NEW BOOK BY ADAM GOWER PH.D.
Capital Calls and RESCUE Capital
A guide to thriving during the coming real estate crash for real estate syndicators and their investors.
Raising Real Estate Capital on Social Media
By Adam Gower Ph.D.
Looking for investors, there’s a lot of pressure to be in the right place at the right time. Unfortunately, you only have so many hours in the day and you just can’t be in more than one physical location at once to meet and interact with potential real estate investors.
Luckily, social media is now available to help fill the gaps in your physical abilities. While you can’t be around the world all at once, social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and others are all tools in your arsenal to find investors and raise the capital you need for your developments.
Extending Your Reach
The value to you of social media is not to replace personal interactions with investors. Instead, these platforms are designed to help you extend your reach to places and people you wouldn’t have had access to before.
Think about it: how often do you get the opportunity to meet people from all around the US, and even those outside the US, in one location? Networking conferences and meetings are great, but social media gives you the ability to connect with people everywhere without having to pay to physically go anywhere.
The benefit of social media is its ability to put you in the same space as thousands, if not millions of investors at once. You may not be automatically connected to them, but you do gain direct access to them through messages, posts, content feeds, and more. Your reach has never been as extensive as it is through the top social media platforms.
Creating Your Own Audience
Considering there are millions of users on social media, including a great many of the accredited investor population, how do you actually connect with any of the people who could be interested in your investment projects? This is where your content strategy comes into play. By posting the right types of content and fostering the type of engagement you want, you’ll actively build your own audience and attract the types of prospects you want to attract.
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It’s the same kind of strategy you would use for a physical property. If you wanted to renovate a building, you would first want to have an idea of the type of end user you were looking to rent or sell to, then you would renovate based on that. Medical tenants don’t have the same needs as retail tenants, who are also different from industrial tenants, and so on. Build what appeals to the people you’re trying to attract by identifying who your target audience is up front.
On social media that means narrowing down your target audience and creating a content strategy that revolves around them. Find out what topics they like to view, what content types they prefer, when they’re usually online, and more. Use this information to craft content that grabs their attention and makes them aware of what you have to offer. They should want to know more from you because you’re providing them the type of value they’re looking for on social media.
Going from Online to Offline
Real estate investment has a long lead time. As you know, developing relationships with investors is never quick and easy. It takes a lot more than good content and a few online interactions to convince someone to put a significant amount of money into your development.
This is why social media is primarily and introductory tool and ‘top of funnel’ in the investor journey. Through social media you can connect with prospects for the first time and begin new relationships constantly. However, as the relationships grow and people begin to be more trusting and interested in what you’re offering, you can then take your conversations offline and meet up with them in person.
Transitioning to in-person meetings will give you to opportunity to pick up with the closing skills you’ve already built over the years. If you try to do it all online, you’ll have trouble being taken seriously enough for large-scale investments. Smaller crowdfunded projects may be possible through online interactions alone, but you’ll have better luck with larger developments if you take the relationship building offline as things progress forward.
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Social media offers a phenomenal opportunity for developers seeking capital for their projects. If you use your profiles well and post the right kind of content, you can build up a large audience of potential investors to start building relationships with.
Gone are the days of begging for introductions and hoping for Hollywood-esque run-ins with the right people. Add social media to your arsenal as a powerful modern tool for introductions to all the right people all in one place.
If you have only just started in real estate development, have completed no deals, have no email list, but know you want the freedom and wealth being a real estate developer brings, then I suggest your first step is to start evaluating deals so you can recognize a good one when you see it.
Here’s where you should start. You’ll learn everything you need to know – the different types of real estate, different development strategies, how real estate cycles influence the market, and all about due diligence.
If you want to find deals and raise money for them so you can start your real estate development business, then learning how to conduct due diligence so you can pitch your deals better to investors is a great place to start.
If you’ve already purchased one or more real estate project and are seeing more opportunities than you can finance, then now is the time to start building your investor network so you can finance all your next deals quicker.
You’ve already got some momentum; now start finding and educating prospects about what you’re doing so you can build an email list of people to pitch to when you’re ready to raise money for your next deal.
This is what we build for private clients all the time – it’s called the Investor Acquisition System and you can access the entire program right here so you can find prospects, and convert them into being deep pocketed, repeat investors in your deals.
If you are a seasoned pro with multi-cycle experience, a substantial portfolio, a decent deal pipeline, and find yourself spending too much time raising equity capital because you’re still doing it in-person, then it’s time you put technology to work for you.
The wonderful thing about doing this is that you’re not going to be doing anything different than you’re already doing and, guess what, you’ll never have to sit through investor meetings again.
Sounds crazy I know, but I lay the whole thing out for you in this white board workshop where I personally show you exactly what it takes for you to transform your equity raising into a fully automated, capital raising machine so you can find new investors while increasing commitments from your existing network.
