Joe Fairless Interviews Tucson Real Estate Agent Tony Ray Baker
Tony Ray Baker: Why they have earned the right to be there consultant and how much value they bring to the table when walking them through a transaction. Probably one of the most expensive things are looking to do and we are valuable and we need to show that.
Joe Fairless: Best-ever listeners before today’s episode. I want to invite you to join us in Keystone, Colorado February 20th to 22nd. It is the 2020 best ever conference and not only do I want to invite you to join us. I want to invite you to Earn 15% for every ticket that you’re responsible for selling. Should you join as an affiliate for the conference great way to earn money and also if you’re planning on attending great way to pay for your ticket, essentially you get enough sales so you can go to be EC 20.com and in the top left corner. It says earn 15% as an affiliate. You can click that join the affiliate program and you got all the resources that you need to share the Word about the best ever conference in Keystone, Colorado and we will be talking more about this on future episodes. But for now go check out BC 20.com and that affiliate page. You can earn 15% as an affiliate and we will see you in Keystone Colorado best of our listeners. How you doing?
Joe Fairless: Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless. This is the world’s longest running daily real estate investing podcast where we only talk about the best advice ever. We don’t get into any less fluffy stuff with us today. A Tony Ray Baker. How you doing? Tony Ray?
Tony Ray Baker: I’m great. Thank you. How are you?
Joe Fairless: I’m doing well and looking forward to our conversation a little bit about Tony Ray. He’s a real estate agent has been for 25 years that focuses on residential real estate makes three hundred thousand dollars net profit per year teaches marketing to agents and small businesses helps investor clients purchase investment properties and has two rentals of his own and he takes 66 0 vacation days per year based in Tucson, Arizona with that. I said Tony Ray you want to get the best of her listeners a little bit more about your background and your current Focus?
Tony Ray Baker: Yeah, so I started 25 years ago. I was actually celebrating that this month is my 25th year. Congratulations. Thank you. I had a rough start my very first year they wanted me to cold call and door knock and do all that stuff that I didn’t want to do. So I didn’t sell a house my very first year and my broker who is nice as could be asked me to leave.
Joe Fairless: I was just kind of wasted
Joe Fairless: space. Sounds like you kind of deserved it to
Tony Ray Baker: ya know. What here’s the thing. My family was all about reputation. I my dad was all about reputation into as my mom and the one thing I refuse to do was destroy that name they had created in our community and they’re very well known here in a very positive way and I just couldn’t grasp doing something that felt against my ethics and door knocking and all that stuff was just not for me. So I asked the broker if I could stay longer and told the I wanted to have people come to me like a dentist or a doctor and make an appointment and that work with me Monday through Friday 9 to 5 and appreciate and be thankful to have my counsel and advice and that was the business I wanted and at the time she said all right, I’ll give you one more year, but you have to go meet this guy named Joe stump and Joe stop was just starting with by referral only at the time. So I went and met with Joe and he taught everything that I was about. So I followed him around for quite a while and built my business based all
Tony Ray Baker: on referral and taking care of clients and high Roi and a lot of time to do what I wanted to do in life. And that’s where I come from.
