Recently, REsimpli Podcast’s host, Brandon Barnes, had the privilege to talk to a very special guest, Tony Javier – the owner of an INC 5000-rated real estate investment company, a successful business owner, real estate investor, coach, and speaker. In this valuable podcast, he talked about TV commercial ads in detail and many other important points that can help real estate investors in multiple ways.
Thinking of growing your business via commercial ads? We can help!
Nothing happening right in your real estate business? Unable to get multiple inbounds lead? Want to skyrocket your business? If so, meet Tony Javier, who is helping real estate investors like you to exponentially grow their business with TV commercials!
Tony Javier has been investing in real estate since 2001 and has done close to 1,000 flips. Over time, he mastered the art of flipping houses, profiting from over a thousand successful deals and accumulating substantial equity. However, as his team grew, Tony faced new challenges in managing them efficiently. Seeking guidance and embracing automation, Tony revolutionized his business approach. He stresses the importance of finding mentors whose lifestyles align with one’s aspirations.
By adopting inbound marketing strategies, Tony attracted superior leads, resulting in more fruitful deals. Surprisingly, television advertising emerged as a uniquely effective marketing channel for Tony and his fellow investors. With fewer working hours now, Tony dedicates his time to launching new businesses and further investing in the real estate industry, thus continuing his remarkable journey of triumph.
Brandon Barnes 00:06
Hey, what’s up, everybody? I want to welcome you to the REsimpli podcast. We have our guest Tony Javier today. Tony, how you doing?
Tony Javier 00:15
Doing good, man. How you doing, Brandon?
Brandon Barnes 00:17
I’m doing well. Just trying to take in this beautiful weather, man. It’s usually by this time of year, I’m in the south. It’s wet, like a wet blanket outside, and right now it’s perfect! So….
Tony Javier 00:29
Nice! Where are you located again?
Brandon Barnes 00:30
I’m in Charleston.
Tony Javier 00:33
Charleston.
Brandon Barnes 00:34
Yeah.
Tony Javier 00:35
Awesome. Yeah, I’m in San Diego, and it’s been gloomy for about six months now, which is why we’re here, we, you know, pay these nice little taxes to have the sun and all that good stuff. But it’s been literally cloudy for the last six months. It’s been the weirdest thing. So glad you’ve got some sun out there, though.
Brandon Barnes 00:48
Yeah, dude, it’s been so nice. Well, cool. So, Tony, tell our guests a little bit about yourself and kind of what you got going on.
Tony Javier 00:57
Yeah, so I’ve been in the business a little over 20 years now. Started with finding an infomercial on TV called No Down Payment by Carlton Sheets, which I’m sure you’ve heard of and a lot of people that are old school have heard of. He started teaching people back in the think and how to buy properties with no money down. And that’s pretty much what I did, and still do to this day, actually, is using other people’s money to buy properties.
So being 21, a college kid waiting tables when it said, you can buy properties with no money down, and they showed all these examples of people doing it, I’m like, there’s no reason I can’t do this, too. So I ended up buying a course for $200 on TV. And within let’s see, I bought it in April of 2001 and then closed on two properties September of 2001. So 911, basically, and got my career started in Burr. So I burred the first ten properties I bought. So I would take a chunk of money that a friend had that we partnered with. We would take I think it was like 60,000. We would buy a property for, let’s say, 40. We’d put 20,000 into it, refinance it, get all the cash out, and just keep repeating that over and over.
And we did that for the first year or so, and we were able to do about ten properties, and we had several hundred thousand dollars in equity just in the first year. So that’s when I realized real estate was a way to build wealth very quickly at. And I was, like, 23 years old with hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity and properties and just realized how great of a business it could be. So grew the business for 10, 11 years before I kind of hit not even a plateau. I kind of did one of these and just kind of hit a rock bottom mentally because I was working 60 to 80 hours — 80 hours weeks and within a 30 day period I had to let go all five of my team members within a 30 day period.
And I’m like, what am I doing wrong? Because that’s the second time it had happened. And so I ended up hiring a coach that he had automated his business and wasn’t working in it. And I’m like, there’s no way you can do that. How can you not meet with buyers, not meet with sellers, not meet with contractors, not deal with investors and have a good sustainable business? Because I thought I had to do all of that, right? Because we feel like we’re the best at what we do and we need control of it and all that kind of stuff. And then we hire support people to just help with it.
And so within about, I don’t know, three years or so, I’d worked myself out of a job, which was great. I hired good people, I put good systems in place. I just made a lot of moves that I couldn’t have done on my own, that I had to find through a coach as well as some mastermind groups I started being a part of and got to myself to where I was only working a few hours a week in my real estate investing business, which I still do to this day. I don’t spend a lot of time and we flip a lot of houses every year.
