Navigating Real Estate Challenges: Oleg Donets’ Top 3 Marketing Tips

Dylan Silver (00:00.963)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the show I have real estate entrepreneur, technology, digital marketing strategist, and founder of Real Estate B’s cutting edge technology marketing platform for the real estate industry, Oleg Donets in Cleveland, Ohio. Oleg, welcome to the show.

Oleg Donets (00:26.35)
Thank you for having me, Dylan.

Dylan Silver (00:28.567)
It’s a pleasure to have you on here and you know this is an interesting one for me because you have a really impressive and robust real estate community that I’m not previously familiar with and I’m glad that we crossed paths here. Tell us about

Oleg Donets (00:47.918)
Sure, yeah, so we basically have free platform for real estate professionals. We work with different types of real estate pros, right? At this point, we really concentrate on real estate investors, which kind of mainly encompass flippers, wholesalers, and landlords with short-term, long-term rentals.

So this is yeah, it’s a free platform where every investor can join and utilize our tools, whether it is marketing, technology to grow their business.

Dylan Silver (01:26.223)
And so you mentioned before, but you have several, many thousands of users. I was shocked. said, wow, what a big group. Is it on Discord? Is it on Facebook? Where is it at?

Oleg Donets (01:36.654)
Yeah, is really community. When I say community, I’m saying like our email list and the users that we communicate almost on a daily basis, whether it is through our email or through our content, through our text messaging. We don’t really have a community. It’s a group of Facebook group. We do have, but we’re not very active there.

Dylan Silver (01:54.307)
Very interesting.

Dylan Silver (01:58.243)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think Facebook can be hit and miss. I see a lot of people with school communities, with Discord communities. I’m part of both. I have groups in both. I think, you know, anytime that people can bring people together in the real estate space, it’s always an interesting one because I started, and I’m curious to get your background here in sec, but I started with no connections at all. I’ve said this before, to the real estate space, knew nobody. I was doing something completely unrelated and…

Now here I am. And I’m curious, how did you get into the real estate space?

Oleg Donets (02:36.782)
Sure, yeah, so it’s really started like back to 2013. I founded the digital marketing agency, just generalist agency. We provided marketing services to any types of business under the sun. One day it can be, I don’t know, a bakery, local bakery. Another day it can be a manufacturing plant or what have you. So kind of over a few years in…

started looking into, know, kind of trying to make it more efficient, right? And whenever you try to serve every business under the sun, you know, it just, doesn’t work out. Like you have a lot of waste and so you need to start thinking how to concentrate your resources. So this is how we started looking into niching down, right? And so back then we had a few real estate clients in our Rolodex and so we kind of…

made an executive decision by, know, let’s go into real estate. Plus, I love real estate myself. My wife was realtor. She just became realtor back then. And so we decided, you know, let’s go and kind of dive into the real estate space. So yeah, fast forward from there, we started serving mostly real estate companies. And from there, you know, we completely changed.

We switched the gears and we went away from the agency world and started kind of created Real Estate Bees as a platform to serve the middleman between the real estate professionals and helping them grow their business.

Dylan Silver (04:19.299)
So you go and dive heavy into strategy and marketing and then you niche down into real estate. I’m curious from a business perspective and scaling a business, were you doing many marketing and strategy for lots of different avatars of business before niching down into real estate? you helping many different types of businesses?

Oleg Donets (04:46.914)
Before, you mean before niching down, yeah, we serve many different businesses or you mean like specifically in real estate, within real estate.

Dylan Silver (04:50.51)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (04:54.583)
No, no, before, know, what was, I’m curious as your business scaled, right, so you niche down into real estate, but before that it looked different, right? You were helping maybe many different types of businesses. I’m curious what that business looked like.

Oleg Donets (05:09.506)
Very hectic. Again, it’s just, it’s very complicated to try and appeal to every single type of business because every business has different needs, right? Different pain points. was very, very draining because you have to, I literally needed to learn the entire business within, you know, short amount of time in order to really deliver results. And it was very stressful, very, you know, draining. So very challenging.

Dylan Silver (05:19.183)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (05:39.151)
Can you help me and our listeners have a better understanding of what those early days were like? How were you finding your clients? What was the kind of marketing avenues? Is it all online? Was some of it in person? Are we talking about mailers? What’s the kind of marketing that we’re talking about here?

Oleg Donets (05:56.11)
Yeah, so if we go back to that time, it was like 2013. so the whole premise of this business was, we had really good time back then if you look at it from the perspective of search engine optimization. So we started kind of mainly doing SEO, providing SEO services. And back then, those who know search engine optimization, generally, 2013, was like a wild west.

Dylan Silver (06:14.575)
Mm-hmm.

