Get ready to be F.I.R.E.D UP! Today on the podcast we have Chase Maher. Chase Maher is the CEO of Maher Real Estate. He is also the host of the Life Worth Chasing Podcast. We will provide tips on how to generate leads and how to prospect clients. Chase is also a real estate investor and he will give us pointers on how to do it.
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Krista Mashore:
Hey everyone. Are you ready to be fired up? Because I sure am. I have got Chase Maher here. He is a full-time real estate investor, and he's got a top podcast called Life Worth Chasing. And he's here to give us tons of information and to just light us on fire. Chase, welcome. So excited to have you.
Chase Maher:
I'm excited to be here, Krista. So thank you. You were just on my show for the second appearance, and I'm excited to be on yours.
Krista Mashore:
Yes. So Chase had me on his show back when it was really, really new, probably about 13 or so months ago. And now his podcast is the top 75 of entrepreneurial podcasts. He's got over 10,000 downloads a month, and he is crushing it. So, Chase, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Chase Maher:
So my name is Chase Maher. I'm a full-time real estate investor in San Diego. And yeah, I started my podcast because I wanted to help people build businesses worth building and invest and make investments so that they can live lives worth living. And then the name Life Worth Chasing just had a cool little play on my name. And yeah, that's me. You want me to share my background?
Krista Mashore:
Yes, tell us all about yourself.
Chase Maher:
All right. Cool. So I grew up in an entrepreneurial family on the East Coast in the car business, and I learn how to buy low, sell high. I learned sales, but I never learned how to manage my money, and I never learned how to invest from my family. I grew up in a family that was rich three weeks of the month, and they were poor one week of the month. It was just starting at zero every single month. And so when I was 18, from selling cars I had a good amount of money saved up. And I thought to myself man, it might be a good idea to buy a house. I'm moving out of the dorms of the college I was in. And instead of renting, why don't I buy a house and then rent the bedrooms out to my buddies? A lot of you might've heard of the term called house hacking. It was house hacking before BiggerPockets was even around, before they were talking about house hacking. I never read a business book, an investing book. I had no idea what I was doing. So I bought a house. And then the next year-
Krista Mashore:
That's incredible that you bought a house so young. I mean, that is scary.
Chase Maher:
I know. And then a couple years later, another one, then another one, then another one. And I stacked them up enough where I kind of wanted to leave my hometown and go try something new. So I drove across the country to San Diego, traveled around for a couple of years, and then one day I looked at my bank account, and I had gone from like 50 grand saved up to like $500. And I was like man, I've been just partying too much, just blowing all this money. I'm not living up to my potential. I knew I had the skills to do something great, but I didn't have the work ethic or the systems and the tools.
So I was browsing online for ideas. I had some rental property. I wasn't going to starve, but I needed to make money to get to the next level. I bought a training course on how to be a realtor. And then that was like December 2015. 2016 I became a top 3% agent in San Diego my first year. 2017 I was like top 2% in San Diego. I sold 25 million my first couple of years. And I created my niche in the investing realm. So I was selling properties to investors that were doing development deals, fix and flips, rental properties, things like that. I realized they were making way more money than I, so I switched my business in a way where it was full-time investing. And then I still do some listings on the side. And then now I run a lead gen company, my own and buyer of the leads for the investing, and then I sell all the other leads to realtors in my eXp network. And that's what I'm doing today.
Krista Mashore:
That's awesome. So tell me a little bit about the leads. So how are you going about getting… Do you use Carrot by chance, the Carrot website?
Chase Maher:
No, I don't.
Krista Mashore:
No. So tell me how you're getting leads.
Chase Maher:
Okay. So all just prospecting off-market distressed sellers. So I don't buy from agents. I don't buy from wholesalers. I don't buy from the MLS. I do everything direct to seller. So we do SMS. We do cold calling. We do mails. I have door knockers. We do driving for dollars lists, tax liens, divorce, pre-foreclosure. You name it, I'm prospecting to 20,000 to 30,000 homeowners in different cities around the country every single month.
Krista Mashore:
Oh my gosh. That's a lot.
Chase Maher:
And every single lead, I've run through a system according to my goals. So my goals is long-term wealth through real estate. So every lead I look at it can I buy that property at a discount, fix it up, rent it out, refinance it, have that equity, and get my cash back? If I can't, can I flip it and make at least $50,000 on a flip? If I can't, can I wholesale it to another investor and make a good chunk of cash that way? And if I can't do that, can I sell that lead to a realtor? And so that's the way that I classify and the way the leads kind of go down that sort of pyramid, if you will.
Krista Mashore:
Are they all local?
