Episode #275 – Encore: Building Your Real Estate Investing Brand with Penney Dollar

You're listening to the “REI Marketing Nerds” podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords Nerds, a high-tech digital agency focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition, and live a freer, more awesome life. And, now, your host, Dan Barrett.

Dan: Hello everybody, and welcome to this week's REI Marketing Nerds Podcast. As always, this is Daniel Barrett here from AdWordsNerds.com, helping real estate investors all around the world find more leads and deals online.
Man, we've been doing this for a while. I don't know a number this is. I've got to look, but we have been at this for a while and I'm loving it. Thank you so much for showing up to the show every week. We really appreciate it and I hope you are getting a lot of value out of it. [01:10.2]

I usually talk about this at the end of the show, but I'm going to throw this in the beginning. If you're not in our Facebook group, I cannot tell you what a big part of what I do this group is. We are really dedicated at AdWords Nerds to educating real estate investors everywhere about what is actually working in online marketing. We do that for free.
We do that because I personally believe that, because the real estate investors, our clients, help me build this business and provide for the people that work for me, and provide for my family, I really view it as my responsibility to give back to the investing community as much as possible. What I know how to do is find leads and deals online, so I am dedicated to putting out as much good information about that as possible, and this podcast is part of that and the Facebook group is part of that.
So, if you're not part of the Facebook group, I highly encourage you AdWordsNerds.com/group or just go on Facebook and type in “REI Marketing Nerds” and you'll find it. Request to join. It’s totally free, and I would love to have you. [02:16.1]

This week, this is a really fun conversation I'm having this week with Penney Dollar. Now, Penney Dollar is basically a marketing director at a real estate investment company. She's got an incredible background. She's done everything from corporate marketing to every different possible industry you could possibly want to be in. She has had a really amazing career, and right now, she is doing this really amazing thing where she is combining real estate investing with this really interesting take on what she can do to help the city that she's located in with us, which is Philadelphia. She is using real estate investing as a vehicle for good and advocating for really specific changes in how the city deals with housing. [03:05.0]

I just had this incredible conversation with her, and I really want you to take a listen to it and really think about how you can use your real estate investing business, not only to make money, which obviously we all want to do, but to affect our communities and affect change in the people around us. I’m really excited for you to hear this conversation with Penney Dollar. Without any further ado, let's get into it.
All right, everybody, this is Daniel Barrett, and I am here with Penney Dollar. She is the director of sales and marketing over at SnappyHomeBuyer.com. They are an investment firm. They are buying homes in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, which is Philly plus the counties surrounding Philly, and it's extended to Jersey and Delaware, so they're all over the place.
Penney, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming. I appreciate it.
Penney: Thank you for inviting me on. I really look forward to having a discussion with you.
Dan: Yes, it’s absolutely my pleasure. I want to address this upfront because I feel like people will feel like I made up the name Penney Dollar, but that is absolutely your name. Are you at the point in your life where, if anybody makes any more Penney Dollar jokes, you will murder them? Is that officially in the part that we're at or do you just accept it? [04:17.6]

Penney: No, I embrace it because I'm in marketing, and I have a feeling that my parents knew. When I was born, I had red hair like a shiny new penny, and my dad was a bit of a funny guy and he just insisted, and no one has ever called me anything but Penney.
Dan: I love it.
Penney: I got harassed in high school, but from then on, I embraced it.
Dan: It’s an extremely striking name, which is kind of like when we are talking about marketing and stuff, that's what you want. You want attention? You’ve got attention. We were talking earlier and you were saying that the catchphrase is like, It makes sense to go with Penney, right? It's like there are a million. There are a million and one ideas there. So, I absolutely love it. [05:02.2]

Penney: And I've heard all the jokes.
Dan: We won't. I'm going to tell people. People know I love a good pun. I love terrible jokes. I'm going to let you all know right now, I'm not doing it. I'm not going there. We're going to keep it professional.
Let’s start. I would like to actually know two things. How did you get into marketing? Then, how did you get into real estate? First of all, let's start with, how did you get into marketing, in general? Maybe it's the same story. Maybe there are different stories. But what was your introduction into just marketing and sales?
Penney: I worked for a very boring, very uptight conservative company in New York City, Salomon Brothers. I worked for a guy. His name was Lewis Ranieri and he started the mortgage-backed securities industry.
Dan: Wow.
Penney: Yes, and this was quite a few years ago. I met a client there and the client liked my skill set, and he offered me a job to work as a booker for entertainment groups. [06:03.0]