Oleg Donets (06:25.954)
Right? So we literally, you know, learned how to do search engine optimization and all our client acquisition came from search engines. It was so easy to rank websites back then. Right? You literally just throw a website, you optimize it for, you know, specific keywords and, you know, in a few days it starts ranking. You know, throw a few backlinks here and there and it starts ranking. So, yeah, most of our clientele, especially in the beginning, came from search engines.

And some of them were from word of mouth, right? But yeah, we became profitable almost like in the second month, right? So we became profitable. Never seen it before. And, you know, I spoke to many business owners, it’s just almost impossible, right? But we really were profitable, right? you know, once we started. But it was different time back then.

Dylan Silver (07:07.044)
Wow.

Oleg Donets (07:24.972)
Now it doesn’t work this way.

Dylan Silver (07:25.305)
So did you have a software engineering background or did you figure this out on your own? How did you get the skillset?

Oleg Donets (07:34.126)
No, it’s just, you know, it’s just with doing so many things, you know, like whenever you run a business, right, so you try to automate stuff, right? And so kind of over time, we started thinking, okay, so what if we do certain activity, right? What if you automate it, right? And so we started kind of hiring developers to help us automate stuff. We started building our own software in-house, which I don’t know if I would do it again, you know, if I go back.

Dylan Silver (07:44.334)
Yeah.

Oleg Donets (08:03.754)
We just wasted a lot of money, but I did acquire the skill of understanding how to build, how to automate things, how to work with developers and all the software building aspects.

Dylan Silver (08:06.894)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (08:20.175)
So you decided to niche down into real estate and you touched on this right at the top of the podcast here. Your wife had an influence. She was getting her real estate license. But I’m imagining you’re also seeing a lot of clients that have maybe some kind of presence online but they’re not being ranked very high. And you say, OK, this is kind of a repeatable process that I can do with everyone in the real estate space.

Walk me through that though. Was the decision to niche down into real estate because you were getting a lot of clients from real estate or was it because you saw an opportunity there or a little bit of both?

Oleg Donets (09:00.654)
Yeah, it’s just very simple. We have a sole opportunity. We had already a few clients in real estate, right? We have one considerably large brokerage that we worked with in Houston, Texas back then, and a few smaller clients, like sole agents. And so yeah, it’s just literally from just seeing opportunity and kind of knowing already this industry, said, okay, let’s just roll that way.

Dylan Silver (09:27.019)
So you’re scaling now your business and you’ve niched down into the real estate space, 2013 timeframe. We’re now, know, 2025. So your business has been around for quite some time. Congrats on your success there. What were some pivot points along the way during that timeframe? How did you manage to adapt? You must have had to adapt with everything that’s changed since that time. Walk us through that.

Oleg Donets (09:55.778)
I mean, there definitely were a lot of pivots we made, right? So as I mentioned, know, just switching from, you know, from the industry, you know, from all the industries to a specific industry, then, you know, completely going away from, you know, the agency world and kind of becoming a product led company where we started developing our product, right? Over the years, I mean, there was so many different pivots. I can’t even think.

how many we did. yeah, it’s just like, you’re just seeing a certain obstacle right on the way and just trying to, you know, to survive, trying to make the right decision. You don’t always get the right decision. You know, wasted a lot of money. I guess not wasted, invested, you know, a lot of mistakes.

Dylan Silver (10:42.884)
Yeah.

Oleg Donets (10:48.151)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (10:48.195)
That’s how it happens though. You know, gotta grow from somewhere, right? The current iteration of your company today, Real Estate B’s, is this like an adaptation of that early business or is this something entirely different?

Oleg Donets (11:02.604)
Yeah, it’s, it’s, whenever we switched away from agency, right, so we have completely different name, everything, we created this new brand Realisted Bees as a platform. And from there we evolved it significantly. You know, we still obviously, we evolve it every single month. But yeah, like we developed really cool features, I think, in the platform. Over the years, you know, we kind of galvanized a few very popular products that right now work on the,

industry and we just try to iterate every single month and just to improve you know listening to feedback of our customers and you know try to provide more and more value.

Dylan Silver (11:43.695)
And so what does the platform do?

Oleg Donets (11:47.544)
So it does a lot of things, right? So I don’t want to get into all these things that it can do because it will confuse listeners. But primarily what we do, right, we help real estate professionals. At this point, real estate investors mainly, right, to grow their business through helping them acquire leads, right, acquire customers specifically for real estate wholesalers, flippers, landlords.

Dylan Silver (11:55.78)
Yeah.

Oleg Donets (12:14.552)
who are looking for off-market properties. we help really with acquisition. We work directly with motivated sellers. So we generate motivated sellers and then we help our clients to get connected to the sellers. Whether it is through our lead marketplace, paper lead, basically marketplace where investor can come and just buy leads as they please. They set criteria of their acquisition criteria and then

our system can buy it automatically for them based on the criteria.

