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225: Stack Your Lead Generation with Chris Prefontaine

Chris Prefontaine, Founder of Smart Real Estate Coach, is motivated by creating experiences that money cannot buy.

We learn about Chris’s journey from the 2008 real estate crash to establishing Smart Real Estate Coach in 2014. He developed an interactive model for creative property deals without banks, cash, or credit, enabling students to work with them across North America.

Chris’s frameworks include owner financing, lease purchases, and subject-to deals, helping students avoid financial exposure while achieving their goals. He also shares his LeadGen Stacking framework, which involves swapping email lists, writing books, building a YouTube presence, and hosting events. This diversified approach ensures a steady stream of leads and business growth.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Stack Your Lead Generation with Chris Prefontaine

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Chris Prefontaine, the founder of Smart Real Estate Coach, four times bestselling author, three times Inc. 5000 honoree and the top half percent podcast host. Chris, welcome to the show.

Thanks Steve, good to see you as always.

All right, so let’s dive in and let’s talk about how you started Smart Real Estate Coach and how does it connect to your personal Why?

Sure. Okay, so Smart Real Estate Coach, I’ve been at real estate for 33 years, but Smart Real Estate Coach started post 2008 real estate crash. So, that was a few years later after I dug my head out of the sand and got beat up financially. We started in 2014 officially, and it was spawned, Steve, pretty organically, meaning myself, my son and my son-in-law were buying and selling properties creatively without banks, no cash, no credit. And then we started to get demand, organic demand, so we could teach others to do the same. And then that grew organically until about 2000, gosh, I don’t think we even advertised until about 2020. And so now we don’t just do our own real estate deals. We have students all over the country, all over North America, because Canada as well, doing real estate deals the way we do them without utilizing their own cash, without utilizing banks or jeopardizing their personal assets. So that’s how it was born. And we have an interactive model whereby they’re doing deals with us in the trenches, so to speak. Not here’s a course, go ahead, good luck. There’s a big difference in that model. That’s why I call it interactive.

Love it. So how does it connect to your personal Why, what drives you as an individual?

Yeah, my, I mean, that changes with age, right? But my why of late is to create experiences and do the things that money cannot buy, but you got to create money and wealth to get there, right? So, create the money and wealth to do the things that money and wealth can't buy, create experiences. Share on X And when we take on a new student, if you think about it, we’re creating three paydays, we’ve trademarked that on every deal they do. And they’re able to create life experiences out of that, that they’d never dreamed of. Some of these people were in W2s for gosh, 20, 30 years, and we helped them exit that and come over. So, they are creating experiences. And I like that alignment because it’s never boring. A new student comes in, we get to start a new transfer of that Why and that experiential treatment. Pretty neat.

So, give me an example of what these new experiences look like. Are these personal experiences? Are these the business experience? Is it the training experience? What are we talking about here?

Yeah, when you relate it to my Why, it’s personal experience. So, it’s again to create the income and the wealth to do things that money can’t buy. For example, building where I am now in my new home up in the woods and being able to bring grandkids in and create family experiences. Well, likewise, with the students, I’ll use the most recent example, Rick in New Hampshire. Rick had 100-plus employees for 30 years working for the government, and now he can transfer all his time into real estate deals, thus creating experiences for his family that he never could do because he was tied to the J.O.B. That’s just one tiny example in the community, but that’s life changing for people to actually have some freedom back.

Yeah, that’s for sure. So, when you say that you help people create less than deals without financial exposure, going into debt, without credit lines, how does that work? Is it about relieving people who are in financial straits from their burdens and the kind of seller financing or how does it work?

Yeah, good questions. I’ll describe it this way. Two different advertisers. Yes, one of the advertisers would be, hey, I need financial relief right away, in which case we can purchase that owner financing, we can purchase it subject to their loan staying in their name, we call it sub two in the industry, or we can purchase it, lease purchase, all giving them immediate relief if that’s what they need. But when I say there’s two avatars, there’s two ways we do this in creative real estate. One is to solve a problem for that avatar. The other one is to perhaps help them accomplish a goal that the market couldn’t otherwise help them with. Example is what you alluded to, seller financing on free and clear properties. So, they owe nothing, they’re not in financial stress, but they want the best price and they’ll take it over time. And so, we’re helping them accomplish a goal that the market can’t give them, perhaps price or perhaps tax planning over time. And those happen, both of those deals are great, they’re just totally different advertising.

