Judgement Investors, Lender File Checklists, Bank REO Inquiries, and Cold Email Scripts

We’re going to jump right into this week’s Monday Q & A with a cold take. I don’t even know it’s in here, so this’ll be exciting. Let’s see. 

Hi Brecht. I’m off to a good start as I had my first meeting with a bank this week! 

Congratulations. And I’m really happy to hear that. Folks, what you need to do if you’re not having meetings is more activity. That is how you solve the problem. If you’re watching this right now, and you’re thinking, why is this guy having meetings and I’m not having meetings? Have a look at your activity. If you’re not tracking that, and you’re not pushing the envelope every day, every week, to make sure that you’re doing the work, then you’re not going to have the results. You’ve got to do the work. And the reason this member has results is they’re doing the work. Okay. I’ll keep going. 

Two things came up. We used Zoom for it. (I have an account I paid for, which probably helped facilitate getting it set up.)

Yes, you should have a Zoom account. Highly recommend it. I have one also. I think it’s $150 a year. It’s a no-brainer. 

Two things came up. We discussed various loans they’d consider selling, including one owed by a law firm, which I’ll admit surprised me. I know the focus in our training is real estate, and yet, is there a specific type of investor that buys this type of loan? I have done some searches, although mostly pull up “how to find a loan for your business.” So I guess I need to get more creative in my Googling. 

Yes, all kinds of investors buy all kinds of debt. If the debt can be collected and even sometimes when it’s more difficult to collect, there are folks who are interested in buying that. You’re going to have to dig a little bit deeper, and it’s not something I can give you a list of while we’re sitting here on the phone. 

But what’s going to happen is if they don’t pay and they go to court, and they get a judgment, then there’s even a whole other market on top of the loans for judgments, which is when a loan isn’t paid, and then the court says you owe this money. That’s one way that it happens. And then that judgment is a tradable asset. The folks that I would look to for that you can actually search on our site for Rod Gagnon and Recovery Analytics. He can definitely help you with judgment-type stuff. 

So, yes, for every type of debt that there is, there’s an investor who wants to own that debt. Most interest is in real estate debt. And that’s why we talk about it the most. It’s also what most of my background is in because once you get into consumer credit and business credit, it depends on the collateral that they’ve pledged.

There may be some; there may be none. It’s not always as straightforward as real estate and really opens up a whole other world that, that isn’t stuff that we go deep into inside of the Bank Direct Mastery or at Distressed Pro, but there is a market for all kinds of debt at whatever level, collateralized or not. It’s all about how much you pay and what you figure you can collect on that.

When we were talking about an NDA, he said, “I guess you’ll want to see all the loan documents as well?” And I said “yes,” only because I did not want to say “no,” then go back and ask for them. 

Good move. 

Is there a checklist of things that, in addition to a tape, we want to ask for, or is that dictated by what an investor wants to see? If this is in the training and I missed it, please just point me back there, and I’ll find it. Thank you. 

Okay. So every lender has a file on each loan, especially once it’s gone into a workout like this. Basically, you want everything that’s in the file because there could be notes on it. There could be an assignment in there. You never know what you’re going to find in there a lot of times, especially if it’s bigger. You might have a broker price opinion or an appraisal.

And you might have different UCC statements. Whatever’s in there, you want it. So, just say yes, send over the file. That’s what you want to work with. Good job. Congratulations. Thrilled to hear it. Let us know how else we can help you. 

I’m looking at American Momentum Bank, and there is shown that they have $13.98 million in construction loans REO in College Station, Texas. Is there a way that you can tell me what that consists of and the number of properties, the type of property, the location, etc.? This is also showing that they have $8 million in commercial REO. How can I get the detail of what that consists of without having to call them at this time? 

Sadly, you can’t do it. There’s a whole bunch of reasons for it, but basically, especially in Texas, because of the way real estate is recorded or not recorded there. If you want to get detailed information about individual assets, then it’s about having a communication with them.

So the location that you’re seeing, that’s the office, right? Those are the offices where the stuff is managed. That doesn’t mean that this all exists in that one town. And the way that I would approach that is I would contact somebody there, and I would say, hey, I see that you’ve got $13.98 million in construction loans REO on your books, and this is why you should talk to us about it because we do X with construction loans, whatever it is, if that’s what you’re interested in, we take over construction projects. We manage construction projects. 

Now lots of different folks come to distressedpro.com for lots of different reasons. So I don’t know what your business is as I’m reading this here, but I can tell you that the way that you need to approach this is that you need to tap in there and speak with some folks.

It may be that that’s spread across a couple of different groups that you’re going to have to penetrate in order to find the different workout or special assets officers in order to really get the details on that. 

If you come into this, I’ll call it an inquiry with this knowledge, and you present that at the outset and you say, I see that you’ve got, you know, $8 million-plus in commercial REO, who is it that I should be talking to at your institution that manages that because we’d be happy to take that off your books and here’s how we do it and here’s why you should talk with us. 