Now I live in San Diego and my business runs in Wichita, Kansas, which is great. I get know live in a great place like San Diego, which is usually sunny, and then get to invest in the Midwest, which is good inexpensive real estate. So I flipped over 1000 houses over the last 22 years and kept a decent amount of those as rentals and still continue to do that to this day. I’ve got a great team that runs the business out there and now I get to concentrate on opening up other businesses and potentially looking at buying some other businesses here in the near future.
Brandon Barnes 04:30
That’s awesome, dude. That’s a really cool story. So the first thing I want to touch on is the coaching. When you saw that you had letting go an employee is probably, especially if it’s not necessarily their fault, is probably one of the hardest things in the world to do. I’ve always valued hiring somebody, their livelihood, their wanting to entrust in us as business owners.
So you found a coach that I’m assuming had a business model that you like. And one of the best pieces of advice I was ever given was find coaches or mentors that have lifestyles and businesses the way that you want lifestyles and businesses. If you want to be the guy that works 80 hours a week and is on all the phones and doing it all, there are people to teach you how to do that. And then likewise there are people to teach you kind of how to build your business the way you did. I’m assuming that’s kind of what it was.
Tony Javier 05:20
Yeah. I mean, I hit a pain point. Anytime I look at big pain points in my career, there always was something good that came out of it. And so just one of those things where it’s like, man, I’ve tried so hard to make this business work. It’s not because of a lack of effort. So it’s like Tony Robbins says, if you’re not getting the results you want, you have to change your approach, you know, it’s kind of like insanity. If you keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, then it’s just going to create insanity.
And then it was actually just good timing. I don’t know if I was necessarily looking for it. I think I just kind of put myself in the right position by going to seminars and things of that nature, and that’s where I found them. I can’t say that they gave me any earth shattering advice. It was more just the model. It was like, it’s possible. Roger Bannister running the four minute Mile nobody thought it was possible until it happened. And all of a sudden, there’s still people, probably weekly to this day, that are breaking the four minute barrier.
And that’s what I like to kind of spread the word. I know some people may just be getting started in real estate, but even if you are getting started in real estate, you still have to look at it as, where do I want to be a year from now, two years from now? Do I want to be working 60 to 80 hours weeks? Or do I want to figure out how to work smarter by learning lessons from people that have been there? And work a balanced 40 hours week? Because I own multiple businesses, only work a few hours a week in that one business, but I still overall only work a 40 hours week.
Now, is my mind on sometimes at night and on the weekends and things of that nature? Yeah, but still I’m able to step away and not feel like the business is going to fall if I’m not there. In fact, I went to Hawaii a couple of weeks ago, eight full days from Thursday to — it was basically ten days where I left my phone at home and had no contact whatsoever with work. And there’s no way I could have done that 10, 12 years ago.
And most entrepreneurs can’t do that, and if they did, a lot of things would fall apart. So very fortunate to be there. And that’s kind of one of the big words I like to spread, is how to run business with leverage. We leverage money all the time, right? People leverage other people’s money on transactions. But what a lot of people don’t understand and teach is that you can leverage your time with other people, with systems, and just making smarter decisions.
For instance, even from a marketing standpoint, which we’ll probably jump into a little bit, is a lot of people get started with texting and cold calling, which is fine. But when you look at it from a standpoint of how much time and energy you’re going to find deals through those platforms? What if you could do inbound marketing where people are calling you so you’re not having to every day talk to people? And even if you’re outsourcing it still managing those people. And then even if you have people that are doing that, you still have to evaluate the deals and you have to go through three to four times as many deals on an outbound campaign as you do when people are calling you just because the quality of lead.
So just looking from that perspective, and I made a big mistake a couple of years ago starting a business that used way too much time and money. So even that learning that lesson of like, okay, I did that. Now next time when I open a business or I invest in a business, how can I put as little as possible into it and get a high output, whether that’s money or time? So it’s just a different way of looking at business and the way you do things on a daily basis.
Brandon Barnes 08:56
That’s cool. Yeah, and you’re right. Inbound versus outbound marketing. We’ve built my personal investing business. We built everything on inbound. It was too much, the texting, the cold calling, the chasing. And we have established a brand and everything comes in. And I talked to people in my Mastermind and other investors and they’re like, well, how’d you get this deal? And I’m like, oh, well, the guy saw my truck. Or as a referral, or everything comes to us, which (A) your bandwidth is better, (B) those conversations are ten times better than they are cold texting or cold calling somebody.
Tony Javier 09:35
Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I mean, think about it. If you’re having to convince someone to sell, chances are they’re probably not super motivated. And if they are, you still have to break that barrier. Who are you? Even when I get a text, I’m like, who are you? I have no idea who you are. And even if I every once in a while respond to one just for kind of fun, or there might be someone that responds with something, like how to make money doing something and I’m kind of interested and I’ll text them back and then I’ll stop the conversation because I’m like, I don’t know that they’re credible.
And if I had to spend a lot of time trying to figure out who they are and that kind of thing, it’s not worth my time. Whereas when people call you and they’re saying, hey, will you come make me an offer? That’s way different. Way different. You don’t have to convince them to look at their house. You don’t have to convince them that and depending on what the marketing method is, the credibility of them calling you and saying, I want to do business with you is just night and day.
