AI and Automation: Scaling Your Real Estate Business Faster

Gage Garber (00:00)
We have clients right now that as of, I guess now it’s…

the end of July, but back in March they already had $350,000 worth of wholesale deals. We have a client who we just brought on two months ago who has gone from five flips a month to now he has 12 under contract for this month for flipping. ⁓ So we help people across the

Erika (01:59)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Real Estate Pro Show. I’m your host, Erika, and today I’m pumped to be joined by Gage Garber, who’s making serious waves in the real estate tech space with his platform, Button Leads. Gage, it’s awesome to have you on the show today.

Gage Garber (02:16)
Thanks for having me on Erika.

Erika (02:18)
I think for our listeners tuning in, they’re really gonna love what you’re doing. But first, let’s ask, how did you get started in real estate?

Gage Garber (02:27)
I started out as a wholesaler, as a door knocker, driving for dollars. A lot of people may know exactly where I’m coming from, no money. I was young, had another W-2, and I just wanted to way out of it. So every day after work, I was driving around knocking doors of distressed properties in Dallas, Texas, seeing if they wanted to sell. So I did that for about a year. Had some pretty good success, moved out to Arizona, did not have the same success there, a little different market, and working with another

younger wholesaler out there, he asked me to build his systems and that’s sort of what led me to where I’m at today.

Erika (03:05)
Awesome. And can you explain a little bit about what you do with button leads? How do you solve pain points for different people? Agents, flippers, lenders?

Gage Garber (03:15)
Yeah. So we strictly work with visionaries or people that sort of do the money-making activities of acquisitions or running a team. And we just do all the backend super boring technical work. that involves list pulling, skip tracing, setting up the system, running the system campaigns, running ads, making sure everything’s working. You guys have automations of follow-up outreach contracts, LOIs, whatever you need in terms of the system side or

like the backend stuff, and all our clients do is they do what they do best, and that’s closing deals and talking to leads and negotiating.

Erika (03:55)
Awesome, awesome. And you said that when we were talking earlier that a lot of your business is from word of mouth. So that must mean that you have a lot of happy clients. ⁓

Gage Garber (04:06)
Yeah,

so we we don’t run any ads we don’t do any code outreach we just have a pretty good community of people that are in the real estate space and They love talking about us

Erika (04:20)
That’s great. Gage, are there any relationships that you’ve made in the real estate industry that have made all the difference for you?

Gage Garber (04:29)
Of course, yeah, I think…

I met a young kid named Kevin Cho. Some of y’all may know him. He’s pretty popular in the real estate space. believe he’s 23 now. I met him when he was 20. And at the time he was doing 50 deals a year. And he asked me as another young guy if I could help him with his system stuff. And at the time I did not know anything about systems. As you can tell, I don’t look like I’m on the nerdier side. I’m a genius or a whiz when it comes to the system stuff. But he asked me to do it and I told him I

just to kind of be around him and be able to

help somebody at that level and I took him from 50 deals to 90 deals a year and when people asked him how did you go from 50 to 90 in a year, he said I used Gage Garber. ⁓ So because of him, I can say that a lot of this system and success of the platform itself was built off of his first word of mouth of saying, know, this is who I use and then from there I was able to bring on a partner who actually knew the technical stuff, software engineer,

He really took it to the next level but it so him as well smart guy was in the real estate space and then Kevin Cho I Would say was my most prominent relationship that I built a few years ago

Erika (06:34)
Gage, you have any standout deals or client success stories that show the power of button leads?

Gage Garber (06:42)
Yeah, mean, my first client, know, within himself, Kevin Show did 40 plus more deals within a year.

We have clients right now that as of, I guess now it’s…

the end of July, but back in March they already had $350,000 worth of wholesale deals. We have a client who we just brought on two months ago who has gone from five flips a month to now he has 12 under contract for this month for flipping. ⁓ So we help people across the

Another one for the lending side would be Ryan Shrope. Some people may or may not know him for the lending. ⁓ He was doing, he already crushing it.

doing about three deals a week. ⁓ Once I got his systems down he was doing about seven to ten per week on the EMD and the double close. So there’s a lot of people out there with names ⁓ that you can go out ask them I’m sure they’ll vouch but I think across the board for flippers for wholesaling and lending those guys are absolutely crushing it.

Erika (07:52)
Awesome. One of the things that you were talking to me about earlier, Gage, how you were, one of your strengths is that your business, even though it’s tech, has a very hands-on approach. Can you explain that for our listeners?