Joe Fairless: Well, what we’re about to learn is applicable to any type of focus as a real estate professional or investor because referrals are the number one influencer of purchase intent is Word of Mouth referrals. So let’s talk about this. I’m excited to talk about this. You said you went to this gentleman and he taught you everything that your business is about and you built your business on referrals talk us through what you learned. Please
Tony Ray Baker: all his a lot and that took years and years, but the basis for me was Joe and I sat down and he said let’s design the life you want and then let’s put the business into that life and I had lost a best friend at a very early age. So I realized life is short and I I needed to not take each day for granted. So I wanted to live a happy very good life while I was enjoying real estate and any aspect of real estate. I didn’t enjoy I wanted to make sure I had somebody who could take care of it for me. So I stayed in the happy Zone if you will, so when we sat down and designed the life, I wanted it was I want to go to Europe or travel around the world every year. I want to take a vacation every couple months. I won’t work on Sundays. I don’t want to work on Saturdays. Possible and I want to be home at night and I want to have dinner or do what I want to do like everybody else. So that’s what we created and we design that actually with calendaring and scheduling and learning time management and then we
Tony Ray Baker: worked clients as they came into the system. We worked with them on what the benefit was for them to work on my schedule and to not be in the rat race on weekends competing with everybody else. And it worked out beautifully and I think the other thing that Joe really hit me and taught me was the authenticity of just doing business my way and being me and every aspect and letting people know who I am and attracting those right people to me and being okay not to attract all the rest and then as the business grew and I had more and more clients. The beautiful thing is they sent more and more people just like them. I’ll just in March. I invited a couple hundred people to one of my houses for a party and 125 or hundred fifty of them showed up. And the neat thing is that they all get along and they all meet each other and they all become little mini tribes within the big tribe and it’s just wonderful to watch how they all connect in the things that comes out of all those relationships but there’s a
Tony Ray Baker: Common Thread and that’s that right energy that’s attracting if that makes
Joe Fairless: sense. It does make sense and I I understand what you’re saying. So you mentioned that you first focus on designing your life and two components of that was one no working on weekends. And the other was be home at night and you mentioned that you would talk to your clients about the benefits of being on your schedule. How did you communicate that to them so that they said okay. This makes sense
Tony Ray Baker: period well one of the things and just to be clear if we have us a client that’s coming from out of town and Lion, and they’re only going to be here for Friday through Monday. We’re definitely going to take care of them. Well never let a client not have the best of care that may mean also that I may have an agent help me if I need to but usually we give them our attention the reality is that if they’re coming in from out of town a lot of times they get better flights and better timing during the week and we’ve discovered that a lot of them don’t want to come in on a weekend so that works out really well we We do about 5 million a year and relocation via websites. Now that I’ve created so they’re very happy to come in without being in that Lush on the weekend. And that’s one of the things I explained all of our buyers as buyers reps when we’re out there with you and everybody else is shopping on Saturday and offers are all coming in on Sunday you’re in that competition. But if you and I are
Tony Ray Baker: out there looking at properties on a Wednesday on your lunch. Hour or after work or whatever it is for you. As soon as we write an offer. You probably not going to be competing as much and that is because everybody else is scheduling for weekends. One of the things we’ve discovered now in a hot Market that we’re in is we don’t have time to do three hour runs and take people out and show properties because houses are moving very quickly. So we have all of our clients on call every day. And if a new house pops up that’s going to meet their needs. We’re running to show them that house. House as quickly as they can get out of work on a lunch break or whatever and that way they can be first in and forced to write an offer. So the benefits to them is obvious and once you explain why you don’t want to be on a weekend just this weekend. We listed the house on Friday. I had five offers by Sunday.
Joe Fairless: Let’s say you do a phenomenal job with the client. They love you. They love the service that they had as a result of the transaction and now you are leaving the title company. They have closed on the property. How do you stay in touch with them on an ongoing basis? So that whenever they sell that property years down the road. You’re still top of mine.
Tony Ray Baker: That’s a great question. First of all, we tell everybody we never leave them where a ball and chain anything they need from us. They call. We also offer our little black book of vendors and anybody they need for that house. They will call us and we will help them with the right people to come out and remodel make repairs. Whoever they want to do. We also are Foodies so they call us for restaurants for a food all over the city, which is great. We do snail mail. So I still do an old-fashioned newsletter that talks about fun things. It’s not to do with real estate. It talks about our vacations and things I do in life and things I’ve learned and stories and things that are of value and I’ve been doing that for 20 some years and they love the newsletter. We do an email campaign, which actually is in Active email that allows them to click every month on their property and then it actually starts calculations for them and it teaches them anything. They want to know like how to pay off their mortgage early.