You have to go through less leads, you have to spend less time at the appointment because you’re not having to, again, build as much rapport. You’re probably going to negotiate a better price because again, it’s a more quality, serious lead that you’re not having to convince that you’re the real deal. And we actually had a deal the other day where we had someone call from our TV commercial and they took an offer $10,000 less than our competitor. And they said it was because they’d seen us on TV and they knew who we were, whereas the other person, they didn’t know. And they could have gotten more money, but at the same time, they didn’t know if they could close or not and didn’t know if they were legit or trying to scam them, that kind of thing. So yeah, it’s just again, another way to work smarter as opposed to harder.
Brandon Barnes 11:17
Absolutely. Let’s talk some TV. So I know that’s something you’re doing a lot with and helping a lot of investors throughout the country and also doing it yourself. How did you get into the TV marketing channel? Because I know three years ago, maybe less, nobody was talking about it.
Tony Javier 11:36
Yeah, 100%. So 2012, so 11 years ago. It’s kind of weird how things happen. Like things just kind of line up when you look at some different things that happen in your life. And I ended up going to this networking I wasn’t supposed to go to this networking event, actually. I was very sick. And I told my friend, I was like, I don’t want to go to this event. And he’s like, you know what, just go have a drink and you’ve been sick for a little while, maybe it’ll help you, that kind of thing.
And so I went to this event. I ended up meeting this guy named Brian and we ended up hitting it off, became really good friends. And we are to this day still. And about a year after we met, he met a guy randomly on a plane in Vegas. And the guy, they became friends and so he introduced me to him and said, hey, why don’t you come to a poker game? So we go to this guy’s house, his name’s Cody.
So we go down to the basement and I see these two know across the way and I’m like, those guys are on TV. I’m like, that is super know, they were just business owners that had TV commercials, but I was kind of star struck in a way, you know like, oh man, that’s so cool. I’m playing cars with these guys that know on a TV commercial. So I end up sitting next to one of them, his name’s Chad. And I said, Chad, how are your TV commercials doing?
And he’s like, man, we’re doing millions of dollars a year from our TV commercials, and that’s all the marketing we do. That’s all we have to do. He said, you know, people tell other people they see our commercial and people call directly and just telling me everything about it. So I start drilling him with questions, and he’s like, you know those are questions that my media guide, Drew could probably answer for. So me being me, Monday morning, first thing, I called Drew and I said, hey, I heard you’re the TV guy. Tell me about it. And he’s like, you know, based on what your avatar is, I think we can probably get you some pretty good rates. He goes, let me call some stations and negotiate some rates for you, and I’ll get back to you.
And about a week. So he calls me back in about a week and he said, hey, got some great rates for you. For a few thousand bucks, we can get you hundreds of commercials a month. And I’m like, man, that’s really inexpensive direct mail. You can spend five to ten grand pretty easily on a direct mail drop, if not more. So I’m like, you know what? I’d always wanted to be on TV. Let’s do it. And so within 30 days, I wrote the script, he produced the commercial, he made it super easy for me.
And that was 2012 when I launched my first commercial. And it’s been the best lead channel over the last eleven years. It’s been the most consistent. It’s, I think, pretty much every year been the number one from an ROI standpoint. And then there’s all kinds of other benefits I’ll jump into here in just a little bit. But over the years, people are like, just like you said a few years ago, I joined Collective Genius back in 2015, there was only one other investor doing TV at that time, brad Chandler. Some of you guys may know him.
Brandon Barnes 14:12
He was everywhere. He was national when he was doing that, right?
Tony Javier 14:15
Well, he started with TV locally, and then eventually he ended up doing a national SEO campaign, which I’m not sure if he’s doing that anymore, but….
Brandon Barnes 14:22
Yeah, I remember that because he would send me Charleston, I remember that, yeah.
Tony Javier 14:28
Yeah, exactly. And then Investor Fuel, I joined Investor Fuel two and a half years ago, and there was only one other investor doing TV in that whole group. And for those who don’t know who these Masterminds are, it’s some of the highest level investors out there doing usually doing anywhere from 50 to 100 deals a year, maybe even more than 100 deals a year. And some of the brightest of the bright in the business, and they didn’t even know about TV.
And so a few years ago, someone convinced me. They was like, if TV works in your market, it would probably work in other markets. And so he convinced me to put together a program to show people what I was doing and I was like, you know what? Rather than showing people what I’m doing and just giving it to them and letting them do it on their own, why don’t I talk to my media guy who’s been doing TV for 25 plus years and see if he wants to help real estate investors implement this marketing channel by putting together the scripts. We know that we’ve worked over the years and tested and tried by buying the media, calling the stations and negotiating like he did for me, producing the commercial, basically doing 95% to 99% of the work.