Chase Maher:
No. So I'm in San Diego. I'm in a city in Arizona. I'm in a city in Virginia, and we'll be opening up another city soon. And I say we because I have a great team. I don't have any partners or anything like that, but I have a great team that helps me out.
Krista Mashore:
Gotcha. Okay. And so when you sell these leads to realtors, they're sellers that want to sell. They just don't want to sell by the means that you're doing. It's more of a traditional means. And how do realtors find out about that to be a part of one of your realtors that they can refer?
Chase Maher:
So I prefer quality over quantity right now. As I grow, I'm realizing the lead gen component to the realtors is quite lucrative. And so you and I might chat in a year, and I will still be investing in real estate, but I think I'm trending towards really scaling up this lead generation business. But right now, I personally buy all the investor leads. And then all the realtor leads, I've partnered up with one, maybe two top teams through my eXp network. I held my license there, just like you, and I partner up with them and that market, and they have exclusivity to those realtor leads. So instead of selling the leads to any agent that's going to pay 100 or 200 a lead, I send them all to that exclusive team, and I get 35% of their commission when it closes.
Krista Mashore:
When it closes. Awesome. That's a pretty fat commission. That's great. So how many of those would you say you're doing about a month of the referrals?
Chase Maher:
So we're prospecting 30,000 or so sellers a month. I'll flip or wholesale three to five deals. And then I would say probably another 100 to 300 are going out to those realtor partners.
Krista Mashore:
Wow. That's a lot of business you're doing.
Chase Maher:
Yeah. And they close anywhere from 5% to 10%.
Krista Mashore:
That's great. A month?
Chase Maher:
Yeah. So every single lead that goes is completely teed up. And what I mean by that is I have a virtual assistant that jumps on the phone with the lead, and they sort of classify what's the condition of the property? Does it meet my parameters? And then if it doesn't, do they have permission and do they accept to be reached out to by a top-producing realtor in that area? And then that lead gets sent through an automated system that I have straight to the CRM of that realtor. And so when that realtor's ISA reaches out, that seller's already expecting to hear from that team specifically, not just a realtor, but the X, Y, Z team. So the conversion ratio is much higher, and that's why I can get the 35% instead of the 25%.
Krista Mashore:
Yeah. That's great. Good. Man, so you've really, really at such a young age, Chase, been able to really kind of figure this game out.
Chase Maher:
Yeah. And I'm trying to take the… I don't want to flip and wholesale forever. So I think sort of where I'm taking it is growing the lead generation company even more. It's quite [inaudible 00:07:55]. It's very scalable. And then instead of doing so much flipping and wholesaling, taking that cash instead and just continuing to stack the assets, which I'm sure with Fire and everything that you got going on, that probably resonates a lot with your audience.
Krista Mashore:
Yes. I love it. I love it. I love it. Okay. So definitely wholesaling and flipping and lead generation is your key. Tell me some of the indicators or the… So you're going after divorces, pre-foreclosures. You named a bunch. So what is your hook for these people? What's the kind of hook? How do you hook them in? And is it all through Facebook Ads? Is it through emails? How are you going after them?
Chase Maher:
No. So we do SMS. We do cold call. We do Facebook. I mean, I do just about anything that you can think of. And the hook is… This is going to sound like a really boring answer, but I don't have some special, unique selling proposition in the sense of some creative thing that they'd never heard of. They're getting reached to by a lot of investors. But here's the problem. Most investors only offer a cash offer. What I do is I try to figure out, and I've trained my team to try to figure out, what is the seller's problem? And which solution can I craft in a way that's the best solution for that problem? Sometimes it's a cash offer. Sometimes it's a loan assumption. Sometimes it's a realtor referral. Sometimes it is connecting them with a lender to get a refinance, and I get maybe a little bit there. But I don't focus so much on my only one solution. I focus on which solution can I provide that helps the seller the most because then I'll win more deals, and then in turn I get referrals from sellers. I have sellers that send me, “Hey, my aunt just had a divorce. She needs to sell.” So we're just really trying to craft it in a way that it makes a lot of sense for the seller.
Krista Mashore:
So let's talk more about the problem. And I love that because marketing is attraction. And so in order for you to attract more sellers and more buyers, if you can solve problems that they have, it's a great way for you to hook sellers and buyers. Also being able to solve problems that they don't even know they have, meaning being able to help them resolve problems that they don't even realize that they're having. When you can show them that you're the solution, you're the answer to problems they have and problems they don't know they have, that you make them aware of, that's when the icing meets the cake, when things really, really… So let's talk more about that.
Chase Maher:
That's when the magic happens.
Krista Mashore:
Yeah, so the magic happens. So kind of go into a little bit more detail about that.
