Luke Smith Creates Great Success Quickly (CFFL 535)
Transcript:
Jack Butala: Luke Smith retired from being a penny stock broker at 33 and is now a full-time dad of two toddlers from Encinitas California. He heard about Land Academy on biggerpockets.com. He has not completed a purchase from his mailers yet, but he got a huge response and he's using that to learn from and he's sending out higher targeted mailers.
It sounds like Luke, that we're catching you right before massive success.
Luke Smith: I hope so.
Jack Butala: Tell us ... You sent the mailer out. Give us a little bit of some of the details and some of the types of calls that you got back, and the response that you got.
Luke Smith: Sure, I'd love to. I was too cheap to pay for your program at first. I thought I'd give it a try with all the free information, and just reading between the lines, I thought I'd give it a try. I fired off a couple hundred mailers and people started calling.
Jill DeWit: Awesome.
Luke Smith: I think where I was off base, was I was going off the appraised values and doing like a smaller piece of the appraised values. I was thinking I should sell these properties for a couple thousand bucks or more, so I'll go for a couple thousand dollars or more appraised values, and the people that are calling back think their properties are worth $50,000, or $100,000. I'm offering like $400 or a couple hundred dollars, but I was amazed at how many actually called back. They read their mail, they stewed on this thing. They got pissed off at my low-ball offer. They really value their land, and they called me back and they wanted to chew me out, or haggle on price.
To me, that's success. My numbers were wrong. I can fix that in the next ones, but those are potential buyers of land. Those are people who buy vacant land in the middle of nowhere that I was making offers on. They have astronomical numbers that they value that land at.
Jack Butala: Well you're exactly right. They are on your buyer list now, I hope.
Luke Smith: Yeah, exactly.
Jack Butala: That's great.
Luke Smith: You know?
Jack Butala: All right, so I'm going to ask you a few questions.
Jill DeWit: I have to interject one thing though. Oh, go ahead.
Jack Butala: No, yeah.
Jill DeWit: I just want to say, when you have these people though, I feel like a broken record, but $10,000, they think it's worth $10,000, three, six months from now, your $500 offer is not so bad. You know? Sometimes they do overvalue. It's a priceless asset to them and I get it. It was handed down to the family, whatever, but then they realize, "Gosh, nobody really does want this and this guy wanted to give me something", and then they do a little homework and they realize you're not that far off.
Luke Smith: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: It can happen still, so that's good.
Jack Butala: Did you, Luke, the offers that you sent out, did you send an offer out that was modeled after the ones that we always send out? Was it an actual offer?
Luke Smith: It was an actual offer, two page offer with a dollar amount in there, and I put a reply envelope and I was amazed at how many people sent back notes and comments and things on the offer in the reply envelope with no postage on it, and the post office still delivered it.
Jack Butala: Wow.
Luke Smith: Because it had my name and address in both to and from, so I wonder how many got lost in the mail. I just went off of your free information to give it a try,