I just decided, You know what? I'm never going to make it as an investment banker. This is boring for me. I have to dress up every day. And it was a guys’ world then and I just didn't want to fight it. So, I went to work. I was called the Happy Booker. It was the name of my company. You know, Penney Dollar and the Happy Booker. I did that for 12 years.
Then, I kind of transitioned over. I wanted to do a hard product, so I went into the packaging industry in Las Vegas. I took a job in Las Vegas, flew from New York, the city I love, and took a job in packaging, and I met some really nice people and they were in real estate. They invited me. They needed somebody to do marketing for them. I thought marketing was traditional marketing. Marketing and real estate is totally different.
It was a REIT and it was mainly made up of people from China, Australia, and the Philippines, who were investing your money in the United States into real estate. That's how I got into it. [07:05.3]

Dan: First of all, that story is amazing. I kind of just want to talk to you about entertainment booking, but I think I'm going to leave that for a different podcast. We’ll try to keep it real estate for this [podcast.]
You said right off the bat that you came from a more traditional marketing place, moved into real estate, and marketing and real estate is very different. What do you see as the core differences between marketing in real estate and marketing everywhere else?
Penney: Okay. So, up until a few years ago, marketing in real estate was, basically, you get on the phone and you make cold calls, and you send out postcards. That was basically it.
Technology has changed that a lot. We can do email marketing now. We can do newsletters. We can take some of the traditional marketing tools and move them into a digital age and used them in real estate. SEO has a lot to do with that, pay-per-click, and we still use traditional methods. We still use direct mail, which is really good, but now you can integrate all of them. [08:08.6]

You can buy a list and you can use it in three or four different ways. You can send it out. You can use it in your online marketing, as well as traditional cold calling and just the traditional marketing.
Who's not calling you? If you send out to a list of 5,000, you're only going to get maybe 20, 25 or 30 good leads out of that. If you target those people on Facebook, you target them in Google Ads, those same people, they'll continue to see your name over and over, and maybe in six months, they'll call you. We've had a lot of people that have started doing that. Hey, we got a card from you and then we saw you online. We looked a little bit more. And so, I think that real estate is finally coming around to integrating lots of technology, which is good.
Dan: That's super fascinating. I think people who listen to this podcast a lot have heard me talk about this, but I think this is a really important point that I want to sit out with you for a little bit. [09:06.3]

I want to get your feedback on that because I've been talking for maybe about a year now about this really fundamental shift that's happening in real estate investing. You're exactly right. Real estate investing marketing used to be, I find the most motivated person; I send them a postcard; they call me; they send me in their house. It's this immediate sort of sales cycle, where, obviously, it takes time to get the deal under contract. Essentially you get them when they need you and that's the whole marketing cycle, right?
The rest of the world, for a long time, has been on this very different approach to marketing, which is people have to know they can trust you and you build a relationship over time, an extended period of time before the moment that they buy. And I think that investors for the first time are realizing—with the entry into the marketplace of Zillow, Trulia, Opendoor, Knock and these huge companies that are dumping millions of dollars into the space in terms of marketing—that they actually need to have a relationship with the sellers. Their brand does before the seller actually needs them, so that the seller chooses the, out of everyone else. [10:16.4]

I'm wondering, do you see that happening, this need for investors actually needing to build a brand and build a relationship ahead of the sale, whereas before it was just find someone that needs to sell and get that deal under contract as quickly as possible? Do you see that shift happening as well?
Penney: I do, and I can give you a case study in point that happened just this morning.
We have a pay-per-click campaign going on right now and I got a text this morning from one of the people that had seen our ad. They sent me a text and I responded right away. I responded within two or three minutes. He literally said to me, “Of all the people I’ve contacted, you're the only one who's actually gotten back to me.” [11:02.5]

