Dustin Singer: (00:00)
And we actually bought that deal for 25,000 less than one of our competitors offered. If we’re talking about a lead funnel, you know, at the top of the funnel is awareness, and then at the bottom of the funnel is conversion. And you know, TV can really function as, as both ends of that funnel. What’s the easiest and cheapest way to get the most, you know, impressions per dollar. It’s television. When someone’s on tv, it just eliminates a lot of that anti credibility factor where it’s like, hey, if he’s on tv, like he must be the real deal. It just makes it very simple. You’re not filtering through data with mail, you know, it’s kind of just marketing on autopilot more or less. It’s getting you in front of motivated sellers that are talking to way less people.

Noah Kesslin: (00:39)
Tell us just a little bit about your business, what you do, where you’re from and um, yeah, just give us a 30,000 foot overview.

Dustin Singer: (00:46)
Sure. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, been in real estate since 2019, full time. Came from a carpentry background before I was doing this and uh, we have, there’s nine of us on the team do fix and flipping wholesaling innovations and we have a small rental portfolio as well.

Noah Kesslin: (01:04)
Gotcha. Cool. Have you changed your team at all as far as since starting tv?

Dustin Singer: (01:08)
Yeah, so we added, oh geez, actually probably five of those nine people are new since TV , so a good bit.

Noah Kesslin: (01:19)
Gotcha. Cool. So what have you added since starting tv? So an extra lead manager and what else, what else have you added?

Dustin Singer: (01:25)
Extra acquisition manager, a full-time construction manager and an operations manager as well. Gotcha.

Noah Kesslin: (01:31)
Have you seen a difference in production, obviously adding all those people? I’d hope so. But you know, what kind of production increase have you seen since adding, you know, that bigger of a team?

Dustin Singer: (01:43)
Yeah, so we, you know, we would keep maybe, I don’t know, have like 20 properties, 25 properties in inventory at any given time, pre tv. And now we hover in the forties, so double . Awesome. So we needed quite a few more people to be able to handle the increase naturally. And then, you know, as far as fix and flips are concerned or we’re, we’re, we’re actually, we’ve been getting a lot of like whole tail type deals a lot this year, which is nice ’cause those are a little bit easier, but also we’re buying so many of them that it still, you know, can clog the pipeline if you don’t have the right people downstream to, to kind of take care of everything.

Noah Kesslin: (02:17)
For sure. Are you seeing stuff sit on the MLSA little bit longer than they have been in the past couple months?

Dustin Singer: (02:23)
Yeah, so it, it’s taken longer to catch up to Pittsburgh than the rest of the country, but really, like, probably from actually really this, the summer season starting this year for us is really when things started to die down a little bit. Now going into September, October, it’s really, really slow.

Noah Kesslin: (02:40)
Yeah, I’ve heard from a lot of people that, you know, it’s a little bit slower when, when selling deals. Right now there’s not as many buyers right now. Do you mind sharing what your cost monthly is on TV

Dustin Singer: (02:50)
Right now we’re about 25,000 a month

Noah Kesslin: (02:53)
As far as that 25,000 goes. You know, what, what’s kind of your return on that?

Dustin Singer: (02:57)
So, well we’ve talked about this know many times it’s, it’s TV’s a tough attribution channel because at least in my opinion, I think, you know, as far as everyone else is concerned should be theirs too. But when you do tv, you really wanna make sure that you have a heavy website presence, PPC presence, retargeting, presence, because TV might generate a lead that they don’t necessarily take action right away and then they come in on a different marketing channel. So we actually did create like a whole new section on our lead intake where we were asking people, you know, where they came in from. So we will get a lot of PPC or organic or even Facebook leads that when we ask how did they hear about us, they’ll say tv even though it didn’t come in as a TV lead. So we don’t switch the attribution, but we’ve definitely been above like four or five x even with just the TV attribution.

