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NEW! Robust Analytics, Slick Dashboard, and Fresh Site Design Options! 

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Today is a pretty big deal. Why you ask? Because we just rolled out 3 major updates to the InvestorCarrot platform (Carrot V2) that are going to make your life easier, more effective, and be an amazing platform to house our future inbound marketing tools and features. It’s funny how things work out. For the past 6 months we’ve been working on some big projects here at Carrot and several of them just happened to wrap up around the same time. So we decided to do one big release (after a bunch of testing) this morning of those 3 major updates. More under the radar, we’ve also released dozens of other smaller updates this year and have other big updates rolling out over the next several weeks (like Land Buying / Selling websites, and more). But let’s dive in to what’s new in your InvestorCarrot account as of today! NEW: The Carrot Dashboard: The Foundation For The Future Our vision here at Carrot is to build the single most effective and simple to use tool for high achieving real estate investors (and soon to be agents as well) to attract more high quality prospects online and convert more of them into profitable leads.  With tens of thousands of leads per month being pulled in through our platform by our members every month already, we’re proud as heck of what our members like you have helped us build over the past 2.5 years. But, to make room for the amazing features and tools we have planned for the rest of 2016 and into 2017, we decided to redesign your user dashboard from the ground up. Take it for a spin and let us know how you like it. The biggest changes you’ll see are…  More simplified dashboard showing your websites in a more compact space We’ve brought many of the settings for your websites out of the confusing WordPress interface and into a simple and intuitive custom dashboard. Want to add tracking codes to your site? Attach a domain? Great, it’s just 2 clicks away now :-) More robust website stats! (more on that below) Better organized way to display the different types of websites you can setup in your account It looks clean and crisp. Can’t beat that! You’ll notice more changes too but you’ll have to dig into your new dashboard to discover everything :-) Check Out More Of Our Latest Features: NEW! All Your Leads In One Place, Campaign Tracking, & A New Dashboard View NEW: Know Your Numbers With Carrot Site Stats Having quick access to your basic website stats is important to knowing what’s working and what isn’t. So we decided to bring more useful data and fancy graphs right into your dashboard for each website. This will help you save time from having to learn Google Analytics and it’ll deliver you the essential traffic data that you need on a continual basis. You’ll notice more changes to your stats to come as well so be on the lookout! Now See Robust Traffic Stats (more to come!) NEW: Fresh Website Styles Rebuilt From The Ground Up For Desktop And Mobile = Beauty + Performance At Carrot, all of our website design decisions are based on performance. Will these changes improve the conversion rate and overall ROI for our clients or not? Over the past year we’ve had countless requests for “new site designs” so you can even better stand out from other’s in your market. After all, you already know that Carrot is the most effective tool for SEO and conversion in the industry (which is why more Carrot websites control more top … Continued