Tony Ray Baker: What would it be if they paid a hundred bucks a month? What would that look like? What would they save? Is it a good time to refi or not refi. So it’s a very interactive email that lets them play with their property and their area and they love that product get about a 91 percent open rate on that every month. Which is crazy, right but one of my younger guys one of my Millennials said it feels like the stock market for him because every time he opens it he sees his value moving up and he gets to see his mortgage moving down and it just makes them feel good to open that email. So I think that’s why that’s such a great one. So we hit him with snail mail. We hit him with email. We make sure we talk to them on the phone at least once a year many of them are more than that because we’re interacting on other levels with other groups. We involve them with our group so we run a wine club and then when I’m on the board of directors for pet partners therapy animals, so we involve all of our pet loving clients
Tony Ray Baker: with with that as much as we can and then we of course do appreciation parties and I randomly text people when I think about somebody I randomly send them a message letting them think about them. So I try to hit him on all of those places because my theory is be where they are. So I want to get them on snail mail email. Text messaging phone calls and in person and then my other thing is social media. So I use Facebook and make sure that every client is in Facebook that has a Facebook page and then we give them fun things in Facebook silly stuff funny stuff. Whatever it is, just to keep them seeing us in every World. They
Joe Fairless: are the appreciation parties. How frequently are they done in can you describe what that is?
Tony Ray Baker: Yeah. Right. Now what we’re doing is a block party. We take one of the vacant houses one of our rentals. For example, we leave it vacant and we actually use it for our incoming relocation folks. We let them stay there while they’re looking to get a house if they need a couple months. So we use that property also then for a big block party and our neighbor across the street actually has a really great band. So we Set them up on the porch across the street and then we bring everybody in and the rest of the neighborhood piggybacks a porch best is what they call it. And we put 15 live bands on everybody’s porches and we bring in food trucks and there’s a park for the kids to play and we give them Kites and we bring in food and wine and beer and sodas and everybody comes out and hangs out with us on a Sunday. So the nice thing is it’s very Down to Earth because it’s at our home and it shows us as normal human beings and we all get to hang out and listen to great music on a beautiful Sunday and it’s
Tony Ray Baker: during really nice weather and it’s just a really fun party. The other thing we do is on a random spur of the moment on a Tuesday night. I’ll text 50 people and invite them to a happy hour events at a hotel or someplace. And typically we get 45 to 50 show up. And we all hang out for
Joe Fairless: happy hour. With the house party, what’s your budget for that and how do you determine the ROI?
Tony Ray Baker: I think that’s really hard to determine Roi when it comes to parties for me. That’s part of the entire marketing when I’m looking at my numbers Roi on marketing. I want ten to one or more and I know that’s a super healthy number. It’s a matter of fact. I just had a Zillow kid tell me that two to one was really great, but I’m looking for ten to one. So what I look at is all the marketing that we do the newsletter the email letter everything we do that is specifically client-focused if I look at that number and it’s 12,000 a year for an easy number. Let’s say I spent twelve thousand a year. I need to make a hundred and twenty and I can look at that because I track every single client where they came from including the tree that they’re related to so I can see the lifetime value of every client. And when I’m looking at those numbers if I’m spending 10,000 and I’m getting a hundred and twenty thousand and referrals I’m doing well. So I have to lump all that ink because I don’t know that there’s a
Tony Ray Baker: great way to get an Roi on one specific item all those little things you do to be with your clients. I believe that creates the big picture at the end of the year when you look back
Joe Fairless: God, okay, that makes sense. So what’s your budget for this year
Tony Ray Baker: my budget for spending? Mmm our total I Probably will stay around $30,000 range for a total marketing for
Joe Fairless: clients. Okay, which aligns with your 300K net profit for the year?
Tony Ray Baker: Yeah. We do a little better than 300 K cheers a little obviously a little German, you know how that goes. But the goal for me is I will always want to run a 60% profit or more. Okay, and Roi is a big part of that, but I have to be very careful because we go to Europe for a month every year which I read a my It’s love it to actually because they get to see the pictures and we all talk about travel. I have a travel plan group that loves to travel as well. So it’s very fun to chat about where we’ve all
Joe Fairless: been what are some things that you’ve done from a marketing standpoint that have just Fallen flat
Tony Ray Baker: who post cards in the mail. I paid Zillow 12,000 bucks for leads for a year. That was a really big mess. I paid a magazine one time 12,000 bucks it with a thousand a month. Be in a magazine that got zero leads. Oh my all I did was all the other Realtors were impressed that I was in the magazine, but that
Joe Fairless: was about it. Yep.