Noah Kesslin: (03:42)
Awesome. Cool. Was it more or less than what you thought it was gonna be, you know, before starting TV as far as your monthly budget goes? Monthly

Dustin Singer: (03:50)
Budget? No, I, I feel like we started at 15,000. I feel like I had a pretty good idea of that’s, you know, kind of where we’d be and like our PPC budgets were always around 10 to 12, so it’s not like it was astronomically different than what we were spending on anything else. I think PPL, you know, there’s times when we were spending 20, 25 a month, so. Awesome.

Noah Kesslin: (04:08)
Cool. Have you seen a difference in the kind of sellers that are reaching out from the TV commercials versus any other channels?

Dustin Singer: (04:15)
Yeah, so there’s there and there’s pros and cons to that. Naturally the TV leads, in my opinion, function very much like direct mail leads where generally when they’re calling in they’re, they’re kind of like ready to go, you know, they might see the commercial for months, but by the time they pick up the phone, you know, they, they want an appointment with us, of course, you know, it still brings a little bit of, you know, spam just like anything else here and there. But then, you know, also you kind of get the credibility from the other marketing channels of, you know, that omnichannel presence where it’s like not only do they see you on Google, they sell you on Facebook, they sell you on tv, maybe they received a letter from you. So you’re kind of hitting ’em with multiple touch points, you know, without really having to spend the actual lead cost five times, if that makes sense.

Noah Kesslin: (04:59)
Yeah, for sure. Do you feel like there’s a difference in trust factor, you know, since starting tv?

Dustin Singer: (05:05)
Yeah, we, funny enough, uh, at the timing of this recording, we just got a review yesterday. The team was because they were the ones that really dealt with the seller. I, I, I dealt with him on a, on a renegotiation situation and that that was it. It’s the only time we ever talked, which you’d think he’d be like, I wouldn’t be the memorable one, but he left us a review and it was all about me. And uh, you know, he mentioned how uh, you know, everything that we said we were gonna do, we did. But really he saw us on TV and he seemed like, or he, he thought that I looked like a man of integrity, which I’m not saying I’m not, but um, you know, the commercial, uh, is, is I guess what what sold him on calling us and we actually bought that deal for 25,000 less than one of our competitors offered.

Noah Kesslin: (05:50)
That’s awesome. Yeah, we see that a lot. We see, you know, even 20, you know, 25,000 under highest bid and they still go with us. Have you seen any other deals where the TV credibility directly, you know, really paid off on a certain deal besides that one?

Dustin Singer: (06:06)
Oh, there’s probably been many over the past year, but generally, you know, like we’ve had a couple sellers in the office to do closings and like number one everyone mention, my daughter’s on my commercial and everyone brings her up. But I would say the majority of the sellers that we work with, you know, the guys who are on the appointments or whatever, they’ll be like, yeah, I saw Dustin’s daughter on TV and they just seem like a nice local family and blah blah blah blah. And like at that point we’re not even really paying attention to where the lead came in from as far as lead source attribution, but it’s just this, the fact that, you know, so many people are mentioning the exact same thing. It’s hard to put an actual data number on that

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Noah Kesslin: (07:22)
Have you seen, I, I know you kind of mentioned it, but you’ve seen a lot of TV leads coming or like people saying they saw you first on TV coming through PPC organic Facebook, you see it from kind of all different angles?

Dustin Singer: (07:34)
Yeah, so I mean I think TV can function, uh, if we’re talking about a lead funnel, you know, at the top of the funnel is awareness and then at the bottom of the funnel is conversion and you know, TV can really function as, as both ends of that funnel and a lot of other marketing channels can too. But you know, you start to create that, I, and there’s a data statistic on this you’re probably more familiar with than I am, but how many touches someone needs to see before they convert into a customer. And it’s like, what’s the easiest and cheapest way to get the most, you know, impressions per dollar. It’s television and that’s, you know, a lot of our avatar is still watching tv. I mean we’re not doing business with 20 year olds, so

Noah Kesslin: (08:12)
No. And even the people that we are doing business with that inherited a house, you know, they still see it at the gym, they still see it, you know, all sorts of places. So yeah, no, for sure. I definitely agree with you there. Has there been any scenarios that you’ve noticed that you have gotten anything additional to TV deals as far as like, you know, raising private money or getting any special treatment or anything like that because of tv?

