
Jordan Samuel Fleming sits down with Tony Javier of 10X TV to unpack why old-school television is a modern, affordable powerhouse for inbound real estate leads. Tony shares his journey from investor to TV marketing expert, how local commercials drive highly qualified calls, and the bonus credibility and PR that lift every other channel you run. If you’re ready to scale, strengthen your brand in-market, and replace some cold outreach with warm conversations, this episode is for you.
About Tony Javier

Tony Javier is the owner of an INC 5000-rated real estate company and has been investing in real estate since 2001. Over the past two decades, he has completed more than 1,000 successful flips—many of which he never even set foot inside of—thanks to the power of automation and systems.
After automating his real estate investing business, Tony shifted his focus to helping other entrepreneurs grow through television advertising. Through his 10X TV Program, he runs TV commercials for real estate investors and businesses nationwide, leveraging the same strategy that has been a cornerstone of his own success.
Today, Tony is trusted by over 100 real estate investors who use his proven system to gain TV exposure and scale their businesses. Members of his TV community also benefit from exclusive masterminds, a network of vetted vendors, and ongoing support designed to maximize their marketing impact.
Important Links
Watch & Listen
Website: https://tonyjavier.com/tv
Does TV Still Work?- With Tony Javier
Hey everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of That Real Estate Tech Guy. I’m your host, John Samuel Fleming, and on this awesome episode, I welcome Tony Javier from 10X TV. Tony is not only got a fascinating, long and involved history in real estate. We go a bit into that, but he’s also really kind of he’s cottoned on to an amazing inbound source.
And I know from working with customers over the years that inbound is the hardest type of leads for them to get, you know, most people get started, they do cold calling, they do leafleting, they do door drops, all that. But inbound is kind of the holy grail in my of using. Because inbound people have come to you, they’re usually pretty qualified.
And in this, Tony really takes us through how TV is a surprisingly low cost and affordable way of getting unbelievably powerful inbound leads. I was really amazed at a just how easy it is for people to do, and just the type of, you know, the type of qualification rates you get and the fringe benefits of being able to, you know, have your profile known, the PR benefits of of being visible in your local community.
All those little bits extra means that the money you spend on the, the ads and television goes even further beyond just getting amazing leads, which it seems like that does as well. So this is a fantastic episode. For those of you who are trying to figure out how to add more inbound leads, to your, markets, how to kind of maybe boost up the other lead sources and get more credibility going in your markets.
Tony really takes you through how it works, why it works, and the process they do, definitely recommend you hit up Tony again is 10X TV and all the links will be in the show notes, hit up Tony, hit up his team and check out how television can work in your market. But for now, let’s hit directly to the show.
All right. I’m live here with Tony. Javier. Tony, thank you so much for coming on. Give everybody a little bit of a background on yourself. Yeah. So I’ve been investing in real estate for 24 years now. I bought the no down payment system by Carlton Sheets. Are you familiar with that, Jordan? You remember that back in the day?
That’s almost like when I talk to people about BellSouth and, it sort of immediately dates, you know, like the phone book, right? Yeah. So, yeah, totally. So I bought that info product on TV. And when I came, when it came in the mail, it was CDs and, and they had just got on the CDs like a literally like an a, like a year or two before it went from tapes to CDs.
That tells you how long ago it was. And, the cool thing was it’s like it was a straightforward program. There wasn’t a lot of fluff to it. Not saying that there’s, you know, all of them do these days, but it was literally like, here’s how you raise money. Here’s how you do rent to own, here’s how you network, here’s how you buy properties, here’s how you go in the newspaper and find deals.
And that’s actually how my how I found my first deal. I won the newspaper, did exactly what he said, just kept calling. And then finally I found someone who had a fixer upper and bought that property. And that agent actually talked me into getting my real estate license. So she was kind of my first mentor and got me into the sales business.
And I was able to sell real estate, while waiting tables and going to college for two years before I could quit my job and go full time. Wow. That’s, that’s how I got into the business. That’s a hell of a story. And also, you just you just made. You took me back 100% to the first time I ever did, like, a correspondence language course when I was pretty young.