And so we launched that almost three years ago, about two and a half to three years ago. And it’s crazy because almost every time we plug it into a market for another investor, it works just like it did for me. I’ve spent a few thousand dollars my first month and I made over 30 grand in my first month, so I was profitable month one, which is hard to do in any business or any marketing channel. And the same thing is happening with the people that we’re helping implement TV for in the first 30 days. They’re typically getting at least one, if not multiple deals under contract, and it’s just totally changing the game for them.
The credibility you get from TV is second to none when people know you’re on TV, just like did at that poker game. I’m an introvert, but I ended up talking to Chad and treating him different because he was on TV, right, when you go into people’s houses, if you’re the one that’s on TV I haven’t been to an appointment in seven years, but I can remember going in people’s houses and going, you’re Tony from TV. You’re actually here, you know, just like I’m Pat Sajak or something like then you know TV.
I could go on and on. It helps your other forms of marketing just because of the can. Raising private money is a lot easier. When people know you’re on TV, the conversations from them and anybody you do business with is a lot easier. I mean, I could go on and on about the benefits, but it’s been something that’s been great for us. And I just love that I’ve been able to find something above and beyond some of the other things that we’ve done that can really help grow and scale other people’s businesses and just really change it for them.
We’ve worked with investors that have just started out, which were a little bit choosy on that, but if we feel like the investor is right for it, we’ll take them on. But we’ve taken investors that had trouble texting and cold calling. We’re doing a few deals here and there to actually just had a guy in a market, he’s only been with us four months now. He was having trouble finding enough deals to keep his business going, and he plugged TV in and he just had to pause his commercials for a couple of months because he had too many deals that he was working.
So just things like that, that’s like, man, I get kind of goosebumps thinking about it, how I’ve been able to take something that I’ve done and help other people implement it and really change the game for them. And then there’s some investors we worked with that were doing three to five deals a month that have gotten closer to 100 deals, three to five deals a month, that have gotten closer to ten deals a month because of the amount of volume we’re able to get them from TV commercials.
So we talked about inbound versus outbound marketing, and I think pretty much everything we do now is inbound. And so you have people calling you asking you to do business. It’s just a game changer over. You having to beg and convince people to at least get an offer from you, and it’s just completely changed the game.
Brandon Barnes 18:21
That’s awesome. So does the TV commercial, do the people call directly from the TV commercial or do they go to your website? Because I know when I did billboards and we had a little bit of success with billboards, but it was extremely expensive. The one thing that was weird for me about the billboards is that it was to drive people to your website. It wasn’t directly to, hey, here’s your number on the billboard, call it. Unless you had something like a vanity number that was really easy to remember. And so are the TV like are people calling directly from it or is it a mix of all of it or what’s kind of the main goal?
Tony Javier 19:00
Yeah, it’s a great question. So we have a full formula we have with our TV commercials, and one of them is the way that we position our phone number and our website on the commercial. And so statistically, about 80% of people will call, which is what we want, because if people go directly to a website, we feel like they can kind of get lost. Or if they type in the wrong, you know, type in one letter wrong, or forget what the website is, and then they’ll try and Google you and then they find your competition, that kind of thing. And even if they find your website, if there’s one thing missing on your website or something that doesn’t grab their attention enough for them to call you or to fill out the form, then they’re lost.
Whereas if they call you, you’ve got their phone number, you’re going to have their caller ID. And if you have a good enough team, you can follow up with them. If they don’t leave a message, or even if you do get them on the phone and you don’t get them to schedule appointment right away, you can follow up with them. So we like to drive mostly phone traffic, but it’s going to happen where people just want to do more research before they give you their information.
Brandon Barnes 20:04
Got you. And that, it’s — I like that a lot better, because that was the one thing about billboards. I would sit every month and go through my presentation from the company, and they’re like, oh, well, look at all the traffic coming to your website. And then we were having stuff optimized, and I’m like, well, it’s not converting. I’ll take some of the blame for the website, but also there’s a phone number, there’s stuff for people to call. So I definitely like that TV can drive direct phone traffic, which I think is important because you want that phone number, you want the data so you can follow up with these people.
Tony Javier 20:36
Yes, exactly.
Brandon Barnes 20:38
And so you guys help turnkey kind of the TV model for people, is it? They pretty much just got to go into a studio and shoot if somebody’s wanting help with the TV commercials?
Tony Javier 20:50
Yeah. So when I launched this, I looked at it because I’ve had so many different service providers. I said, what would I want if I was provided this service? What would I want? And I would want it as easy as possible. Real estate investors are so busy that even some we do 99% of the work for, and that 1%. It’s hard for them to get that 1% done, even if it’s just filling out a little paperwork. And so we already have the data. We know what scripts work well because we’ve tested them with us over eleven years, and now we have over 100 real estate investors, about 115 real estate investors that are using these that we know have been proven in other markets. So we put that together for them.
