I have a background in marketing and a lot of experience with management/ownership of telemarketing businesses. Hence, I have a question…
What if someone (me) put together a business that specialized in “Bird Dogging” real estate for investors? We could search for properties nationwide, do all of the marketing to potential sellers, handle all of the mailers, etc.
Thoughts?
hello
I would certainly entertain that idea. I would not want a dentist defending me in court when I could hire an attorney. As long as you don’t overprice your services to where it would not be worth it to the investor.
John
Sounds like a huge undertaking. What fees would you charge ? How would your find the properties? Put together your plan and you might be able to get investors in your business. No one really wants to do all the leg work involved in finding the “good” properties so if you can alleviate some of the grunt work… sounds like a win win situation.
It sounds nice on the surface, but I am not sure how effective a formal, national in-house office situation would be as opposed to the “in-the-trenches” neighborhood bird dogs. How would you secure leads on a nationwide basis? Would you rely on the same internet leads that are already available to everyone? I’m just curious as to what advantage you would offer over someone who is more hands-on and in touch with their farm area?
Still working on all of the minor details of the program, but the fees would be relatively inexpensive. We’re thinking of a range between 9.95 - 19.95 per month.
As for the “hands-on” approach, we feel that it would be beneficial to designate “territories” to our in house staff. They would peruse newspaper ads from their territory and work with potential sellers to find suitable properties. We have a plan for working with “LIVE” bird dogs in the area as well.
The major problem we’ve encountered at this point is the pay scale for our staff in as much as we’d like to be able to make the bird dog fees on any property we found and “introduced” the deal.
We may be able to accomplish this with a special area on the web site or by giving the basics of the property and deal with a “click here” for more information. At that point we would sign an agreement with all potential investors and collect a “bird dog fee” if they closed on the property in question.
Another possibilty is that all of the people in the network could be bird dogs as well. For instance, we have one investor that does only sub2’s with no major rehabs. However, he finds many properties that he’s not interested in personally, but he could notify us of these properties which we would then put into the database… if the property closes through the use of our service - that investor would then be paid a “bird dog” fee for the lead.
Again, these are just ideas at this point. But, if we could alleviate a lot of the time consuming leg work it could become a “win, win” situation for all involved.
UPDATE:
We are off and running from a company standpoint. The web site is still under construction as we are looking into the various DB issues, etc.
We have one full-time representative ready to start work and make the calls to qualify sellers, so we’ll keep you posted as to how it works out.
Personally, I’m farming my own area now and finding a few good properties to start work on and I finally got my partner to understand what I’m looking for. We drove around yesterday and we drove by this one house that I said, “Oh yeah. There’s one.”
My partner, who hasn’t quite grasped the concept up until now, said, “That’s a piece of …”
I looked at him at that moment and told him he now knew what we were looking for. HA!
If you have local bird dogs, how much are they going to charge you or me? Your service fees are low, but who will pay the person who is in the trenches, driving around, paying for their own gas?
That is one of the things I was getting at, Dee. It might take a little more time and effort on my part, but I’d just as soon assemble my own team of bird dogs and deal with them/pay them directly. I once did a craigslist ad and specifically said that I wasn’t looking for birddogs and I still got emails from birddogs (“I know you said no birddogs, but just in case…”), so it’s far from hard.
From the birddog’s standpoint, I would not want to enter a situation where I’m doing all the same work as an independent birddog, but getting a lower than usual fee because of some middleman. From the investor’s standpoint, I would not want to pay higher than usual birddog fees because, again, of the middleman.
So it sounds like a good program and the initial fees are low enough to get people in, but I’m trying to understand what the true benefit would be for an investor to use your service, or for a birddog to work for you.
Great questions and I love it. We have decided that it would be in everyone’s best interest if we paid the bird dog fee to our staffers as well as the in-the-field bird dogs. For anyone using our service - they would pay a one-time fee to us (other than the monthly membership fee) and we handle all of the rest.
I understand the concern of a bird dog who is working hard to get properties and spending his/her time, money and gas to end up with a slightly smaller amount by working for us, but I think that we can eventually alleviate that problem with more deals and faster turn-around.
It’s still in the planning stages, so we’re not even sure if we’ll launch this. We’re still looking for input so keep it coming.
[ planning stages, so we’re not even sure if we’ll launch this. We’re still looking for input so keep it coming.
sounds like a good plan, where did you get the idea from. It seems like you might not be too clear on what you exactly want to do. You are just throwing out a bone and hoping you get some good info to start. If that is the case then just say so.
Why would a bird dog work with you? Are you providing compensation weekly, or how about are you offering some sort of training. If so have you bird dogged and can you handle different objection and reactions. What you going to do to motivate your bird dog. How can you pay your bird dog and you are the middleman?
Why would you want to bird dog for investors, why not just assign the deal to them and secure you profits?
We would definitely be offering the training to bird dogs. And we would be offering a weekly compensation plan as well.
I actually came up with this idea because I saw that there was a possible need and we could probably fill the need.
I think there would be some people out there now who are bird dogging that would not come on board with us. That’s just human nature. They would think that they were getting cut out too much. But, in all actuality I think that a bird dog could make more money with us in the long run since we’d have a major investor pool to work with.
Objections come with the territory no matter what our company sells or markets. We would certainly train reps to understand the real estate market. Not so much from the investor side of the equation, but the seller’s side. Such as ways to help the seller better understand their situation if they’re about to be foreclosed, etc.
As far as looking for more input… I come back to the “need” part. It’s actually a little bit more probing to find out what other services we could offer that would benefit all concerned. For example, we’ve put together a questionaire for sellers that we will ask them what the absolute rock bottom price they would sell for is if we got them a CASH deal. We’re also going to ask them if they would oppose us showing the home to prospective renters or buyers, would they consider a Sub2, etc.
We’d like to have as much information available to the investor so when you walk into the deal you already have an idea of what you can get out of it, what you can structure, etc.
So, I’m not throwing out a bone. I really have a grasp of what we’re thinking of offering. I just want to make sure I don’t miss something that could matter to most everyone. Feel free to IM me anytime.
Forgive me for just perusing here, but this sounds very similar to the concept used by HomeVestors, 1800PayCash and 1800BuyKwik.
Just to name a few.
You can utilize them for ideas I would imagine.