Real Estate Lead Generation in the Age of AI with Bryan Driscoll Part 2 #966
In Part 2 of Joey Romero's conversation with Bryan Driscoll, founder of Motivated Leads, they continue their discussion on real estate investing, motivated seller lead generation, and what it really takes to turn leads into deals. Bryan explains why investors need to buy properties with the right numbers in mind, especially in a changing interest-rate environment, and why having a strong follow-up process can be just as important as generating the leads themselves.
The conversation dives into one of the biggest challenges investors face: what happens when the leads come in but the deals don't follow. Bryan explains why some supposedly “bad leads” may actually be opportunities lost because of slow response times or weak follow-up systems. He discusses the importance of using a CRM, automation, and quick communication to reach motivated sellers before the competition does. He also shares what investors should be tracking, why they need to understand where their time is going, and when outsourcing marketing can help them focus on the parts of the business that generate the most value.
Bryan also shares his perspective on AI and where it fits into real estate investing and marketing. While AI and automation can make businesses more efficient, he believes the personal conversations investors have with motivated sellers still require empathy and genuine human connection—especially when sellers are dealing with difficult life circumstances.
Beyond business, Bryan talks about how he manages his time between work, investing, family, fitness, and community involvement. He also shares the story behind The Goodness Game, which grew from his desire to pay forward an act of kindness he received years ago. His experience became a reminder that making an impact doesn't always require doing something huge—sometimes small acts of service can make a meaningful difference.
Bryan Driscoll is the founder of Motivated Leads, a real estate lead generation company that helps investors connect with motivated sellers through digital marketing. His experience combines marketing, entrepreneurship, and hands-on real estate investing.
Bryan also shares his personal journey into real estate investing, from attending a real estate seminar shortly after high school and struggling with his first attempts to find deals to eventually connecting those early lessons with his digital marketing experience. He explains how he used income from marketing to purchase properties, why he has remained focused on a buy-and-hold strategy, and how refinancing allowed him to recover his initial capital while keeping equity in his rental portfolio.
Today, Bryan continues investing while running Motivated Leads and building his rental portfolio. He is also the creator of The Goodness Game, a project centered on helping people discover their own way of giving back and showing how small acts of kindness can create a meaningful impact.
In this episode:
Why investors need to buy right and prepare for changing interest rates.
How fast follow-up and a strong CRM process can improve lead conversions.
Why some “bad leads” may actually be mishandled opportunities.
The key numbers and KPIs real estate investors should track.
Where AI can help—and why human connection still matters with sellers.
How Bryan balances business, investing, family, and community service.
The story behind The Goodness Game and the power of small acts of kindness.
Why experienced investors can use outsourced lead generation to buy back their time.
Episode:
Narrator
Welcome to the Norris Group Real Estate Podcast, a show committed to bringing you insights from thought leaders shaping the real estate industry. In each episode, we'll dive into conversations with industry experts and local insiders, all aimed at helping you thrive in an ever-changing real estate market, continuing the legacy that Bruce Norris created, sharing valuable knowledge, and empowering you on your real estate journey. Whether you're a seasoned pro or a newcomer, this is your go-to source for insider tips, market trends, and success strategies.
Welcome back to the Norris Group Real Estate Podcast, and welcome back to part two of our interview with Brian Driscoll from Motivated Leads. You've talked about not overleveraging yourself. How does that affect it now with the lending culture or climate that we're in now? Yeah, you got to buy right.
It's like you got to get a good deal on a property, and then you have to also anticipate too, what if interest rates go up? It's like 10 years ago, we're sitting there, it's great. Interest rates might go to three or four or five or something. It's like, what if they go to 12 or 15%? It's like, you need to think that now, because it could.
It was 18% before. Yeah. Bruce Norris talks about that.
In the early 80s, he refied his house to become a real estate investor, 18.5%. We've just been spoiled, where traditionally over the last 40, 50 years, it's about seven and a half. That's a real interest rate. Lately, we've all seen this on less than five, and then 2.75 for a little bit of time, and everybody just got spoiled.
We've had a couple of economists on, and one of them, he said that he actually is predicting double digit interest rates. People can't wrap their head around that because they haven't seen it. It's been so long.
If it happens, the market's going to adjust, but it's also keeping your head. When you get the deal, you got to get the deal right. Then if you fix it nice, the property value, the spread's going to be there.
A point or two shouldn't matter. It matters because it's real money, but we should still be able to adjust there. Sure.
Now, being a realtor sometimes gives you access to deals that other people won't get. Does being a marketer give you access to deals that maybe other people don't get to? Sometimes. See, I only invest in a really small market just because I don't want to drive that far.
Yeah, I would have access to a lot of deals. It's just I don't have the time to even go look at them. I only invest in one zip code in Pittsburgh.
