Finding leads and securing buyers for your real estate business takes a lot of time and energy. Jenna Hoover aims to ease the burden through her all-inclusive CRM and data provider service for investors. Joining Jordan Fleming, she explains how Realeflow gathers data on more than 140 million properties across the United States, giving users behind-the-scenes access to everything they need to close deals. Jenna also spells out the three components that ensure success in the wholesaling business and how they integrate AI to analyze properties.

About Jenna Hoover

• Real Estate Speaker & Mentor since 2013
• Residential Redeveloper- (Historic Preservation is my fav)
• 23 Rental Properties & Airbnb
• Licensed PA Realtor
• Nationally Featured in TV Infomercials
• HGTV/DIY Network Personality
• Public Speaker & National Sales Rep since 2006
• Business, Lifestyle & Performance Coach
• “Mom” to Addison and Aceson
• Life & Business Partner to Adam
• Business Development Manager for Realeflow & Leadflow

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Hey, everybody! It’s Jordan Fleming here with another That Real Estate Tech Guy Podcast. I’m delighted that my co-pilot for this episode is Jenna Hoover from Realeflow. Jenna, welcome to the podcast. Why don’t you guys just introduce yourself and Realeflow quickly?

My name is Jenna Hoover, and I’m a real estate investor by trade. I’ve been doing that for the last 10 years. I’m from the southwestern Pennsylvania area. I started out flipping houses. I started getting into rental properties and Airbnb. I’ve done a lot of really cool things in real estate, like a TV show on HGTV DIY a few years ago. But my real passion is being able to pay it forward with the things that I’ve learned in the industry. And so now I am teaming up with an awesome company called Realeflow. We are an all-inclusive CRM and data provider for real estate investors. And we also work with different affiliates who are able to white label our product, and we’re able to work with them and do as much hands-off for them as possible. Thanks for having me, and I’m super excited to be here with you.

I’m excited to dive in with your background in real estate as well as your connection with Realeflow. In terms of the core functionalities of Realeflow and how it will really help real estate investors, can you dive into what you see as the core functionality for everybody listening?

I like to break it down into two different parts. We have our data. What we do is almost like having your own behind-the-scenes access to 148 million properties across the nation. It’s really simple. All you have to do is put it in your specific area. Your city, your county, and your state. If you search, it’s going to pull up all the different properties in that area. Then what we’re able to do from there is really scrub down our list, because a lot of newer investors start out, they get their LLC created, they’re sitting there, and they’re like tapping their fingers, like, What do I do now? There’s nothing in the MLS. I can’t find any deals on social media. We have to find them. We have to find deals. We have to find leads. 

What we do is put all that information in, and then we start scrubbing down our list. And so we can search for different things. We have 17 different lead types, like absentee owners, free and clear properties, high equity, and low equity. We have them, and we even have active listings.  We have a lot of different options that we can search for. Because we have, I like to call our recipe like scrubbing down and seeing what exactly we’re looking for. Because it’s great, we have 148 million leads, but we’re not going to send a direct mail piece to every single one of them. We have different leads. We can search by the type of properties we want to look for, like maybe land, whether it be multifamily, whether it be commercial, or whether it just be single family, whichever their niches, and then we can further scrub it down. 

We have different tools where we can hone in, like with our Polygon tool if we want to look for just a really small, specific area. And then we have a lot of different things that we’re integrated with. With things like Google Maps, somebody can be sitting there and have a list of different properties that came up. But they can virtually walk that neighbourhood. 

They’re going to be able to go in there and pull comparable sales. Everything is in one place. They don’t have to toggle between this site and that site and call an agent. The whole goal was designed by investors for investors.  If you were to sit there as an investor and say, I want to create something, let me think of what would be the best-case scenario. And that’s what we’ve done. And so from there, we have our different leads. And then we can do things for a very small fee. We can skip-trace them. We can get access to their phone numbers, and we can send them a direct mail letter. Our direct mail pieces are the absolute least expensive in the entire industry because we send out over 100,000 pieces of mail a day as a company. It’s a really inexpensive way, as a new investor or even a seasoned investor, to get your direct mail out. 