Gage Garber (08:08)
Yeah, so

when it comes to CRMs or automations or outreaches or kind of how a client goes about their marketing, it’s very customized, right? They wanna do it a certain way. There’s a lot of CRMs out there where you can purchase a CRM that comes with the fixed automations. You gotta learn how to set it up, how to run a campaign, pull a list, import. You still have to do the day-to-day tasks or hire someone else out to do it, train them and manage them.

we do all that in a package, right? So we’ll set you up, we’ll customize it based off your markets, what you want to do, your outreach, if you want to send out LOIs with an offer, whatever contracts that you’re using for your state. ⁓

We’ll set everything up for you based off of what you’re doing that is a hands-on and as a real person We also provide that support in real time So we don’t believe in email tickets waiting 72 hours for somebody to get back to you You actually have a direct cell phone number to your operations manager Which each of our clients is assigned to one and you’re able to reach out to them asking questions if you need help Have any questions about how the system runs if you want to add something change something customize something you can do that through them But all in all they’re going to run your system for

So that means that we’re going to begin the campaigns We’re going to pull that list skip trace it for you making sure that we’re getting the best data that we can get And we’re going to find that phone number for that prospect import into your account start those campaigns and all our clients really have to do is just talk on the phone and Respond to those leads that are coming in now. We do have some questions like

I want to change my market, it’s just a good market. I want to do pre-foreclosures now instead of like distress properties, know, like where should we get those? So there’s a lot of questions on the strategical side, which we also help as well. each of our clients, get two things, they get, or they get two managers, they get an operational managers and a client strategy manager.

So those two managers will help with the systems as well as the strategy whenever they’re looking to grow and expand.

their operations.

Erika (10:47)
That’s exciting. Gage, have lot of listeners who are newer to real estate. How would you help someone who’s newer specifically get set up?

Gage Garber (10:59)
So unfortunately we do not work with newbies. You will have to have at least a few deals under your belt in the past month or three. That is because we are really hands on and we also are very limited to who we can work with because we’re so hands on. So we want to make sure that we can give you the best success or help you create that success. And as I always tell people is if you’re doing zero deals a month and we 10X you, that’s still zero. So we really want to work with people who know how to close

Erika (11:01)
Okay.

Gage Garber (11:29)
they’re going to be doing. So we would rather see you have success and with that we do need to see that you’ve had prior success as well.

Erika (11:37)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Gage, I want to transition and talk a little bit about the real estate market because you probably see some different things on the tech side. What trends are you seeing when it comes to lead generation?

Gage Garber (11:55)
Yeah, so we see ⁓ a lot of people trying to get into the AI space. ⁓ Sometimes it gets taken a little too far. We love AI, it’s very useful. ⁓ What I mean by too far is they’ll use AI to build a relationship, right? AI cold calling, that is a thing. ⁓ We’ve set that up for a lot of our clients. And you kind of just got to be careful when and how you use it, right? So.

It’s really good for the low hanging fruit for people who are really distressed. need to get out of their house. It tends to work, right? But you can also miss a lot of opportunities when you use something like that because it can kind of go off the rails. You know, most people who are under the age of 50 can read it pretty well that, this is not a real person. And then you can kind of lose that opportunity. But if you’re doing a mass scale list and you’re just trying to get low hanging fruit, maybe get five deals a month from a list of like 10,000, they’ll probably

work.

Same with the conversations. We like it for conversations and responses, but not outreach. That could help well, especially if you have a higher list. But I think where people tend to get wrong is they get a little lazy and they use it when they shouldn’t. I think it’s good to use when you have a really wide net, like a big list, thousands of people, totally fine. You’ll find your low hanging fruit. But if you’re going really niche, which we recommend people do in their list, then it’s best to kind of have

a real person who’s able to pick up the phone and talk to these leads because they’re gonna be warmer right the more niche you are the hotter the leads should be and you don’t want to waste the lead because you know you don’t want to spend five minutes on on the phone when you’re only talking to a minimal amount of people but when you have a wide net it makes sense to use AI because there’s just too many people to talk to

Erika (13:46)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Gage, you know, every owner operator has a moment where things get real and it takes a lot of work building a company. Do you have any moments in your journey that were pivotal for you?

Gage Garber (14:03)
Absolutely. I always tell the story of when I lost my first client. Heartbreaking. It was my first client I ever got on the subscription and this was a year and half, almost two years ago. And the reason why they left is because they said, Gage, I love your system. I love you. I just can’t figure it out. I don’t know how to use it. There’s too many tags, there’s too many buttons, too many training videos to watch. And I said, thank you so much.