Tony Ray Baker: Yeah for me. It’s really Back to Basics. I don’t want to work harder and make less money. So I’m really super careful to watch those things and I’ll try everything once and I don’t care about failing. I’ll try it and I have to prove it to myself just to know but typically my instincts are correct when I see something I’ll be like I don’t know that that’s a winner but I’ll give it one one answer here. We’ll see but usually I’m right on it and really in today’s world with I buyer and all these issues coming in our pathway with this big lawsuits and things going on. I’m thinking that the people that are going to survive are going to be the agents that are Back to Basics and take care of their clients and show their value and why they have earned the right to be there consultant and how much value they bring. into the table when walking them through a transaction probably one of the most expensive things are we gonna do and we are valuable and we need to show that
Joe Fairless: you mentioned earlier the very Dynamic engaging email campaign that you send out that gets over ninety percent open rate what software do you use to create that email
Tony Ray Baker: okay so this is a really cool toy it’s called home Bots and if Realtors are listening owing to this they want to call their lender because it is a lenders program and it has a way for the lender and the realtor to pay both of them pay for the system and then the realtor and the lender can either one see each other’s databases and there’s a buyer’s portion and a seller’s portion and it’s a really really cool toy now I have three really Loan officers I worked with for 20-some years, so I didn’t want to pair up with a loan officer. So I spoke to the managers over at home bot and they did let me sign up and create the system just for me. So I pay for it. Just Without A lender attachment, but it’s really great program for a realtor and A lender to pair up on
Joe Fairless: very cool incredibly valuable. Thank you for sharing that and then from a CRM standpoint. What software do you use
Tony Ray Baker: the business coach that I talked about is Joe stomp with by referral only and the by referral only program offers a very sophisticated CRM that tracks everything you do with a client and actually shows you how that client has been in your business since the beginning so I can actually click on a client and it tells me their downline. It tells me how many people they refer to me. Every person that that person is referred and I can see the family tree if you would from each client and then I can tell which one of my clients are raving fans and who I need to make sure I’m paying more attention to because when you see that you have clients that have raised their hands and they want to be around you and constantly send their friends to you. Those are absolutely the people you need to make sure you’re scheduling more time with and it’s so easy. To be busy and not remember to schedule time with folks. So I love this CRM for the fact that it reminds me to do that. But the CRM itself has massive amount
Tony Ray Baker: of marketing on a pre done in it. And it all is centered around creating a referral business and taking care of your
Joe Fairless: clients based on your experience in the industry for two and a half decades. What’s your
Joe Fairless: best? Hey, it’s it’s better than the alternative, right? One
Joe Fairless: of my friends he posted on Facebook. He common one of my pictures and he has a son that I used to babysit for and he made some reference to how I’m getting older and I said, well, it’s better than the alternative of not getting older
Joe Fairless: because I’d much rather age than not and it is quite an accomplished to be in this industry for 25 years. How about I say that way? Thank you.
Tony Ray Baker: I’m totally cool with it based on
Joe Fairless: your experience for a little while in the industry. What’s your best real estate investing advice ever
Tony Ray Baker: for a real estate investing?
Joe Fairless: Yeah or agents. However, you want them either one. We got a lot of Agents on here.
Tony Ray Baker: You know, that’s one of the things is that when I started in real estate, I kept thinking I was gonna get rich quick and make a lot of money obviously because that’s what they sold at the school and as I went through life, I had an identity theft that wiped out everything. I owned FBI involved. Um, it was a mess. I have to go off the grid for two years. I lost everything in the middle of my first 10 years in real estate. I lost it all and interestingly enough. It taught me a great lesson, which was that you really need to be Diversified and investing for me. Now we have made sure that we have investments in different areas. So if one is under attack, the other one is probably more stable and the one thing I know about real estate is no matter what if the economy crashes. I have three houses right now that I know are still assets that are brick-and-mortar sitting on ground and I can use those to live in I like to use those to create income from rent. But having those properties just makes total
Tony Ray Baker: sense. Even if my stocks all go away and buying property for a realtor is one of the easiest and should be one of the easiest things there is especially with programs like 203k renovation loans. I purchased all my properties on 203k. I bought them all under priced because the owner wanted the I buyer effect. We went in and remodeled everyone I’m to the nines and now the renters pay the mortgage on those and we have assets sitting there that are being paid for and glowing and I think that’s super important when it comes to expanding your portfolio. Make sure you’re really looking as a realtor in to make sure you have other assets other income besides just real estate because you can make 300,000 or 500,000. A year, but the reality is the market is going to go up and down and it’s really nice to have peace of mind that something else is working for you behind the scenes very true. So so true
Joe Fairless: we’re going to do a lightning round. You ready for the best ever lightning round.
