After burning out from 10 years of struggling to succeed in real estate, Tony Javier looked for ways to automate his business. Today, we’re talking with Tony about using TV commercials to grow your motivated seller leads on autopilot. He tells us the top 5 benefits of using TV ads for investors, what channels he focuses on and why, and how he does this for even smaller costs than direct mail.
Tony Javier Real Estate Background:
- Full-time real estate investor
- 19 years of real estate experience
- Portfolio consists of 100 properties and 800 flips
- Based in San Diego, CA
- Say hi to him at: www.realestatemastersTV.com
- Best Ever Book: The 12 Week Year
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TRANSCRIPTION
Theo Hicks: Hello, Best Ever listeners, and welcome to the Best Real Estate Investing Advice Ever Show. I’m Theo Hicks and today, we’ll be speaking with Tony Javier.
Tony, how are you doing today?
Tony Javier: I’m doing good. How are you, man?
Theo Hicks: I’m doing well, thanks for asking, and thanks for joining us today. Looking forward to our conversation. So a little bit about—
Tony Javier: Yes, I’m excited to jump on. It’s been several years since I’ve been on. So I’m glad to be back on.
Theo Hicks: So Tony is a full-time real estate investor with 19 years of real estate experience. His portfolio consists of 100 properties, he’s also done 800 flips. He is based in San Diego, and his website is https://realestatemasterstv.com/.
So Tony, do you mind telling us some more about your background and what your current focus is?
Tony Javier: Totally. I started 20 years ago, bought the No Down Payment system by Carlton Sheets… So for those of you who are older – I’m in my 40s now, young 40s. Those of you who are younger probably don’t know him, but he was a late-night infomercial kind of guy. So I bought that course on TV one late night, 20 years ago – this will be my 20th year in business – and ended up just start buying properties with no money down. And a couple years after I bought the course, I dropped out of college with nine hours left to graduate, and took on real estate full-time.
So from day one I’ve raised money, I’ve been doing deals with other people’s money for 20 years now… And now, I actually lend money out, interesting enough; we may or may not get into that later. But it’s led me to many different paths. So first 10 years of my business, I had a lot of struggles, I did the wrong things, I didn’t ask for advice. I tried to do everything myself. I started building up a team, hired the wrong people… And while I had some success, because real estate can be forgiving, the first 10 years I had some success. I was burnt out, I had a lot of wrong people in my business, and decided I needed to make a huge change. So I ended up hiring a coach, something I’d never done before, started asking for advice, getting help, and started modeling the people I wanted to model after.
So I found someone that did not look at properties, was not full-time in the business, and I thought, “That’s so hard to do. There’s no way.” Because I was doing the acquisitions, I was doing all that kind of stuff. So I had this vision of being where that guy was. And within about three years of that, I ended up automating my business where I didn’t need to be there anymore. So I moved from Wichita, Kansas, where I do all my real estate and I’ve got a co-working space and rentals and many businesses out there. And now I live in San Diego, I have been here for five years and now I only work a few hours a week on those real estate businesses.
So now I spend a lot of my time, I run Real Estate Masterminds, Virtual Real Estate Masterminds for real estate investors, and then also help real estate investors utilize TV to find motivated sellers. I’ve been doing that nine years now. It’s something that is a little to no competition, builds a lot of credibility, builds a great brand and it has done very well for me. So now I love talking about TV and helping other real estate investors implement TV in their market.
Theo Hicks: The perfect segue to my first question… So you go to Tony’s website, and you’ve got the very top, it says, “Use TV Commercials to grow your Motivated Sellers Leads… On Autopilot.” So that’s going to be the main focus of our conversation today.
So, Tony, I’m going to let you just tell us what you think we need to know about using TV, why it works, how to do it and then I’ll ask some follow-up questions to extrapolate even more from you.
Tony Javier: So I’m going to give you the top five benefits of TV. I have many benefits, but for the sake of time, when I talk about it on short episodes like this, I just narrow it down to the top five. So what we kind of talked about it already is credibility; it helps build a lot of credibility for you and your business. When you’re on TV, for some reason, they just look at you way differently when you’re on TV, whether it’s your a paid actor or whether you’re on a TV commercial. Tt’s the weirdest thing that there’s that perception, but that’s just the way it is.
So a second benefit would be little to no competition. Anytime I have a conversation about TV for Motivated Sellers, nine out of 10 people say, “I’ve never heard of anybody doing that,” and then the other one out of 10 says, “I’ve heard of a couple other people doing that and they’re absolutely crushing it.” It’s just there’s not much competition. So for me, cold calling, texting, all that stuff work, but everybody’s doing that. So why not go where nobody’s doing it or very few people are doing it?