Dustin Singer: (08:35)
That’s a good question. I don’t wanna say that. Like someone has called me from the television commercial and said, Hey, I’d be interested in like funding one of your deals or anything like that. That being said, all my private lenders are aware of our TV commercial and I’m sure that that has helped, you know, pitch credibility and and things like that. But I don’t know, I don’t know if there’s any benefit to like maybe the , the local governments of Pittsburgh, they probably know who I am and things like that, but I don’t know if that’s a pro or con more reveal.

Noah Kesslin: (09:04)
Have you seen an impact on your size of deals as far as starting TV goes, like margin wise? Profit margin wise?

Dustin Singer: (09:11)
Not necessarily, and I’m only saying that because we’ve always done number one, we’re like one of the most profitable areas in the country for fix and flipping. It’s been like that for a long time. And then number two, it’s, I personally believe that it’s kind of a sales thing like average profit per deal and we’ve always done inbound. We never did outbound, so I’m not the best person to ask for that ’cause I don’t have a direct comparison to like cold calling and SMS we’ve never really dived into. It’s just not something we wanted to deal with.

Noah Kesslin: (09:38)
Yeah, fair enough. I know, you know, I did a little testimony with Tommy Har and he, he was talking about how he went straight from cold calling and texting to TV and it was like night and day. It was crazy. But yeah, going from inbound to inbound is, it’s not as drastic for sure, but,

Dustin Singer: (09:53)
So we did, we tried cold calling for about three months with a third party provider and it was, uh, it lasted three months. Do I need to say anything else ?

Noah Kesslin: (10:02)
No, that’s, that’s good enough for sure. Uh, yeah, I think, you know, cold calling and texting is so low cost and it’s so easy to do that. Most people jump on it first, but they don’t realize how much time they’re spending and, and frankly wasting, you know, if, if it’s taken one in a hundred or one in, you know, 200 leads to get a deal. Do you know what your kind of average, uh, lead to deal ratio is On, on TV or, or just in general with most of your inbound?

Dustin Singer: (10:31)
Only ’cause I have this number at the top of my head right now. I know in August, which was, you know, two months ago or really a month ago, we were at like, uh, I don’t know, 2,700, probably

Noah Kesslin: (10:40)
2,700 leads to get a deal. No,

Dustin Singer: (10:44)
$2,700 in spend.

Noah Kesslin: (10:45)
Oh, dollars dollars. Okay. Okay. I got you. I was like, what ,

Dustin Singer: (10:50)
This is like rough guesses, but they’re fairly close. I think in the month of August we had about 265 leads and we did, um, 22 contracts as that, that month. So Awesome.

Noah Kesslin: (11:00)
Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, I’m, I’m about to prove how bad my math skills are there, but Okay. I think our average is like one in 10, one in 12, you know, we have people in the one in five, one in one in 10 mark, but our average would, I would say is about one in 10.

Dustin Singer: (11:13)
Yeah. And then, you know, there’s a difference in, you know, people talk about gross leads and they talk about net leads and it’s like that particular month we were, you know, one in 10 on, on gross leads, which is amazing. If you translated that down further in the funnel to qualified leads, then yeah, we, for, for the month of August, we were probably closer to one in five.

Noah Kesslin: (11:31)
Yeah. That’s awesome. Cool. Have you found that anyone’s treated you differently since getting on tv? Any like seller, whether it’s sellers, agents or other investors?

Dustin Singer: (11:41)
I think on this, I can speak to the seller’s end, uh, I think they just take us more seriously. You know, it’s like one of those weird things where, well, it’s not for our industry, right? We, we get, we get reputations as being scammy and, and fake and all these things. And it’s like when someone’s on tv, it just eliminates a lot of that anti credibility factor where it’s like, Hey, if he’s on tv, like he must be the real deal. Not that there’s necessarily any basis in that, to be honest, but that’s just the way that it works.

