WS1959 Data Empowered Cold Calling For Real Estate | Highlights Stash Gelezinski

Welcome back to The Real Estate Syndication Show! In this highlight episode, we have an enlightening conversation with Stash Gelezinski, the Managing Director for Capstone Company's Cincinnati office. Stash shares his inspiring journey in commercial real estate, his unique perspective on cold calling, and how he leverages data analytics to identify profitable deals.

Here are 3 key takeaways you won't want to miss:

1. Cold Calling: Your Superpower: Discover how Stash transformed cold calling into his secret weapon, and learn actionable strategies to approach potential clients with confidence and clarity.
2. Harness the Power of Data: Unveiling Needle, the innovative platform that utilizes data analytics to predict real estate transactions and generate hot leads, allowing you to focus your efforts on the most lucrative opportunities.
3. Building Relationships & Streamlining Prospecting: Gain insights into building valuable connections within the industry, effectively managing your contact lists, and leveraging technology to optimize your prospecting process.

Want to hear the full interview with Stash and unlock the full potential of cold calling and data-driven prospecting in your real estate syndication journey? Click the links to listen to the full episodes now!


https://lifebridgecapital.com/2024/01/02/utilize-data-and-analytics-in-commercial-real-estate-stash-gelezinski/

https://lifebridgecapital.com/2024/01/01/use-these-cold-calling-techniques-to-scale-your-business-stash-gelezinski/

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Transcript

Whitney Sewell: This is your daily real estate syndication show. I'm your host, Whitney Sewell. Today, we've packed a number of shows together to give you some highlights. I know you're going to enjoy the show. Thank you for being with us today. Well, Sasha, let's jump into a little bit of your background, and we will jump into some of your superpowers as well, which we talked about. But maybe give the listeners a little bit of an overview of what you've been doing in commercial real estate.

Stash Gelezinski: Yeah, so my name is Stash Galazinski. I'm the managing director for Capstone Company's Cincinnati office. We've been with Capstone since 2016. And when I was in college, I made up my mind that I was going to make my my fortune and career in commercial real estate. And so I've made the career, haven't gotten the fortune yet, but I figured out that my mom was a residential agent and unfortunately she passed when I was younger, but I saw the success that she had and I was like, well, real estate sales is a thing, but I didn't want to cart people around on the weekends in my minivan. So I decided to to get into commercial real estate brokerage. And it took me a little while to break in. It's kind of a, it's a tough business to, to get into, especially with no contacts, uh, no experience, but yeah, I figured it out and, um, you know, here I am today, so to speak.

Whitney Sewell: Yeah. Well, no doubt. It's neat that your mother had success in real estate as an agent and you wanted to follow in that same path. And one thing you mentioned to me before we got started was your superpower was cold calling people. I don't know if anybody's ever said that when I've asked that question. I have almost 2,000 people now. But I love that because it's such an important skill set in our industry. I feel like in almost any business, but especially in ours, if you are looking for clients of any kind, it's a great skill to have. So I wanted to jump into that a little bit because I feel like it's a piece that when people are trying to find deals or trying to find clients of any kind, it's It's a skill that they need, but it takes so many reps to get there, right? And they're nervous and just don't do it. You know, so I wanted to dive in there, you know, and maybe I'll let you elaborate on, you know, why that skill set so important, maybe for one, but, and then maybe how you became so good at that.

