As I travel all over the country teaching real estate investors how to automate their business one of the questions I get asked the most is “how do I get my real estate business online like you”? Well that’s a great question and one that can easily be solved but lets think about this for a minute. What exactly do you mean by getting your real estate business online? Well, you can have a website which seems like the most logical way but there are many ways to get your offline real estate business online.
In fact, you can have an extremely successful real estate business, operating it by Phone, Fax, Fed Ex, Email and Internet and never have a website at all. After all that’s how we buy and sell all of our properties and we didn’t even have a website until a couple of years ago. I know it can be scary thinking about buying and selling houses online but it can be a very simple transition. In fact when I created my system called the Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine, I made a commitment that I would not include any process or procedure that required any technological skills more than being able to send or receive an email.
So what is the easiest and fastest way to start getting your real estate business online? Well let’s look at locating deals online first. There are many websites to help you find deals online and I want to give you some of the best categories to start with. But first I want to help you get your online search system set up to maximize your time spent searching online.
There is a web browser called Firefox that you can download for FREE by going to www.getfirefox.com. The Firefox browser has a lot of features that you will not find in most other browsers. One of the most useful ones is a feature called “tabbed browsing”. In most browsers, if you have a website open and want to open another one but keep the same one open as well you have to open up a whole new browser window. That waste time and computer resources. With Firefox you simply click on a little button to open another tab within the existing window. The best part is you can open as many tabs to view as many websites as you want within that one window. You can also save entire groups of tabs as well. Let me give you an example.
In my market of real estate there are eleven different newspapers we like to read the classifieds for the real estate section. I started a group of tabs called “My Newspapers”. I opened my Firefox browser and went to the first newspaper, the Charlotte Observer and clicked on classifieds and then clicked on real estate. Once I found all of the listings I bookmarked it in the “my newspapers” group. Then I opened another tab and went to the next paper and clicked on classifieds and then I clicked on real estate and when I found the listings I bookmarked the page. I continued to do this until I had all eleven newspapers open to the real estate listings of the classifieds all in one window. Now on Monday mornings when we want to search for the newspaper listings we simply open Firefox and open the group called “My Newspapers” and it opens and loads eleven different newspaper listings of real estate ads and we can literally search them in less than fifteen minutes. Is that using technology or what? And the best part is I haven’t purchased a single newspaper yet. In fact if you like that wait until you see what I did with this technology. After about ten months of research I created a ready made set of importable book marks you can import into your Firefox browser and you can literally create a customized search like this for not only newspapers but real estate auctions, government auctions, For Sale By Owner sites, realtor sites, REO bank owned property sites, appraisal sites, county records sites and much more This is available in my course called the Ultimate Buying and Selling Machine!
Well now that we have learned to locate properties on the internet we must be able to follow up with all of the prospects. You do this by creating a database of all of your contacts with auto responders for weekly follow up. You actually need four different types of contacts in your database. You need realtors, investors, for sale by owners and you need retail buyers. You want to create specific auto responders for each of these groups so you are contacting them every week. I don’t know of anyone other than my employees or students that contact every person in their database every week do you? In fact this is so important that I have created twelve months of auto responder text for my students so the work is already done for you. For example, every time we put a realtor in our database they start getting an email every week. Each email refers to when we spoke to them or the last email we sent and it always ask them for any properties they may have that we should make an offer on. Our auto responder emails also ask them for referrals of any rehab contractors, appraisers, attorneys and lenders that they would recommend we do business with. After all, who knows who to use on your team better than the realtor, right?
These are just two of the many ways we automate our business and are doing business online, and that’s even without a website. I hope this has helped to see a few of the many options you can use not only in real estate but in any business.