I don't even drive past three miles. I want to accumulate properties. I want to accumulate nice properties that have families in them that don't turn over and they don't beat up my house.
I know the neighborhood where I live, so I can just walk into a place. I don't have to worry about getting priced out or bidding wrong or anything like that. I'm super busy at my day job.
I work 12 hours. I'm hustling. I don't want to drive far.
The downside, though, is I miss almost every deal out there because on average, with an online lead, one out of 10 are turning into a deal. And getting leads in only one zip code, it's hard. You only get a very small amount of leads.
I can get tons of leads in Pittsburgh, but to get them in this one zip code, it's like I might get one lead a month. So it's like, okay, you can't really scale by doing it that way. Yeah, and that kind of leads to what I want to talk about right now.
So what happens when the leads come in but the conversions don't? Do you get a lot of pushback? Because I see you have coffee reclosers back there. Everybody wants the Glengarry leads. They don't want the bad leads.
So how do you respond when an investor tells you, oh, your leads are bad? You know what we started doing is I started auditing people's processes when we bring them on as a client. Because there's only two reasons you're going to fail. It's like the leads suck or your process sucks.
So what we do is we start looking at, okay, hey, Joey, let's talk about your process. Number one, do you have a CRM? If they don't have a CRM, okay, let us get you a CRM. We'll put some automations in there at least to get you started.
But if you do have one, let's see what happens when a lead comes in. I was just looking at someone's stuff last week. It was 32 hours before the first contact after a lead came in because it was on a weekend and it was overnight.
It's like, you're not going to have a very good success. You might get some deals, but that person that wants to sell yesterday, they talked to the next guy, they filled out his form. He met them that day and he got the deal.
You still didn't even call him yet. Now you're calling, he's not answering the phone because he doesn't need you anymore. Yeah.
That's exactly what we were telling people at Tsunami, that the investor that has that in place is going to respond even if it's just an automated text. Like, all right, hey, I'll call you in the morning or ask for some information. And then you follow up as soon as you can.
And just because you're not contacting them, you could set up, like one of the things that we use our Go High Level for is not only are we responding to clients, but I get the notification that, hey, somebody just responded. So it's like, I'll set up the text and I'll take the text from that. It's like, okay, I better check my CRM because I got something coming in.
Right. And you know what too, say in the middle of the night, we have a text that goes out and says, hey, Joey, thanks for filling out a form about selling 123 Main Street. Here's a link to my calendar to book an appointment for me to come give you an offer.
If you do things like that, if you picture the person laying in bed at two in the morning scrolling, they go to Google, they fill out the first website. What are they doing next? They're going to the next website. So what we want to do is we want to pull them away from that Google, book the appointment.
They feel like, okay, I at least accomplished what I needed to do at this moment. And hopefully you cut the competition off. You're answering all my questions before I get to them.
That's great. So what percentage of supposed bad leads are actually just Manhattan, you know, mishandled leads? It depends on who's handling them if they're bad. So I'll tell you this, out of 10 leads for inbound marketing, normally six leads want too much money or they're just not a fit.
Four leads are usually leads people want. Usually guys lock down one of those. So it's usually like a one out of 10, maybe one out of 15 conversion.
So if, and that's on inbound marketing, like Facebook, Google with direct messaging, not like on Facebook, find out how much your house is worth, which is something you got to worry about on Facebook, especially if you're buying leads from people. What's the message say? Or if you're generating them yourself, you don't want to use that message because you're getting like realtor leads. Or they just don't even want to sell their house.
They just want to see how much it's worth. Yeah. All right.
Let's, let's, let's finish with a quick round. What's the best dollar you've ever spent on marketing? Our best dollar I've probably buying a book, richest man in Babylon. It's not even marketing best dollar is like putting it in like learning and not even like spending it in the channel.
It's like, okay, let me go find someone else that did something and like consume it and then make it my own. Yeah. You know, I've been on a weight loss journey for the last couple of years and I I've been listening to books a lot.
And so I, you know, run the gamut from AI to, you know, personal motivation books to just fun books. And, um, you know what, that's, that's one of our founders, uh, favorite top, top five books is a rich man Babylon. That's a great book.
Yeah, that's a good one. So what's the worst lead source you've ever paid for the word? Worst lead lead source I've ever paid for was probably downloading leads and then just telemarketing them. Like, like just buying one of those lists online when you start, it's like, Hey, you know what? We'll give you these thousand leads.
You don't even know where they're coming from. And you're basically just buying an Excel sheet and hoping that like actually came from a data source. Yeah.
So what's the number that every real estate investor should be tracking? Uh, but isn't the number they should be tracking. I would probably say the KPIs that we already talked about before. And then also what are you doing all day? I would probably track like for a week, a daily log of what you do all day.