Stash Gelezinski: I moved here to Cincinnati in, in 2011 and I had no contacts and no connections. So I had to just. Pick up the phone and start. I like to say I've met all my friends through cold calling, so to speak. And it is super important because it's so easy to get lost in spreadsheets and emails or what have you. I have at any given day at least 100 emails in my inbox. You can spend a lot of time in the inbox, and it's not necessarily you feel like maybe it's productive because you've gotten down to zero or what have you. But the best way if you're in sales or as an acquisitions person, a principal, raising capital, a broker, insurance, financial advisor, whatever it is, it's just picking up the phone. and not being afraid to, I guess, make a mistake. I don't know. It takes a lot of reps. And when I'm doing it, my default MO when I'm in the office, especially if there's a pile of emails or other things I've got to get to, my default is I'm just going to get on the phone and start. I've got a bunch of different lists that I'm working through for different clients, whether it's calling on prospective buyers or calling on prospective sellers on behalf of a client. You can say fishing for listings or hunting or just you know making making a market like you've got a given set of people that you've got to be in touch with. So you know that the keys to being successful at cold calling is like you wanna. What I have found is you want to have one list that you're just calling through, and you want to work through that. And so, for instance, for me, a list could be calling on prospective buyers of a listing. And those are the easiest calls you could make. Because these are people that have usually logged in to our document vault. They've given us their information. By logging in, they're at least high-level interested in the deal. And you're calling them to see if they have any questions or any further interest in the opportunity. And so those are the easiest ones to make. The maybe next easiest would be, and the script is simple, it's, hey Whitney, this is Stash with Capstone calling today because I see you logged into Clearpoint Gardens, 150 units that we have here in Cincinnati. Just want to see if that's something that you're interested in pursuing further. And then you stop. And then you let them talk. And that's when the kind of back and forth comes into play. And then you have to be prepared and know the deal. And you can have the OM up on your screen. I have three screens. You can't see it. But I usually have my call widget here. I've got my browser here. And I've got my email here. And then I have my iPad here. So I'm surrounded. So I have plenty of opportunities to have the information right up in front of me. So you don't have to have it all in your mind. And it's okay to be like, you know what, that's a great question. Let me figure that out. Or let me look that up for you. Or that's a great question. Let me get back to you. Because I think that the worst thing that you can do when you're on the phone prospecting is to like make something up. Because people have a good, generally, a good BS detector. And if they know you're lying, they're going to fish you out pretty quickly. So just having a good list or script. And I don't really have a script. I used to work off a script. I built like a flowchart when I first got started of you know, here's what you say. And that, that walked me through it. And it took mapping out the conversation to, I literally, it was, I had it pinned up on my, my cubicle at the time, but it was a flow chart of the conversation. So I could just trace it. And now it's just memory. Right.

Whitney Sewell: I love the determination there, right. Even writing out a script or flow chart, you know, if necessary, at least to get started. Right. I feel like getting the reps in it's important, right. To build some confidence. Uh, even if you're, uh, even if you're told no, right. Many, many times, which you will be, uh, you know, it's, it's just building the repetition. You're going to learn. I feel like from every call. Uh, right. You're going to improve hopefully most of the, most of them.

Stash Gelezinski: Yeah you should and you know what i found is everybody has their own style but mine is i like to get to the point pretty quickly cuz if somebody calls me. And they're dancing around i'm like get to the point why are you why are you calling me cuz i need to figure out if this is worth my time or if i need to hang up on you. And so I try and give that same courtesy to the people that I'm calling. And some people like a little bit more friendly conversation, you might say, but others are like, what do you want? Especially if you don't know them and you're blindly cold calling, which if you're starting off in sales or in a new role, chances are the people you're calling aren't going to know you. And so They're going to want to know why you're calling and to get to the point pretty quickly. I feel like that does everybody a favor. Cause you could, you could go through your whole pitch only to find them to say no. And so it's like, if you get to it pretty quickly, um, does everybody a favor?

Whitney Sewell: Yeah. Yeah. It does them a favor in there. And then they may be even more willing to pick up the phone again later. Yeah.

Stash Gelezinski: I think so. Yeah. The thing is, in a sales role, ideally, if you're farming for listings, you've got a set of prospects. It could be property owners in a given geographic market, property owners of a given size or type but anyway you want to be calling these people over and over again over the year so sometimes you want to be calling them four times a year sometimes you want to be calling them twelve times a year just depends on how hot of a prospect you think that they are it's okay to move people in and out of those lists Based on the conversations and the feedback they gave you some people are always just mad and angry and it's like i don't need to talk to that guy every week or every month.

Whitney Sewell: I love that you talked about, you know, you, I mean, you've got different lists that you're managing, right. And, you know, you're, you know, depending on the conversation, you're going to move them around. Right. You know, what list, how do you manage that? Excel sheets, you have a specific CRM you use. I get that question all the time. So again, obviously we're calling investors often, right. We're raising money, you know, often and, and often it's just to stay in front of them, see how we can serve them. You know, if we're, if we don't have a raise, but we still want to call, right. We still are. trying to stay in touch and be in front of them but for you how do you manage that.