How To Use Facebook Retargeting Ads To “Fetch Back” More Real Estate Leads

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You know all of those sellers, buyers, and tenants who land on your real estate website but never fill out a form or give you call? (i.e. – most of your visitors) They bail from your site to never return. What if you could “fetchback” a healthy percentage of them and turn them into a lead and deal after they leave?  Well, you can (and we have been) do it with retargeting… especially Facebook Retargeting. Follow along with us as we walk through the steps to create a simple Facebook campaign to fetch back your lost leads. So put on your big boy (or girl) pants and roll up your sleeves for this really really detailed guide on getting your first Facebook retargeting ad launched today. It’s a doozy so hold on tight :-) So, What Exactly Is Retargeting / Remarketing Anyway And Who Should Use It? Raise your hand if you’ve ever visited a website (looking at shoes or even our site) and then magically you see ads on Facebook and other websites you’re on for that exact company or product? Ya, I think we all have. And retargeting ads return the best ROI that we see in any of our own marketing. Retargeting basically drives potential leads back to your website by targeting the users who have previously visited your website with ads on other websites… like Facebook… but didn’t opt-in or take a specific action. Once the visitor leaves your website they can be displayed customized ads as they move around the Internet. These ads bring your brand back in front of them, often generating the highest click-through and conversion rates of any type of online advertising. How Retargeting Works In Simple Terms Retargeting can be one of the highest return on investment paid advertising channels real estate investors and agents can use today. As far as what types of real estate investors or agents should be using retargeting / remarketing on Facebook in your business, if you’re doing any of these types of marketing actively below you NEED to be using retargeting. Are you actively marketing and driving traffic to your website right now using any of these?  Direct mail – If you include your website or if people search on Google and land on your site, retargeting is a must. PPC Marketing – If you’re driving people with paid clicks through PPC, retargeting is a must. SEO – Working your butt off on that high ranking that’s generating traffic? Retargeting is a must. Craigslist – Yes, Craigslist is free, but may as well fetch people back who visit your site but don’t convert right away. TV / Radio – People are likely hitting Google to research your company name or phone number and landing on your site. Retargeting is a must for you too. Buying Leads – After you call a lead you bought, they’re hitting the web and researching you. If they land on your site, keep your name in front of them with Facebook retargeting If you’re doing any of those actively and investing money and time into them, retargeting will help you fetch back more of them who visit your website and turn them into more leads over time. If you convert just 1 more deal every year because of retargeting isn’t it worth it? I’d say so. Why Use Facebook Retargeting Specifically As A Real Estate Investor Or Agent? First off, marketing 101 is to deliver a targeted message to your best prospects where they already hang out. That’s why bandit signs can be so effective… because you’re putting your message in front of your prospects where they’re already driving. With … Continued

Using SEO To Close 3-5 Deals Per Month (How Jack is doing it)

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So you’ve heard people say you can’t generate consistent deals with SEO? Tell that to Jack of Jack Buys Houses in Orlando, FL… he closes 3-5 deals a month in Florida almost exclusively through his search engine optimization efforts. See how… Are those results typical? They’re not… but Jack worked his butt off and continually hounded us on our weekly coaching calls (we say that lovingly because we love it when customers do that!) for months with questions and advice that helped him crack his Carrot website from page 2, to page 1… to the top spot in his market. We had a chance to sit down with Jack recently and have a conversation with him about…  How he got started in real estate investing How he closed his first deals and why he dove into wholesaling in his market when others were heading the other direction What makes his online marketing strategy so effective for him in his market Hear Jack’s Story + Learn How He Incrementally Grew His Google Rankings To Turn 3-5 Deals A Month This case study is a full-length deep dive into Jack’s story and how he’s built a very successful wholesaling and investing company over the past 2-5 years and his exact strategies on how he cuts through the clutter online in a sea of other competitors trying to find active cash buyers in his market too. Click play and dive in!  Not a Carrot member yet? Take a demo and see InvestorCarrot in action >> Things Jack Covers…  Start – 4 mins talks about how he went from a Target executive to doing short sales and now 4-5 wholesale deals a month 3:40 – What he learned from Warren Buffet that helped him leave his day job in 2009 8:25 – Why he dove into short sales first + his business strategy that helped him crush it (personally did over 350 short sales) 12:20 – How he took the leap into rehabbing and wholesaling in 2012 and why most wholesalers are doing it wrong 12:45 – Currently do approx 5 wholesale deals a month (over 100 deals so far!) 17:15 – What 1 DEAD SIMPLE thing gives him an edge on deals (that most wholesalers drop the ball at) 21:00 – Started marketing w/ direct mail first, didn’t get solid results then decided to get a website up. Found Carrot and “Just did what you guys said to do and the rest is history. I haven’t done direct mail in a year. Every one of my leads come from Carrot”. “I found you guys, and I’ll be honest w/ you. All I did was this Trevor. I just did what you guys said to do. Because everything is pretty much done. You just pull it out of the box. A few things you have to do on the backend. I just did what you told me to do. And the rest was history. I’ll be honest w/ you… I haven’t done direct mail on over a year. All of my leads come from Carrot. I don’t do bandit signs, I don’t do direct mail, I don’t do postcards, I just do Carrot (closes 4-5 deals a month)” 24:10 – How he generates his leads online (and more importantly, what he doesn’t do and why) 28:30 – Trevor walks Jack through a couple ways to ramp up his leads even further in his market in a big way (“PPC Stacking”, City Specific Landing Pages, and swiping more Google real estate, and retargeting) 35:20 – Jacks biggest surprise working w/ Carrot was the results. He assumed he’d get a certain amount of leads but he didn’t think he could … Continued