Third thing is it’s a high return on investment. I’m getting 11x return on my money right now, which is unheard of, especially for something that’s so automated, which is the fourth benefit, is automation. So we get a high ROI. But even better than that, I’m getting 11.2x return on my money right now. But the better thing is the return on time. In 2020, I spent three hours on TV commercials, and that was just shooting a couple of new TV commercials, I felt like I need to freshen up a little bit… And I met with my media buyer, I think once or twice. So I spent three hours the whole year on my marketing for TV and Motivated Sellers and through that channel, and it brought huge returns. There’s no other thing that I know of out there that can do that.
And then number five is the high-quality leads. When people pick up the phone and call you from the commercial, they are motivated and they are not tire kickers. If you cold call, you text, you do what we call outbound marketing, that gets a lot of tire kickers; people who will say, “Well, just give me an offer on my house”, that kind of thing. When people are inbounding and calling you and reaching out to you, that’s where the high-quality leads comes in, the high motivation… And not only that, but the competition. So if you’re cold calling, texting and mass mailing lists, chances are you have 5, 10, maybe 20 other investors hitting those same lists… Whereas TV, if they’re calling you, chances are you’re the only one that they’re calling.
So, so many different benefits of TV. And with TV, it’s not as expensive as you would think. It’s not cheap, but it’s not as expensive as you think. You can actually hit more people with TV if you’re talking about a cost standpoint than you can with direct mail. And like I’ve mentioned already, if you were to do direct mail, cold calling, texting and compare that to TV, you’re spending 10, 20, 100 times more time on those marketing methods than TV.
So I don’t know if I answered your question there, Theo, but I’m all about TV because it’s worked very well for me over the last nine years and built a great brand and gotten a lot higher returns for me, and for a lot of the people that I’ve helped implement it.
Theo Hicks: That credibility brand aspect is something that we talk about on this show a lot. So I’m glad that that’s included in one of your top five benefits. So I am one of the nine out of 10 people. I wouldn’t say I have never heard of it before, but I don’t think I’ve interviewed anyone before who’s used TV. The closest would be radio.
So let’s say I’m listening to this and I’m one of those nine people and I want to start advertising on TV, or creating TV commercials; how do I know that this will work for the type of deals I’m looking for? Does this only work for single-family homes? Or if I’m maybe a multifamily investor, can I use this to generate multifamily leads? Or is it more for only certain types of properties?
Tony Javier: Well, that’s interesting… I had someone earlier today ask me if that would help them raise money as far as the message, and what I can say is I have a franchise-like system, is what I like to call it, because I’ve done it for nine years, I’ve tested it, I’ve proven it not only in my market, but in many other markets. So I know it works for motivated sellers for single-family. I’ve never tried a message for multifamily and I’ve never tried a message for raising money specifically, which if you’re raising money, you’ve got to make sure that you file that appropriately with the SEC if you do that.
So single family, 100% for sure, I know that it can and has worked in many markets. But if you’re doing it for other things, I would say it probably would work, but I can’t guarantee it, because I don’t have that data. I have nine years of data knowing what commercials have worked for me, the types of commercials, because I’ve filmed many different commercials and tried many different things. So that’s what I give to the people I teach about it. I know what schedules have worked best for me, what times of day, what shows, what stations… And I’ve tried many variables and some have tanked. So I try to keep people away from those variables.
One of them I’ll just share with you is franchise system animation – just being way too animated. I’m a pretty even-keeled guy, so my commercials I’ve done pretty even keel. And when I went very animated, my calls just dropped like that. So I’ve got a lot of data behind that. But to answer your question, I don’t have any data behind multifamily or raising money, but I would imagine it probably would work.
Theo Hicks: So let’s say whether I’m looking for motivated single-family owners or I want to try out, what’s the first thing I do? How do I find a station to put me on? How does that work?
Tony Javier: That’s a great question. So here’s the thing – let me tell you the back story. So how I found TV is I went to a poker game at a friend of mine; he was actually a newer friend, so I didn’t know him super well… And we get downstairs and we’re getting ready to go to the poker table and I’m like, “Oh, wow, I recognize that guy.” And I got kind of little celebrity status thing in my head, right? Because this guy has been on TV, he’d been marketing his construction business for many years. So I started talking to him, just a normal guy, and asked him how his TV commercials were doing. And he’s like “We’re doing super well with it, we did $2 million last year, just off our commercials.” And I’m like, “Oh, that’s great.“ And he’s like, “You need to call my guy and see if it would work for you.”
So he hooked me up with his media buyer that helped him produce the commercial, buy the ads, negotiate, the whole thing. And long story short, within 30 days, he had me up and running, because he knew it all.
So one of the things that I’m doing for other real estate investors is bringing my system into that and helping them buy the media as well. So I’ve talked to a few other people that have said, “I’ve tried TV, I tried to call the stations, I didn’t get the right answers, I wasn’t sure where to go with, I spent months working on, I just never got on the air.” So we automate that process completely by negotiating the rates for you, and we can get better rates because we’re media buyers, and they’re going to answer our calls and get back to us quicker as opposed to someone calling in.