It came in a big kind of plastic, thing with the tapes in it. Like, you know, you said I had these sheets of tape, so you had to put them in, and, you know, on your on your desk or your bookshelf, it was this big sort of thing of, that everything came in. And now you click a button and everything’s downloads your computer and nobody have it in the day.
You used to have to fill out a form and send it in the to get what you wanted to get back to you. I mean, imagine how long that so compared to what it takes. Now our kids will never understand. The, the deferred enjoyment of sending away for something and then having like, my daughter is getting a new phone today and it’s not available till tomorrow.
And for her, it’s like, how is this possible that I might. You got to understand, it used to be worse. Well, so you I mean, you’ve, I’d love to have you on some time to talk more about the real estate business, but I also I’m fascinated by your next project with the project, that you sort of pivoted on, on the back of real estate, which is the TV program.
Before we get into the specifics, can you give cut? How did you get started into that? Yeah. So let me finish this story about my kind of career. So I ended up, was able to drop out of school and quit my job, waiting tables to go full time into real estate. And, so I started bearing properties.
I was actually the I was actually the, I don’t know, anybody was borrowing properties before I was learning. 2002 is when I started bearing properties before it actually became a term. And as I was raising money, buying properties, you know, refinancing them within like a year to two years, I had bought ten properties and created hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity in properties.
And I’m like, man, this is this is it, right? You know, and so, you know, just kept growing the business, growing the business. About 2010 I grown my team. I, you know, on paper over there, I was looking great. But I ended up I ended up just firing my whole team within about a 30 day period. It was one of those one of those times where, you know, you think things are going up and all of a sudden like things just kind of start not clicking, you know, people are stealing from me.
I had two of my five employees living in my properties, so I had to end up evicting them. And of course, they take me to court because they think that I’m doing something wrong and all these types of things. And so I hit rock bottom mentally and I’m like, gosh, I got to do things smarter. So that was really the shift.
Me going, okay, I need to hire better people. I need to have better systems and processes in place, and I need to do things better. And I didn’t reach out. We didn’t have masterminds back then. We didn’t have YouTube. We didn’t have, well, actually, YouTube, I think started in like 2007. But we didn’t have big podcasts.
I mean, there wasn’t a lot online to learn, so I ended up flipping it around. I end up hiring a coach. I ended up going to mastermind groups as they started forming in the early 20 tens. And in 2012 is when I found the TV business. And so what happened was I ended up going to a poker game, and I was invited by this guy who I had met at a networking event where I wasn’t even supposed to be in.
He hits me up. He’s like, hey, man, you one of those poker games? So I’m like, sure. And so I meet this guy Cody, and we go down in his basement and there’s two guys across, down, you know, down in the basement, across the room. And I’m like, I recognize those guys. I’m like, oh, those guys are on TV.
They have TV commercials. So I’m an introvert by nature, but I, you know, I was, you know, the celebrity status thing and like, people be on TV. I sit next to him and I start talking to him and, and then I asked him, I said, you know, he knows TV commercials. I’m like, I see you on TV all the time.
He’s like his eyes lit up. He’s like, dude, we do so well with TV commercials. He’s like, that is all the marketing we do. We have a 6 to 12 month wait list and we just do millions of dollars. And he has a construction business, millions of dollars of construction every single year. And that’s all we do is TV.
And he’s like, you start telling me the benefits. He’s like, people recognize me and, you know, it’s easier to build jobs and, you know, all this stuff. And I didn’t even think about it for my business. He goes, you know what? It might be good for your business. Why don’t you check it out? And I’m thinking, and I don’t know.
So anyway, so he gives me gives me the numbers media guy drew. So I call drew up and I’m like, hey drew, here’s my business. He’s super nice guy. And he’s like, give me until the end of the week, I’m going to go to the stations. I’m going to negotiate some spots for you. I’ll come back and if you like it, we can get going.
So he comes back to me. He’s like 3000 bucks. I can get you hundreds of commercials a month. And I’m like, really? I was like, I figure it’d be at least $10,000 a month. And even for that 10,000, I thought I’d get, you know, maybe 50 spots or something like that or a hundred spots. So I write the scripts.