Tony Ray Baker: All right,
Joe Fairless: you’re ready. This isn’t anything that you can’t handle first though a quick word from our best ever Partners. Best of our listeners. Go to be EC 20.com look in the top left hand corner. You can earn 15% as an affiliate. You can join the affiliate program and participate in the conference that way and basically earn a free ticket to the conference B EC 20.com most of our listeners. We have launched best ever causes.com that’s best ever causes.com. We profile a non-profit or cause that is near and dear to our heart get the word out about their cause and also donate money towards their cause if you’d like to one learn More about the causes that we’re profiling. We do one a month then go to best-ever causes.com and if you want to suggest a cause that we profile that is near and dear to your heart then go to best-ever causes.com and there’s a little form at the bottom of the page where you can submit one and we’ll check it out. Alright, best-ever book. You’ve recently
Tony Ray Baker: read recently read The Power of Now by Eckhart
Joe Fairless: Tolle. What’s the mistake you’ve made on a
Tony Ray Baker: transaction? Taking the client when I knew I shouldn’t
Joe Fairless: and what question or questions do you ask now to try to mitigate that from taking place again?
Tony Ray Baker: I read a book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and I trust my instincts now and if in my questioning if I feel there’s a red flag. I will not take the client on it at all. I’ll refer them to another agent.
Joe Fairless: I still think of the divorce case study in the book blink. Just phenomenal how they can determine if a couple is going to be together not within the next three years. Based on ten seconds of interaction about a topic that they don’t agree upon.
Tony Ray Baker: Oh my God, if everybody red blinking just got it. What a beautiful world. This would
Joe Fairless: be yeah, I agree. What’s the best ever way you like to give back?
Tony Ray Baker: I’m on the board of directors for pet partners therapy animals, and I’m giving from every cell of every house. We’re giving back to the pet partners program. Plus I volunteer my time now to serve their so charity for me. I just love anything to do with animals bringing. Love to people I think it’s
Joe Fairless: great. And how can the best ever listeners learn more about you and what you’re doing?
Tony Ray Baker: Well right now ironically I teach classes and a half for 15 years. So I just put up a website called Tony raise marketing on a dime.com and I just put up nine or twelve our classes for free so they could go back and watch every one of my marketing classes on back-to-basics guerrilla marketing and they can watch them all for free and then I’ll be adding another six hours coming up soon.
Joe Fairless: So that Tony raise our ays marketing on a dime.com.
Tony Ray Baker: Yep, that’s it. And you’ll see all kinds of classes in there. They’re about 50 minutes each and I’ll just keep adding everything. I have I have four cameras on me now when I teach at the association and we’re just playing on keep editing them and putting them in there for everybody
Joe Fairless: Perfect. All right. Well, Tony Ray, thank you for being on the show. Thank you for talking about your experience and the approach that you took with the help of Your business coach at the time to first to design your life. Then you build your business around it. Yeah, Tony Robbins talks about success fulfillment is the ultimate failure and this certainly ties into that where we could have success in business, but then 40 50 years down the road we realized well, we didn’t actually live the life that we wanted. And what was it all about. So really appreciate you sharing that as well as ways to stay in touch with your clients after you work with them on a transaction and you gave List of nine things that you do. So thanks for that that will be helpful regardless of where real estate agents or not. So I hope you have a best everyday really appreciate it. Will talk to you again soon.
Tony Ray Baker: Thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate
Joe Fairless: it best ever listeners. We have launched best ever causes.com that’s best ever causes.com. We profile a non-profit or cause that is near and dear to our heart get the word out about their cause and also donate money towards their cause If you’d like to one learn more about the causes that we’re profiling we do one a month then go to best of our causes.com. And if you want to suggest a cause that we profile that is near and dear to your heart then go to best-ever causes.com and there’s a little form at the bottom of the page where you can submit one and we’ll check it out.