The Anatomy Of A High Converting Mobile Responsive Website For Real Estate Investors

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So, you already know your website needs to be “mobile optimized”… right? In fact, 64% of our motivated house sellers, cash buyers, and rent to own tenant leads were from mobile devices last month. But what the heck does that mean and why is your “mobile optimized” website likely losing you tens of thousands of dollars per year in lost leads and lost deals without you even knowing it? If you have the choice of a higher-performing website vs. one that loses leads… which would you choose? You may be asking the question… Does A Higher Conversion Rate On Your Cell Phone Visitors Really Matter? Even if your mobile website for real estate investors is not responsive, it may still not be geared to convert visitors into qualified leads at a high rate. That’s a whole different ballgame. You’re investing a lot of time, energy and money with PPC, Facebook, and SEO.  You want to get qualified leads to your websites without any technical deficiencies. No mobile deficiencies. Your Website On Mobile Is Perhaps More Important Than Your Desktop. Here’s Why… Through Quarter 1 and Quarter 2, 2020, our Carrot members pulled in over 142,136 buyers, sellers, and tenant leads all through mobile devices (cell phones and tablets). That number doesn’t include any leads that came through on desktop computers or any phone call leads (which according to our surveys is as much as 2x more than the online opt-in leads). A full 64% of our member’s leads came from mobile devices last month. That’s a lot. This is why internally we started making it a point to make it an everyday practice to spend as much time using our cell phones on our customer’s sites so we can continually improve the mobile experience and conversion rate. Here’s an interesting stat for you… The visitor to lead conversion rate on our Carrot websites is a full 3 percentage points higher on mobile devices than on desktop computers. Why? Because most real estate investor websites look really bad on mobile and aren’t set up to perform well on mobile… so a web searcher bounced off of those sites… back to Google… finds a Carrot site (which is streamlined to generate leads on mobile devices) and engages in the Carrot site… becoming a lead. We feel right now anyone with a really well-optimized mobile responsive website design has a big edge on those who don’t. As we’ve really shifted a lot of our focus over to mobile (we believe in getting ahead of the curve vs. following it) we’ve seen some really interesting patterns in the way people use their different devices to find information online. Here’s a graph below that shows when people are using different devices during the day. Basically, people are using mobile devices the vast majority of the time in non-work hours. And these tend to be the times that more leads come in on mobile devices by far. In fact, digging into our own data… we found the same exact trend in fact. Percent Of Leads By Time Of The Day From Mobile And Tablet Notice how the mobile leads on our system correlates in a big way with the mobile usage patterns… but also see the importance that mobile plays when people are at home. It’s a big deal. So We Know That Mobile ISN’T The Future, It’s The Dominant Force Already… Below we’ll dive into how your real estate investing website or agent website should be designed to maximize your chance at converting your visitors into qualified leads. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say… … Continued