Interesting. So, if someone wants to get a good price for a property, but right now, the market is down, then essentially, they lease the property or they sell it on terms and then the price could be linked to a later market price?

Sort of. The price could be a little bit of a premium and the reason is this. I’ll give you an example. I bought our office building for $550,000. It was on the market for $550,000 but he wasn’t getting it. Why was I able to pay what he considered, and I considered to be a slight premium? It was probably worth $525,000. Well, that extra 25 grand, I got a 20-year term. In the first 18 months of that, I got principal only, zero interest. So, those payments eat right into any premium that was given. And if it’s over time, I’m okay with it. So, the longer term, they can usually get more money. It’s not tied to a future price. It’s tied to a price now, but usually we can buffer in some premiums based on the aggressive principal paydown.

And for some people, that could be better because their income is spread over a longer time period that they are in a lower tax bracket perhaps and they save some taxes?

Well yeah, this gentleman wanted it for two reasons. He wanted it for estate and trust and planning reasons for his family. I think he was ill, Steve. I didn’t know at the time, but he’d since passed and I think that he wanted his wife and his son to have an income stream versus a building. That’s number one. So, it’s estate planning. And number two, he was adamant about spreading out the tax liability over time.

That makes sense. That’s very interesting. So, you guys are creative in how you structure your deals and then you bring people in. So, your students, they don’t have to have the cash perhaps to buy into those deals, but they can have you help them and they originate the deal and you help them close the deal.

Yeah, exactly. Now, I’ll never say zero cash because if you do a lease purchase, it’s next to zero, it’s $10. But if you’re going to buy it on a financing, there sometimes are some closing costs. You’re talking small money, but there’s some money. The difference is you’ll never ever sign personally like you would on a bank loan. That’s the big difference. And you look at these deals I mentioned trademarked earlier. When we say we trademarked the three payday system, you’re not talking small, just so the audience gets an idea. You’re talking like 45,000 low to a 350,000 high. That’s the range in the community per deal per all three paydays. That’s pretty lucrative. So you don’t need to go out and do 100 of these, right? For most people, you need to do a strong handful of them.

Okay, so basically that’s kind of a commission structure. Someone brings in a deal and they get a minimum 45K payday three times as the deal is going through the process or maybe straddling over time?

Yeah, but it’s not commissioned, so to speak, because let’s say you, you’re a student, and I show you how to purchase a homeowner financing. You’re going to get an upfront payment from your buyer, that’s payday one. You’re going to get payments every single month on the delta between what you’re paying the seller or the bank and what you’re getting in from the buyer monthly. And then you’re gonna get a payday three when the deal cashes out. So, you have now money, monthly money and long-term money, and that’s your asset that you either own or control.

Yeah, so you build up long-term equity, so to say, as well.

Yeah.

Very interesting. So, Chris, as you know, this podcast is all about frameworks and you’ve developed several different frameworks. And one of the frameworks we talked about on our earlier call, which really intrigued me was what you called LeadGen Stacking. So, it’s a way of generating leads. Can you speak to that and explain how that LeadGen Stacking process works?

Yeah. So, this could be for the real estate business, could be for my own business to LeadGen, it could be for anyone listening. And that is, I like in particular, Steve, when any business can stack different lead sources, so that you’re never relying on one, if that makes sense. So, I don’t care if it’s economic driven or industry driven or niche driven, if you’ve got a variety of leads coming in, you can always pour gas or turn up or turn down one particular variable, one particular lead source. And that’s what I mean by the lead stacking, if you will. I can go deeper, but that’s the general premise of it.

So, what are the different types of leads that you should be stacking? Or if you’re an entrepreneur and you think about, okay, my business, maybe I have a consulting business, a professional service. What could be the different buckets that I would be trying to collect leads in?