We have very similar schedules we use for our investors. So we know shows work really well. So we’ll go negotiate with the stations. It take us a week or two to go to the stations, give them our formula, get rates, negotiate with them, make sure that we’re getting the right rates. And then once we do that, then we set them up in the studio. Once they approve everything that we put together, set them up in the studio to shoot the commercial. Usually it’s on a teleprompter, so it’s super easy. They don’t have to really memorize anything.
Yeah, the footage is sent to us and within all of that time frame, produce the commercial and do everything on the back end. Within 30 days, we can have someone on the air. We’ve actually done it less than three weeks before because someone wanted it and we got it done. But usually 30 to 45 days is what we typically tell people just to be safe. But yeah, we do all of the hard work because if you think about it, even Brandon, you’re a smart guy. And we’ve had a lot of smart investors try TV commercials on their own. But think about if I’m like, Brandon, go do TV commercials. Could you do it? Absolutely. But it’s like, who do you start calling? Once you start calling people, do you trust the reps at the station that they know what they’re doing?
I’m sure you’ve talked to service providers where they’re like, oh, I’ve got the perfect thing for you. We can find you tons of buyers. And it’s like, you weren’t listening to me. I’m looking for sellers, not buyers. You know what I mean? So just training them on what your avatar is and then you have to figure out what to say in your message, which is only 30 seconds. You have to be on the right shows.
So even if you find a representative that’s really good, that gives you customer service, it’s like, are they going to really buy the right shows for you? And we’ve tried expensive stuff and we’ve tried cheap stuff, and luckily we found that the inexpensive stuff works really well. Whereas if you call a representative, they’re going to want to sell you the expensive stuff because it’s harder to sell and they’re going to make more money off of it. Right?
Brandon Barnes 23:19
Yeah.
Tony Javier 23:20
And so just being able to take something like TV and put all the pieces together with a company like ours really dials it in, and the great thing about what we do is it’s not easy to do. So even if I just said, hey, guys, TV is great, not many people are going to be able to figure it out. And so that makes the competition much less. I mean, think about how many people are texting and cold calling in your market and even doing now Google, PPC and buying leads and things of that nature.
There’s typically probably dozens, if not potentially hundreds doing those marketing methods, any one of those marketing methods. Whereas if you look at TV, I bet you there might be one, maybe two investors in your market doing TV. Chances are they’re probably doing it with us. But there’s so much room for more people to come in, like even Charleston, for instance. I mean, you could probably have five to ten investors on TV because if I remember, right, I think it’s about a million people between Charleston and the surrounding areas that you can hit with TV. And even if you have five people, that’s 200,000 people per investor that is marketing on TV.
So again, I could go on and on about the benefits of TV and everything, but think about what people are doing. Can you model people and do what they’re doing? 100%. But if you can go against the grain and figure out what people aren’t doing, that works. That’s where the magic happens. That’s where what they call the blue ocean know, you can go into a bloody red ocean where everybody else is, but if you can find a nice blue ocean where not many people are, that’s where you’re going to thrive the most.
Brandon Barnes 25:03
Yep, I agree. And I can attest that you guys are operating in Charleston. And I’m friends with Zach, who you guys work with. And he had success. And I think he had success pretty quickly, from what I understand. I think he’s been with you guys over a year.
Tony Javier 25:22
He’s done two $100,000 deals from TV and he did them in the first, if not four months. Six months.
Brandon Barnes 25:28
Yeah. I remember him and I were at a bar one night having a drink, and he was telling me about it, and he was like, yeah, we did like $100,000 assignment within like two or three months of turning on our TV commercials.
Tony Javier 25:39
Yeah, super cool. And he’s young. He’s in his young 20s, man.
Brandon Barnes 25:43
Yeah. He’s a hustler. And so you talk about buying shows. So is that kind of what you guys the demographic of people watching certain shows at certain times? Those kind of things? Because when I did and again, I’m trying to understand, I’ve done some radio, you didn’t really buy shows. You just bought the amount of commercials and they kind of wedged them in. So in TV, are you able to buy specifically for shows and things like that?
Tony Javier 26:07
Yeah, so actually we can do radio as well. What we do is we promote TV a lot. But once TV works, then we start people with radio because they work really well together and then add billboards eventually if that’s what they want to do. But to answer your question, with that TV 100%, you can dial in and people I’ll kind of give people a tidbit if someone tries to sell you, streaming run away. Not saying it can’t work, but streaming is so new and you can’t really buy specific spots because the way that it works, you get so many impressions, they’ll put you in a bunch of random places.
So the great thing about TV is when you get a schedule is they will show you how many spots you’re getting on, what show you’re getting, how many people are watching, what the price of that commercial is, and your cost. They call it CPM, which is basically cost per thousand. So it’ll know this week you’re getting five commercials on Jerry Springer. I’ll give you a little piece of our formula.
Here’s the cost of each commercial. Here’s the total for that show, and here’s how many people are watching. And it’s cool because you can see what your cost per view is. And I’ll just ask you this question. I’ll see if you get even close with 1000 postcards, the cost is about $500, right? About fifty cents a postcard, give or take. Might be a little less, might be a little more. Cost per thousand for TV. How much do you think it cost for every 1000 people that see your TV commercial?