So, building that relationship is important. We may get the house or we may not get the house. I don't really know. We're going to send our acquisitions out to take a look at it, but I know that he's going to be in a cocktail party and somebody's going to say, I really have money troubles and I need to sell my house. Call Snappy. Snappy will respond right away.
It is building the relationships. It's listening to the client, listening to what they need, but they have to know that you're credible before because there are a lot of scammy people out there.
We're in a big metropolitan area and people see this as the fast way to make money, and we tell our clients that we're as transparent as possible. If you have a question, please ask because we will give you an honest answer.
Dan: It strikes me that what you are talking about, I think what you're really good at and what your marketing approach is good at is about shifting the goal from getting the deal, which is very hard for an investor to do. [12:05.9]

Investors are trained to get the deal, get the deal, get the deal. It's a hunt and ‘eat what you kill” kind of industry a lot of the time. You are shifting the goal away from getting the deal towards building a reputation, and the reputation built over a longer period of time is going to bring you more deals than any amount of hunting and killing could possibly do.
But, in the moment, this is very hard because you want to just focus on that immediate feedback and the reputation of the feedback is much longer-term. I think that's such a valuable mindset to have.
You're the director of marketing and sales at Snappy Home Buyers. We talked about that before. The website is at SnappyHomeBuyer.com, right?
Penney: Correct.
Dan: In your time doing the marketing here, do you notice trends in terms of what's been more effective, what's been less effective? What are the commonalities between the things that you do where you're saying, Hey, this is what's working for us at least now? [13:08.6]

Penney: Basically, what's working for us is doing follow-ups, having that personal touch with the clients. We send down an acquisitions person. We try to follow up within 24 hours. Hey, did everything go okay? Do you have any questions? Anything that we could have done better in our meeting with you?
Sometimes they'll just say, Yeah, everything was good, and they hang up the phone and we never hear from them again, or we call them in three months and [they say], Oh yeah, we sold our house already. So, I think it's the constant being at the forefront and just managing those relationships.
Dan: Yes, I do think that consistency is really critical. We live in such a distracted age where there are a million and one things going on. I always try to stress this to people that a seller can want to sell to you; they can have a problem that they're motivated to solve and just not have the mental bandwidth to actually get on the phone with you in the moment. [14:07.3]

I was telling this story to someone else recently where it was like I was getting mail from the IRS, and I know this now, but what had happened was, I filed my taxes in 2015 and everything was fine now. Somebody else has changed something in their business now, and so, then, all of a sudden, I owed money from 2015, the way that it worked. Someone reported something in 2015 that wasn't there before. Anyway, I owed them about $1,000. It wasn’t a ton of money, but whatever.
The IRS is sending me mail. They're sending me mail in the mail. It's from the IRS. It's the mail you're supposed to open and I just wasn't opening it, because I would get the mail and I'd be like, I really need to open this, but I’d get my mail at the end of the day and I’d be tired, and my kids would be running around. I would just put it in a pile and be like, I'm sure I'll get to this, and I just never got to it until the last mail that they sent me where it was like, We're going to repossess your home or take your social security or whatever. [15:05.6]

And so, then I jumped into action because I was like, Oh, I've been a complete idiot. Of course, I can send you a check for $1,000. Who cares? And I'm lucky enough to see that. A lot of people wouldn't be in that situation. But it was purely because I just didn't have the mental bandwidth to solve this.
Penney: Right.
Dan: Usually a solvable problem, right? It was the fact that they are the IRS and they want my money real bad, so they mailed me 10 times, and then each time was a little more dire than the previous one. It's the consistency and the follow-up that really make a difference, because I could have solved that problem at any time and I wanted to, and if you had intellectually sat me down and explained it, I would've said, Of course, I'm going to do that.
But, instead, what happens is that so many investors will send someone one email or call them once, not get the person on the phone and be like, That person isn’t motivated.
Penney: Yep.
Dan: And there's a ton of money left on the table. Now, you're in Philadelphia, one of my favorite cities of all time, but a pretty competitive market, right? You're in a competitive market in terms of investors. [16:11.5]

