My quest for finding deals...Direct Mail, Cold Calling, RVM, SMS
Everybody knows that finding the deals is key in the real estate business.
I have done direct mail, cold calling, RVM, SMS and Voice Broadcast campaigns for a while, on my quest to find good deals...a steep learning curve on what and how to do it.
Please note that I have ran these campaigns for myself and never have planned to wholesale.
Direct Mail Campaign...very expensive ($0.70/record and up) with a very low response rate...under 1% (depending on area)...still legit
Cold Calling Campaign, cost not so bad if using foreign VA's to do it ($0.10/record)...higher response rate than Direct Mail...this was no robocalling...all calls were done manually
RVM Campaign, pretty cheap, $0.02/record...highest response rate, lots of angry people...OK to run except Florida (please correct me if I'm wrong)
SMS Campaign, $0.04$/record...response rates higher than Cold Calling Campaign but lower than RVM Campaign...highly regulated and tough to run
Voice Broadcast, very cheap to run if you have your own calling center, but ineffective...basically almost zero returns...just frustrated people
Before running Cold Calling, RVM, SMS and Voice Broadcast campaigns, you need to skip trace the data (lists)...costs varies, and could be anywhere from $0.03/record to $0.30/record (charges are typically per returned records)
However, what I have found is that the returns are somewhere between 43% to 67% from the original submitted list (names and addresses only).
From the returned skipped traced results, maybe only 50%-60% will be good valid numbers and from these, only 30%-40% might be cell numbers, rest of them will be landlines (60%-70%)...cannot use landline data for RVM and SMS campaigns...
Of course this depends from where data is pulled by the skip tracing provider...Please note that skip tracing should be more accurate than phone number appends...a phone append is kind of quick and basic data mining that might take a few seconds, vs. skip-tracing which is supposed to dig deeper, return more results and it might take longer (more expensive too).
I ran these campaigns to see which one is more effective than the other and it is tough to say...while the campaigns using the skipped traced phone numbers are way cheaper, you basically touch only 25% from the entire list...on the other hand the direct mail campaign might touch a very high percentage from your list, but re-targeting will be really expensive (considering 4-5 touches) when compared with phone numbers usage campaigns.
Vast majority of my findings were very low end properties, in a bad shape, in D and F neighborhoods, that no Bank will refinance...if that's your niche, then these marketing channels described above might work fine for you.
I am looking for feedback, suggestions, advice, from other real estate investors, wholesalers, brokers, agents, etc. on BiggerPockets, regarding the marketing channels usage and results.