February Harvest Report – Lead Data & Survey Results

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As we wrap up another month in 2016 we are ready to bring you InvestorCarrot’s lead data for February. Despite being the shortest month of the year, the lead volume was right on pace with December and January. InvestorCarrot members generated 14,178 online opt in leads last month (this doesn’t include the tens of thousands of phone call leads). Which is very close to the 14,212 leads that were generated in January. Consistent lead flow is a great asset for a business. If you are driving traffic on a consistent basis it can make your marketing dollars stretch when you know which channel are your most profitable. Thanks to everyone who took our 2016 survey last month! The survey gave us great insight and data We ran a survey in February to get a little more information about how many deals members were closing from their leads, and to get some feedback on how we can make improve Carrot even more in 2016 (we have exciting news on the horizon). The general consensus among our team after conducting this survey was…we need to do these more often. We got a ton of great feedback from our members and got a lot of great questions from the form. We read through every single submission, suggestion, and question. After talking with our team, we wanted to put together some answers and share some of the data we gathered from the survey. Our hopes in sharing these results, is it answers a question you have, shows you where you are at in comparison to other Carrot members, and gets you excited about some of the changes we have in store for Carrot. So let’s get started with some data and insights we found from the survey. 1. 74% of our members primary investing strategy is either Wholesaling or Fix & Flip This isn’t a huge surprise to us, but we were curious if members were using their Carrot websites for investing strategies that were new and creative. We did find a few note buyers and commercial real estate investors. The breakdown wholesaling came in at 43% and fix and flip was 31%. 2. 34% of our members have closed between 1-5 deals in the past 12 months We are always curious about how many deals our members are closing from the leads they generate on their website. Tracking that data would be difficult and is often left to us reaching out to customers and hearing about their success. With this survey we were pleasantly surprised when a lot of members shared with us how many deals they have closed. Closing 1-5 deals is a huge success and we are proud as heck that our members are turning leads into revenue. Nearly 29% of Carrot member said they have yet to close a deal from their Carrot websites. We are constantly working on ways we can improve Carrot to help bring this number down. 9% of Carrot members said they closed over 20 deals in the last 12 months. These members tend to be leveraging a lot of different marketing strategies and are driving a large amount of traffic. If you’d like to learn about ramping up your marketing budget and leads, consider investing in an SEO firm or a PPC campaign. Talk with us today about how we can help. 3. We asked about what content you wanted us to write…the answer was overwhelmingly SEO We were curious what types of blog posts, training’s, and featured content our members and prospects wanted to read from us. Within our company, we all had our hunches, … Continued

6 Simple (but powerful) Questions A Six-Figure Per Month Wholesaler Asks Motivated House Sellers

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Don’t you wish you could listen in while a 6 figure per month wholesaler talks to a motivated seller? Many real estate wholesalers focus so much on “getting the lead” that they forget that a huge leverage point in closing more deals in the first 3 minutes on the phone with a motivated seller. Bryan Harris, the CEO of  Homes For 10k, a 6-figure per month investor and Carrot member from Memphis Tennessee hopped on and walked us through 6 of his most important questions he asks during the initial motivated seller prospect call. But first, Bryan wanted to stress the importance of perhaps the single most important (yet simple) thing that most investors just flat fail at that is costing them deal after deal without them even knowing it. Did You Know, You’re… Talking with Bryan and several other real estate wholesalers and flippers who do $100k/mo in different markets around the country they always say they’re amazed at how few of their “competitors” call back the leads they get quickly. As InsideSales study said… ‘It’s like taking all of that money you spend on marketing and setting it on fire.” The bottom line there is a lot of competition, so call back your leads as soon as you get them in. There’s no such thing as too fast. Online leads can be a very impatient bunch. Competition can be Fierce. Leads have many other investors to contact, so they expect a very fast response to their inquiries. Ideally, you will respond to them with a phone call within a few minutes. Always be prepared to respond. Have your questions ready to go. You can be the best negotiator in the world… but if you’re not following Bryan’s advice above on calling back your web leads immediately… you’re competition could be grabbing deals out from under you before you even get the chance to call the seller. Quick Tip: Have your web leads instantly sent to your phone with a text message! The Carrot Instant Text Message Lead Notification feature sends you a text message as soon as leads come in so you can tap a button and call back your web leads immediately. This feature alone could possibly save you from losing a deal or more every year and pay for your Carrot membership for years and years and years. Not A Carrot Member Yet? Take a demo to see why the top investors are all switching to Carrot! 6 Simple High-Impact Questions to Ask Motivated House Seller Leads When You Call So, you got a lead that came in over the web, GREAT! You already know that you NEED to call them back immediately and that every minute that passes your chances at turning it into a deal goes down. Now, let’s dive into what Bryan Harris, a 6 figure per month wholesaler in Memphis says on the phone when he talks with motivated house sellers. Now let’s turn it over to Bryan!  Brendan: Bryan, it’s all, you man! Bryan: Awesome, I’ll just go ahead and dive in! Ok, so when I call back a motivated house seller I like to start the phone call very much like I’d start a call with a friend of mine. You don’t want to go straight to the numbers and the deal. I’ll dive into my basic structure for talking to motivated sellers in this post. I’m not really going to give a “motivated seller phone script” mainly because I feel that when you use scripts things don’t come off as authentic and real. So I’d be doing a disservice to you if I told you to “grab my script and … Continued