So the quick answer to that is if you want to do anything, get a good system behind it. And if you have someone that can do it for you and streamline that process, that’s the best way to go. If someone want to do it themselves, they could but it would just take a lot longer; you just have to call three, four or five different stations, you’d have to talk to different representatives, you’d have to ask them their pricing, you’d have to give them your demographic and they’d have to figure it out. So we’ve done all that for you. We’ve already figured it all out, and we can get people on the air within about 2-3 weeks, as opposed to spending months trying to figure it out, and then potentially not getting on the air.
Theo Hicks: I’m sure that all of this depends on the channel and the time slot and the quality of the commercial and all the different things, but just kind of in general, how much should I expect to invest in a TV commercial? And [unintelligible [00:13:33].11] for multifamily it’s a dollar per unit. Is it dollar per hour? How does that work?
Tony Javier: That’s a great question. The general statistic for people you’re going to hit, for every 1000 people you’re going to hit, you’re going to spend somewhere between $5 and $10. So if you compare that to direct mail, if you were to hit 1000 people with direct mail, you’re going to spend at least $40. Not to mention, a lot of those are going to come back. A lot of people are getting returned mail for whatever reason. So a lot of those aren’t even going into people’s hands. So it’s much cheaper in direct mail.
We do 30-second commercials, we do some 15 second as well. So the 30-second commercials, in Wichita, Kansas, where I do all my commercials, we can buy as cheap as dollar slots. Those are the late nights. Those are the not very watched episodes. But those are people that potentially may have an issue with their house, that are up at night, not sleeping, so we hit some of those. And then we do a lot of daytime stuff and stuff in between.
So you can get as cheap as $1 to $5 for some of the cheaper ads, and then depending on the market, because obviously if you go into bigger markets, you’re going to hit a lot more people, so it could be more expensive… But most markets are between about $20 to $40 a commercial so you’re able to hit a lot of people with a very small ad spend.
Theo Hicks: So a 30-second spot is about 20 to 40 bucks; that’s a lot less than I thought.
Tony Javier: Those are non-prime time spots. When you buy primetime spots, which I’ve tried before and I can tell you which ones are working and which ones don’t… We spent a lot of money on those spots and a lot of those haven’t worked. So yes, you could spend $150 to $500 on a prime time spot, but for us, we’ve been able to figure out how to take advantage of the less expensive spots that have done really well for us.
Theo Hicks: What channels are your commercials on?
Tony Javier: We do local channels. We want to make sure that whether you’re on YouTube TV, Cox Communications, spectrum, all those different kinds of the broadcast companies that your commercial gets seen, and there are still people who do over the air with antennas, which is crazy to me… But still, people get free TV and we want to make sure we hit those people too. So we do all local stations.
Theo Hicks: For someone who’s listening to this, maybe the concept of being on TV – they don’t really like that. Do you have people who hire someone else to be in the commercial for them? Or do you recommend that it’s your business, it’s your product, you need to be the face?
Tony Javier: I always recommend my people to be in the commercial, for kind of what you just said, is credibility. People all the time will text me or email me and say, “Hey, I saw your commercial.” They’re shooting screenshots of the picture they took of the commercial that they saw. And I’ve done some private money from those commercials as far as people calling me and say, “Hey, I want to invest in real estate. I saw that you’re the guy in town that’s doing it. I don’t want to buy properties.” So they ended up being private lenders, and ended up having a lot of money invested with us within a short amount of time. So I always recommend them being in the commercial.
But I got an email from someone’s team yesterday, the guy does 200 deals a year. And he’s like, “I’m just too busy, we have too much going on. Can you just do it for us?” So I’m shooting the commercial for him next week. And I’ve done that for several people as well; because it takes me 10 minutes to go in the studio and shoot the commercial. I’ve done it enough times where I can just go in there and I can bang it out and do it very quickly. So really, that is the only thing that I have our people do for the most part, is shoot the commercial, and then just approve some different things that need to be approved. So we can be as hands-on or as hands-off as you want to be.
Theo Hicks: For someone who wants to get started with using TV commercials to grow their motivated seller leads, what would be your best ever advice for that person?
Tony Javier: TV specifically or just in general?
Theo Hicks: Let’s keep it just TV specifically, since that’s the focus.