And then number one, see what you can give to AI, but also number two, see what you're doing. That's like not efficient. What's actually making money, right? Right.
So what's the biggest mistake that investors make when they're trying to handle their own lead generation? I would say trying to become a marketer and then you lose focus on your business. It's like, I see a lot of investors. They want to learn marketing.
It's like, okay, you got to learn a whole bunch, but then back to where you're spending your time during the day. It's like, if I can make $500 an hour and I can pay someone else a hundred dollars an hour to do what I'm doing, pay the guy a hundred bucks. You're still 400 ahead and do something different.
What's the one part of real estate investing that you personally don't think that AI will ever replace? Dealing with the seller, like the actual conversations with the sellers. Sitting across the table, right? Yep. Even on the phone, being able to be empathetic because people that are motivated to want to sell, they're dealing with life issues.
They have a problem. So it's like, you have to be empathetic and try to help them solve it. They're not just a number.
Yeah. One of my mentors in insurance sometimes will tell me no is the right answer sometimes. Yep.
It's hard to know when that happens because you're so hungry for that yes. Now I've heard you talk about you working 12 hours a day and you're doing the side hustle, but you're still, your husband, your father, you're doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. You're still active in that? Yeah.
Yeah? Like tournaments or just like you practice? No, no. Just like messing around. Okay.
So how do you protect that time though, like with your family? And so like for me, it was the nonprofit space. I'd worked and then a nonprofit, then I have my three kids. Now they're all, two of them in college and one of them's flying for FedEx.
But I always had this like, Hey, the weekdays are for the business. The weekends were for my family. How have you purposely set aside time to stay engaged with your family and make sure that your kids don't miss on the best part of their day? That's a good question.
So what I do is I wake up around four in the morning, I'll exercise, then I'll read the Bible. And then I'll do like my morning work. Then I'll usually work until like then around six, six o'clock, seven o'clock when the kids get up, certain different grades, I'll hang out with them, drive one of them to school.
The other two are taking the bus. And then I'll work till like five o'clock after five o'clock, I try to shut down and just focus on the family. So it's kind of, I work a lot, but I wake up early to do it.
And then on the weekends, I will, like, it's funny, you said a nonprofit idea. I'm involved in a nonprofit. We feed the homeless every Sunday, downtown Pittsburgh.
And I'll take the kids down there with me too, to experience different types of things. But on the weekends, I try to do things with the family and at night. So it's kind of like, I'm just working like a normal job.
I just happen to be awake four hours before everybody else. I'm an early riser too. I love it.
My, the rest of my family, they don't, and they're like, they're waking up nine, nine o'clock, 10 o'clock on the weekends sometimes. And I'm like, I've done five hours worth of stuff already. I love it.
Cause you still have the full day. Now I need my naps a little more now and then. Yeah.
You gotta get to bed early. Yes. So you created the goodness game.
Can you tell our listeners, you know, what it is and how that came about? Sure. So, so I came up with the goodness game. I ran away when I was a long time ago, right? Some lady picked me up on the side of the road.
I was going to sleep. I was in Orlando, Florida. I was going to sleep in the Greyhound station and some random lady pulled up on the side of the road and picked me up, gave me a place to stay.
And, uh, I owe her some money still. Like she, she gave me a place to stay, spotted me 300 bucks for a hotel. And then I ended up coming back to Pittsburgh.
I owed her this $300 still. Right. So it's like I came back, I was drinking, doing all kinds of stupid stuff cause I was young.
Um, but eventually I wanted to pay her back and I don't know who she is. Like, I don't have her contact info. I lost it.
So my idea was I'm going to pay it forward. I saw the pay it forward movie. I'm like, I'm going to pay it forward.
And I started just doing things more out of guilt for myself. Cause I couldn't like pay this person back that helped me out. I started doing things and I'm like, it's interesting because it's like the small things that make a difference.
You know, cause I, everyone always, and I thought myself too, it's like, Oh, you got to go start a nonprofit or you got to do this or do these really big things. And, uh, so I had, I was curious. I'm like, let me see if this is actually true.
Can I prove this? So what I did was about 10 years later, this was like in 2009 I put it out on Craigslist saying, Hey, I'll come to your, I picked a random city, which happened to be Chicago. I'm like, Hey, I'll come to your city, help you out. No strings attached.
Just pay it forward. And I posted, I didn't even know who was going to reply or anything, but people responded back to it with like real things. They're like, some guy needed a ride to go pick up a truck.
And this was before Uber. Um, and like, you know, back in the day, some lady needed help taking down a swing set. So I just got my stuff.
I was single at the time. No kids. I'm like, I drove to Chicago from Pittsburgh, drove up, help some people out for the weekend.