Stash Gelezinski: You know the question about we do have a CRM and we augment that with a number of different tools you know other data providers that we use needle being one of them. But the best CRM, I think you should be using a CRM and not working off of Excel sheets because Excel's built for financial models. It's not built for contact management. I think HubSpot is pretty good because it's, it's sticky and you can build workflows out of it. I think Salesforce is good if you're, uh, I think it's built more for, I don't know. We use it in our day to day, but I'm not in love with it. The best one that I ever used, it was called real hound, but it's, I think it, it may still be around. Um, but. They moved it from the cloud or it was Microsoft access-based and then they moved it to the cloud and a lot of the functionality changed and I just think that they kept it.

Whitney Sewell: I've never heard of that one. That's, that's interesting. You know, Salesforce, I have nightmares about just so the listeners know, but, but HubSpot we've used for a long time and it's been, it's just very intuitive for the whole team. And I like that a lot. You mentioned a call widget that you use. What is that?

Stash Gelezinski: So we use a dialer called RingDNA. I've heard some guys use like, it'll call five numbers at once. And then whoever picks up first, that contact will pull up in front of you. I'm not that sophisticated yet, I guess. But we use one called RingDNA. It's from a firm out of San Diego called Revenue.io, I think. or maybe they're out of LA and it's cool. It basically, it will, it plugs into your browser and it will recognize any phone number that pops up. So if you have, if you're using Excel spreadsheets and you're using them through your browser, Ring DNA will recognize that this is a phone number and you can click it and it will dial the number. If you're swimming in colder waters, so to speak, and you're trying to find the correct contact information, and you're just on the prospects website, it will see the website there on the browser and it'll, it's got a distinguishing characteristic, like it's got a little icon next to the phone number and you can click that and it'll call them. And then you can add the contact or if the contact's already in there or the company's already in there, it will pull it up in that widget, in that calling widget. And so that's a really handy thing instead of just pecking at your cell phone all day. That would be terrible.

Whitney Sewell: Didn't ask you really how you get that list, you know, and how do you, how do you know, you know, like, I guess where's a good place to start. Right. I mean, we could buy lists and have thousands, tens of thousands of numbers and people, but man, that's, you know, if we can narrow that down, our time is going to be a much are used much better. Right. How do you do that?

Stash Gelezinski: Yeah. I mean, I think it starts with, um, defining your, your category or, you know, who you're prospecting on for me, it's, um, you know, Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana property owners, and you can even get more specific than that and having, um, uh, specific multifamily owners, and then even more specific than that, given vintages are just affordable or, or what have you. Um, but, on that, on that subject, um, my partners and I, uh, so I've got a, aside from brokerage, which is my primary at the moment, I've got, I've been working for maybe two years or so on a software platform. It's called needle. And it came out of. me using different CRMs and what I would find is that if you are prospecting through a call list and you get an owner and they've got 20 different properties and you say, hey, Mr. Owner, do you want to sell anything? They're going to say no. But if you say, hey, Mr. Owner, I'm calling about capital square apartments. I have a buyer for that or whatever your pitch is. Are you interested in selling that? They're much more apt to have a specific conversation with you about that. And so out of that, You know, I had the occasion more than I, I liked more than I like to admit where I would be calling, doing my prospecting and talk with somebody and, you know, no, we're just, we're not doing anything right now. It's like, okay, great. You know, you just. being honest, doing, doing what you can. And then all of a sudden you see a deal, a listing pop up with a competitor or a, a sale transaction come through on, you know, the, the different websites that track those. And it's like, I just talked to that guy. Like, what am I missing? So the question was talking about CRMs, um, you know, there's a lot of data out there. And what, so what if you could use that data, uh, applying analytics to it, to predict transactions before they occur, you know, being a broker, we underwrite a couple hundred deals a year. And, you know, there are, uh, telltale signs, you might say, of when somebody is prepping a property for sale. The typical life cycle of a deal is somebody who's popping in and out of deals pretty quickly. So they're going to buy it, the occupancy is going to drop a little bit, but then revenue and occupancy are going to start climbing. And then you know they're gonna spend a lot of money on capex and then two years to three years five years later they're gonna wanna turn around and sell it. And so you know there's a number of different data providers out there i was like what if we could use that what if. you know, that in conjunction with loan maturities, you know, cause that's a telltale sign of somebody who's got to do something. And then even just ownership behavior patterns. Like there are certain owners that just buy and hold forever. Uh, and there are certain owners that are in and out of deals every two to, you know, five years. And so I had a friend come to me and he happens to be a senior vice president for data and analytics at, at a local bank here in town. And he said, Hey, um, my partners and I have a background in software and, uh, we want to buy value add real estate. I was like, that's a great idea. You and everybody else. What if we did this? Um, and I, I pitched him on the idea and, um, He came back a week later with our third partner and said, yeah, this thing has legs. And so we started slowly chipping away at it. And, um, you know, we're in our, uh, pilot program phase right now. So we've got probably 15 different users, user groups, um, on the platform, maybe I want to say 50 or 60 individual seat licenses, and, you know, we're actively testing it with anticipation of being able to go to market. Probably sometime late in q1 is what we're targeting. So,