Brandon Barnes 27:42
If I had to honestly take a guess at it, I’d probably say between $50 and $100.
Tony Javier 27:47
$5. $5 in most markets. Now, granted, it’s not something in their hand. Of course, it’s not something that’s as targeted. But think about hitting 100 times more people with a channel that is more credible and that is going to be impressed in their head. People who have postcards, yeah, they can keep them and they might call you later, but what do they usually do? They throw them. They’re like another annoying postcard. With TV are they going to be like another annoying commercial? Maybe, but still the credibility is there because you’re in their living room almost every single day.
And the other great thing is you’re hitting people that aren’t necessarily on all the lists, right? Because if you’re competing with lists, you have 100 people texting and cold calling, you have another 20, 30 people potentially hitting those lists with postcards, it becomes very clouded. And then you hit people that maybe aren’t quite on a list yet, or maybe getting ready to be on list because they’re getting ready to fall behind on their payments, or they’re getting ready to inherit a property, or they’re getting ready to have a vacant property, you’re hitting those people before anybody else.
And so we actually get a lot of people that call us from a stack of postcards. So even if you are marketing and you hit those same people, we’ve had a lot of calls from a stack of postcards. We’re like, we have ten postcards here and we called you and only you because you’re on TV. We have no idea who these other guys are. I just love it that we can hit people that aren’t on our list and then even people that are on our list. It just helps build the credibility that when we do hit them from direct mail or something of that nature, that we’re able to increase our return on those avenues because of that.
In fact, we had someone the other day that Googled us and then was coming into town and they ended up hearing our commercial at the same time. And so I’m not saying we got that deal 100% because they saw our commercial, but I can tell you that it helped with the conversation, that it helped probably my team put the contract together quicker and we may have even gotten a better deal on it. Right?
So anyway, like I said, I can go on and on about this stuff. I’m super passionate about it and I think it’s one of those things that not a lot of people talk about. And even if you look at other industries, like car dealerships, there’s a lot of car dealerships on TV. That’s obvious, you know, accident attorneys I think are one of those that there’s a bit of competition. But if you look at most industries, there’s not a lot of competition. In most industries you maybe have a couple of investors on TV, you may have HVAC companies even that you may have a few on the air, but when you’re hitting millions of people, it’s really not much competition.
And a lot of people think that TV is going away because people are streaming. Well, if you’re hitting a lower income demographic that doesn’t want to spend money on streaming or doesn’t want to spend money on cable, you can hit them with TV that they’re getting for free. And hitting that lower income demographic, which is another reason the TV works well, is even if the population is going down a little bit from TV, I think it’s like 40% of the population still watches regular TV at least 3 hours a day. Right? So that’s a big amount of the population. And a lot of those people are over 50. So if you look at it from that perspective and that they’re lower income, it’s just a beautiful way to market.
Brandon Barnes 31:13
Yeah. I laughed in my head when you said, if somebody tries to sell you streaming, run. Because my billboard company, that’s what they tried to sell. I was like in it. And I was like, man, I should just run. But when you think about TV, I think about my parents, both my parents. My dad’s in his 50s, my mom’s in her 60s. Their TV is on constantly, and they are your typical person. They’re not going to sell. It’s going to get passed down to us. But they own it free and clear. They’ve inherited the home, everything that lines up with what you’re going to do and hitting as many of those people as possible. But they fit that demographic of who’s going to watch your television show.
When it comes to streaming, you’re probably not buying a bunch of people’s homes who are streaming anyways. I think of my mother in law who tries to we try to teach her how to use a fire stick, and it’s pretty tough. So they go back to whatever TV commercials or whatever TV they’re watching.
Tony Javier 32:14
Yeah, it’s interesting because I did acquisitions seven years ago. I’d go into people’s houses and their TV was on. You’d go during the day, you’d go late in the evening. They always had their TV on. It was always playing in the background, whether they were cleaning or washing dishes or playing with their kids. If they were young enough to play with kids, it’s just when you grow up that way, that’s just what happens, is you grow up with TV on.
I grew up that way. I mean I don’t watch as much TV, but even my age, we grew up, when we came home, TV was on and always playing in the background. And we watched dinner or we watched TV while we were eating dinner. And then even Saturday mornings, that was 3 to 4 hours of TV before we’d go out and play and do stuff. I think it’s going to be here for a while, and it’s going to be something that 20 to 30 years from now may change a little bit, because the people that grew up with TV are kind of going away a little bit. Streaming becomes easier and things of that nature. But I think it’s going to be here for a little bit.
