Wholesaling, Multi-Family, and Marketing Products to Increase Your Lead Flow

In this episode, I am excited to interview Justin Silverio, who is the owner of JS2 Homes and Open Letter Marketing. Justin has been investing in real estate since 2011 with extensive experience in rehabbing, new construction, wholesaling, and multi-family rental properties in and around the Boston area. Justin founded Open Letter Marketing in 2016 with a focus on providing real estate investors with a more effective direct to seller marketing approach than the outdated methods. Justin’s company works with hundreds of investors throughout the country and is recognized as one of the top real estate investor marketing companies.

Justin begins by telling us about his background and how he always had a love of houses because his dad was a contractor. The flipping television shows that came out around 2009 really piqued his interest as he was working as an accountant, but didn’t love it. Partnering with his father in finding and rehabbing houses married two of Justin’s passions together - love of houses and of numbers. For the first five years in real estate investing, Justin and his dad were flipping houses while he continued to work his full-time job, also while doing marketing for new properties. We talked about the challenges inherent with the situation, but also how it is possible to make it work.

I asked Justin how they funded their first deal and he described the process he went through in order to pitch three regional banks to do business with them. He did his homework, knew what information the banks wanted to see, and put together a five-year business plan to get funding before selecting his first property.

Justin then described what his business looks like today. He went from rehabbing entry-level homes, to mid-level homes, to high-end homes and new construction, to what he is doing today which is primarily multi-family condo conversions. The bulk of his day-to-day business dealings is made up of wholesaling homes while staying involved with the multi-family developments which are more long-term projects. He talked about how competition and profit margin per time spent really drove him to switch his business model.

Justin then told us about his company Open Letter Marketing, which was created to provide real estate investors with direct to seller marketing. I asked Justin to describe what their program does better than his competitors and he spoke to the fact that his product looks at the very fine details. With his product, they promote campaigns with a sequence of letters where each letter builds off of the prior.

I asked Justin to describe the current project he is working on, software called OLM InvestorHub, which is a lead and marketing management system based on his own business process. It will enable investors to purchase or import multiple lists, identify properties that are on more than one list, and identify the quality of a list once it is imported. Once the lead quality has been identified, you can create marketing campaigns specific to each. Justin talks about the software’s dashboard and how it organizes all of the marketing tools an investor is using and sends reminders to perform certain tasks to keep everything organized and visible to the user. They also have a CRM product that communicates with InvestorHub called OLM DealFlow.

Going forward, Justin is concerned with defining a systematic process for his wholesaling business so they can grow and expand. He also talked about looking at the more technical side of direct to seller marketing and how that can influence the direction of Open Letter Marketing.

During this interview, Justin speaks about being on the front lines in order to engineer new things to help people get better responses in changing market conditions. This is an incredibly informative episode for helping investors use the most current tools in order to fuel their business and I hope you will join us!

Notable Quotes:

“The degree is just the gateway to the world you want to get into.”

Mike Simmons

“I know I have something that works much better and there is nothing on the market that offers this.”

Justin Silverio

“If a marketing strategy works in my real estate investment business, I’m going to offer it to my customers.”

Justin Silverio

“It is almost though you are building a conversation with the seller, and you do it in a specific way so that they are getting to know about you more with each letter.”