We have different courses to teach you how to advertise on Facebookt. What we can do is target them with skip tracing by getting their phone number and sending them a direct mail piece. And now what we can do is target them on Facebook because we can export that list uploaded to Facebook, create a really cheap $10 ad on Facebook, and then market it to all those specific people that we just targeted in different ways. That’s our data side. 

And then we have our CRM, or business management tools. I like to call it the command center. It’s like the heart of the business. It’s the heart of the actual software when it comes to all the different tools. If you’re a brand new investor and you’re like, I just got into this, I don’t have a website, and I don’t know how to target people. I don’t know how to analyze a property. How do I know if it’s a deal? What will it cost to fix it? You’re freaked out by all these different things, and that’s what it solves. You get to have your website created, you have the ability to have a repair estimator, and you can go in and say, Click, Click, click, yes, yes, yes, or no? And then we know exactly how much it is gonna cost to fix that property. 

I speak to a lot of different system and technology providers and investors as well. And one thing that I want to pick up on is this notion of education. The success journey that any investor goes through revolves not only around sales but also education and learning things. Not only do you have the data side and then the CRM side, but you also have this education piece as well. Is that available to everybody inside the system?

There are a lot of different training modules, like the foreclosure system and private lending. There are all these different modules. There’s something called a Facebook Masterclass. It will teach them exactly, because somebody will say, First off, I’m not savvy on computers. And if somebody’s like, I’m not savvy on computers, plus, I don’t even know your software, it’s going to baby them. It’s not like when I ruin a baby. It’s going to hold them. It’s going to say, Here’s what we do in steps one and two. 

We have a fantastic knowledge base with all these different walkthroughs and video tutorials. It’s going to tell somebody exactly what they’re going to need to do. It’s going to tell them, Here’s how we export our leads, here’s what we do, and how to create this on Facebook. 

I’m a product of the product. I started out as an investor in my area. I started out as a user of the product. I did my own thing and then became so infatuated with the product that I said, I want to be part of it. And so it’s a guinea pig for a lot of the different components that we have integrated into the software. And so whenever I first started doing Facebook marketing, it was so intense that I had to get an additional virtual assistant to be able to help me. I couldn’t call them all, and I thought this was terrible because they were doing all this marketing for me. And now I can’t even keep up with the leads. I had to bring on an additional person because I didn’t want anything to fall through the cracks. 

If somebody’s brand new, we have things integrated, like a seller script. If they’re thinking, Oh, my gosh, I’m doing this marketing, and my phone rings, what the heck do I say? What do I do? It’s literally going to have an exact walkthrough of the different questions that they’re going to ask, and there are going to be different prompts. If I hit a no or a yes, then it’s going to prompt me on what to ask next and what to do next. And it’s also integrated into your Google Calendar. If you have a team in place and you want to have team congruency and be consistent, we can make it so that you click on a button and you’re going to be able to set an appointment. And then, boom, it’s going to show up on your entire team’s calendar. You can tag each of your teammates, and you can set assignments and different tasks for each other. 

The whole goal is to be as efficient as possible. And some people will say, Okay, I’m already a seasoned investor. It’s gonna work for me. Even if you have a whole bunch of business cards and you’re super disorganized and you have Excel spreadsheets everywhere and post-it notes, you’re a hot mess. It starts on day one. Today can be day one, and you can put everything into the system. And then you can eventually start going back or hire an assistant or somebody to eventually put all those things into your system from the past. But then, moving forward, you’re super efficient, and you know, continuing to go forward. 

We are integrated into Home Depot. Investors can do all their material lists. They can see before and after pictures of other projects that other people have done and say, Oh, I like that kitchen, and I am able to say, I want all that material, and I can continue there. With no real estate experience, no construction experience, and no background in it, somebody is going to be able to go in there and feel super, super confident, to be able to say, Okay, my website’s in order. And it’s SEO optimized. It’s WordPress. And it’s literally going to walk you through like five or six different steps. Plus, we have a fantastic support team. You can call, you can email, and there’s going to be live chat right there on the screen. If you’re sitting here and you’re like, Oh, my gosh, I started this website, I don’t know what I did to help somebody. There’s gonna be somebody there to fix it for you and work with you.