Chase Maher:
About me trying to discover what their problem is. Okay, so most of our leads, let's just… We're in COVID right now. Anytime we're in something like this, a black swan event or a recession, I focus on the three D's of real estate, so death, divorce, and default. So deaths, probate deaths, that's something that's going to be around forever. It's been around forever. And the solution to that problem typically is they want a streamlined high customer service. They don't want to have to do a whole lot. It's an emotional sale for them. And so I just try to make that process very easy. Typically, what works best with that is a quick streamlined cash offer where I cover all of their closing costs.
Divorce. The thing that works best with that… Here's the trick with divorce. Never, ever, ever play one side over the other. Never ever play favorites with one side or the other because it'll always backfire in your face. So what I like to do is I'll meet with one of them, and then I'll jump on a three-way call, and I tell them upfront, “Hey, I don't want any secrets. I don't want anybody thinking that I prefer talking to one person or the other. You're both the decision-maker in this. What are your goals?” And I always ask them, “What are your goals?” And then with default, a lot of those times we're doing loan assumptions. Maybe they're in the rears on back payments. And so I can cover that difference, take over the loan. And they don't want to leave the property, so I can actually rent it back to them or seller finance back to them. So it really depends what their goals are. And I always start with that. I always start with, “What are you looking to accomplish? In a perfect world, what's the best thing that could happen to you in your situation?”
Krista Mashore:
I love that. So you're asking a lot of questions. So many people come in, and they just start talking, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you're asking as many questions as possible. Very, very good. Trying to find the solutions to their problems.
Chase Maher:
He or she who asks the questions controls the conversation. So of course, I have an end in mine. I have a goal. I want to make money, obviously. I want to acquire properties. But the way to get there, the path to get there is to sort of show that door, but they got to walk through it. And the way to get them to walk through it is by asking questions that sort of lead you down that path.
Krista Mashore:
Great. That's awesome. I can tell you've studied from some of the same people that I have. It's becoming very clear the more I talk to you, Chase. You just figured it out at a lot younger age than I did, I think.
Chase Maher:
Oh, that's all right.
Krista Mashore:
How old are you?
Chase Maher:
30.
Krista Mashore:
30? Oh my gosh. I am 49. I'm 19 years older than you. You're such a baby.
Chase Maher:
I appreciate that. You look great for 49. You look great for 39.
Krista Mashore:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so what else? Tell us how else you can help our listeners. We've got entrepreneurs, service providers, real estate agents, lenders, any type of local professionals on this call. And obviously, their goal is the same as yours, to attract more clients, to close more deals, to have more transactions with their clients and their customers. What advice would you give to people that are listening to this right now and thinking about marketing?
Chase Maher:
So I was going to give a piece of advice, and then you brought up marketing. So I'm happy to talk about marketing, but I do have one thing that I'd want to advise-
Krista Mashore:
Yes, yes.
Chase Maher:
But let's do marketing first, if that's what you want.
Krista Mashore:
Okay.
Chase Maher:
Okay? So I think I mentioned this when you were on my show. I had a friend that's very successful in the marketing and fitness space, Michael Morelli. And he taught me something a few years ago of market what they want. Then sell them what they need.
Krista Mashore:
So explain that more.
Chase Maher:
Of course. So whoever your lead is, you want to market what they think they want. And so usually what people want is a quick solution, an easy solution. They want a quick path from point A to point B. And so you got to figure out what's the mindset of that lead type. Whoever your avatar is, figure out what do they want? And you can do this by reading online, like on Reddit or on Quora or going to interview your avatar. What do they want? Ask them questions. And then you sell them what they need. And a lot of times, they know what they need. In my business, they want a quick and easy solution, but they don't realize that what they need is an investor to come in and close the deal with high customer service and no closing costs. Or they don't realize what they need is somebody to take over their payments for them. Or they don't realize what they need in a divorce situation is somebody to come in and take care of all the moving expenses.
Whatever that is, you'll learn over time. But I think the most important thing is volume and mass marketing. I go volume. So I just blast 30,000 homeowners a month, and then I figure out over time what works. I pick up the pieces, and then I hone in more on what's working. So I know when you were on my show, you went really, really deep. Then you go wide. I go really, really wide when I hit a market. I figure out what works. Then I go deep on that.
Krista Mashore:
Gotcha. Gotcha. And so when you're talking about contacting all of these people and getting this 30,000 list, what software and programs are you using to generate this kind of information?
Chase Maher:
All custom, custom built, custom coded.
Krista Mashore:
Really?
Chase Maher:
Yeah. Fully custom.
Krista Mashore:
You're not using PropertyRadar or Red, or any of those kinds of softwares?