Penney: Extremely competitive. I live in West Philly. I live on a not-so-great block. I can't tell you how many times a day we have people knocking on our door, leaving mail. Do you want to sell your house?
Dan: Wow, really?
Penney: Just go out and I confront them and say, Yeah, I want to sell it. How much you offering? Or they don't know what I do for a living. I never tell anyone in my [neighborhood] what I do for a living.
Dan: Because they don't ask. They don't ask, right? I'm sure, if they asked, you would tell them, but they don't ask.
Penney: Right. So, I could just say to them, Sure, give me what you’ve got. How much are you offering me? And these are people that they probably found them on Craigslist. They're probably getting minimum wage to go around. They don't know. I’d say, Why don't you take my number and have somebody call me? Yeah, we'll let them know. Never hear from anybody else. It's just noise.
Dan: Wow. Really? They don't follow up on that. [17:00.6]

Penney: Nope, never do.

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Dan: This is one of those things where it just boggles my mind and I think that so many investors are looking for like, Hey, what's the cool new marketing trick I can use? You imagine how that person's investing business would change overnight if they just followed up with the people that were maybes. How do you guys follow up?
You're in a competitive market. Like you were saying, you're having people knocking on your door all the time. So how do you think about follow-up and get that done? You guys are, obviously, doing this and you're dedicated to it. You're good at it. What's your approach to that part of this business? [18:11.1]

Penney: We have several different approaches. We make phone calls. We send emails. Sometimes it takes a handwritten note if we can't reach somebody and we've tried to get them on the phone to follow-up; they're not answering or their phone number has changed. That happens all the time. I can start out every day. I try to get 30 phone calls then in the morning, and by the time I’ve made my fifth one, I have three that have had their numbers disconnected or they're not taking phone calls, or the phone just rings to nothing.
If it's a really hot property, then after a couple of weeks, we whip it out and we just drop a mail [saying,] Hey, call me. That's it. Or send them a postcard that says, Trying to reach you. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes we have, Oh, I changed my phone number. Here's my new number. But, really, if a person wants to sell their house and they're motivated enough, they're going to find me. [19:04.8]

Dan: They're going to find you, provided you give them the opportunity to find you. This is the thing that's so fascinating about what you're doing. Most investors call the line to see that the phone is disconnected and they give up. They don't have the opportunity to have that person reach out to them and be like, Hey, I changed my number. That person is never going to know that you called that disconnected number. You keep going past that point, get to the written card or whatever it is, you at least have the opportunity to do that.
Think about, over the course of a year or five years, the number of properties that you're going to close on that you never would have closed on otherwise from the exact same pile of leads that everybody else has. That's the massive factor as to why you're having success and you're closing deals, when other people are like, These leads are no good.
Penney: When we have them on the phone, we try to dig into … okay, their brother died. They don't know what to do. They don't know what their next steps are. We find out their brother died seven years ago, but they've had this property just sitting empty because they don't know what to do. We'll help you. We actually listen to them rather than just, Hi, I want to buy your house. I'll pay you $30,000. [20:16.7]

Dan: Right. That's a really fascinating example actually. I will say this, too. This is something that I've said multiple times on this show. Every time it comes up, I make sure to call it out. The investors we have on this show that are doing really well, really successful, all of them think about these calls as “I'm helping this person solve a problem,” rather than “I need to get something from this person.”
Penney: Right.
Dan: Your example is a really interesting one, this person whose brothers died seven years ago and they don't, if you make them an offer of 30,000, [they will consider], Is that a good offer or a bad offer? Am I being an idiot by taking that offer? Are people going to make fun of me? Am I betraying my brother's memory? There’s all this stuff going into this problem that is not solved by simply trying to throw an offer at somebody. [21:08.3]

But if you could have a conversation with somebody and figure that out, and figure out what's really underlying that, that's such an effective approach to take because everybody wins in that scenario. You win, but the person? You solve the person's problem and that's a huge win for them.
Speaker: Right. We've done things, gone as far as to help people get their ID because they couldn't open the estate without having an ID, but they don't have an ID because they didn't have a way to get a motor vehicle. They didn't have it copy of their birth certificates and we got [unclear 21:38.2].

