Category: General

2019-04-29 Live Training Call

On this live training call, we discussed…

  • Where do we find the recordings of the Investment Dominator Live Q&A Calls  – 6:55
  • How to export records with ampersand (&) characters in field(s) – 10:00
  • Can emails be placed directly into the Investment Dominator  – 15:40
  • How to format fields correctly in a .CSV file being imported into the Investment Dominator – 21:15
  • How to properly format APNs and Zip Code values – 29:20
  • How to split a large imported record list into smaller mailing lists – 31:00
  • How to export a list and import that same list back into Investment Dominator – 33:30
  • New 2019 Import process updates in the Investment Dominator – 38:40
  • How to enter Pat Live Reps into Investment Dominator – 42:00
  • How to manage Pat Live Reps in your business – 44:20
  • Does Investment Dominator highlight the records changed/updated after importing – 51:50
  • How to handle data files using Agent Pro – 57:30

2019-04-22 Live Training Call

On this live training call, we discussed…

  • What are the correct steps for obtaining an SSL Certificate for a website  – 0:00
  • Is an SSL Certificate required for our Land Websites – 4:20
  • Is the Pat Live Rep using an Offer request in the Investment Dominator  – 5:55
  • How to Merge fields to customize Offer Letters in the Investment Dominator – 7:40
  • What is the rationale for merging additional fields on Offer letters – 18:10
  • Why does the Investment Dominator system use Thumb Nail images in photos – 20:15
  • How to produce Neighbor Letters out of the Investment Dominator – 23:40
  • Will Investment Dominator leave a space if NO second owner exist on the Offer letter – 29:30
  • How extensive should negotiation conversations be with Sellers on the phone – 34:50
  • How to customize the PDF Neutral Letter Envelope – 39:30
  • How to reload Default print settings for the Neutral Letter Envelope – 45:10
  • How to prevent the incorrect printing of the Owner Reference # on the Neutral Letter Envelopes – 48:10

Phone System And Call Center

In order to build your land business in a scalable manner, we recommend that you set up your phone system with a company called Ring Central.

Ring Central will provide you with options such as custom extensions, directories, automated menus and more. They provide you also with both a local phone number, eFax number, and company toll-free number and sms/texting capabilities for your business.

Click here for more details. Or visit www.LPGphone.com

With Ring Central, you can easily set up a phone system that separates callers from your buying side and your selling side of the business. You can also set up additional extensions for marketing, pre-recorded messages, and even offer processing so that callers get routed to the right person or agent depending on their need.

Call Center

Even with your phone system may be setup through Ring Central you’ll want to consider outsourcing the actual call taking/ call processing to a Call Center and for that, we recommend Pat Live. Pat Live not only specializes in processing real estate calls for investors, but they also have experience taking land calls. Sign up through www.LandCalls.com to add a call center to your land business.

Additional Reference:
https://user-guide.investmentdominator.com/using-a-call-center-to-take-your-calls/

How To Customize The Look of Your Built-In Websites

In this two-part video tutorial we explain how to customize the look of your built-in websites using both the basic customization controls that are built into the Investment Dominator Admin Console under the ‘Customize> Website Settings – Buying‘ and ‘Customize> Website Settings – Selling’ areas as well as in part two, some advanced customizations you can make to your websites using CSS scripts.

NOTE: We do not recommend that you make CSS customizations to your websites and if you do, you do so at your own risk. If your websites become unresponsive or display an undesired look after you make your custom CSS modifications, you can remove your modifications from the ‘Customize> Website Settings> Website Header Tracking Code‘ area to reset the sites back to their default styles.

NOTE: In the 2nd part of this video we do not cover displays issues on mobile devices or tablets. You will need to make sure your CSS coder accounts for this and adds media queries to the style script that will adjust the look based on the screen size.
Reference: https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_rwd_mediaqueries.asp

How To Re-Order Statuses and Custom Statuses

If you’ve created Custom Statuses in the system then chances are you would also like to re-order your status such that they make sense in your new customized Deal Flow.

By default, new statuses will display at the bottom of the Status selection list. But you can change the order of your statuses (both default and custom) under the ‘Customize> Custom Stages and Statuses> Sort Status’ screen.

status4

Simply click and drag the statuses around on the preview screen to change the order they should appear in your lists.

Then click the blue ‘Save‘ button to save your changes.

System Email Notifications

IMPORTANT REQUEST:

The internet service providers (Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo…) are drowning more and more in spam. As a result they are taking more and more action to protect their users – YOU.

On a daily basis thousands of emails are being rejected directly and are not even allowed onto the server.

That means, the emails never arrive in your account – not even in your SPAM folder

To prevent that, I need you to urgently mark us as “Safe Senders” in your email program.

Otherwise it’s very likely that you won’t even receive over 60% of all my emails including our instructional videos.

If you haven’t yet done it, please whitelist us asap, or add the following emails to your Contacts list (for example with Outlook, Gmail or Yahoo):


Next, when you added our email to your Safe Senders List, or to your Contacts, please press REPLY and send a quick message back with just the words “I marked you as safe” or something like that.

That will also improve your deliverability rates a LOT, because your email provider now sees that you don’t just receive emails but you also answer (so there is back and forth communications which they love)

Another factor that can impact your delivery rates is: if you no longer open the emails you receive from me (for example you might say “I will collect these emails and look at them later”…

Or, you never interact with us (meaning you never click the actual links, or open or even read the emails, or you simply open and close them right away), then your providers will classify that emails form us as “non-important” and “not interesting” and will over time not show you these emails anymore.