Chase Maher:
For the marketing and the prospecting, no. Custom.
Krista Mashore:
To get the data?
Chase Maher:
To get the data, I use PropStream.
Krista Mashore:
Props… Okay, that's what I mean. As far as getting the data and knowing they're getting divorced, knowing they're… What's the cost of PropStream?
Chase Maher:
It's 99 bucks a month for 10,000. And then it ends up being like a penny per record after that. So I spend about 300 bucks a month on it.
Krista Mashore:
That's awesome. You can hone in on the exact kind of content that you want.
Chase Maher:
Yeah. And then the CRM that I use, the SMS platform, the cold calling, all that stuff, I was spending so much money on it. And so I hired a developer, and I built all custom on Podio. It's open source. And so instead of spending $200 a month on my CRM, I spend about $15 a month. Cost me a couple grand to have it built, but it pays for itself in like a year. And then the SMS platform, my in-house system, instead of using CallRail and spending 450 bucks a month… CallRail is built on Twilio. I had a developer copy CallRail, and now I spend $40 a month. So it takes some upfront costs, but then I have all my systems that like 10% of what other people charge. And then for your coaches and consultants out there, eventually I'll get into that space of coaching and consulting, and I'll have my own software and tools that I can have all my students in my audience use.
Krista Mashore:
That's great. I'm actually building one right now. It's basically going to be Click Funnels and Carrot and Realvolve all in one, all the lead-generating software, platforms being built, CRM, transaction management. You name it, you got it. It should be done in hopefully about 30 days. So we know how important it is because it's so hard using so many different systems and getting them combined. When you can combine them all, it makes a huge, huge difference. The name of that software one more time, for the property finding-
Chase Maher:
PropStream.
Krista Mashore:
PropStream. We need to write that. Everyone should be writing that down, by the way, not if you're driving.
Chase Maher:
Yeah, exactly.
Krista Mashore:
Not if you're driving. That's great. Man, you just seem like you've got it all together with this. How long did it take you to do this? I mean, it seems like you've got this pretty darn figured out.
Chase Maher:
I mean, just like you said on my show, what people don't see is all the trial and error prior. And so I learned my skills in sales and negotiations from growing up and working at the car dealership, basically. And then I learned how to talk to sellers and the whole real estate game. I mean, I had bought some rentals, but I didn't really learn it until I was a realtor. And I shadowed investors. I shadowed luxury home developers and just really invested a lot of time and learning about that game and just spending a lot of money on marketing and trial and error. And I mean, I think experience is the number one learning tool out there. And then I'm a big proponent of using experience to get to 80% and then using coaching and mentors to get to 100%. And so getting there first and building that experience, it's really hard to optimize and learn from coaching and mentors unless you have some experience that you can sort of feed off of and analyze behind you.
Krista Mashore:
I totally disagree. I'm 100% opposite. I believe that in order to get the experience, that you need to have the coaches and the trainers and the mentors to help you get there. So you can miss out on all the trial and the error and kind of fast track yourself there and then learn the skills, and then you kind of make them part of your own. So it's funny we've got some different philosophies, but really, super, super successful. So that's kind of neat. And I like a little bit of adventure.
Chase Maher:
Well, I will say this. I agree with what you're saying once you have… For example, you had 19 years of real estate experience. And I would imagine… Here's the thing. Somebody can start in a new field, but if they're starting from ground zero on the entire entrepreneurial journey, they might not even know what they want to do. They might not even know who they are as a person. They might not even know what skill sets they have. And so going out and building some general skill sets and some general experience, then once you realize okay, I want to be… For example, I'll give you this. I want to get into mobile home parks and self storage. So when I build my lead generation company, the next phase of my life is large commercial property acquisitions. From day one, I'm going to hire a coach for that. I'm not going to build up to the 80% in that because I know that the skills that I've built over time are going to help me there, but I need a coach for that acute market and acute niche knowledge. So I agree with what you're saying, but if I was like some green person out of college, personally I think coaching and consulting and hiring for that is a waste of time because you don't even know what the heck you want to do yet.
Krista Mashore:
But when you do… So for example-
Chase Maher:
Exactly.
Krista Mashore:
If somebody wants to be a real estate agent or they want to be a lender, they want to be an investor-
Chase Maher:
If they know for sure-
Krista Mashore:
Yes.
Chase Maher:
And they have the capital, then yes, I'm a big proponent of coaching.
Krista Mashore:
And even if you don't have the capital… And I don't say this because I'm a coach, but I was that kid that paid for my own college. I was the foster kid.
Chase Maher:
Me too.
Krista Mashore:
I paid for my own college.