Brandon Barnes 32:19
For sure. And you talked about competition earlier and you used our market, it’s roughly our Tri Counties, just under a million people. Does TV is it kind of like the fast food model where you have McDonald’s, Burger King, whatever? They’re all in the same corner, they’re all in the same spot. They don’t run from each other. Is it similar to where if there are multiple investors on TV and they’re talking about this service or what they can do, does it kind of lend credibility to the industry as well for the homeowners? Be like, all right, there’s five people talking about this. There must be something to somebody buying my house for cash and it must be something legit. Does that kind of line up with the same thing?
Tony Javier 34:06
Great point. Absolutely. People ask that question quite a bit. Well, you already have someone else in my market, or we know somebody else running TV and it’s like, okay, are there five or ten people running TV, or is it just one or two? And even if it is five people, just like you said, the thing about any marketing is the message has to be heard so many times for somebody to act. So if you have multiple people running TV for the same thing, then it’s more likely that someone is going to act sooner.
Now, there’s a potential you could help other people’s commercials because they may see someone else at the time that they’re willing getting ready to sell, but at the same time, it could be the other way around. So I think, to your point, the more people that are on TV now, there’s obviously a saturation point, but if you have a few people on TV that have that message, you’re getting into their head more about selling their house for cash. So it’s more likely for them to act faster. So I think they can definitely help each other for sure.
Brandon Barnes 35:04
Yeah. And it’s going to be like any marketing channel, the first to answer their phone, first to go on the appointment or make the offer or provide the service, regardless of if they call two or three people, the better you operate your business, the better likelihood you’re going to have to winning the deal or buying the house.
Tony Javier 35:22
Yeah, exactly. And that’s what I mentioned just a bit ago, is we’ve gotten multiple deals where people have said, we got a few offers. Yours was 10,000. I think the most we’ve seen is like 15,000 below the highest offer, where they’ve gone with us and said, we’ve gone with you because we’ve seen you guys over the years on TV and we feel like we know who you are and you’re going to close. Whereas these other guys, we just didn’t have a great feeling about them and we have no idea who they are we’re meeting them for the first time? So it does hand itself in, making it easier for sure.
Brandon Barnes 35:54
That’s cool. Yes. I definitely think for people that can make the budget work, it is a marketing channel that’s not saturated and competed. Again, I talk to a guy, I take my kids on a bike ride in our neighborhood every night. And there’s these two houses, they’re both abandoned, or I thought one was abandoned. And I saw a guy there the other day. So we rode our bikes down and talked to him. He’s like, yeah, I get postcards and letters and this and stuff all the day, all the time. He’s like, I’m just not selling. But you hear it all the time. I get all these postcards, all these letters, all of this stuff, and it’s like, how do you stand out from it?
Tony Javier 36:35
Yeah, exactly. And like I said, we’ve actually gone in houses where they had a stack of postcards. It wasn’t even one of ours. They didn’t even have our postcard. But they called us from TV and they’re like, we have a stack of postcards here. We didn’t call any one of these companies. But we saw your TV commercial and we called you. Right? Because it is clouded. I mean, so many people are sending postcards and text messages and we do postcards too. I’m not saying that’s a bad way to market, but when you can do things that people like better and that aren’t going to complain about I mean, think about it. If you’re on TV, it’s not like someone’s going to call you and complain that you’re on TV. Right?
Whereas postcards, you’re going to get that all the time. Every direct mail drop you do, you’re probably going to at least one or maybe a handful of people that are not very happy and probably one that’s going to cuss you out that you have to figure out how to calm down. Again, it’s not bad to market that way, but why would you do that and only that when there’s other ways that you can market a lot easier?
Brandon Barnes 37:36
Yeah. So let’s talk about size of the city. So let’s take Charleston, pretty small in the grand scheme of the larger markets. You take an Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas. How much does it change somebody’s ability to have TV commercials, budget, things like that, for somebody that is in one of the bigger cities?
Tony Javier 38:00
Yeah, great question. So like you said, bigger cities, you’re going to have to spend more there’s more population, you’re going to have to buy more commercials. That’s just the way it is for smaller markets. The reason I like smaller markets, which again, million people isn’t tiny by any means, but in the grand scheme of things, it is considered a fairly small market. Could even maybe call it a medium size. The ad spend can be pretty low. I’ve spent as little as $3,000 in my market. We’re spending $10,000 a month right now, which is a lot for a small market, which is probably a little bit smaller than what your market is.
So for someone starting out, I would say 5000 a month in a small to mid-sized market is probably where you’d want to start. And the good thing about that, for some people, that may sound like a lot of money, but you’re getting just to give you an idea, for I think the 10,000 we’re spending, we’re getting like 1200 to 1500 spots a month. I mean, it’s insane. We’re being seen 40 to 50 times every single day from our TV commercials, right?
Brandon Barnes 39:02
That’s a lot.
Tony Javier 39:03
And even some of the smaller markets like yours, I would say a $5,000 budget would get you probably close to 500 commercials a month. So you do the math on that. You’re being seen an average of about 15 to 20 times a day. So the likelihood of it not working is pretty slim. You’re getting a lot of eyeballs on your commercial to where the numbers there’s no reason it shouldn’t work.