We shoot the commercial together. Month one, I make $35,000 on a $3,000 ad spend, and I’m off and running. So again, this is 2012. This is 13 years ago. And fast forward 13 years and it’s still my number one lead source. It has been by far the most consistent lead source. And then it’s just got a ton of benefits.
It gives you credibility. It, you know, people when they call you, they typically only call you because you’re hitting them at that right time. It’s easier to negotiate deals there. I mean, there’s just so many different benefits of TV that, you know, eventually we’re like, man, we are crushing it with TV. And and someone kept pushing me to show other real estate investors what we were doing.
And so I went to my media guy drew, and I say, drew his partner up on this. I we’ve been doing this for many, many years. We’ve refined our schedules to do really well. I’ve tested different scripts. Why don’t we launch this out to the public? And so we ended up, you know, calling up ten investors that I knew.
Eight of them said yes, and we launched it in their markets. And they got similar results that I did where month one, they were doing deals and making money. And so that’s how NXT TV was born. And so that’s kind of my baby right now, is just helping other real estate investors do what I did. And that’s find a lead channel that nobody did.
Not many other people are doing and just stick out from the competition because, you know, as much as I do marketing methods, they’re so tough these days. So many people are coming into markets from out of state, and then even the ones that are in state are in the market, are learning all of the other, you know, marketing channels that people are doing.
And it’s just become super competitive. So, yeah, so that’s what I spend most of my time on now, is showing other investors how to do TV and the power of it. And I guess with so many channels we have these days, there’s so much more noise on all the different channels, and I guess is probably a bit of a fear that TV’s going to be super expensive.
Like, I just, I think there’s probably an inbuilt assumption that I can’t afford this as a marketing channel. But I mean, obviously when you started out the that was a while back and prices change and things develop, are you are there kind of as an entry point point is it still roughly kind of something? What point in your investment career could you start looking at this as a channel realistically?
Yeah, that’s a great point. So there’s many reasons that people don’t do TV, which is great for people who figure out how to do it. People think it’s too expensive, right? And it’s not nearly as expensive as you would think. People think you have to be a big business, and there’s business owner like we’ve actually got people on that have just started investing in real estate.
We don’t always recommend it, but we’ve gotten people on TV that were like, hey, I’m a new investor. I’ve started texting and cold calling. It’s too much work. It’s too much time and energy. We get them on TV. We have one gal in Illinois that’s been crushing it for the last three years. She just had her first six figure month and she’s doing this on the side.
She’s doing this as a side hustle, and she loves TV because people are calling her. And then she can answer inbound. I’m she can. Yep. She can call them back when she, when she, when she has time and, so to answer your question, you know, if you think about other marketing channels, I mean, most people are spending 15, 20, 25 grand on any marketing channel.
Well, TV, it depends on what market you’re in, of course. But, you know, for as little as 7000 bucks and a lot of markets, you can get a lot of commercials. So that’s $3,000 that I’d mentioned back in 2012 that that’s probably, you know, 6 or $7000 equivalent today. Right. But that’s still that’s still a very reasonable amount of money for, you know, like for the exposure and for the inbound element.
And I, you know, as speaking as someone who owns a phone system, outbound compliance gets tougher and weirder state to state. The the absolute gold standard of compliant lead chasing is when you’re chasing inbound. And this is a phenomenal inbound source, which is what most people struggle to get. They you know, cold calling or all that outbound effort, cost compliance, all those things and success rates are low.
Inbound is what you want. And that’s this seems to me like, an absolute perfect example of of an immediate inbound boost that you wouldn’t get from many channels. Did that make sense? Yeah. And it’s the only channel I mean, radio we we do radio as well. Radio is probably the next closest thing, but there’s no channel where you can get people calling you that builds credibility, that helps your SEO, that helps your other forms of marketing.
And just does all those things combined. Right. And so that’s why I’m so bullish on it. And people think, oh, the other thing is people think TV’s dead TV. If you if you look at the statistics, we, we have a study from was it last year? I think it was last year in Florida. They, they interviewed or polled, a bunch of people in Florida and or the state was out of for I can’t remember if they they poll people in Florida, but it was people that own a house, $150,000 or less in they they had an income of $100,000 or less.
