oleg 26:17

Yeah, first. So we launched the platform. Well, the brand was created 2016. Right? And this is where we still were operating as a digital marketing agency, but specializing in real estate. But we transitioned into the platform, I think around 2018, where we completely stopped providing services as far as digital marketing services. And we became like an unbiased entity between the real estate professionals.

Brandon 26:47

Got you. And are you all nationwide? Are there market zip code cities that maybe you aren’t in yet or?

Oleg 26:55

No. Full United States. We cover the whole United States.

Brandon 26:59

That’s really cool. And how many Ballpark users do you think are on the platform buying and selling or wholesaling properties right now?

Oleg 27:08

Generally, I would say total users, probably close to 20,000. Again, this is all the users, right? Maybe more. And it’s growing every day. But specifically for investors, we literally just transitioned. We released all these features that I just discussed a few months ago, right? So we kind of onboarding a lot of users recently and yeah, so I don’t even have numbers. It’s every day really updating.

Brandon 27:39

That’s awesome. That’s good to hear. And it’s good to hear that people are going to the platform. And I see that they will because again, the platform is just a vehicle and all the value is trying to be led to the investor.

Oleg 27:55

Yeah.

Brandon 27:56

So are there anything for agents or other real estate positions other than just the wholesalers or is that really who you’re focusing with or the investors?

Oleg 28:08

We have other stuff. So basically, as I previously mentioned, the business directory, right? So we have it open for every type of vendor, right? So whoever wants to go and create the account, they can go, whether this agent, property manager, builder, lender. But we’re really developing at this point. We’re really developing all the functionalities for investors at this point.

Brandon 28:35

So let me ask a little bit about growing this business because I’m sure you’ve had some growing pains as creating it. What has been one big thing that you’ve learned in building this business that’s helped you think start to have some success and really help you cast the vision that you want?

Oleg 28:57

There’s been so many pains in this business. One of the biggest things, I guess, in this type of models, the biggest pains is having two sides, right? So whenever you try to run this type of company like this one, right, so you have always the buyer and the seller, regardless buyer of the property, seller of the property, buyer of the lead, and somebody who brings the lead, right? So it is really hard because it’s always like a chicken and egg, right? So who you get first?

You get first the buyers and then you go in and generate leads or properties, whatever, or the opposite. First you generate demand and then you get the buyers. Right? So this was one of the biggest issues that we kind of faced. But there are definitely more because it’s just obstacle after obstacle after obstacle.

Brandon 29:58

I can see that because I guess it’s like, hey, I want to put this platform out for investors that’s going to have leads. But if you don’t have leads, then they’re just going to kind of log in and be like, well, there’s nothing in my area and I can see them forgetting about it or not, maybe updating it.

And then on the same side, when you’re generating leads, generally these people want something to happen quickly. And so if you don’t have users, then the leads kind of die down. Will that affect your SEO strength at all? Or I guess the SEO really doesn’t know whether the leads are being anything’s being done with them or not?

Oleg 30:36

No, it just sucks. And this was more of our issue whenever in our business we have the ability to generate those leads and we always had and so we generate a bunch of leads and then we don’t have enough customers to sell it to. Right?

And so some of the leads always kind of stay unsold, which sucks because it’s a lot of resources from our site to generate those leads. But we are getting better in this and we get more and more users. So we kind of see it’s picking up right now and more and more leads get sold and all of that.

Brandon 31:19

Do you, let’s say you had a city that you got ten leads in and you don’t have anybody, let’s say you don’t have a user there or you don’t have somebody buying them. Will you go out and reach out and try to find investors in that area and say, hey, listen, we have a handful of leads, let’s try to see if we can make something work to try to get them on the platform.

Oleg 31:41

At this point, we don’t do this, it’s just not enough resources to do that. But we try to kind of attack this from different sides, so we try to do it on a massive scale. So, for example, making relationships with some large companies where we come and say listen, we can offer you those leads in these areas for deeply discounted price, right? But you’ll just buy all of them and that’s it. And so this is how we try to approach this.

Brandon 32:13

Got you. Okay, that makes sense. And then a question I had, this is more, I guess, for me, do the leads and if you don’t, we’ll have a conversation with Sharad. Do the leads that we buy from Real Estate Bees, can they be pushed directly into REsimpli into our CRM or do we have to manually add them? Are there any connections, I guess?

Oleg 32:37

Yeah, definitely. We are open for this type of integrations. We did do few integrations with large companies like for example, for HomeLight. So we do have those custom integrations when we have good partner. Yeah.

Brandon 32:55

Cool! That’d be something. Because I know myself, I’ve used like paper lead services and SEO. And until I got it to where Zapier was the word I was thinking for, until I was able to get them and I know nothing about technology at all, but until I was able to get them pushed into my CRM automatically, I felt like I never worked them as hard as they needed to be worked.

I’d get the lead, it would come to my phone, I’d call them, they either wouldn’t answer or not. But then I’d always have to go back to my email or that website where now I can get them pushed into my CRM immediately and then get them on drips or emails and stuff like that.

Oleg 33:37

Totally. Yeah, we are definitely. Looking into integrate with some of the leaders in the space and are simply definitely one of them. So we definitely will be building those direct integrations with certain apps. Yeah.

Brandon 33:52

That’s cool. I think that’ll be a huge help for anybody. But obviously people buying leads from your website, having the ability to kind of have them in front of them and then it allows them to know because what resample is based on is knowing all of your numbers and making educated decisions.

And if they’re paying for leads and they realize that they’re paying this much money a month, but they’re making this much more money a month, then it’s like, hey, how do I get more leads? Or how do I make sure I work these leads more? Which would benefit both parties, for sure?