Tony Javier: Okay, well, I think that would be pretty obvious – just reach out to us and see if your market’s available. The first 10 years of my business, like I said, I tried to do everything on my own and tried to figure everything out myself. I thought that I needed to figure it out and that kind of thing. And for 10 years, I tried to figure out so many things that I figured out, but then there’s a lot of things I tanked on. And once I started hiring people, coaches and mentors and implementers that can implement certain things that I wasn’t as good at, that’s where it changed the game. So if you want to do TV, just reach out to us we’ll see if your market’s available. We only allow so many people per market, and we can streamline the process for you; we can get you on TV within a couple of weeks if you want to and make it very quick and painless for you.
Theo Hicks: Okay, Tony, are you ready for the Best Ever Lightning Round?
Tony Javier: Absolutely.
Theo Hicks: Alright. First, a quick word from our sponsor.
Theo Hicks: Okay, Tony, what is the best ever book you’ve recently read?
Tony Javier: The 12 Week Year by Jim Moran. Basically, the concept is instead of creating year-long goals, which people when they do year-long goals, they’re super motivated in the beginning, and then towards the end of the year, they’re like, “Oh crap, I didn’t meet my goals,” and then they start scrambling, right? So the concept of the book is rather than doing year-long goals, do 12-week goals. So basically, instead of the year, you’re doing those goals in 12 weeks, and by hyper-focusing on those things within 12 weeks, you can get as much done in 12 weeks as you would in one year. So it’s a great book, and I actually do coaching with them as well.
Theo Hicks: If your business were to collapse today, what would you do next?
Tony Javier: Oh, gosh, that’s a great question. Well, hopefully, that doesn’t happen. But if I did, I would do something similar to what I’m doing now. So I started my real estate investing business and now I work with entrepreneurs on their real estate investing business. So I would continue to help other people, if not in real estate, in some other capacity, help them with their businesses. I really love and enjoy that.
Theo Hicks: So these next two questions, I want to focus on these just to specifically the TV commercials. It could be for you or for someone you’ve worked with before… But what has been the absolute worst commercial that you or someone else has recorded?
Tony Javier: Well, I think I kind of mentioned it earlier… I’m pretty even-keel, right? So I decided in one of my commercials to be like, “Hey! This is Tony!“ to just be like super animated and kind of car salesmen like, and it just completely tanked. We were getting really good call volume on our calls, and then all of a sudden, this commercial comes down, I’m like, “We’re going to crush it, man. People are going to love the energy, people are going to love the excitement” and then our calls just went to almost nothing.
Theo Hicks: That’s funny. On the flip side, what’s the best commercial that you or someone else has recorded?
Tony Javier: I did one last year with COVID. That’s the reason I shot a couple new commercials. I call it our “tough times commercial,” it was something of the nature of, “I know right now is a tough time; the least thing you want to have to worry about is repairs to your house or having to sell it if you need to sell.” Something of that nature. It’s done really well for us. I think we did that second quarter of 2020. And like I said, we ran that almost most of last year and we got an 11x return on our money. So that was a really good one for us.
Theo Hicks: What is the best ever way you’d like to give back?
Tony Javier: I do a lot of free stuff for the real estate community. I’ve got a podcast. Right now I’m letting a lot of people into my mastermind for free in some of our calls that we’re doing. I don’t have time to take everybody’s requests, I get a lot of requests for people asking me to get on a call or mentor them or anything like that. So I try and cater to as many of those people as possible. And in fact, I’m getting ready to start a Tuesdays With Tony, where I’m going to do an hour every Tuesday for anybody who wants to jump on; a lot of new investors are again wanting to get advice from me, because I do lending for real estate investors, I do masterminds to help people do TV commercials. So my name is out there a lot, so people reach out to me for mentorship, and I just haven’t had time to do it, so I decided I’m going to carve out an hour each week to doing that for real estate investors that need that mentorship… Because I needed it the first 10 years of my business and I didn’t get it. So that’s something that I really want to start doing.
Theo Hicks: And then last question, what’s the best ever place to reach you and learn more about the service you provide?
Tony Javier: You mentioned it once, you said https://realestatemasterstv.com/, that’s one way to get a hold of me. Another one is the mastermind that I mentioned. You can also go to https://remmastermind.com/ and then Instagram, I just started becoming more active on it, but you can follow me on Instagram, @realtonyjavier is the handle.
Theo Hicks: You know you are a celebrity when you’ve got the “real” in your handle.
Tony Javier: Too many fake ones out there.
Theo Hicks: Too many imposters. Well, Tony, thank you so much for joining us today and giving us a rundown of the benefits and the “how-to’s” of using TV commercials to grow your motivated seller leads on autopilot. So we went over the five benefits, we went over the types of leads that TV can generate for you, we talked about how to get started, the costs based off of different time slots and markets, where to post your commercials, and then you went over a few examples of some best practices and some maybe things to avoid as well.
So Tony, thank you so much for joining us. Best Ever listeners, again, that website is https://realestatemasterstv.com/. Best Ever listeners, as always, thank you for listening, have a best ever day and we’ll talk to you tomorrow.
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