And they asked them, how much TV do you watch per day? Can you guess how much TV people are still watching per day? Three hours? Yep. Close. They say two and a half. And you know as much as I do, if they’re saying that they watch 2.5 hour TV, probably four hours if they’re right, because they have it on when they’re cooking, they have it on when, you know, kids come over, you know, that type of thing, right?
The what was the other stat? Oh, they said, what were the things that triggered you to do an online search? And it was like 70 to 80% of people said that TV was the number one thing that triggered them to do an online search. So people think that TV is dead, but people are still watching hours of TV a day.
Yes. They’re streaming platforms and all those other things that create a little bit more noise. But for real estate investors, it’s perfect because we are looking for back all key under $100,000 in income, $150,000 or less houses. And and I forgot to say 55 and older was the demographic they they interviewed as I was going to say, you know what?
When when you were talking there, I would say by myself, there’s such an there’s such an arrogance that some people have when they think about these things where, you know, like TV is dead. Well, it may be dead if you’re talking about a 25 year old who’s got a good job, they’re your best route to them.
May be Instagram, or it may be some of these other things because of who they are. But from most real estate investors I know, aside from the divorce elements, you’re looking at older, tired landlords that like you’re looking at very specific demographics who are much more likely, I would have thought, to watch TV versus a 25 year old barista who just looks on Instagram all day.
It’s a different you know, you got to know who your market is and pick the channels to your market. And I think you’ve illustrated that perfectly for what most real estate investors look for. Yep. And I actually did acquisitions for three years, for so from 2012 to 2015 before I stepped out of that role. And I remember just going into the houses and there were times my commercial was actually on TV.
I mean, there’s no matter credibility then sending out the seller and going, oh, hey, who’s that guy on TV? Right. And and if so, if you investors are still going in houses, think about when you go into a house. I bet you 50% of the time the TV is probably on it. They’re on. They’re just sitting around.
They’re hanging out. They’re, you know, they’re cooking, they’re cleaning, they’re doing whatever. That’s that’s just what you did. It was a privilege back in. You know what the 50s, 60s, whenever TV really started exploding cities to have it now it’s like everybody has it, you know. But still people value it that are older just because that was their pastime.
Now, I’m sorry to interrupt this amazing conversation, but I wanted to make sure you knew that smrtPhone, the only phone system built for real estate investors, connects to the best in class real estate. Invest in CRM. And because as its my show and I am co-founder and chairman of smrtPhone, I got some great deals for you.
Click the link make. Take advantage of 5000 minutes free calling with smrtPhone. The only phone system built for real estate investors. Click and call close more leads back to the show. Absolutely. Now when people you know, I, I totally understand and I think that that to for people listening the that understanding of the demographic you’re targeting and why TV works so well, I think is really important to this in terms of, you know, the markets will change and depending on where you are, the markets will change.
What is the process you guys have for, you know, say I’ve got a new investor. I’m not new. I don’t mean a new investor, but a new investor to you. I’ve got someone who’s interested in this. What’s the process you guys have for sort of understanding, you know, will that what will work in their local market? What is the expectation?
Because it’s got to be different. The different markets will be different. So can you tell me a little bit about that process of understanding for, a new potential customer who comes to you? Yeah. Well, that’s that’s the good thing is, is a lot of people if, if I just said Gordon, hey, go get on TV. And I just gave you a couple bullet points, like the time and effort it would take for you to to know which stations to call, to know what questions to ask to the representative, to know what the good cost of commercials are, and to be able to negotiate that rates would be really hard for you.
And so, you know, it’s like we’re like a buyer’s agent for buyers, right? You know, it can comparatively. And so you know, we know we we do this every day. So we know which stations work. We know what shows work. We know what scripts work because we’ve tested all of this stuff. And so when we go into a market, we look at, we look at the market, we see what the population is.
That gives us an idea about how many commercials we can get for every thousand dollars you spend. And, so we’re able to give that, information off the bat. Then we can look at your business and say, okay, based on the scripts that we have, here are the scripts that we think would work well for your business.