New investors have to figure a lot of things out, and it can be quite intimidating. How will they be able to start to organize better and make sure that they’re getting some leads or data and doing some marketing? What’s the journey like inside the actual business management tool side of things? Does it handle everything from A to Z? Does it go from acquisitions to closing if you’re doing wholesaling? Or if you’re flipping, does it manage construction, lifestyle, and marketing? What’s the business tool feature like?

The main thing is the confidence that it’s going to give the users. We have a deal analyzer. We can plug in what we’re buying it for, what we’re fixing it for, and what we’re selling it for. And it’s going to take in all the different holding costs and pop out a really nice PDF document in a matter of a minute or two. We can have the confidence to pull our comps. We know what it is going to sell for, and we talked about how we can do all of our repair numbers right there. 

We asked all the right questions with our script, and then we have our deal analyzer, where we can basically say, All right, here’s the exact amount we’re making on our deal. And then all these come in PDF format. If I hit a button to generate a document, it puts it together in a really nice PDF format. I can share this with my team, with potential lenders, and with my contractors whenever I’m looking at those repair numbers. It’s gonna give them confidence that the deal is an actual deal. 

How does it work from start to finish? So if I’m getting all my leads generated from the beginning and putting them into my system, I can do things like track all of my expenses. When I start my rehab, I can track all my expenses. I can track all my maintenance. If I’m keeping it as a rental property, like down to who’s cutting the grass and things like that, that we could put on there. We also have a paperless office option. We have things like all the different real estate contracts. A purchase and sale agreement and all these different things where it’s going to be integrated, where it pulls your name, and then we have our property file, and it’s going to pull all that information and merge it together into an electronic document so we can send out different offers to people all without any sort of an actual paper type of feel. 

We have so many different options, like Power Matching. What is it like? Let’s say I’m a brand-new investor. If we talk about the three legs of wholesaling, obviously, we need good leads coming in. We have to be able to get it under contract. Obviously, the art of negotiation and a good buyer’s list is like a tripod. You kick one leg out, and then the whole thing falls over. If we have leads coming in, we can get them under contract. But if I’m new, I may not have a lot of buyers on my buyer’s list. The cool thing is, if I can click a button, I can see everybody who’s on my personal buyer’s list. You’re also teamed up with the entire network of 175,000 different users within the Realeflow network. If I hit another button, what it’s going to do is show me every single person in the entire network whose buying criteria matches that of that specific property that I just put in. If I don’t have any buyers, I can hit a button, and I can see 10, 15, 20, 50 different people that are buying in that specific area. If I’m in Pennsylvania and I get a lead for Ohio. I can hit a button, and I can see every investor in that area who’s put themselves into our system, scrubbing through 1000s and 1000s of different users, and I can virtually wholesale this property without ever meeting that person. And it’s going to put together a link for me. It’s going to send out a message if I tell it to. Things like that are as hands-off as possible. 

We also have things like email autoresponders that will be set up. We can put an agent in our system—a real estate agent, a contractor, a buyer, or a seller. We can put them into the system, and we can set them up for 180 days of seamless communication where every day, every three days, or you can change the frequency, and the emails are already written out for you. It’s keeping you as detached as possible while making it look like you’re as involved in your business as humanly possible, which is super cool.

If we go back to the seller, at the acquisition stage and lead management stage, a lot of investors are going to start out by themselves, bring a VA in, and want someone to assist them either with calling or transaction coordination. Is it easy to expand the team in Realeflow? Is it easy to control access? A lot of people get nervous if they’re bringing a VA in. Can you speak a bit about that concern?

You can create multiple users in your account, and you can set them up for either primary or secondary access. If somebody is set up as secondary, they don’t have the ability to delete anything or certain things like that. You can put different restrictions on what they have access to. Everything that they do is time-stamped, and it’s not able to be erased at all, ever. Any notes they take, it’s boom, type hide. Yeah, and anything that’s added in is listed as who created it based on the login, so everything is tracked. And you can tag each other. You can set it up so that if I want you to see something, it’s gonna send you an email and alert you as soon as you log into the system. Then we have a scrum board. It’s like our virtual bulletin board, where we can basically put in and say, Here are all our different properties we’re working on. This one needs calling, and here’s the status for this one, or we can move them all around and really track ourselves. to be as efficient as possible.