I’m never going to let this happen again. And what I did, and that’s when I brought on my partner, said, Hey man, I have this idea where we just completely run our clients accounts for them. They do not have to worry about trying to learn it. They don’t have to worry about watching videos, figuring it out, it all out, all the tech stuff. Let’s just run it for them because all of our clients, they’re all visionaries. They’re all people that just, they just want to be on, on the phone. And if they have some technology, which

some of them do, they just don’t have the time

to use it because that’s not where they’re to make money. You don’t make any money from setting up automations. You make money from talking on the phone. So that was a huge moment for me when I realized that that is my avatar as a client, is they’re all visionaries and they don’t want to or they don’t have the time to learn how to run a system. They’d rather you do it for them. So

Since then, that’s all we’ve done. We do not offer any package where it’s, you know, watch these videos, figure it out on your own. We always set it up for them and run it for them.

Erika (16:14)
Yeah, you’re turning a difficult moment into a success story because you probably have a lot of people that are thrilled with all the changes you made.

Gage Garber (16:25)
Yep.

Erika (16:26)
So Gage, looking ahead, what do you see on the horizon? What big goal are you planning for?

Gage Garber (16:33)
Right now we’re trying to scale our team. ⁓ Like I said, it’s just word of mouth, so it’s a nice organic grow. But because we’re so hands-on, we still have to cut off every month, unfortunately, on who we can bring on. So I hate saying no to people. We’ve tried to limit it as much as we can with you having to have to have experience for as well.

But I think for us, we’re looking to grow and scale. So we’ve worked with a lot of ⁓ scaling programs and mentorships out there to kind of help us structure our side of the business so we can scale faster and we can provide this to more people. that’s, know, for 2025 or the rest of it, we are trying to grow our team, but still have that same service, right? We don’t want to grow too fast where we lose our…

services and how well they are. So we need to grow slowly but right in the right way. So that’s sort of our vision for our team is to continue to scale, be able to provide our services but in the best way possible.

Erika (17:42)
Yeah, for other people out there who are looking to scale their business, what’s one piece of advice that you would give them in order to scale smoothly?

Gage Garber (17:53)
Nice. ⁓ One thing that I’ve learned is to record everything. So whether you’re doing just a boring task, you’re setting something up, you’re doing a sales call, you’re fixing something, record it.

Organize it so whenever you do bring on somebody as a hire You can just have all these training videos on how to do it So you don’t have to do it again and walk them through it. You just have them watch it So that’s what you’ve seen that I learned is just record everything that you do if you tend on Replacing that job right because everybody starts out most of the time by themselves, which I did as well It was just me for about eight months and I recorded everything so when I brought on my partner and we started to hire people it was very easy

for to say watch this video, learn how to do this so I can scale that part out of it so I can focus on what I need to focus on which still today I record everything that I do expecting that one day I will have somebody else doing that for me.

Erika (18:51)
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And with your business being so hands on with your customers, what are you looking for when you’re looking to add someone new to your team?

Gage Garber (19:02)
Yes, so somebody who’s very…

easy to talk to, they’re good at communicating, they understand real estate, they understand tech. So that combination’s pretty hard to find. So that kind of like limits us, but we try to look for the best people possible because they are very forward facing. A lot of Zoom calls, a lot of one-on-one, a lot of on the phone, a lot of texting. So they need to be able to communicate well. They need to be able to pass off information if they’re not so good at the tech stuff. But first and foremost, they need to understand real estate, especially on the client strategy side.

So there’s a lot of things that we look for, but first and foremost, they need to be personable, good at communications, understand real estate, and have a good attitude to show up every day. Like we love our clients, we treat them like family, and it needs to be presented that way, and our team needs to feel the same way about them. So that is a very…

It’s very important for the people that we hired to have those same values.

Erika (20:07)
Yeah, absolutely. Engage. You have so much passion with what you’re doing. I love it. Before we let you go, if someone wants to reach out, learn more about what you’re doing, ⁓ work with button leads, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

Gage Garber (20:24)
Yeah, so if they want to learn more, I still am the only one who jumps on the calls. So if you schedule a call in buttonleads.com, that’s B-U-T-T-O-N-L-E-A-D-S, Button Leads. If you schedule a call, that will be with me directly. And we can talk, chop it up, you can ask questions, I can show you everything that we do. Or you can reach out to me through Instagram, that’s gage underscore garber.

Erika (20:50)
Gage, thanks for dropping so much value on this episode today. It was awesome having you.

Gage Garber (20:55)
Thank you so much, Erika.

Erika (20:57)
And for our listeners, if you got value from this episode, make sure that you’re subscribed to the Real Estate Pro Show. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators like Gage who are building fantastic businesses in the real estate world. We’ll see you on the next episode.