And then it’s plug and play. From there, we go to the stations, negotiate the rates, and then set people up in their market to shoot. So that’s another thing is like, well, where do I shoot the commercial? Yeah. We’ll set you up in the market, shoot the commercial. You have a teleprompter, you have the scripts. And you know, some people are intimidated by that.
But it’s so funny when I talk to people before they go shoot, they’re like, God, I’m so nervous. And then afterwards they’re like, what was I nervous about? I was so busy, like, well, you said you’re an introvert. You said you were an introvert and you started this. Yeah, yeah. And they were like, I was there for 15 minutes and it was like, I literally just read the script and that was it.
And our editors are awesome. So like, and you know, here’s the other good thing. So there was a guy three years ago, he was in the San Diego area. That’s where I lived at the time. And he ended up driving down from, I don’t know, Orange County. I think it was. And we shot the commercial and usually it takes ten, 15 minutes.
It took like over 30 minutes, probably closer to an hour, because we had to do so many takes because he was so awkward and I was like, okay, this is going to be fun. So we edited it and it came out okay, and it absolutely crushed it. And I think it did because you could see the realness oven.
It was like it was authentic. It was authentic. And that’s that’s how we do our commercials. So it’s not a you know, we do some B-roll footage, but it’s not like super fancy, you know, this and that and some polished, you know. Yeah. Guy coming on in his suit talking about how he can buy your house. It’s a real business owner that’s talking to, the homeowners.
And, you know, some people are like, well, I just literally do not want to be on TV, and that’s fine too. We can hire, you know, I’ve been in commercials for people. I, you know, we’ve we’ve hired actors before and, you know, made it look real that way. So, so yeah, having a real person in the commercial, I think is, one of the key elements that makes, makes it go really well when particularly, as you pointed out earlier, stacking up that credibility in your market where people recognize you, you know, because they recognize you and they recognize, you know, walking down the street or when you come to see them at the house and they go, oh, God, that is the person from the, you know, from the commercial. There’s an an instant element of recognition, credibility and comfort. Whereas if it was a model or someone else, you’re, you know, you’re not going to have that instant, kind of that instant rapport and that instant credibility. And so I think that speaks to exactly what you said earlier and why it is such an effective tool, to, you know, to, to build that credibility in your market.
I think that’s great. Yeah. And don’t be scared of that because I, you know, if you don’t want to be in the commercial or if, like for me, the first three years, it was it was interesting because I’d come into the house sometimes the people were like, oh, it’s you. Like I thought you were going to be sending someone else.
You know, they were surprised that I was in their in their living room, kind of like celebrity. But I haven’t been in acquisitions for ten years now in our in our company still gets the credibility. So even though it’s not me in there, but I tell people all the time, like if you can be in the commercial and just stand to be in the commercial, even if you don’t want to be, it’s going to give you so much personal credibility and branding so that when you’re meeting with contractors, when you’re meeting with banks, when you’re raising money like it’s just another extra layer of credibility.
I didn’t even mention that raising money. Oh my gosh. Like any, any time that I’m connected with someone in Wichita where my commercial is running, if they say, I’ve seen your commercial, I know what you do. The conversation is exponentially easier than if someone in San Diego has no idea who I am, and I have to. I have to educate them on what I do, who I am.
And, and, and we actually had a guy one time Sierra commercial. He walked into our office. He’s like, I want to invest in real estate, but I don’t really want to buy houses. Do you guys have like, can you guys help me? Absolutely. We have a private money program where you can lend us money and we you will pay an interest rate.
And so within I know less than a 12 month period him and his family had over $1 million invested with us all because that credibility. And you build that up and and it and it feeds off to those different. It’s not even just for the acquisitions. It’s that generalized credibility that you’re that your TV presence brings 100%. I’ll give you another example.
Dean Rogers, a good friend of mine, he was one of the ten, actually, that I called good. But I was like, hey, you know, I want you to, you know, I want you to try this. And he was hesitant, but he ended up doing it. So he was he was starting, Reia program he’d been doing it for, I don’t know, probably year or something like that.