Whitney Sewell: Interesting. Well, I want to dive into Needle and what it does, right? And it's brand new, obviously, to the listeners. And maybe you mentioned there a little bit these things that are needed, right? It helped narrow that list down and the things that help You to see what's gonna happen almost right for a property but before the sale takes place you mentioned you just talk that person and all of a sudden you see something you know something happened and man that you hate that feeling right now i missed it or what happened what you know why did i not see that was gonna happen and if you could have. some AI or analytics right combined in a way that could help you see that ahead of time that would be so helpful right. So yeah let's jump into some of that but maybe let's take it back before even needle you know you could dive into and what was some of the analytics that it's important to use stash when you're when you're looking for deals right that are potentially going to sell you mentioned them a little bit let's dive in there a little bit and let's talk about how needle helps with that.

Stash Gelezinski: Yeah. So, um, you know, the things that we, this past year, 2023, we spent a lot of time prospecting on deals that had, uh, adjustable rate mortgages or floating rate debt with the thought that the increase in rates would cause some distress, um, and cause owners to say, you know what, let's, let's hit a single instead of hold out for a home run. And you know, we, We spent a lot of time on that and we just didn't find a lot of those opportunities, even though I could see what the rates were doing. Some of these groups were signing up deals, buying deals with rate caps at, I don't know, I'll call it three and a half percent. And then with the interest rate increases, they'd be up around eight or nine percent. And the cap would burn off, and they still were holding. And you can't call somebody and be like, hey, I know that you're having to dig into your pocket. That's a great way to get somebody to hang up on you. But the market anticipated a lot of those distress sales, and they just never really came. So things like loan maturities, those are the best indicators of a potential sale because somebody has to do something, right? There are three outcomes. They can pay off the debt, they can refinance it, or they can sell it. Those are the only three things that can happen. Or they could give the keys back. So maybe that's four. We've looked at deals on the watch list, um, upcoming maturities.

Whitney Sewell: Yeah. Maybe even part of that, you know, as you're building that list to find deals, right. If you're cold calling a ton, they're giving, I mean, often sellers are almost going back to the cold calling conversation a little bit. You know, they're giving you information that you're tracking as well. Right. Oh yeah. This is going to happen in September. Well, you're probably making a note to call him back. A hundred percent couple of months before that, right?

Stash Gelezinski: Yeah, definitely. Um, yeah, we've got lots of, uh, follow-up notes and even calendar events of call this guy. Cause he said to call me, you know, around that date. So I've got a couple of those coming up next week.

Whitney Sewell: So, yeah. Well, speak to how, uh, what needle does then, you know, as far as those things are, are concerned and how it helps you to find those deals.

Stash Gelezinski: Like I mentioned, we've cataloged every single property in the United States, 50 units and greater, every single multifamily. I know multifamily, so it's like, well, let's start with what you know. And we're looking at rental rates and maturities and the occupancy and changes in occupancy, changes in rental rates, how the subject property is doing against its It's sub market competitors and then ownership behavior patterns. And, you know, we're taking all these things into account and creating a list every, you know, we, we update the leads every month. And what we found is that in backtesting the formula in 2021, we were about 44% accurate. And in 20, 22 in backtesting the formula we're about 47% accurate so we're. You know we're calling a little less than than half of the transactions that are occurring but it's like okay well if they're. Popping up on the radar you at least know where to go and spend your time. As. A young broker as a mid career or is a you know established broker and it's just then all depends on how you approach the conversation and what your level of relationship was is with the owners but then what we've also done. is say you do get somebody, and we had a guy with Capstone in our Charlotte office who is relatively newer to the investment sale business, and he was able to pull seven different opportunities out of it within the first two weeks of using it just by focusing on the leads that we were delivering. So that was a great endorsement of what we're doing.