Noah Kesslin: (12:10)
I think most people just know that it costs money mm-hmm . And, and most people think it’s a lot more than it really is, you know, right. To be on tv. So I think that’s like the main part of it is they know you’re serious and they know you have cash, which is the main point, which I feel like is the main reason, you know, a lot of investors get called scam is ’cause some investors say they’re gonna buy it in cash and they don’t really have the cash. And you know, I think that’s kind of where that comes from. But being on tv like they, they really feel like you have that cash. So definitely makes sense.

Dustin Singer: (12:38)
There’s a big difference between, you know, like there’s, in, in any given market, there’s 15 or 20 people probably texting and cold calling the exact same person. Whereas like I, I can, you know, I can only speak to my market, but there’s about four, maybe five of us on TV and that’s it. So, and we’re not reaching out to them like they’re just seeing our commercial on television. So, you know, I can understand from their point of view where it’s like they get 15 texts a day, Hey, I wanna buy your house, I wanna buy your house. Like, there’s just, there’s not a lot of juice in that.

Noah Kesslin: (13:08)
Yeah. Do you feel like, ’cause a lot of people their burden with, with starting TV is they’re like, oh, I already have like one or two people in my market already doing TV and I find that kind of funny to your point, like there are marketing channels that there’s, you know, probably 40 to 50 people doing mail in each market, you know, blah, blah blah, like, so on and so forth. What would you say to people that are kind of hesitant to do TV because there’s, I don’t know, 1, 2, 3, 4 or five people in their market?

Dustin Singer: (13:36)
Y you know, how often do you go to an appointment where there’s only been one other investor there? Like, you know, you’re, you’re asking for a, a unicorn that doesn’t exist and it really doesn’t matter. You know, that our, our main goal with marketing, right, is to get in front of the seller, get the appointment after that, it’s a sales thing. So, you know, maybe you gotta work on the, on the sales skills a little bit, but, uh, the marketing’s doing its job. I mean, it’s getting you in front of motivated sellers and it’s getting you in front of motivated sellers that are talking to way less people than the person that has 20 postcards sitting on their nightstand.

Noah Kesslin: (14:06)
Yeah, definitely. Fair enough. What would you say to an investor that is relying on, you know, texting or cold calling or, or any other outbound strategies?

Dustin Singer: (14:16)
I don’t think it’s in, there’s anything inherently wrong with it as a beginner strategy, right? Like, it, it’s, I understand and there was a time like in my career when I couldn’t dump, you know, 15 grand a month on a marketing channel and then wait, you know, 90 day cash conversion cycle to get my money back. But, you know, I, I think the goal of the operation would be, would be, hey, do the cheap marketing for a little bit, be a one man band, like do all the work, stack some capital, and then start spending money on the marketing channels that are actually gonna build a foundation for your business. So you’re still in business five to 10 years from now, not just, you know, doing this hustle mentality for the next 10, 15 years.

Noah Kesslin: (14:51)
I know you said in August you got 200 and something leads from tv. I know a lot of people have been slow this year, not necessarily tv. Just in general, how have you seen TV perform this year with a lot of investors having trouble just finding leads in general?

Dustin Singer: (15:07)
I mean, we are not down on leads this year. We have been pretty consistently getting between, I don’t know, two 40 to 300 leads a month. Not necessarily, you know, all from tv, but again, we’re not doing right now, we are not mailing and we’re not doing PPL. So you have, you know, organic, you have PPC, you have Facebook and you have TV and that’s it. Those are four very intertwined things. So, you know, between those four marketing channels, it’s, it’s, it’s been bringing in pretty consistent lead flow for us. Have we seen a, a drop in, you know, maybe qualified leads or even conversions? Sure. And you know, there’s a little bit of sales in that. There’s a little bit of, you know, the market, but there’s plenty of people still reaching out to us that have a house to sell. So we haven’t seen much on the, on the marketing side of things, let’s put it that way.