Dylan Silver (12:48.611)
Very interesting. Lead generation is a big component of this. Is that 90 % of what you’re doing? there other components with it as well? Or is it mostly lead generation?

Oleg Donets (13:00.994)
Yeah, it’s mostly lead generation right now. So we’re trying to really kind of make very, very, you know, good quality product, right? So we don’t want to go different directions, which again, that’s one of the mistakes I made before. We try to kind of go different directions and it just never works. You need to pick one thing and just work with that. So yeah, so lead generation specifically, paper lead, right? So we are…

Dylan Silver (13:20.003)
do everything.

Oleg Donets (13:30.39)
really good at it and so we try to improve it just every single month make it better and better and better but yeah mainly

Dylan Silver (13:37.263)
There’s so many options that people can go to for lead generation specifically. What have you found your clients have gotten from you that has them continuing to come back?

Oleg Donets (13:55.026)
I mean it’s multiple things, right? Obviously the most important thing specifically for investors is the quality, right? It’s the motivation of the leads. And I won’t say that our leads, motivation of every single lead is there, right? Because there is no such company, lead generation company out there that can say, okay, 100 % of our leads will convert, right? It’s just impossible.

Dylan Silver (14:17.156)
Yeah.

Oleg Donets (14:24.034)
Yeah, mainly it’s a motivation because most of our leads come from search engine optimization, right? And so if you know the difference between the sources of those leads, right? And those investors who already work with different types of leads, they know exactly what I’m talking about because the intent behind those leads that come from search engines specifically from search engine optimization, right?

Dylan Silver (14:45.263)
Yeah.

Oleg Donets (14:52.91)
much higher, the intent much greater and much higher than the intent of the leads that come, let’s say, from Facebook ads, right, or from, I don’t know, YouTube ads or something like this. So yeah, the motivation is very important. The ease of working with us, I think, is also pretty straightforward. Another thing is the refund policy, right? So it’s like, it’s very, yeah, it’s very interesting how this works and there are a few other

paper-lead marketplaces out there. But the refund policy is very important, and so we kind of try to be very easy with that. So obviously, we don’t want users to kind of start requesting refunds on left and right whenever they couldn’t reach out to a seller or something like this, or they call them once and then seller didn’t answer and they refund it right away. So we try to kind of…

our quality assurance team tries to call them and see if it’s a real request or not. But generally, our refund policy is very lenient. So if it’s really bad lead or something like that, they can’t reach out to them, we will correct them.

Dylan Silver (16:06.927)
get a refund. know, for investors who may be starting out and may not have, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a month to pay for leads, but they want to know, you know, what’s the minimum that I should start with, like realistically to see some traction if I want to get a contract. Realistically, what’s the minimum that someone should have set aside? Is it, $3,000? Is it $5,000? How much do they realistically need to have set aside?

Oleg Donets (16:37.582)
Yeah, mean, it’s a good question. It really depends, right? Because there are two sides of the coin. One thing is to be able to get in contact with a motivated seller, right? So let’s say we cover that part of the coin, right? So we give you those motivated sellers. On the other side is your ability to close, really. Because this is one of the biggest issues that we see when people, you know…

Dylan Silver (17:00.441)
Yeah.

Oleg Donets (17:06.466)
they even request refunds for that just because they don’t have the skill to close the deal, right? But in general,

Dylan Silver (17:12.611)
Yeah, if you’re getting it under contract, that’s a win though.

Oleg Donets (17:16.566)
Right, but if they don’t know how to negotiate, they don’t know how to talk to a seller, know, it’s just they will never get there. Right? So it’s not just so. So, yeah, but in general, I mean, it’s like anything, right? And again, this is from my perspective. I’m not saying that this is the right way or not right way, but this is how I always do it. Right? If you’re serious about your business, right? If you, you know, you’re really serious, you want to start business and

Dylan Silver (17:24.398)
Yeah, no, you can’t.

Oleg Donets (17:45.292)
whether it is wholesaling or don’t know, plumbing or wherever it be, right? You need to have some sort of budget because without that, it’s just, you can’t grow their business. And so I would say, I don’t wanna say in terms of how many dollar amount, right? But I would say you need to commit mentally first of all, right? For at least doing something for a year, but also be able to have access to a capital, right?

Dylan Silver (17:57.518)
You can’t.

Oleg Donets (18:13.93)
At least I would say, I don’t know, if you were opening any business, how much money you would have, right? I would probably for myself, yeah.

Dylan Silver (18:25.837)
No, no, no, I said yeah, I agree with you.