Whitney Sewell: Speak to maybe who needle is for as well. Is it just brokerage firms or is it? Okay.

Stash Gelezinski: So it's, um, designed with the broker primarily in mind. Cause I am a broker. Um, but you know, acquisitions people as well.

Whitney Sewell: Um, you know, an investment firm like ours could are, you know, could our, uh, you know, acquisitions gap, you know, use needle as well. A hundred percent.

Stash Gelezinski: Yeah. And then what we're, what we're trying to do is also create a hot list of prospective buyers from the brokerage seat of, Hey, here's the groups based on what they already own, uh, either in the current sub market or similar assets, maybe in different markets that are similar, um, that might be interested in buying the property. And then we, what we want to do is take that a step further and allow you from your seat, your pilot seat, so to speak. to say okay here's my portfolio i'm interested in in selling or refinancing at these levels at these prices that we've will art we will articulate and then further here's a set of here's a hot list for you of properties that we think you might be interested in and you can click yes I'm interested or no I'm not and provide whatever feedback that you want and you can use the tool to go and directly prospect and go out and find those deals before anybody else or when that owner of the property that you said hey I am interested in selling says you know what the property that you've identified that you're interested in buying when that owner says I'm interested in selling you're going to pop up as like a verified lead or verified buyer, somebody that's said already, I'm interested in buying this property at this given price or in this given range. So that'll be beneficial for you because you can go direct to the owner or it'll be beneficial for the owner because they can see, okay, there's one or five or 30 different groups that are verified that have said that they are interested in acquiring my asset at this price. So that's a little bit further down on the roadmap, but that was one of the things that we were working on this morning. Yeah. On our call.

Whitney Sewell: No, that's interesting. Anytime we can narrow our focus, we're much more likely to have more success. I think about even a 50% accuracy rate, that's more than, say, the numbers I could just pull out of most lists or thin air trying to just find property owners myself. and calling, and so that would, I mean, it's a big leg up. You know, how does the, I guess, how does the system maybe speak to, you know, how the AI works a little bit to pull that information, you know, where it comes from, some of that?

Stash Gelezinski: Yeah, so we have subscribed to our primary data source. It's called Cherry. And we've spent a lot of time smoothening that data out, so to speak. And they've got a number of different APIs that we're taking advantage of. There's some other publicly available free APIs out there. And candidly, I don't. I don't know. I don't know exactly how the, uh, the sausage is made, which is probably good. Um, but cause I speak broker, I don't speak, um, data scientist. I'm figuring it out a little bit, but that's why I have my partners for this. Um, but anyway, you know, we're taking all these different pieces of data in each property has a, has a formula that's being run on it that you might think of that's ranking it. And so each prop, each property we're ranking as hot, warm, or cold, mostly, or we're ranking a data set of hot, warm, and cold leads. And what I've found especially early on when we were testing it, um, is they would just give me, you know, an Excel spreadsheet of, of 20 deals, um, in my market. And what was so interesting is that like seven of them would be either listed. We were underwriting, they were under contract, they're listed by somebody else or listed by us. Like they were actively in play. And I was like, this is awesome. Um, and then the other ones just weren't there, but it's like, okay, great. Um, so that was kind of proof of concept that were, that were, we were onto something. Um, but you know, to tie into the cold calling, you know, what we're aiming to do with needle is not only be a value add, you know, cause like when I was first getting back in my day, um, I, I literally didn't have, I didn't have any of the data subscriptions. So I just had the auditor site. Um, And I had to look everybody up online. And you would have to make 100, sometimes 200 calls a day to hit your conversation goals. Because back to cold calling, I still try and hit 50 solid conversations a week, which is 10 a day. during a typical work week. So it's like, if you can do that, you're going to be all right. Um, but what we're trying to do with needle is identify the opportunities to go out and be in front of so that hopefully you don't have to have 200 calls. Hopefully you can have 50 calls, uh, or maybe 20 calls to get the deal flow that you're, that you're seeking. So that's what we're trying to do.

Whitney Sewell: Thank you for being with us again today. I hope that you have learned a lot from the show. Don't forget to like and subscribe. I hope you're telling your friends about the Real Estate Syndication Show and how they can also build wealth in real estate. You can also go to lifebridgecapital.com and start investing today.