Noah Kesslin: (15:57)
Gotcha. What would you say to someone that is running TV that doesn’t have a PPC campaign running, like coincide with their tv,

Dustin Singer: (16:05)
You’re throwing some money away. . Yeah, those are the e especially PPCI mean, you could probably, you know, lose the Facebook portion of it, but especially PPC if you’re running tv, it’s just, it’s, it’s like a must have. Like you, you at the, at the very minimum you have to be running a branded campaign. I know like in our commercial, my, my website URLI think is sell to Dustin and then of course the business name is Dustin buys houses. I mean, you gotta be running Dustin Singer, Dustin buys houses, sell to Dustin, you know, hopefully a couple of your competitors too. And to at least capture that traffic that, you know, I mean, it’s a 32nd commercial, so if they miss, you know, maybe that exact URL or they miss the phone number, the first thing they’re gonna do is go on Google and look you up and, you know, you could rank number one SEO all you want, but those paid ads come before you and you do not want to give your traffic to your competitors. It’s as simple as that.

Noah Kesslin: (17:01)
Yeah, I have a lot of people ask me what, what I would recommend to do coincide with tv and I always say PPC and they always ask about direct mail or anything else. I love direct mail. I think, you know, in most markets it works really well. Are markets a little interesting with direct mail, but I know a lot of people that do really well with it. But I just think PPC works so well with TV that, like, whenever anyone asks me, I’m like, you’re dropping the ball heavily if you’re not running some sort of PPC. So no, I definitely appreciate the, you know, that thought because it, it is really, really game changer for sure.

Dustin Singer: (17:34)
And you don’t, I mean, uh, just a branded campaign is what they’re called, what we were just talking about. You don’t have to spend a ton of money on, on the branding campaigns. I mean, you know, even something as simple as like three grand a month just to capture some extra, I mean, that’s it. You just wanna capture those clicks so you don’t have to spend another 7, 10, 12, you know, some, some of the bigger areas, 20, $40,000 a month trying to capture cold traffic. This is hot traffic that was supposed to belong to you anyway.

Noah Kesslin: (18:00)
Yeah. Yeah. I, I like the, the notion on that that makes, when you say it like that, it makes a lot of sense for sure that that’s kinda already yours. They’re just having trouble finding you ’cause you’re not at the top. Yeah, I like that. Cool tv, A lot of people think TV’s for only big, big markets. Obviously you’re in a pretty mid big size market, but do you feel like TV’s only for bigger markets or do you think it can kind of work for investors everywhere?

Dustin Singer: (18:25)
Hell, I wish I was in a smaller market that I was the only person on tv . No, I, I mean obvi, I don’t have any data to back this up or, or you know, even, uh, I don’t know, maybe a story from another investor, but I, I just logically thinking, I would think that if I was in a smaller market, I’m probably gonna be the only one on there. And then, you know, you’re getting the cream of the crop at that point.

Noah Kesslin: (18:46)
Oh yeah. Yeah. We, uh, we had a guy start in north Texas. He was the only one in the market and first month I think he had 13 contracts within month one. It was crazy. So yeah,

Dustin Singer: (18:56)
It makes sense. Yeah, small

Noah Kesslin: (18:57)
Market, small market, so definitely, uh, definitely not wrong there. Um, you know, if, if you were to take yourself back before starting tv, what would you tell your past self before you ran your verse TV commercial

Dustin Singer: (19:14)
Number one, probably be a little bit better prepared to handle the, the inbound traffic. We were just lacking in the lead manager department a little bit. And then the second thing was like, you know, the PPL for us should have been cut off way, way before. You know, the, the, the fundamental problem with PPL is that it’s all this you, you know, if once you start focusing on inbound marketing, you’re doing very branded campaign marketing, which is what big businesses do. You know, Nike, Walmart, like all these people, it’s all branded. They’re not buying PPL leads. So, you know, kind of focus on that effort of that omnichannel marketing as opposed to just buying these $300 leads from who knows what landing page. And then now you got off people that you’re calling to Dustin buys houses, they filled out a form for us, cash offer, whatever. So probably those two things, those would be the main things. Awesome.