Oleg 34:30

Right. Especially yeah, definitely all these productivity apps definitely help because we so many times, especially, I remember in the early days in our agency time, right, so you do all this heavy lifting, generating leads and then client doesn’t answer the phone or client doesn’t check email. It was so frustrating for me. And then they blame it on us because I don’t have business. Okay, well then why don’t you just answer the phone?

Brandon 35:00

Yeah. It’s such a strange concept and it’s because everybody wants they see all this stuff on social media and this is my belief is that they want people to just call them and say, hey Oleg, I want to sell you my house at $0.50 on the dollar. Come buy it next Friday. It’s going to be really simple and then that’s it.

Where in the grand scheme of it I have one right now that we have been under contract since February and we were set to close last week and now we are on a investigation, right? Word a hunt maybe for one of the sisters who’s just all of a sudden disappeared, won’t answer a phone, won’t answer an email, and so we can’t buy her house until she signs the closing docs. And it’s never easy. And I think that’s where people kind of struggle with it and it’s easy to blame the person generating the leads. Hey, your leads just they’re not motivated. Well, did you try?

Oleg 34:14

Yeah. And actually, you know what, we’re building this system right now, which also actually another pain point that we identified between, especially among wholesalers, is that they don’t know, like a lot of wholesalers, especially the newbie ones, they don’t have enough exit strategies that they can apply to really monetize as much leads as possible.

And so there are many wholesalers who get really good lead, right? But let’s say they have a really small equity in the property and so for wholesalers, it’s a dead lead in most cases. Right? Unless they know how to utilize this creative financing strategies where we have some investors that buy leads from us that do it. All right?

And so we see the most value for them and for the client at the same time, because person who has this small equity, right? So they still need solution, right? And if wholesaler comes across, very likely they won’t close the deal. And so they need somebody who has more strategies under the belt that they can deploy. And so we are working right now on this feature that will allow Wholesalers or not just Wholesalers, also investors.

So, for example, if a lead comes in and they just don’t know what to do with it, they can push it directly to our marketplace, add few fields to it, kind of explain why it wasn’t good fit for them, and then really find a better buyer for that lead, better somebody who can really serve that client. So we’re really working on this solution right now.

Brandon 37:59

That’s really cool because it can allow wholesalers to learn. It can allow people that do things differently or creatively to maybe see or have access to some other leads, because there are a lot of strategies that a newer investor may not know, where if they were to pick up the phone and call somebody, they could figure something out.

Oleg 38:23

It also allows them to kind of get a little return to their marketing budget. Because right now, as long as I’m aware, there is no program like this anywhere where somebody obviously wholesalers investors, those who invest in the marketing, right, who have budget, monthly budget, it’s just on average. And again, we did some surveys with our users.

On average, I would say 80% of the leads that they get, they can’t do anything with. So this is a lot of money, right? And this money can be returned to them if not 100%, at least 80% of that money can be returned by just using the solution that I’m talking about.

Brandon 39:10

Yeah, now, that’s a huge one, is like, what do you do with your wasted leads? So that would be awesome to have the ability to kind of network with people who do things differently. And again, at that point, it’s not about making money. It’s just, can I get some of my marketing budget back that I can redeploy it next month? That’s really cool.

Well, Oleg, is there anything else special about Real Estate Bees you like to share that we haven’t covered or did? We pretty much kind of cover everything that you guys are interested in right now?

Oleg 39:42

Yeah, we have a lot of different features that we didn’t go through. It required the whole day probably to go through.

Brandon 39:46

I was looking on the website. I think the biggest thing that people want, I want people to take away the platform is free to get on. There’s a lot of free resources. And whether you’re newer or experienced or whatever, getting on these platforms and taking advantage of free resources can always help your business. And then on top of that, there’s the ability to use some paid services to help grow as well.

Oleg 40:17

Absolutely. Yeah.

Brandon 40:19

Well, I appreciate it. Where can people find you? Where can people sign up at once they’re done listening to this and they stop the podcast? Where do you want them to go directly and how do they reach out to you?

Oleg 40:31

Yeah, so just to our social media accounts, probably just easy. You can Google Real Estate Bees either just Real Estate Bees or go and do Real Estate Bees. Facebook Real Estate Bees. LinkedIn. Right? So you will reach our Pages business pages as well, of course. Welcome, everybody who wants to join our program. The only issue right now that we are really as we speak, we transition the older dashboard to newer one.

So we kind of transition several modules there, but still some of them are on the old platform. So if you want to get access to the features that we discussed through this episode. So I will drop a link if you can share it, Brandon, on the page later on.

So I will drop a link of this particular URL where you can go and register, because right now on our public website, in many places, it’s still kind of the old registration link. So you will be registering in Real Estate Bees, but to the old dashboard, which doesn’t have a lot of features there.

Brandon 41:38

Got it. Okay. Yeah. So what we’ll do is, after it’s over, you email me the link, and then I’ll make sure it goes in the notes of the podcast. And then we’ll also share it on our social media as well to make sure everybody knows.

Because it sounds to me, as an investor who is really focused on buying, who does a wholesale lot, it sounds like a no brainer to go in there and put my criteria in. And either, A, there may be leads for me to buy directly, because I do use paper leads, but on the other side, there may be people who come across homes that have exactly what I’m looking for.

Oleg 42:17

Absolutely. Yeah.

Brandon 42:18

Oleg, I appreciate it. I appreciate your time today, and I look forward to being on your platform and hopefully making some money together doing it.

Oleg 42:26

Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Brandon!