So if you want to continue to receive emails from me, make sure you follow the instructions above.

Thank you!

Add Records

For the most part, you’ll want to create records in the Investment Dominator by importing data from into either the ‘Land Deals’, ‘House Deals‘, or ‘Buyers List‘ tabs. However, from time-to-time you may need to create just a single record manually. For that please follow the process below…

Create A Land Deal Record

  • Click the ‘Land Deals‘ tab.
  • Click the ‘Add Record‘ option at the top right side of the screen.
  • Fill out the fields under both the ‘Caller’ as well as the ‘Owner of Record’ sections (which includes the owner’s Name and Address) as well as at minimum the ‘Property State’, ‘Property County’, and ‘Property APN’ fields.

Create A House Deal Record

  • Click the ‘House Deals‘ tab.
  • Click the ‘Add Record‘ option at the top right side of the screen.
  • Fill out the fields under both the ‘Caller’ as well as the ‘Owner of Record’ sections (which includes the owner’s Name and Address) as well as at minimum the ‘Property State’, ‘Property County’, and ‘Property Address’ fields.

Create A Buyer’s List Record

  • Click the ‘Buyers List‘ tab.
  • Click the ‘Add Contact‘ option at the top right side of the screen.
  • Fill out at a minimum the ‘Name’ and either a ‘Phone’, ‘Email’, or ‘Address’ for the Contact.

Email Deliverability – SPF Record For Your Custom Buying Site Domain

We use a service called SMTP.com to relay our notification emails.

As long as you have configured your buying site’s domain with a www CNAME record to point to investmentdominator.com as recommended you shouldn’t have to make any adjustments in regards to the email notification system.

However, if you are pointing your domain to our servers another way then you must configure a TXT record with a TXT Value of :

v=spf1 include:_spf.smtp.com ~all

Set Property Location Option (Land)

Most vacant land lots do not have a property street address which is typically assigned to a property once a building permit has been filed. It is likely that the County Assessor will only provide you with partial property location information like the Property’s Township, Section, and Range numbers and legal description, and perhaps a Property Zip code and street name, while others just provide you with a copy of the Plat Map (Showing roads in the area and the lot location), or access to their GIS system (which is preferable).

Use the information the County provides to locate your lot within the Investment Dominator system…

  • Click the ‘Land Deals‘ tab at the top of the screen.
  • Click the ‘Offer Requests‘ Stage to pull up your properties in the “Pending Preliminary Research” status.
  • Hover over the ‘Options‘ icon and click the ‘Set Property Location‘ option.
  • An interactive map will appear and you can hold down your  Ctrl key on your keyboard while rotating your computer mouse wheel control to zoom in and out of the map. Click and drag the map area to move your location view until you locate your property per the information the County Assessor gives you for that property. 
  • Click the map to add a location pin to the property
  • Click the ‘Save Pin Location‘ to save both the GPS coordinates for the property (pin location) as well as the Property Zip code.

Install SSL For Custom Domains

Once you start using custom domains (recommend) for your Buying and Selling websites you’ll want to consider installing an SSL certificate for that domain. While this is not a required thing, more and more internet browsers, search engines, and virus scan software promote the use of the secured https protocol and without having an SSL certificate some web visitors will see unsecured connection disclaimer when they visit your websites.

NOTE: Websites with a SSL certificate installed will display a padlock symbol to the left of the web address when being viewed in a browser with the https:// protocol.

How To Generate A SSL Certificate?

  • STEP 1) GET THE CSR: First, you need to generate a .cert file and in order to do this, you need a .csr file from us that contains some required information. So to get started, please open a Help Ticket under ‘Help> Create A New Support Ticket’ and let us know what your custom domain(s) are that you want to secure. We will then generate a .csr file for you and send that back to you through the support ticket system. (NOTE: Before requesting a .csr file from support make sure your custom domain is pointed to our server via a www CNAME record as referenced in this user guide article:
    https://user-guide.investmentdominator.com/how-to-change-your-websites-domain/ )
  • STEP 2) GENERATE THE SSL: Using the .csr file that we provide to you, you can generate the .cert file by purchasing a SSL certificate from GoDaddy, or for FREE through services like LetsEncrypt.org (NOTE: If you are not technically inclined, we recommend that you go with goDaddy for this step as they can help you generate the certificate over the phone vs. other providers only give you a self-service set of instructions that you need to follow.)
  • STEP 3) INSTALL THE SSL: Upload your .cert file that you generated in Step 2 to your Investment Dominator support ticket that you created in Step 1 and we will install the file on your account and notify you when it has been activated.

Once the certificate has been installed you can go to the https:// version of your website to view the secure connection and certificate.

Go to the https:// version of your site and then click the grey padlock icon to the left of your web address. Click the ‘Certificate’ option to view your certificate details…
Example: SSL Certificate

Where Can You Get An SSL Certificate?

While there are many SSL providers out there (even free ones like www.letsencrypt.org) if you have already registered your domains with goDaddy.com (recommended) then the easiest way to obtain an SSL certificate is through your goDaddy.com account. More information about that can be found at: https://www.godaddy.com/web-security/ssl-certificate

Generating SSL With GoDaddy:

Below we have referenced the instructions for generating the .cert file with goDaddy depending on which type of SSL certificate you have purchased with them.

TypeGenerating SSL – Next steps (Instructional Reference)
goDaddy Standard Assurance SSL certificateRequest an SSL certificate (Standard Assurance)
goDaddy Deluxe or Extended Validation certificatesRequest an SSL certificate (Deluxe or Extended Validation)