Oleg Donets (18:28.782)
Yeah, so it just it depends really but again, I can tell you the numbers that you know what we see behind the doors, right? So what’s the ratio of you know contract clause based on the leads but again, this is more experienced investors right for a newbie. I don’t think those numbers apply. It’s just again, you have to commit for yourself, you know to have at least I guess $10,000 just you know to try one type of

Dylan Silver (18:45.167)
Yeah.

Oleg Donets (18:58.158)
lead generation, can be paper lead, can be mailers, it can be whatever, right? But stick with one type of lead generation for a while and invest reasonable amount, not $1,000, not $2,000, but at least $5,000, $10,000.

Dylan Silver (19:03.364)
Ryan.

Dylan Silver (19:11.012)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (19:15.895)
And you mentioned, Oleg, about being prepared mentally to do something for a year. This is actually really good advice, and I haven’t heard this before. You would think I would have with all the guests that I’ve had on the show and being a real estate agent myself and wholesaler. But when I was starting out, I couldn’t understand real estate contracts as just an outsider. I was like, I don’t get it, I don’t get it. There’s so many people are making their own contracts and then wholesalers kind of have this thing where like,

We got the best contract. Like, our contracts are like the be all in it. And now on the other side of it, and I’m like, well, kind of everyone uses a Trek contract. So probably maybe they had attorneys write these or they wrote them themselves. But either way, now I’m on the other side of it I’m realizing it’s gonna take people, many cases, a while to get their first deal. You hear some stories where people are doing amazing. They rip the cover off the ball. They do amazing. As soon as they start,

But those are kind of more rare and it’s more common. Definitely more than 50 out of 100.

Majority right for people to take a while to get their first deal and take it from the beginning to the end from the cradle to the grave So whether you’re investing Money into leads or not. It could take some time. I think investing into leads helps keep the momentum So if you have the ability to do so if you have the capital bandwidth to do so and you’re already mentally committed for a year You know, you’re gonna be able to weather kind of the peaks and valleys of momentum a little bit better

Oleg Donets (20:51.352)
I agree. Yeah, mean especially again, it’s it’s matter of choice, right? Because you can have you can go different directions when you start business. You have so many lead generation options to go there, right? But you need to think to yourself, okay What is the best kind of in terms of what is the most optimal way for me to get the fastest possible to a deal, right? Is it is it really send sending mailers, right?

mean, mailers are not cheap at all. You can send thousands of mailers, 10,000 mailers and have nothing, right? And those responses that you get, those will be very unmotivated people. They will kind of try to shop you out, right? So, again, not being biased in this, right? But if you think so, whenever you like, you want to shorten this amount of time to get to the deal, right? And so, lead is one of the best ways, the fastest way. I’m not saying this is the only way.

Dylan Silver (21:31.149)
Yeah.

Oleg Donets (21:48.75)
But you also have paper appointment and all these kind of models. But paper lead, basically you get to access motivated sellers whenever they need it, right? And so you just paper for that lead and you get to talk to motivated sellers immediately. You start wholesaling business today, you can start talking to a motivated seller today already. So it’s just a matter of.

Dylan Silver (22:16.919)
Yeah, mean, Oleg, I think about this space and I think really how many people, and I’m sure you’ve experienced this, Oleg, they may have had an experience or they may know someone who’s had an experience and it maybe wasn’t great, right? So then they think, well, this paper lead thing isn’t for me. But I think, you know, finding the right fit for you is also critical because I’m sure you have this experience as well. People might have used the platform, didn’t work out for them. So maybe they’re skeptical now, but then they come to you totally different.

experience that they have.

Oleg Donets (22:49.132)
Yeah, I mean we all the time we have people from other, you know, from that used other platforms or used other lead generation platform and the same from our side, right? They, as you said, they may try us for a while, right? And I’m not saying that, you know, trying the three leads is a good way to, you know, to test out anything, right? But definitely, you know, it’s just, again, it’s whatever works for you, right? So whatever you are willing to invest, how much you’re willing to invest and how serious you are about this.

But either way, if I were a wholesaler that started today, would, again, would commit mentally for a year at least to do consistently certain things that I need to do. I would pick one lead generation channel. It can be door knocking. It can be driving for dollars or something like this. Whatever you pick, but just do it for a year, and you will definitely see results.

Dylan Silver (23:46.541)
We are coming up on time here. Like, where can folks go to get ahold of you?

Oleg Donets (23:52.578)
Yeah, so you can just Google Real Estate Bees or just go directly to the website realestatebees.com and see all the services we provide, whatever we do. Again, I said we do a lot of different things. We not just help with acquisition, we do help with disposition as well for wholesalers and a lot of other things. again, our main primary focus right now is lead generation acquisition for

real estate investors, but yeah, also can find us on social media. are all, you know, on all these biggest channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Axe and all of that.

Dylan Silver (24:33.271)
Oleg, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Oleg Donets (24:38.008)
Sure, thank you for having me, Dylan.