Brandon Barnes 39:27
Got you. So the size obviously if they’re in a bigger city, it’s going to be a bigger budget, but smaller markets don’t hinder the ability to run the commercials. And so I do know people in some of the bigger markets have partnered with other people and they’ve kind of done kind of feed off the leads to the smaller stuff to help pay for it as well. Because I know we’ve looked at with Sharad at REsimpli, I know we looked at doing Chicago or tried to do Northwest Indiana, but I think it was Chicago was the market that it fed off of and they ended up working out with somebody else to where both of them, I think, benefit from it.
Tony Javier 40:12
Yeah, exactly. So the cool thing about TV, and this could play with any marketing method, but TV reach is a pretty broad area. So some people be like, I don’t want to go an hour away, or I don’t want to go 2 hours away. Well, that’s where some of the best deals we’ve done are. In fact, I partner with someone in a small town in Texas and we got a deal. And she’s like, I can’t wholesale this deal. And I’m like, this is a no brainer. I was like, let’s close on it and wholesale it.
So we did two of these deals, almost the exact same numbers where we bought them for 75,000, and we ended up wholesaling them, meaning we just cleaned them up. I think cleanup is the only thing we did on both of those properties, and we ended up selling them for about $150,000 each. So we made 60 plus thousand dollars on deals that were a couple of hours away. But what a lot of our clients are doing is if they don’t want to go 2 hours away, is they’re partnering with people in those markets.
So you can either wholesale a deal or you can just pass a lead onto a deal and get a finder’s fee and potentially pay for your ad spend that way. We have several clients that are real estate agents that just from the deals they get from TV, they’ll list them or pass them on to other real estate agents and get referral fees and pay for their ad spend. I’ve got one client that said he’s actually somewhere between a three to five times return just from the commissions he gets from the properties he lists from his TV commercials. That’s on top of what he gets from his investing deals.
So the thing about any marketing method is the more avenues you can have to monetize those leads, the better. Whether it’s fixing and flipping wholesaling, wholesaling keeping them as rentals, if they’re not in your area, sending them off to other people, they can do the deals and make money on those, and then referring deals that you can’t buy to real estate agents or listing them yourself and making money off of them. It’s one of those things where if you, again, can dial in your processes, the more likely it is to work.
So it’s kind of interesting when people say a marketing method doesn’t work. When you work with so many people that are handling leads, you kind of see how they monetize them and work them. And you can just tell the people that have more exit strategies and have their sales process dialed in usually are at about a ten times return on investment on their TV, if not more. And then the ones that aren’t quite as dialed in, I mean, they could still be doing okay. But that’s one of the things that I love helping our clients with too, is just dialing in how to make more money off the leads that they’re already getting.
Brandon Barnes 42:53
I’ve never even thought about the agent side of it because I’m sure there are listing leads as is type stuff, or even just full retail leads that would make sense for agents or people on your team or something like that. Just to, again, cover ad spend. If you can cover your ad spend and then whatever you’re buying is profit, then that’s a killer deal for the investor.
Tony Javier 43:15
Yeah, 100%. Yeah. We actually have some people that hire agents full time just to work those leads that they can’t take for us. We don’t make a ton of money off those leads, but I can’t even remember how much. We probably do $10,000-$15,000 in referral fees every year. Just sending leads off to agents and paying for a month, a month and a half worth of ad spend every year. So the more juice you can squeeze out of the orange, it all adds up over time.
Brandon Barnes 43:44
That’s awesome, dude. Tony, that’s kind of all I really had for you today. I know you’re a busy guy. Is there anything else you want to share for anybody else or the best way they can reach out to you? Learn more about kind of what you have going on.
Tony Javier 43:58
Yeah, absolutely. So we work with only so many people per market, so if someone wants to see if their market is available, you can go to Remtv.com stands for Real Estate Masters (Remtv.com). You can go on there, fill out your information, book a call with us, and we’ll let you know if your market is available. We can price your market out, let you know how much it’s going to be, about how many spots you’re going to get, and answer any other questions you have.
So this is what I spend most of my time on, is just helping real estate investors. We’re actually helping real estate agents as well to get on TV and potentially get them on radio as well. And I just love not only helping people with their inbound leads, but also helping them automate their business and get out of their business as quickly as possible. So that’s something I like to work with our clients with, as well as just how to work smarter and just leverage our community of 100 plus real estate investors that are really smart, doing a lot of things that they can plug into as well.
Brandon Barnes 45:02
That’s awesome, dude. So, yeah, everybody go check it out, see if your market’s available, and it’s worth kind of digging into. And again, I think definitely inbound leads are, in my opinion, the best that you’re going to get in the industry. Tony, I appreciate your time. Next time I see you or we chat, I’ll expect to see the pilot’s license taken care of for that.
Tony Javier 45:25
100%. Hopefully in the next few months, I’ll get that dialed in and get that taken care of.
Brandon Barnes 45:29
There you go, man. Well, I appreciate it!