He wasn’t getting a lot of traction with it. He said once his commercials started airing, the stuff that he started putting out for marketing, people started contacting him more. And his, the, his group grew exponentially within that first year. And he said that his second year on TV, he attributes $1 million of extra assignment fees from people who saw the commercial.
He would market his Ria group. They would come there, bring him deals, and he would do deals with those people. An extra million dollars just from the credibility. And it may not have been all, all of that. But even if a fraction of that was from the TV credibility, but from what he tells me, he’s like, dude, I it wasn’t.
I didn’t get any traction before TV, but after TV, it’s like people are like, oh, I want to be around Dean and hang out with him because he’s on TV and oh yeah, I’ll trust him. I’ll all invest in his programs and I’ll bring him deals and, you know, do deals with him. And we have probably at least five, if not closer to ten clients that have regrouped similar to that, to where they’re like, man, when I got on TV, I was really able to grow them.
And, people just trust me when they come to the groups, they’re like, man, I see your commercials all the time. And it’s just it’s such easy branding. It’s such easy trust for people when that, you know, I go back to whenever I coach and talk to companies. Now, I will say that as a phone system, it’s probably weird for me to say that in-bounds the best, but I absolutely believe inbound is the best.
And, you know, inbound is also the hardest. It’s the hardest traction to get most of the time because, you know, I hope outbound is easy. It’s expensive sometimes, but it’s easy. The channel, it’s simple. It’s clear. It’s straightforward. Inbound. You know, people often feel like it’s a bit of a black magic box, you know, and that there’s some sort of secret to it, for the types of money that you’re talking about, you know, and you, if you’ve got even a remote ability to close sales, that kind of money to get inbound leads.
And chances are they’re going inbound leads are almost invariably decently qualified. They’re making the effort to call you. They have seed, they have a problem. They’ve got a property. They’re making the effort. And in this case, I would imagine that. Well, of course, every deal is not going to turn into, a contract, of course, but I would gather that your relative success rate for inbound leads, for the type of deals are getting from TV is going to be pretty high.
And so in terms of I always look at if you’re trying to I look at this in particular in this podcast from me, the scaling company is the one I’m focused on the most, the guys who are just starting out great. There’s lots of things you can try, but once you start to try and build a real business and get scale, that’s harder.
And and that requires more. And to me, you know, everything you’ve said about TV just adds that layer of foundation of inbound, and credibility and visibility in your markets. That is just something that is really difficult for most people to to capture. And that’s where you come in. Yeah. And I can give you some stats on that as far as, as far as qualified leave.
So if you’re looking at texting cold calling, I’ve heard as little as 1 in 20 leads has converted to deals. But typically it’s you know, 50 plus is what I’ve, what I’ve heard, we don’t do texting or cold calling, so I can’t really say for sure. What our numbers would be, for TV, we’ve seen that 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 is pretty typical.
But a lot of our clients say one in 5 to 1 and 1 in 7 are actually closed deals. There was a guy I interviewed the other day. What were his numbers? I think he said 80% of his leads turned into appointments. And out of those deals, out of every appointment, I think it’s one in every 2 to 1 in every three appointments turns into a deal for him.
So the numbers are there. You don’t have to go through near as many leads. And I think the TV should be in the middle of every single real estate investing campaign. And there are a lot of other businesses TV would do well for as well. But if you if you are already doing, even if you’re doing texting and cold calling, it can help because there are, you know, some of our clients have actually once they warm up the lead, then they’ll be like, oh, by the way, this is so-and-so company.
You probably seen our TV commercial and that helps with kind of softening, softening them even more. But if you’re doing direct mail, if you’re doing PPC, if you’re doing Facebook, if you’re doing, you mean YouTube ads, whatever it is, I feel like TV should be the hub of it because it just builds all that credibility. So even if you only get, let’s say, a 2 to 3 times return, which is on the very low end of what we’ve seen, it’s worth it because it’s helping those other lead channels.
It’s. Yeah, absolutely. So it’s, it’s and you know, you’re if you’re scaling your business, the chances are you’re going to need three or 4 or 5 channels, like that’s how you build the business. But that credibility, that TV, I can’t think of any other channel that can give someone that quick of credibility because, you know, like to get credibility that quickly.