Continuing on the acquisition side of things, one of the things I get asked about all the time is obviously your platform. I can go ahead and pull out some lists like a probate list in my area. But another thing that people are doing is advertising. They’re doing, in the masterclass on Facebook advertising, whatever leads come through a Facebook campaign, a Google advertisement, or anything like that. How are those? Are those leads able to come in easily? Is there a lot of effort involved? How do I get inbound leads into the system? I understand the data a bit, but what about those inbound leads?

When you create your website, you’re gonna have different opt-in forms. We also have separate opt-in forms that people can go into, and they can just put in their information, and it sends right to your system, as well as sending you an email about it. There are different ways that they can do that. 

We also have something called Mobi marketing. If you’ve ever driven past a property, let’s say there’s like a phone number, and it will say, For more information, text house to the word to the phone number 5551212. What happens is that you’re going to be able to, as soon as they send that text, do different voice recordings or create different additional steps that happen to that person after they opt-in. If you’ve ever had rentals, you put something online and you get 5000 people messaging you, Hey, give me more details. What is included? I have a pet and all this stuff. Can I go see it? What I do is just try to weed out as many people as possible. And so what I do is I’ll say, If you’re interested in this property, text the word race because one of my properties is on Race Street. I’ll say, Text the word race to whatever my phone number is, and you get your own exclusive phone number in the system. You pick your own number. And then after that, it will send them a message. It will give them a link to the property where they can see the pictures. They can read all the facts about it, and then I’ll say, If you’re interested in seeing this property, text the word view, so then they can text the word view, and then maybe it’s gonna give them the application, or you can make as many steps as possible.

As soon as that person texts the first time, it’s in my database now, and I can do things like text blasting. If I have another rental property that’s available, I can take that list of 50 people that were interested in that property when my next one’s available. Now I can text blast all of them, and I have all their contact information. Of course, yeah, they can opt-out if they’re annoyed by me. But the goal is to be able to reach out to them so they can contact you via text. They can get to you through your opt-in pages. You can create squeeze pages. Your websites on Facebook can contact you, and we can put them into our database. When we do a direct mail campaign, we can save all those leads in our system. When they reach out, we already have them in our system. We don’t have to add them in, and all those different things. There are a lot of ways that we can be as connected as possible.

On the property management side of things, if you are holding properties and renting them out, if you get 500 people interested in the property, you want to be able to let the systems drive as much weeding out as possible so that you’re not wasting resources on speaking to 500 people, of whom 452 aren’t even going to be anywhere near interested. 

My response to them would all be the same automated message that they’re going to be getting anyway. If I can take myself out of that mix, basically make myself robotic, and put that step in there, then it’s going to answer that question. And I can do that to 15 people at one time. I don’t have to be sitting there texting or responding on Facebook Messenger, and all those different things I can let the system do. And honestly, it’s a good way to weed out. Because if they can’t follow a simple instruction, then maybe that’s an indication right there of what tenant you’re gonna be getting anyway.

People are potentially wondering about where they’re going to invest and making sure that they make the most of their money, like tracking down performance on lead sources or types of leads and getting advertising spend. Now what sort of metric tracking do you guys have in-house inside the system, either for leads or for agent performance? 

One of the things that they can do is, whenever they send out their direct mail letters, you can use your own phone number if you have your own phone number, but for a small fee. Every phone call that comes in is tracked for that specific campaign. We can really accurately track all the calls that are coming in associated with that campaign. That’s one way to do it. 

Another thing that we do is constantly evaluate our own data. When we’re filtering out our leads, we have AI, so we have artificial intelligence that is built into our system. We purchase over 40 years of all the real estate data—all the real estate sales in the entire country. And what we’ve done is looked at that super invasive creepy data, like the stuff you know, you say something and then it shows up on Facebook stuff, like all that data, like how much money are people making? Who lives in their house? What cars do they drive? Do they have a screened-in porch? How old is it? 

We take all that data and see all the house sales, and then we look at that, and then we look in reverse, and we see what happened that led up to that house sale. Maybe they lost their job, or whatever the circumstances were, and we take that and apply it to today’s world. If we see somebody showing the same symptoms as somebody else in the past, then we’re able to accurately predict the likelihood that this person is going to sell their property in the next 90 days. And this is another filter that we can search by. And what we’ve seen across the countries is that if we have a typical list of houses, we see that about 1% of these houses are going to sell in the next 90 days, just based on a national average. When we take ours, we’ve tested and tracked it. And we have all these stats, so we can provide all the way to a 17x lift. We’re 17 times more likely to see sales in the next 90 days. That’s going to drastically reduce the cost of marketing expenses while drastically increasing our reach, our open rates, and our success stats. 