3 Top Tips for Planning Your 2016 Search Engine Marketing Budget

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How much should you invest in search engine marketing in 2016? This includes SEO and PPC. Well in this post we’ll dive into the 3 things I consider when I dive in to create an effective and high ROI SEM (search engine marketing) budget for myself and the clients that we work with in the real estate industry. If you’re feeling beads of sweat drip down as you try to determine where to spend your marketing dollars to get more real estate deals for the highest ROI, don’t fret. I have three top tips to help you make smart decisions. 1. Dig Into The Long-Tail Keywords, Not Just The “Broad” Popular Ones Your Competitors Are Using Long tail keywords are easier to leverage and often times bring a high quality visitor to your site. Why? They’re very specific – often three to six word – keyword phrases (also less competitive than more general keywords). Long-tail keywords became more important to online marketers with the advent of Google Hummingbird, Google’s major algorithm update in 2013, which gives preference to the long tail keyword. With a recent surge in voice search via platforms such as Siri and Google Voice Search, there’s no question: long tail keywords are more important than ever. People are searching just as they speak, so it’s time to pay even closer attention to real estate investor keyword phrases like, “How to sell my home fast?” vs. just “sell house.” But even if you’ve mastered the art of conversational dialogue and are pretty certain you know how people might search, there’s a science to figuring out how to get ranked for the right long tail keywords with the least amount of effort / cost (relatively speaking). So working with a good SEO agency to ensure you have a solid long tail keyword strategy in place is definitely going to be vital to online marketing success in the coming year. Here is an infographic that dives into the key differences of long-tail vs. short-tail (or broad) keyword phrases. Source: http://reportgarden.com/2015/07/09/short-vs-long-tail-keywords/ 2. SEM Done Right Is Always a Worthwhile Investment There are certain online marketing tactics that are a sure-bet for a long time to come, and SEM is one of them. Overall, U.S. marketers will spend more than $103 billion on search, display, social media, and email marketing by 2019 — growing at a 12% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) — but search will remain the largest share of interactive spend. (MediaPost). Based on our experience, when doing SEO or PPC, businesses are likely to get at least three to four times their money back. That’s being conservative! We have some real estate investor clients “harvesting” over $60,000 in closed deals, or, getting as high as 100-200x their money back, and that doesn’t even include the long-term residual ROI of SEM. But of course, results vary from investor to investor, based on a lot of factors. 3. Think in Terms of ROI Not “Expense” Having the right mindset is crucial when planning your marketing budget. Many real estate investors make the mistake of thinking in terms of costs rather than returns. While costs are an important consideration, ultimately, your objective is to “move the needle” and get a return on your money. Need a little extra help getting that needle moving?  Here’s some extra real estate investor marketing tips to deliver ROI. Don’t focus so much about what you will spend “today”, but rather what you can expect to get “tomorrow” (ROI). Whatever marketing tactic you choose, you want to make sure it’s yielding the highest ROI dollar per dollar. If you’re wondering … Continued

