When I first got into real estate, the issue I had was not knowing who to call. Once I figured out who to call, the next issue was how to stay engaged with them, stay intentional, and not get overwhelmed, because I was trying to do all of it from my cell phone. For the first two and a half to three years, that is exactly what I did.
Take just one part of it, my daily expired listings. I had to go to my MLS and export all of the expired listings, and my MLS only goes back seven days. Then I had to skip trace them, get the phone numbers, and run those numbers through the Do Not Call Registry to stay TCPA compliant. Then I had to manually call them from my cell phone. I did not have a CRM, so everything was manual. I would spend maybe two or three hours pulling and organizing the data, and another hour and a half to two hours calling. That is where the majority of my time went.
I read the Millionaire Real Estate Agent by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, and they talked about leverage. Do you have the time and energy to do the work yourself, or do you pay the financial resources to have someone else do it. That sparked my interest that there are people who actually provide this service. I found a script somebody posted online, it led me to REDX, and then it led me to the podcast.
The biggest thing was my coach, Christina Griffin. She mentioned REDX in her trainings, and she has been super influential in my career, especially for prospecting to off market opportunities. When my coach is using it, I want to listen to exactly what she is saying, so I figured I would give it a try. I started with the preview dialer, just dipping my toe in the water. It was a form of hand dialing, but I had access to the CRM where the information and the data lived, and it was a lot better than what I had been doing.
With REDX the information is already there. The expireds are uploaded daily from the MLS, so I do not have to pull the list or find the numbers. I can just log in and decide who I want to call, and it goes back a year or two instead of only the past seven days, so I stopped missing opportunities I used to miss. While I am on the call I can take notes, do a disposition, and even click a link to Zillow so I am having an informed conversation about the property.
My first real win came when I imported the data I already had into REDX and started having successful connections. When I called from a Google Voice number I got flagged as spam and people blocked me, but the verified number through REDX had spam protection, so I got more connections and more conversations. It is a numbers thing. The more contacts and conversations I have, the closer I get to a closing. Over the last 18 to 24 months I would say six to seven of my deals came from REDX, and I have grown my database by about 8 to 10% from people who were not in my world before.
One of the things that made me trust REDX happened before I even committed. I said I wanted everything, for sale by owner, expireds, circle prospecting, for rent by owners, all of it. Before I signed up, the representative said let us look at how many leads are actually in your area to make sure it makes sense financially. Some of those things did not make sense for where I am, so we did not commit to them, and they never tried to sell me a service that would not benefit me.
For my market the pre foreclosure and the for sale by owners did not make sense, but expireds made 100% sense and circle prospecting made 100% sense, so that is what I use and that is what I have success with. I love REDX, and if I had known about it sooner I would have gotten to it sooner. Anybody I talk to about prospecting, I am always going to bring up REDX, because it lets me prospect to people every day at a high level with good data, and I do not have a month where the invoice hits and I do not want to pay it, because I know the impact it is making on my business.