And number one, I felt awesome. Like I remember driving on the way home in Ohio. I'm like, this is sweet.
Like, I feel really good, but I documented it and put it on YouTube. Didn't put my name or anything, but it went viral like worldwide. And, uh, so I looked at it.
I'm like, okay, small things do make a difference. And I think that everyone that wants to do, I think everybody in human, like all humans want to do something to help someone. And I think one of the holdbacks are people think they have to do certain things.
And I, so it's kind of like the five love languages I looked at. It's like, you have different helping styles. Some people want to be a connector.
Like, Hey, I got a guy, let me connect you with them. Some people want to just donate money. Some people want to go and like serve, like actually hand out food to people.
So that's where the goodness game came from. It's like, it's a framework on how can you find out what your helping style is and also not burnout and go out and make an impact without doing like super large things. So is that a book? Is that a website? Is it like, how did people find it? Yeah, it's a book.
You can check it out on Amazon. Uh, it's goodness, game.com, uh, all the stuffs on there too. You can take the helper's test right on there.
It's free. Um, you don't have to pay for it, but, and you can also like, I put a map on there too. Speaking of AI, me not being a developer, I was able to build a website with a map and a database that people can put kind acts in all over the world.
It's like, I would have probably had to spend like, I don't know, five or 10 grand to pay someone to do that. Sure. And I was able to do this now because I had the idea and I can make it happen, but that's like one use case.
Therefore I did Claude with that one. That's, that's really cool. Yeah.
You know, when I did all my volunteering in the past, you know, they always knew dad would volunteering and when I could, I'd take them. But last year we, we got a chance to not, not, um, not hand out food, but I took my whole family. So my three kids, their girlfriends, boyfriends, all that.
And, uh, and we worked in the kitchen making the food. It's so like making these like huge, like vats of like a potato salad. And what I found out is that I have a superpower.
I can cut onions for hours and I don't cry. So I was like the onion guy and I'm sitting there like tubs and tubs of onions that I'm cutting for this, you know, the stuffing that we were making. And everybody's like, Oh my God, I can't believe you're doing it.
But that was, it was so cool. And yeah, it like, like we didn't, we didn't even like, like we did this on Thanksgiving and we came home and we had like pizza, you know, it was like, it was just like kind of cool. Just like just doing something, you know, we have no idea.
We didn't get to like, you know, pass it out. We didn't do any of that kind of stuff. All we do is cook.
And it was so cool. It was so like, it was probably our favorite Thanksgiving ever. You know, that's really cool.
And you know what, you have a good point there too, because like, even in a book I talked about this too, it's like give without remembering is what I call it. It's like, so you're doing something, you know, someone out there is getting the benefit, but you don't have to see it. It's like, I'm just doing the thing like cutting onions and cooking the food.
You know, there's a whole bunch of people getting fed from it, but you're not the person handing it to them, but you know. Yeah. So, all right.
So let's get back to how we can help investors. Like how can they connect? And what's, what's what's your biggest pitch for why investors who are starting out should use a company like yours? Sure. So if investors want to reach out, it's motivatedleads.com. I would say we are for the, not the brand new investor.
If you're brand new, go drive for dollars. You got to know how to do the deals first before you spend money, just because you can give us money. And if you don't have those processes built, the likelihood of succeeding is going to be low and you're going to tell us our leads suck and all this, right? What I would say is the guys doing deals, if you want to, if you're busy now generating your own leads, we can, you can buy your time back with us.
So we'll do all the marketing. We'll generate the leads and we'll send them to you right into your CRM or however you want them. Just on an a la carte basis, no monthly fees or anything.
Now we're mainly in California. You all over the country? Yep. Yeah.
All over the country. All right. Is there any other, so what's, what's the best way to, is it just motivatedleads.com or is there a certain like a phone number or anything you want to put out for people? Now just go to motivatedleads.com. We have a number on there.
You can also look me up on LinkedIn, just Brian with a Y Driscoll. That's a good way to get ahold of me like personally. And if you're looking for leads, just go right to the website.
Perfect. Well, we'll link all of that stuff in the, in the show notes. So we'll put them out on YouTube and on all the, you know, all the podcast services that we're on.
So Brian, thank you so much for being on with us. I really appreciate it. I'm sure that a lot of our investors are going to find a lot of great insight from, from this episode.
So thank you so much for being with us today. Hey, thanks for having me. It's a good time.
For more information on hard money loans, trust deed investing, and upcoming events with the Norris Group, check out thenorrisgroup.com. For more information on passive investing through the DBL Capital Real Estate Investment Fund, please visit dblcapital.com. The Norris Group originates in services loans in California and Florida under the California DRE license 01219911, Florida mortgage lender license 1577, and NMLS license 1623669. For more information on hard money lending, go to thenorrisgroup.com and click.