You can’t really do unless you’ve built up a community over time. And it’s like, you know, it’s it’s quite a process to do that. Whereas TV sort of lends in, you know, it kind of lends relatively instant credibility. Oh, I saw you on TV. Well, you’re on TV, you got on TV. You’re, you know that Amelie is there.
So is there any. Just before I figure out, I, I will make sure I let everybody know how to get in touch, how they can get started with you. Are there any, sort of. Are there any times where a market, you know, you feel like just markets can’t, aren’t going to work there? Like, is there any anything that anybody should be thinking about in terms of their own market, whether is appropriate or can almost anything work?
And, and it’s, you know, it’s worth trying it out. Yeah, it’s a great question. So there are some markets that just require a massive amount of ad spend. Right. And so and then when I say that I’m talking about like tens of thousands of dollars, like for instance, New York, New York City, you have to spend at least 30 grand a month at least.
La same thing. But most markets, you know, is, is a pretty reasonable ad spend between 7 and 10 grand a month. Typically when we see people cancel TV, it’s one of a few things. Either their numbers, they didn’t handle the leads properly, their numbers weren’t great because we’ve had people be like, man, we’ve been on for three months.
We got 90 leads. We only got one deal. And I’m like, yeah, 90 bleeds. You should have been. Is that me or is that you? Yeah, that could be. That could be nice. I think that’s a lead problem. I think that’s a that’s a sales problem. The other thing is sometimes you don’t get enough time like month one.
Typically you’re doing deals month to most more likely month three. Almost without a doubt, you’re doing deals and you’re probably making money. Some people will be on for 30, 60 days and they’re like, I ran out of money or I’m not patient enough or whatever it is. You know, it can happen. So I always say commit to at least at the very least three months.
I would say six is probably a better, a better sample size just to know how it’s working. And then obviously there’s other factors that can happen that, that can make TV not work, or make or that people cancel. I should say not the TV doesn’t work, but I’m very certain, like there’s some markets where I’m like, dude, this is a small market.
You could spend $7,000 and that’s all you ever need to spend. You’re going to get a thousand commercials a month, and if you suck, you should still do well in this market. And like we had one guy in a small market in Texas, and, he’s spending seven grand a month. His first month, he did like 13 deals.
12 deals. I mean, that’s like an anomaly, right? I mean, at a great sales team, he had all kinds of different exit strategies, but he just work those leads like crazy. And so yeah, so to answer your question, I mean, obviously, you know, some people get on camera and they for some reason just don’t connect very well.
You know, we don’t have that happen very often, but, we’re hitting our demographic. We have great scripts. We have great messaging. You’re seeing a ton all over. And by the way, the cost per thousand, what they call the CPM. If you were to hit a thousand people with direct mail, right, you’re going to spend about $500 with TV.
You’re going to spend less than $5 most of the time. So you’re able to get 100 more touch points. The reach last with TV. Yeah. And I think actually I get you know, I this all this totally makes sense to me. And and I’d imagine some markets you would be drooling at because you look at it, you just think, oh man, this is like, this is like uses candy from baby sort of stuff.
You’re you’re going to get such visibility. But your point is really valid. And particularly for this podcast, the follow up and how you catch those leads and deal with them is, I think, an Achilles heel for some people because it’s all great. You know, you I think you guys could do your job brilliantly, but if they can’t handle leads properly, if they don’t have the the, the, the system in place to deal with the leads, to work them properly to follow up, then probably they don’t have the salespeople in place or the are the process.
You are. You are priming with the best fuel and you’re just letting it all go to waste. So I think that’s a really important part to remember that not only do you need to commit to a channel like this, but you need to be prepared to catch and to and to and to actually work those leads properly 100%.
It was, a couple of years ago, we noticed that it was a it was a it was a lot of people coming to us. And like I said, I got 90 leads. We only did one deal, you know, all that kind of stuff. So we started buying phone numbers for about a year. We would buy phone numbers for our clients.
It was actually probably less than that because we didn’t need that much. We after a while we were like, okay, we’re seeing the same thing over and over, but, so we’d buy the phone number, we would listen to that, we would record the phone calls and listen to them with their permission, of course. And it was atrocious.