One of the reasons that we can’t know what’s out there is that sometimes, especially in commercial REO, you’ll find that, for example, one of the lenders that I’ve done a ton of business with, all of the REO that they hold, you’ll never find their bank name on one single piece of it, not anywhere.

The reason is because they have a corporation; we’ll just call it Acme Corp with all of their REO. It’s almost like having a bad bank. All their REO goes under Acme Corp. So, even if you go to the county records and you start pulling through deeds, you’re not going to find this bank listed there.

There are lots of different reasons you can’t get that info except with a direct one-to-one. That is why we exist – to help you to do that because if it was as easy as we could just go online and we could just pluck things out of there, and we’re off to the races, then it wouldn’t be as valuable. 

The work that you’re doing wouldn’t be as valuable, but because it’s not all laid out in some web portal where people can just go in and find out who’s got all the commercial REO and who manages it and all that. That’s where the value comes from in you and your efforts and the work that you’re doing in order to uncover that.

That might be a disappointing answer for you. But the way that this business really works is you’re gonna need to talk to the folks. And starting with that base point where you know this information about what they’re having on their books, that is a great entry point to begin your conversation.

Can we talk about cold emailing scripts? 

The biggest thing that I can say about cold email is that what you need to do is test. There are a few different components to a cold email. There’s the subject line, and the subject line has one purpose. And what does it do? The subject line is to get the recipient to open the email. That’s its whole job. It doesn’t need to do anything else. 

There is a famous study from when Barack Obama was fundraising. He employed the folks from Optimizely, who have AB testing expertise and they have AB testing software. That means they test two different things to see which thing works best. And they’re using some of their technical folks to do this testing. And they had tested just the subject line, just, “Hey.” “Hey,” was the subject line. This was, at that time, the single biggest fundraising email in the entire campaign. 

I don’t care what your politics are. If you’re angry that I said the word Barack Obama, then I’m sorry. But, in terms of fundraising, if we’re just talking about strategies in email, using the word “Hey” was the single biggest contributor, the single best performer across all of their email campaigns.

We’re talking about raising millions and millions and millions of dollars. Okay. With one, one-word subject line. So that’s the job of the subject line, is to get that email open. The next job, when we look at the body, the biggest mistake that I see most folks make when we’re talking about cold email is they write a book. They write all kinds of information in there.

And what is the job of the body of the email? If the subject is to get it opened, then the body is to get them to take whatever that next action is. It is not to sell them on who you are. It’s not to convince them of all of the wonderful things that you can do. It’s not to build your brand. It’s not any of those things.

It has one job. And that job is to get them to take the action that you want them to take. Is it a reply? Is it book a call? You need to first decide what that is. So if it’s a reply, then what am I going to do in that email? Think about the emails that you get and the things that people want you to do when you get those emails.

I know for me, if I receive an email that’s a book, and it’s got a whole bunch of stuff that I got to read, and I’ve got 178 other emails in my inbox right now, I’m not reading that email. If I open the email and the sender says I do this, and I do that, we’re the number one at this? I don’t care. I don’t care at all about any of what you’re saying about yourself. Not one bit. The only thing that I care about in that email is what is in it for me. Why do I want to read this email? Why should I even waste time on going another one line deeper? And if you can’t convey that to me in the first line, then I’m not going to read the next one.

And so I advise that your emails should be short, personal, and expecting a reply. Those are the kinds of emails that people reply to. If you’re sending out emails where you really try to do selling in the email, stop it. That’s not how this business works, and it’s not how cold email works because we’re talking about business decision-makers.

Are those folks who are going to open an email and read this thing and decide to do business with you? No chance. The only thing they’ll decide from that is should I reply to this person? Should I call this person? What is the next action that you want them to take? So when you’re sending out these emails, there are different things you can do.

You can be very benefits-driven. You can be real direct about that. You can use some mystery, which I think can be very, very effective, especially in the subject line, but whatever you’re doing, make it short, personal, and expecting a reply because the purpose of this email is just to take your relationship to the next level with that person, which could mean a call. It could mean a meeting. But whatever it is, it could be that they’re going to send you something – whatever that is, bring it out right up front. Nobody has time to read all about you and why you’re so great. Right? Hope that’s helpful. Hope that’s not too direct. 

Would like to delete multiple emails in my bank watch list all at the same time. How do I do that? Thanks.

You can’t. We’ve got a huge update coming. It’s awesome. I was just on a long call about it five minutes ago before I started this call, and I think you’re going to love it. And it’s going to allow you to really dig in there and get exactly what you need out of BankProspector without spending any extra time and it will include more bulk operations like this. And so it’s coming soon.

That’s it. Those are all the questions that I have for this week. Thanks so much for being a member. Thanks for watching this video. I love getting your questions. Do please use that button, click it and ask. I haven’t had anybody ask a question in a video format yet. Maybe you’ll be the first.

I’d love to see it. Have a great day.