And it may be time-consuming and, yes, we could probably have bought two other houses, but we're still helping someone and it's all about we're helping the community.
One of the reasons that I like being in real estate is I want to see more sustainable housing. We have almost 40,000 empty lots just in Philadelphia and Philadelphia is a community of row homes. If one row home is removed, collapses, there's an empty spot there. It's so thin. What are you going to put on it? [22:13.0]

You can put a container house on it, but you have to get zoned for that and the zoning right now isn't. So, I have made it a concerted effort for myself to figure out how we can get the zoning board to change, to allow us to build sustainable housing, affordable housing in distressed communities, because if you have an empty lot, it brings blight to the community. People put trash in it. It’s unused. It brings raccoons and critters. But if you have something that's there and something that's thriving, and a container house is the best thing, and I know that my coworkers, when they hear this, they're going to laugh because I preach this all the time. We need to find a way to have affordable, sustainable housing in Philadelphia proper. If anybody’s listening, call me. [23:07.6]

Dan: Yes. That's incredible. Again, this is something that comes up again and again, somebody who has investors that have a mission beyond just the pure transactional value of the real estate like, I do this thing for you and you give me money. I think that's an incredibly laudable goal and one of those structural things that can have a massive impact down the road. It’s just really massive. You're absolutely right. Empty lots lower the value of everyone's property. It damages the entire neighborhood. It's one of those things that people maybe aren't a hundred percent aware of, but has this systemic effect on everything around it. I think that's incredible.
Speaker: It’s part of our corporate culture at Snappy Home Buyer. It's one of our core values, to give back to the community.
Dan: What needs to happen in order for that goal of having container homes, sustainable housing and infrastructure built [to be realized]? [24:07.2]

It sounds like it’s a zoning thing. It's like zoning laws don't permit it. What has to happen for you guys in order to be able to get that done? Is it that someone in city government has to put something? I don't know how that stuff works or what happens.
Speaker: Basically, the zoning laws here require that, if we have a structure, we have to have a basement, and with a container home, we don't need a basement because it's all contained within the container, whether it's one container or two containers stacked, whatever it is. We can have solar panels or we can run to the sewer line. We can all put that in. We don't need the basement to do that. That's basically what we have to get around and to have people start thinking differently. Hard to do when you're living in a 300-year-old city that has houses that have been here since the 1700s. [25:02.2]

Dan: Yes, and one of the few cities in America that actually has a historical infrastructure, right? There aren't a lot of places with that old kind of housing infrastructure, city infrastructure that's kind of there, especially a huge part of its identity the way that Philadelphia is. Is it the case, basically, that, because when the zoning laws were written, everything needed a basement, of course, if you don't have a basement, you can't build there? And now that's not the case anymore, but just the rule is there and that is the way it has always been, and so, people just don't realize there's an alternative?
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's it. I think that it has taken a while for the laws to be changed in order to embrace sustainable living. There are so many lots and there’s only so much you can do with them. You cannot really rebuild another on a single lot inside on a street that's between two houses. You cannot build a high-rise. It just won't hold it. But it will hold two two-ton containers and that's a one-bedroom apartment or, if you have double containers, that's two units. [26:15.5]

But that's my mission. That's my personal mission. My coworkers think that it's going to be an impossible mission, but [sound dropped] board, if I can get them to change the zoning laws, they're all on board.
Dan: I will tell you, first of all, I think that's an incredible mission. Second of all, anybody that's listening to this that wants to reach out to Penney and sort of share resources or talk about this, SnappyHomeBuyer.com is the website. We'll talk about it at the end of the episode. We'll talk about ways to reach out to you and everything. AdWordsNerds.com/podcast, we'll have all the links to this episode and everything. I highly recommend anybody who's listening to this that has any experience whatsoever, get in touch with Penney, because I think that's an incredible mission, an incredible kind of thing. [27:01.4]