Even companies like, there’s some people that I mentioned their name and you would know their name. And I’m like, they were atrocious. Like their salespeople would answer like, hello? Crying babies in the background or or we’d actually had we had one client that like, the person would answer the phone and they were a, lead manager, and they couldn’t answer any questions.
They were like, like the most simple questions. And we’re like, oh my gosh, did you not train this person? Like, even if you don’t know anything about real estate, you should be able to answer the phone, get the questions you know and like, ask the right questions, get the answers and pass it on to the right person. And so going through that whole thing were like, oh my gosh, people that you think that are even, even if they’re doing 100 deals a year, that doesn’t mean anything.
That just means that they maybe are getting lucky, or they’re just spending enough money to get those deals, but their sales is just not dialed in. So we’ve actually created a little mastermind group where, every couple of weeks, our clients get on a call and we also have like smaller groups. We put clients in together so they can kind of help each other out and, kind of kind of network and go through sales processes and, and all that kind of stuff to help them.
So we, we now know that we need to prep them, even if they are a dialed in company of like, hey, you got to answer the phone, you got to return phone calls, you got it. You got to set appointments like there was one guy one time, called in, and it was a client again. They wanted they wanted to cancel.
So we started going to their calls, and we’re like, do you did you listen to this call? Like someone called in and they’re like, hey, we bought this house for like $50,000.30 years ago. Like, if we can get $50,000, we’d even maybe take a less than that in, in the person said, well, let me do some research and get back with you.
And they never call them back. And it’s like, come on. So you guys need to listen to your sales calls. Ian, was I right now? There’s no reason not to have calls listened to by I in graded. So that way if you’re not listening to them, at least you have I they can go in there and give you some tidbits on what they’re doing wrong or what they’re potentially doing right.
Well, I told you I will send you, I just wrote a book all about phone systems, how to use the phone for real estate investors. And, you don’t need it, but some of your customers may, because the, you know, like, the amount of people I see who don’t train basic sales skills, you know, they just give them a script and let them go, and, you know, they don’t know how to ask questions.
They don’t have to listen. They don’t need all those bits. That’s 100% why I wrote the the book. And your point of I, you know, at this point now, we I mean, we’ve built inbound agents. We connect to, to answer the call and can do all the qualification. You’ve now got, call scoring to your point where every single call can be analyzed and scored so you can spot the problems.
You can give the agents self-guided, learning. You’ve got all the tools now, there’s almost no excuse to be bad at this point, in my view. So, listen, I don’t want to. I want to respect your time. I really want to know just the one final thing, which is, how do people get started? I mean, they’re going to be listening to this and thinking about their own markets.
How can they reach out to the company? How do they get started? Give us that, kind of. Let’s close out on how they can take this action and get those leads flowing. Yeah. So we only allow so many people per market. We usually do two, sometimes three per market. So if you want to see if your market’s available and apply to see if I’d be good for you go to tv.com.
Not.com but TV.com. What we’ll do is we’ll pull up a map, we’ll show you where your commercials reach, kind of give you an idea what the ad spend is going to be. A lot of the markets we probably, already run TV or have some kind of data. We’ll be able to kind of give you specifics. So, yeah, if you’re interested, reach out to us.
No pressure and love to see what we can do for you. Well, I’ll make sure that I pop those links into the show notes, here as well. Also, you know, in smrtPhone, we’ve got, 2500 plus, real estate investment companies. They use us on a daily basis. And these are, these are the sorts of, you know, companies like yours are what we like to feature to our, our customers and say, hey, guys, have you looked at this value added?
So definitely something I’ll pop into the smrtPhone as well. Because I just think this inbound is gold or listen, Tony, absolute pleasure to meet you. You you and I hadn’t had a chance to talk before. I appreciate you coming on. And, I just think what you’re doing is so exciting. And I also love the backstory.
I love the way you started. I love the idea of the big box of tapes. You know, that that only a certain generation of people and above will understand. And I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks for listening to another amazing episode of that real estate tech guy. Head over to that real estate tech guy.com to check out all episodes and get special discounts on tons of awesome real estate technology platforms.