Yeah, in no particular order, I’ll go sort of in the order that I built the company. And so, one would be affiliate marketing. Almost any industry can and should be talking to other people who perhaps market to where your avatar lives. So, example for me might be a virtual assistant service that services other investors. Well, I want to be able to do an affiliate marketing with them. What does that mean? We just swap emails. I send an email to their database. They send one to my database. That’s how I started building the company up literally day one, 2014. Then we can get a little bit more sophisticated here. There’s the opportunity to write a book like I’ve done, because that is a very, very strong, let’s call it a strong business card, if you will, but it’s a strong lead magnet, because it establishes authority, as you know, right away. Number two is the YouTube presence that anyone can develop as long as they stay consistent, and consistent can be once a week, could be three times a week like it is for us, could be daily like some people do. As long as it’s consistent, that’s a great LeadGen strategy and they’re related in that you can tie them together, but they’re not related in that you can stop them independent of each other. And so again, social media too, not just YouTube, but that’s just how we started out originally. And then events, we have small little in-office events with 20 people and we have ballroom events with 150 people, but events are a great way. I know attorneys, for example, who put on events for trust and estate planning, that’s how they generate all their business from that LeadGen model right there. So, none of these are, again, dependent on the other, but they work nicely once you get them all firing.

Does affiliate marketing, like swapping emails, still work in today’s environment where people are so trigger happy unsubscribing from email lists?

Yeah, good question. So, all right, I should have finished that model. So, yes, it works for us. But what we do in addition to a simple email swap is we’ll do in addition to that, we’ll do a virtual event swap, too. So, the list will hear from me via a virtual event, and then we bring our affiliate marketers to our, what we call, our wicked smart sit-down every week. We have guests come into that. So, they get to see it from email and then, oh, I saw that person, now they’re coming to an event and it gets a little bit more solidified.

So, you’re projecting a business relationship with that person and people see the linkage. Okay, this is why I got the email because I’m in Chris’s, Chris Prefontaine has database and they are partnering with these other people.

Yeah, we’re also very picky, Steve, especially nowadays with who we bring to the table, right? Because I want to make sure if someone’s going to come speak to my database and vice versa, that they bring value, something that’s going to help our students along their journey in the Wicked Smart community. So, we are picky with that as well. We don’t just throw anyone at them, because then why would people open emails to your point? And why would people show up to an event if it wasn’t going to add value? It’s got to be sort of something we know can add value in some shape, form or fashion to their life or business.

So the event piece of this is affiliate marketing, which could be swapping emails and doing virtual event swaps as well that links to the events or it’s a different type of event that you have in mind?

We do addition to those virtual events, we do our own events. So for LeadGen, we might take all the people that hypothetically came in off of YouTube or came in off of the affiliate marketing, they opted in, say, for a free book or one of our other tools, a toolbox or book, and then we will bring them into the office or bring them to a live event. Both of those get us eyeball to eyeball with them. And as you probably know, as nice as virtual was during COVID, the face-to-face, you can’t beat because there’s a different trust factor there.

So, definitely a virtual webinar is nowhere near the impact of an in-person.

Right.

Even the people yearn for in-person events. They want to meet belly to belly with other people, and even if it takes some travel time.

Yeah, and community is important, right? Building a community because that in a sense can either add to your LeadGen or solidify the leads that are already there by having a community like we, a Wicked Smart community, but people yearn to have community now and guidance.

That’s interesting, that’s interesting segue. So, when you say you’re building a community, what are the building blocks of that? So, is it just an email list and occasional events or are there some secret sauce to building a community?

Good question. So, in the actual database, in addition to emails that might move them to another stage of the business or life, we want to provide content. So, we’ll give them in our world, that means we’ll give them things like deal structure deals so they can see real deals with no tie to doing anything just here, here’s how this deal worked. We have weekly, what we call wicked smart sit downs, where for free, they can come learn another topic that week. It might be a guest or it might be us speaking, but they come for free. Then we have a weekly mastermind for all the members that are in the community already to come and bring questions, bring deals, brainstorm. So, we’re touching them not just on platforms like Slack and other, but we’re touching them on Zoom at least two or three times a week. And that builds a lot of community. And frankly, a lot of them become very, very good friends because of that, you know, outside of us as a core.

So even though these people may not be subscribers or paying members, you would still include them in the community?

Yeah, the Wicked Smart sit-down is anyone that has been sort of looking at us on the peripheral and they say, well, I want to go see more. That’s a great chance for them to get to know the coaches and us and the other members. Every single Thursday, we’ve been doing it for years.

Love it. That’s interesting. So, what is it that you’re working on right now, Chris, that excites you? That is the future of your business.