I am in the process. Have you ever read the book, The Power Broker by Robert Caro? Do you know what I'm talking about? Yes? Okay. I never had. Someone leant me this book. It's the size of three phone books stacked together. It’s this giant book, but it's the story of the building of the city infrastructure, building the highways, the bridges and beaches. It is the story of this guy, Robert Moses, who was the force behind this.
Reading this book, I am just coming away from it being like … I mean, he's a pretty ambiguous figure. You can look at him as an evil person or a good person, depending on which side of the coin you're on, but I'm like, Holy moly, if this is possible, literally, anything is possible. That's what I took away from it.
So, it's absolutely doable—and, Philly, wake up. Come on, Philly. Let’s change the zoning laws. I think that's amazing.
Penney: There are some communities that have done this. Las Vegas recently built a veterans' community and put in 30 container houses, and then they have a central. Each one is a standalone one-bedroom apartment, and they have a sustainable community center where they have access to resources and it's a community center. They can go. They can meet. There's a place where they can play games, get to know each other. A family can come in. [28:20.1]

Really, there is no reason. Every city in America should really think about how they can move forward into the 21st century because that's where we're at.
Dan: Let me just do this. Do you guys communicate this part of your mission to the sellers that you work with? Is that part of why people choose to work with you? Do you talk about that kind of prominently or no?
Penney: We do somewhat. We tell them that we have a set of values. We're going to be transparent with them. We believe in giving back to the community. We want to work smarter. And we want to embrace technology. I think that the people that buy from us that are in our community, I think that they understand that, that we're not the guy who pins the sign on the light pole and then scribbles a number on it. We try to be as transparent and open with our clients as possible. [29:20.8]

Dan: Yeah, I think that's really incredible. Beyond the clear value that you're adding to the community, I think it makes you stand apart as a brand. To bring this full circle, in the beginning, we were talking about this shift that's happening. In other words, hey, there are a million investors and there are these huge venture-backed companies that are going to undercut pretty much anything you're going to offer.
Penney: Yep.
Dan: Why do I go with you? And I think having a broader mission or a broader sense of “This is why I'm doing this thing,” it immediately sets you apart from everyone else. Beyond the value that you're producing in the world, it's valuable as a business decision, because it gives me a reason to sell me, beyond like, Hey, whoever has the lowest offer. It gives me a reason. [30:13.3]

Just like you're saying, this thought, this idea of following up, the idea of solving someone's problem and focusing on that, that creates a relationship. The relationship is the reason I can sell versus anyone else.
I think all of the things that you're doing all add into this broader picture of what marketing as an investor is going to be in this broader move away from “How do I get the immediate ROI?” to “How do I build a brand and a company that people want to sell to?”
I think that's really amazing and, Penney, I think your Snappy Home Buyer, in general, is crushing it. I think you are really a forward-thinking person. It’s funny because you said you came from a conservative corporate background and this traditional marketing background, but you are really ahead of most of the industry in terms of how you think about marketing and what you're doing, and I think it's just been super, super valuable. [31:08.1]

If people want to follow up with you or get in touch with you or Snappy Home Buyer, obviously, SnappyHomeBuyer.com is the website. Is there anywhere else that you want people to reach out to you or get in touch with you, or is that the best way?
Penney: They can email. I can send that to you. I'll text it to you or I'll email you, and you can put it on your site if you like. They can call me and I’ll be more than happy to have a conversation with them.
Dan: That’s an amazing offer.
Penney: All that information to you.
Dan: Yes. Anybody that's listening to this, you would be remiss not to take Penney up on that offer. Penney is probably going to regret that offer. We're going to just have too many people emailing and calling, but I will put that up there. Again, the main websites is at SnappyHomeBuyer.com.
Penney Dollar, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was awesome and you really brought it today, brought a ton of value to our listeners, so I really, really appreciate that. Thank you. [32:08.7]

Penney: Thank you very much, Dan, for having me. I really appreciate it.
Dan: Yeah, my pleasure.
That's it for this episode of REI Marketing Nerds and, as always, thank you so much for listening. If you get some value out of this show, I would love for you to subscribe to it on iTunes or Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a review. It's massively helpful to us and I read every single one, so please give us that feedback. I would love that.
As always, thank you so much. I hope you're having a great week and will have a great rest of your week. I will talk to next week. This is Daniel Barrett from AdWords Nerds signing of.

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