January Harvest Report – Why Website Performance Matters

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The first month of 2016 is in the books. How did you do? Were you able to improve your mindset, your business, or your numbers? For a lot of our members we sensed a change in focus and finding a marketing plan that works for them in 2016. Across our network of real estate investor websites, there were definitely a strong number of leads coming into Carrot sites. Let’s cut to the meat and potatoes and show you exactly how many leads Carrot sites generated last month. Last month Carrot members generated online opt in 14,212 leads. This doesn’t include the thousands and thousands of phone call leads our members have received… which takes it well over 20,000 leads per month. Those include motivated seller, rent to own, cash buyer, and a few note buyer leads. As you can see, these numbers are up from last month’s 13,340… which we expect.  Leads aren’t the only thing improving We have seen a steady rise in sessions (visits) on Carrot member’s websites. As more and more members improve their SEO rankings it is no surprise that we will see more sessions. A Quick Note: A session is a group of interactions that take place on your website within a given time frame. For example, a single session can contain multiple page views. Another name is “visits”. So what does this all mean? It means that Carrot members are effectively driving more traffic to their sites. This is awesome and is something that we will see continue on an upwards trend. When was the last time you asked yourself why? The last month has been crazy busy for us at Carrot. We have a lot going on and some exciting information to share with you soon. But one thing we realized in the month of January is, with all the planning, all the organization, and all the best intention in the World you really need to ask yourself why? Why am I spending so much time on X. Why can’t I figure out how to rank for a specific keyword. Why is my site not generating leads. Why are you doing what you are doing? If you can’t answer it quickly and with a one sentence that you are proud of, there is a good chance you need to revisit your priorities. Why are you using InvestorCarrot? To get more leads? To have a website that performance for your business? If you said yes, great. But what are you doing to get to your why? More on that later. We wanted to briefly shout-out some members who are seeing their websites perform for them and then break down how they got there. Jeff was wondering why PPC Marketing wasn’t working for him on his non-Carrot website Jeff reached out to Adrian our head Customer Success Hero of Strategy via Facebook after a Coaching Call and informed us that his Carrot site brought him his first lead. Yay! We love to see that stuff on a daily basis. Jeff was using pay per click to bring traffic to his old non-Carrot site, but it wasn’t converting. Instead of getting frustrated, he researched InvestorCarrot, signed up and found that our pages generally convert very well for pay per click traffic. A high performing website was the difference for Jeff For Jeff he simply needed to find a site that converted his traffic into leads. If you are struggling with the traffic side of lead generation have you considered PPC? If you are only using Google AdWords wait until you see what we have next. If … Continued

A New Investor Closing Deals In A Competitive Market – Connor’s $60k Deal Harvest Report

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We’re switching up the format of our monthly Carrot Lead Harvest Reports to not just live up to our core value of transparency by showing our actual data so you can learn what’s working to generate leads online and what’s not… but we want to start to highlight real stories from investors around the country so you know what they’re doing with some of these leads that we’re reporting on each month… and how they’re Harvesting deals consistently online. This month we’re diving into… The “Holiday season dip“ How many leads our members generated and where they came from Highlighting Connor’s story on how he’s “Harvested” over $60,000 in new closed deals in the past 6 months leveraging the InvestorCarrot system and our guidance (awesome!) The Holiday Season Dip (wait for the Q1 bounce!) As we’ve written about before, the holiday season (especially when there is harsh weather like some parts of the country are seeing) sees less house sellers hitting the web to actively sell their home. More time is being spent with families and selling a house around the holidays can be tough. However, the 3rd quarter of 2015 showed that flipping houses in general is up from this time 2014, and the total volume of leads for InvestorCarrot members in 2015 grew by a wide margin from Q1 to Q4. Check out the past months Harvest Reports to see the upward trend. Below we dive into the places the leads came from in December… which shows you that Inbound marketing… specifically SEO and content marketing are still leading the charge by a very wide margin (studies show up to 60% of “direct” leads that Google reports are actually from Google searches). December 2015 Real Estate Investing Lead Sources So congrats to all of you Carrot members who crushed it in December and still had time to enjoy time off, some egg nog, and time with your family. Great way to finish the year! With Fewer Leads In Holiday Months Are Deals Still Closing Consistently? You bet. Realty Trac released it’s Q3 2015 U.S. home flipping report and in that report they state… “43,197 single family homes and condos were flipped — sold as part of an arms-length sale for the second time within a 12-month period — in the third quarter of 2015, 5.0 percent of all single family home and condo sales during the quarter.” Holy cow! That’s a lot of house flipping going on :-) The report breaks down markets for the flips and covers more details about the report and the methodology for which the data was gathered. Knowing that there are deals to be made, it forces you to step back and get the basics down first, and that is generating leads. It’s hard to do a deal without the lead.  Today, we wanted to spotlight Connor, an InvestorCarrot member who was struggling to crack the first page of Google in a crowded market. We interviewed Connor and asked what he did to get to the first page of Google for top motivated house seller keywords in a hyper-competitive market, and how those results have paid off for him.  Connor Steinbrook’s $60k Deal Harvest Story: Closing Deals In A Competitive Market Connor is an investor in the Dallas market, which is one of the most competitive markets in the country. Many of you reading this may be thinking… “But if there are already Carrot members doing well in my market can I succeed too?” Well, read this other post we wrote first, then come back here… but the answer is ABSOLUTELY YES. Connor was brand new into the market in 2015 and got … Continued