How to Market Yourself as a Real Estate Investor

Mike: Welcome back to the FlipNerd.com REI Classroom, where experts from across the real estate investing industry teach you quick lessons to take your business to the next level. And now, let’s meet today’s expert host.

AdaPia: Hi. I’m AdaPia d’Errico, Chief Marketing Officer at Patch of Land, and I’m your host today for the REI Classroom. Today, we get to talk about another topic that’s near and dear to my heart, but it’s more in the execution of what I do, which is marketing. We’re going to be talking about how to market yourself as a real estate investor. We can talk about it in the context of how to market yourself or position yourself so that if you want to work with a real estate crowdfunding company, it’ll be a little bit easier for you to do that.

Mike: This REI Classroom real estate lesson is sponsored by UglyOpportunities.com.

AdaPia: So where to start? Marketing is such a big topic. When you are an individual and you have a small business, there are a lot of basic things that you can do to set yourself up for success. One of the biggest things, and I think it may be overlooked because it’s not technically marketing, is just really making sure you have all your ducks in a row in terms of what you’re doing, your paperwork and your documentation.

Real estate crowdfunding companies, all of them, all the reputable ones, will require you to have a legal structure, like have an LLC. There are liability issues so there’s an expectation that there has to be a limited liability company in place in order for a loan to be made to you for the properties that you’re going to be working on.

So basically, legal docs, having those in place, having a résumé ready, actually. It doesn’t have to be the kind of resume that you would send out to get a job, but a professional resume that really lists your successes, what you’ve done, what you’ve worked on, numbers of properties, some financial numbers around it. That’s all really important because from the perspective of an investor, they want to invest in people who know what they’re doing and that comes with experience. So having a list of that ready is a really strong way to position yourself for success with a crowdfunding company.

Of course, I mean, you know what you’re doing in terms of the rehab or the refi, or the property part. So I’m not going to go into that because that’s just kind of boring, old underwriting type of documentation. But one thing that’s really important too, in the age of the Internet, if you can still call it that, is having your LinkedIn profile prepared and ready to go. Because at least we do at Patch of Land, I mean, we do social search and it really just helps inform who you are. We’re not scouring your Facebook profile because we don’t necessarily have algorithms that do that, although some lenders might.

But, generally speaking, it’s pretty easy for investors, really savvy ones that really want to dig in more, they will go do their own research. So I really recommend having a strong LinkedIn profile, professional headshot, a lot of information about your company, about your background. About really why you are a trustworthy person to be receiving funds from a real estate crowdfunding company and all its investors. This is not the same as the way that it’s always been done, which is meeting people face to face and this handshake, and building trust this way. We have to build trust through basically electronic means.

So how do you do that? How do you help somebody want to trust you? That’s not just the crowdfunding company itself. It’s really the people on the other side. So if you have a website also for your company, it doesn’t have to be a fancy website. Honestly, we can leave that to the corporations and the brands that need the big, fancy websites. But as long as it’s professionally done and it really acts as a visual resume of your work, I think that’s a really great place to start. Because you can actually take advantage of the way crowdfunding companies work, and we do too.

We really like to promote our real estate investors, the ones that are borrowing from us. We love to tell their stories. We love to talk about how they’re doing good work in their communities. We talked about revitalization and we love to tell their stories. We think it’s great. We want our investors to feel comfortable with the people that we’re lending to and for us to be able to do a highlight of them on our website, in our newsletters, and also for press and media. Because we get a lot of opportunities to actually work with media and press who say, “Hey, can we talk to one of your borrowers?”

We’ve done this for a few borrowers, actually, there’s going to be . . . or maybe it’s already aired at Fox News. Not on Fox News, a Fox special on real estate crowdfunding. It highlighted one of our borrowers and this was a Florida borrower. And then we had a very big, nationally syndicated article on the LA Times and that also highlighted one of our borrowers. I believe we also had one of our Chicago borrowers, we actually had him connected with the Chicago Tribune for a story.

So this is actually like an ancillary kind of an opportunity that you can get with real estate crowdfunding. But the best way to go about doing that and positioning yourself for success in terms of marketing yourself for real estate crowdfunding is really just basic stuff that you would want to be doing anyway. Which is having a really solid LinkedIn profile, a good website that really represents and highlights the work that you’ve done, and even just something paper-based that tells a bit of a story about you and why we, as real estate crowdfunding companies and the investors that come through us, would want to work with you because we’re just trying to build trust.

I mean, we go in with the idea that there are really great people doing really good work out there. We want to lend to those people and we want to help them scale their businesses. You are real estate investors. You’re real estate entrepreneurs. You’re professionals. It makes it much easier for us to underwrite, and then to sort of “sell that” concept and you as a person, as a business, to our investors if we have as much information as possible to make that happen.

So, hopefully, these have been some good tips to help you think about how to put all of that together. Anything else, I’m sure we’ll be having more episodes about marketing and in the context also of real estate investing and crowdfunding. So I’ll sign off for now and see you soon.

Mike: HomeVestors, the “We Buy Ugly Houses” folks, is a franchised system of hundreds of real estate investors that have purchased over 65,000 houses. If you’d like to learn more about the most powerful real estate investing system in existence, whether you’re a pro looking to take your business to the next level or whether you have no experience at all but a burning passion to be successful in real estate investing, please visit FlipNerd.com/ugly to learn more.

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