Yeah, we just did a beta test in March. I think you and I spoke right around this time frame and that was to move what we call the Jumpstart Community, which is kind of like the lower level program, move them to an in-office, what we call in the trenches bootcamp, where we’re putting 20 people in our own personal conference room and we’re with them elbow to elbow, unlike an event where you may be on stage or a virtual event where they don’t really get to know you, we’re in the conference room with them, right close in person with 20 people. We did extremely well, not just as a business, but in imparting knowledge and letting them go off and have hope and clear pathways. So, it was the most effective thing we’ve ever done. So, we did another one last week. It was the same, if not better. And so, we are going to run these now every six to eight weeks. And that model alone, compared to the cost of running a large bottom event is night and day and way more effective. So, it’s a win for the community members and a win for us.

So, what kind of traffic do you need in order to be able to fill these rooms?

That’s only 20 people. So, it’s really a personal, it’s like a personal invite. So, let’s say you have 30 or 40 people on that particular list for you to say, hey, if you’re in this group, you can come free to this two and a half day event. That’s, it hasn’t been too difficult to do. And I’ll see, this has been so far, we’re two for two. We’re gonna keep running those because the students leave saying that was by far the best thing you guys ever did. And these are some of these students have been around for a while.

That’s very cool. And these have done in different local localities? Or-

Actually, we do it right in our office right now in Newport, Rhode Island. We bring them right into our own conference room. And people say, well, you could rent a room, but yes, but then it loses the whole personal touch. This is literally, we get to peel back the curtain, we’re in our offices, we’re doing live calls with them, we’re in the conference room whiteboarding. This is just right in our work environment. They get to see all that and experience all that. It’s quite different than a hotel, right?

Yeah. And then do you find that people actually fly in to Newport, Rhode Island to participate in this?

Yeah, they have so far, both months. Yeah, some drive, but many fly. We had people come across country last time, California.

Wow. That is really cool. So, when you say that this industry is going, real estate coaching, how is it evolving and how do you see new technologies influencing it, if at all?

A couple of things, evolving wise, of course, the acceptance of the sellers to do business virtually has been a lot better, so in other words, you can get a lot more done before you go even go to the property by doing a lot virtually, even since COVID, it made it sort of acceptable. As far as evolving, I mean, I call it a revolution, Steve. That’s our theme for September for our event. But I’m saying that because you’ve got banking now that’s getting tighter and tighter and tighter. And it’s pushing so many buyers, which affects sellers to the sidelines, right? So, hard to get financing out for them conventionally. That creative financing’s never been in such huge demands. In my 33 years in the business, never been this much demand. So, I don’t see that loosening. I see that getting better and better for those in creative, not for the conventional. For the conventional, it’s tough to get financing right now with the banks doing what they’re doing. I don’t see that changing.

Is there a role for AI in this business?

Absolutely. I’ll give you one example. We had a consultant recently that does a lot of his book called Come Up for Air, and he’s all about technology and systems. And he saw the hours we spend as coaches on critiquing the live phone calls. And so, he’s working on the system because we have so many of those data are already there, you know, live calls where AI could be doing those for us. So, that’s just one little example, but yeah, it’s definitely affecting us. We have a couple of people going through courses right now to help implement things as we speak.

That’s very interesting. All right, so lots of interesting stuff. So, you came up with this LeadGen Stacking concept and you’re attacking the market from different directions, affiliate marketing, writing a book. That’s not the easiest thing to do, but that’s a long-term asset that you can have in your arsenal. YouTube presence, you’ve got a podcast I think as well, and events, so you are bringing people from all over direction. So, if people are interested in real estate and maybe they are seeing how the banking market is changing and they want to get into the low financing real estate, want to learn more about what you do, where should they go? You mentioned an event in September, so what’s available?

Yeah, thank you Steve. A couple things, the event is in September in Boston, Mass. It’s the first year that my family talked me out of staying in Rhode Island. They said, you got to make it easier. So, it’s in Boston. You can just go to QLSLive.com. And then I do have a free book for your tribe. They can go to WickedSmartBooks.com. That’s WickedSmartBooks.com forward slash Steve and the number one, the numeric number one. That way we know it came from you guys. There won’t be any shipping. I know a lot of free offers make you put in something for shipping. We’ll ship it for free. You’ll get a hard copy book for the Amazon bestseller, Real Estate on Your Terms.

Awesome. Well, definitely go qlslive.com, get your book, wickedsmartbooks.com/steve1. So, number one of all Steves and read it and find out more about what Chris is doing, and Chris, thanks for coming and sharing your experience and your framework and those who are listening don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow us on LinkedIn and you know keep listening. Thanks for coming.

Thanks, Steve.

 

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