I’m probably one of the biggest critics of anything in general in life. if I’m a cheerleader and make sure I’m cheering for the right team. I tried the AI. I sent it out. It was a really small campaign in my area. I sent out 59 different letters. I did a two-touch on two different postcards.  I did a two-touch campaign. I targeted absentee owners of vacant properties. And I filtered it by the artificial intelligence score. I think I did like it, and it scored on a scale of one to 1000, with 1000 being the best. I maybe did, like 500 and above. I only wanted a list of 500 scores and above. And so what I did was send it out, and I had 13 phone calls back out of the 59 that I sent out. 13 calls back out of those seven were pretty decent. One of them I got as a listing of another one. The responses from people were ridiculously amazing.

And then we were saying, What should we do with this property? And then your postcard arrived. It was so amazing. I couldn’t fake it. I bought one of them. I just literally came in and took their place. I’m paying their mortgage every single month. And it’s like $300. It rents for $700 a month. I’m making like between three and $400 a month, every single month for the last however many years that this came out for an ad, and everything was like an $87 direct mail campaign that I did, just to see if it worked. 

To be able to track it. The best thing is testing, tracking, and sending it out. Does it work? Does it not? Do you get the phone calls, or do you not? We have the stats on our end, but they’re able to track it with their phone numbers by seeing the results of their campaigns.

That Real Estate Tech Guy Fast Five. 

1. What feature of Realeflow has the biggest impact on your customers’ businesses?
   I definitely think the artificial intelligence component that I just explained.
2. What’s the biggest mistake people make within the CRM ecosystem?
   One of them is thinking, Oh, it’s too late for me to get started. And also not using it. It’s like a gym. You sign up for it. You don’t go. Whose fault is it?
3. What’s your best advice on how a new investor should look at integrating CRM?
   Things that are gonna make it easy for them and seamless, and things that aren’t going to be intimidating. Things that are going to walk them through, handhold them, and just really grow as they grow?
4. What’s the one thing you wish everyone knew about Realeflow?
   I grew up super sheltered in my personal life. Growing up, I didn’t have computers until I was in college. I went to private schools and things like that. And if I can do this, and if I can work with this software, believe me, anybody at any age can. I’m the equivalent of somebody who’s like Great Grandma age as far as my original knowledge of software and computers goes, and if I can do this, literally anybody can. It’s gonna change the entire game of their business.
5. If you’re a new investor, someone’s just starting out in real estate investing. What three technology products would you recommend they bring on first?
   I would say getting an established website because the first thing people are going to do when you start reaching out is to see who you are and research you, even if it’s something very simple. We create here with our own WordPress website, even if it’s just you. Just put your name and a logo on the page, and keep all the other John Doe stuff on it. Do it because at least it gets you out there. Having our CRM be able to get you as automated as possible and as detached as possible is the only way we’re going to be able to duplicate ourselves because we only have so many hours in a week. And things like our system. The third thing would be anything that’s going to help with fulfillment. Things that are going to be able to help with really following up with people and really reaching out to them after you’ve had those communications. If I talk to an agent, I’m going to be able to have that communication for the next six months with them, even if I’m not personally doing it. Ways that they can continue to reach out to people even after they’ve stopped talking to them.

How to find Jenna Hoover

You can just head over to our website, realeflow.com. Don’t forget the E in the middle. It’s Realeflow. And Jenna Buys Houses in all the different social media platforms. Jenna Buys Floral Houses, Florals on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and all those different sites. If you need me, have questions for me, or want to follow me, definitely check me out there. Any questions? That’s where we’ll be.

Thank you so much, Jenna. Every listener, please do check out RealFlow and Jenna, I’ll put all the podcasts and all the links on the podcast webpage. And of course, if you’re listening to this, go over, subscribe, give a like, and do a review. It really helps spread the range of the podcast to other real estate investors. Jenna, thank you for coming on, and everybody have a great week.