Noah Kesslin: (20:07)
What would you tell someone else, a different investor, maybe not in your market, but another investor that isn’t running tv, uh, about tv. If you could give like a, you know, two to three minutes on your experience with it in, in as a whole and just what you would tell someone that isn’t running it.

Dustin Singer: (20:22)
I just think it’s one of those things that, you know, at some point as your business matures, it’s only, you know, the next, I don’t wanna say final logical step, but it’s a cornerstone of the business that kind of needs to be implemented, especially for what we do. You know, obviously if you run a little brick and mortar, you know, whatever, maybe not, but you know, I i, if you’re doing any kinda volume or, you know, buying houses in like a major county or a couple counties or whatever, there’s no better way to get in front of as many people as there is, like there is with television. You know, and, and unless the demographics drastically change at some point in time, which I don’t see happening, I feel like people are spending even more time in front of screens that it’s not gonna go away.

Dustin Singer: (21:05)
I mean, it’s always gonna be there and it’s, you know, kind of my last thought on that is it is the easiest marketing channel as far as maintenance is concerned because, you know, especially if you have someone running it for you, there’s really nothing to do. You, you shoot a commercial one time and answer the phone, like, that’s it. There’s no, there’s no tweaks, there’s no, you know, negative keywords, there’s, there’s nothing. So it just makes it very simple. You’re not filtering through data with mail, you know, it’s kind of just marketing on autopilot more or less.

Noah Kesslin: (21:34)
That’s awesome. Yeah. Going back to what you said earlier about how many touch points it takes to have someone call in, I think it’s about six or seven is the average of, of how many times they need to see you. I mean, if you look at direct mail, for instance, you send out a thousand direct mailers, obviously those aren’t gonna go to the same people, right? So, you know, a thousand direct mail pieces, maybe 50 cents, it’s five grand. You know, it comes to a point where you send out six of those for TV to reach some like a thousand people, you’re anywhere from five to $10. So to your point earlier, you know, it, it just gets to them so much cheaper. And that many times, I mean, do you, do you remember offhand, how many commercials do you have a month?

Dustin Singer: (22:16)
I don’t, but our frequency is pretty good.

Noah Kesslin: (22:19)
Over over a thousand.

Dustin Singer: (22:21)
I, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Noah Kesslin: (22:23)
So it’s like, you know, for someone to see, like every time they turn on their tv, there’s Dustin. So it’s, it, it definitely, to your point, I think, I think that is six or seven times that they need to see you before they likely reach out, is the, the metric that I’ve heard of. Maybe it’s a little bit more, maybe it’s a little bit less, but somewhere around there. So I, I definitely, uh, agree with you there. But yeah, any final thoughts or anything like that? Well,

Dustin Singer: (22:48)
The, just based off what you, the, you know, the one thing I was thinking of is, uh, and this was recently as we spent more money and got on like the more prominent station. But, you know, my wife and kids get recognized all the time. And then, you know, I think the one thing that I, we forgot to mention is like, you know, household name type situation where it’s like they, the customers start to see, and, and you know, even if you have competitors in your market, they’ve see a couple of you but it, it’s so ingrained in their brains. It’s like, oh, we need a, we buy houses company. What about that guy that we see on TV all the time? There’s this thing that’s almost like impossible to measure for, you know, let’s say today someone sees my television commercial for the, you know, whatever, 20th time, two years from now, someone in their family dies and, and they inherit it in a house and they keep seeing that same television commercial over the years, who are they gonna call?

Noah Kesslin: (23:38)
Oh yeah. It’s like needing new sneakers. And you’re like, oh yeah, just do it. Like, I’m gonna go get some Nikes, you know, it’s, it’s uh, same thing. It’s the same thing. No, I love it. Cool. Yeah. Well, yeah, if this resonates with you and you wanna become an authority in your market and do something that 99% of other investors aren’t doing, please go to 10 x tv.co. That’s CO no m to apply and see if your market’s available. Dustin, thank you so much for coming on. Absolutely appreciate your time and look forward to continuing the relationship.

Dustin Singer: (24:08)
Absolutely. Thanks man.

Noah Kesslin: (24:10)
All righty.