Chase Maher:
I wasn't foster, but I paid for my college.
Krista Mashore:
Yeah, every dime of it. And that has helped me so much. I had student loans up the ying yang. But that education helped me so much. And so I have seen so many people that have been in real estate for 10 years, 20 years, and they have no clue. But as soon as they hire someone that's already achieved a great level of success, is doing things differently, they can go from zero to hero so much more quickly because they learn new skills. So I think that in order for someone to get where they want to go, hiring a coach and a consultant to help get them there, the right one, that's done it, that has the experience, the proven track record, that has plenty of success stories, will help them get where they want to go, even if they have to invest. Skill comes first. Money comes later. If you don't have the skill, the money's never going to come. You need the skill to make the money.
If you understand what people actually pay to go to Stanford… It's like 190 grand to go to Stanford. It's so much money to go to these expensive colleges. And the crazy thing about it is that they average making around $60,000 a year after spending four or five years going to college. For example, Stanford is 190 grand, Princeton around 176,000, Harvard 185,000, Cornell 190,000. All of those universities make somewhere between $58,000 and $67,000 [inaudible 00:22:56] they come out of college with. Now I can tell you that how many people that you know in real estate or yourself or the people that invest that can save all of that time and education, hire somebody that can teach them that already has the skill of doing that skill, that's actually been there, done that, and that then can make that kind of money within six months?
Chase Maher:
100%. I think once you know what you want to do and you're sold on it and you're certain that's what you want to do, then yes, I 100% am all aboard the coaching and consulting. But if you're dabbling in different things, I don't believe that you're ready for coaching.
Krista Mashore:
I agree.
Chase Maher:
I think that you got to be ready for the coaching and consulting.
Krista Mashore:
And you have to be coachable, right?
Chase Maher:
Yes.
Krista Mashore:
You have to actually be coachable. And you and I both know not everyone's coachable. [crosstalk 00:23:45]. I love some tangents here and there.
Chase Maher:
That's okay.
Krista Mashore:
Tangents are good. Okay, well, gosh, we're coming up to our timeframe. My calls usually run 25 minutes. We're hitting that Mark. I always ask everyone the same question when it's done. It's kind of a surprise. And that is if you can give one piece of advice, just one piece of advice, whether it's business or mindset or relations or anything at all, what would that be?
Chase Maher:
Play the long game. I'm a huge proponent of playing the long game. And so I think that so many people are living a life transactionally, and so they're not building towards their future. And so there's a lot of people out there that are going to be 50 years old, 60 years old and not have Jack shit to show for it except a boring ass 401k, and they got to start all over that next month or some standard salary. And all along the way they could've made a couple little adjustments in their finances and bought a property a year. Or they could've made a couple adjustments in their finances and invested in a certain business or invested in a syndication. So I'm a huge proponent of every single year, I like to make one or two investments that I'm not going to liquidate it or see anything from it for 20 or 30 years. And right now, I mean, just like you probably said, I could retire if I wanted to, but I don't want to. But when I'm 40, I don't want to have to work. I want to have the choice to work. When I'm 50, I don't want to have to work. I want to have the choice to work. And the only way, in my opinion, to get there is by investing along the way and playing the long game.
Krista Mashore:
I love that, playing the long game. That is so true. Stick it out. You got to keep on going. As long as you keep on going, you never stop, you'll never lose. You cannot lose if you never stop.
Chase Maher:
100%.
Krista Mashore:
Chase, I just admire you so much. I love your podcast. I so enjoyed talking to you. If you're thinking about investing, go and listen to his podcast. And do me a favor, Chase. I want you to be able to tell us if they want to learn more about you and to have some more absolute fire bombs that you give out, aside from listening to your podcast, Life Worth Chasing, how else can they get in touch with you, Chase?
Chase Maher:
Just go to my website, www.chasemaher.com. That's C-H-A-S-E, M-A-H-E-R. And all my socials are on there. The podcast is on there. I blog on there. And I'm always on Twitter, so if you're on Twitter, it's @iamchasemaher.
Krista Mashore:
Chase, thank you so much. I appreciate you more than you know. And I'm so proud of your success. Way to rock it on on that podcast plus everything else that you're doing so early on. So appreciate you.
Chase Maher:
Thank you, Krista.
Krista Mashore:
And everyone, remember, it's great to be here. Thank you so much for your time. I love spending a little bit of my day with you and for you giving me your time. But I remember, if you don't implement, nothing happens. The key is in implementation and consistency. [inaudible 00:26:34], everyone, and thanks so much for being here. Bye bye. See you next time.
For more of my interviews just visit https://kristamashore.com/category/interviews/
