Casey, IL · Member since 2017 · 175 posts · 308 votes
Ok,
So I'm wanting to contact a bunch of Multi-Family owners about purchasing their property. I know some people have done or mentioned getting "lists" of owners in certain towns or areas etc and doing mailings or cold calls. And I've heard some even filtering it out to owners who have owned the property for more than "X" amount of years.... So.. Where do I get these lists? I greatly appreciate the help! @John Hagen and I have some investors looking to purchase some property, and we are looking to 1031 some of our own property into some larger multi-family.
@Michael Beeman Read your post and started writing my response to recommend ListSource, however, seems like many other satisfied customers already beat me to it! These are the metrics I tend to follow when using the site:
Owner Equity - 30% or more
Age of Occupant - 45+
Years Owned - 5+ years
Property Type - 1-4 units
Exclude Corporate Owned
Exclude Trust Owned
Ownership Type - Absentee. If not enough records in Absentee add, Homeowners
After pulling up your leads I'd suggest carrying out a well-planned direct mail campaign to target those leads. In my opinion a proper direct mail approach needs to be scheduled in such a way that the time in between mailers is spent on outreach too. This is what I deem to be a proper direct mail campaign:
Week 1: Send out your mail to your list and/or Start targeting your prospects with online ads
Week 2: Call up all your prospects to follow up the mail
Week 3: Send text messages to all the prospects
Week 4: Leave voicemails (whenever possible)
Week 5: Send out second batch of direct mail
This multi-channel marketing approach will yield satisfactory results if executed properly. Hope this helps.
I've used Listsource before and found it to be a good resource. I've heard others compain about the service, but can't speak to that myself. It isn't exactly cheap, but it also isn't expensive considering the cost of most direct mail campaigns.
Depending on your target you can also get free lists from local government, such as tax delinquent properties.
@Jack Medford Hey thank you Very Much!! I appreciate that!! I will go check out Listsource. But what has been your experience with doing mailings? Are they effective, what strategy have you used.
@Michael Beeman I had good success when targeting for non-owner occupied multi-families. Unfortunately I didn't run an extremely long campaign because capital ended up tighter than I expected. I've since focused my efforts on other lead generating options. These options are cheaper (aka free) but require a lot more time. I've got more time than capital right now, so that's what I'm using.
Not sure if this is helpful or not, but I attended the Milwaukee REIA meeting in January, and they laid out the average cost of direct mail vs what they call hustle (scouring facebook, craigslist, drive for dollars, etc.). Here is what they found:
Direct mail costs $1,684.07/deal and leads to $17,507 in average gross profit. These numbers have been very consistent the last 3 years.
Hustle cost roughly 100 hours/deal and leads to $43,520 average gross profit. This large skew was due in part to a couple huge homeruns found via hustle strategies.
Obviously, these numbers are specific to the Milwaukee area, but they give an idea of how much it might cost (in either time or money) to land deals and how much you could expect to make. Also note, newbies at these strategies are likely to start on the lower end of the numbers, while pros are probably sitting at the high end.
@Jack Medford Thank You. I fully expect to continue doing the "hustling" strategy as well. But, I'm considering a strategy where I add in things like listing services and mailings as well!! Thank You for the tip!!
How much are you paying for leads on list source? I’ve used a pre foreclosure list through foreclosures daily before with mixed results and that was almost $1 per lead. Wondering how the pricing compares.
Some other strategies that may be helpful if you want to hustle in addition to direct mailing would be cold calling direct to owners. Here is an overview of how you do this, with a couple of helpful resources:
Look up property owner from local tax assessor website. (Google "*property county* real estate tax assessor" and it should be one of the first links)
Get owner information from there, If its an LLC see the next step
Look up LLC on *State your in* secretary of state. Will say Business entity lookup.
After getting the personal owners information, go to fastpeoplesearch.com (free) and search the individual
Call and/or email them if possible.
If you are having trouble finding property owners to lookup and need a "list" a couple of other resources to consider may be reonomy, or costar. They are a little pricier though.
Hope that helps but shoot me a message if you have any other questions
@Brett Kash just went back into my Listsource account to see what it costs. The list I put together consisted of the following criteria:
absentee owned (both in and out of state)
multi-family properties (1-4 units)
Geography was set to these 3 counties: Dane, Rock, and Racine
Those were the main parameters, although I did check to exclude a few things (like corporate owned).
The basic set of data, which consists of property location, name and address of owner, and number of units of the property cost only $0.165 (16.5 cents) per lead. You can add other data points as you want, each one costing a certain amount. There is a package called "Standard Mortgage Leads" which adds close to 50 additional data sources for another $0.3138 per lead. Most of this is probably not needed though, so you can just add the ones you want. Some examples include:
Bathrooms ($0.0052/lead)
Bedrooms (same as above)
Last Market Sale Price ($0.0105/lead)
Last Market Sale Date (same as above)
Pre-Foreclosure Flag ($0.0079/lead)
These barely scratch the surface. Point is, each lead is much cheaper than $1.
Helpful Tip
If you get to the point of purchasing, make sure to check the box remove duplicate property mailing addresses. It is right above the Continue To Checkout button. This will save you money upfront, as well as time later on when sorting the leads.
@Michael Beeman Read your post and started writing my response to recommend ListSource, however, seems like many other satisfied customers already beat me to it! These are the metrics I tend to follow when using the site:
Owner Equity - 30% or more
Age of Occupant - 45+
Years Owned - 5+ years
Property Type - 1-4 units
Exclude Corporate Owned
Exclude Trust Owned
Ownership Type - Absentee. If not enough records in Absentee add, Homeowners
After pulling up your leads I'd suggest carrying out a well-planned direct mail campaign to target those leads. In my opinion a proper direct mail approach needs to be scheduled in such a way that the time in between mailers is spent on outreach too. This is what I deem to be a proper direct mail campaign:
Week 1: Send out your mail to your list and/or Start targeting your prospects with online ads
Week 2: Call up all your prospects to follow up the mail
Week 3: Send text messages to all the prospects
Week 4: Leave voicemails (whenever possible)
Week 5: Send out second batch of direct mail
This multi-channel marketing approach will yield satisfactory results if executed properly. Hope this helps.
@Ehsan Rishat Hey thank you for the tip. We're looking for larger apartment buildings, but that's great advice. The 1-4 unit isn't our forte anymore. If you ever do a 5+ unit building and are able to turn something around without spending a ton of money, and create 6 figures in equity by spending less than 30k and just good management... It's really hard to go back to the 1-4 unit stuff... And that's coming from a guy that has at least 8 1-4 unit buildings.. lol... Wanna buy some? lol
@Michael Beeman I'm getting ready to do my own mail marketing campaign for the same purpose. @Ehsan Rishat provided a great strategy rundown. I was also going to mention that @Anson Young's book Finding and Funding Great Deals has a great tutorial on how to use Listsource and other resources to find leads, but it looks like you are already well on your way. I look forward to hearing how things turn out (just stay out of Champaign County, jk:)
@Nick Gaines haha.. Fair enough.. Well I'm now working with investors that need something in the 40-50 unit range, and we need something in the 20 unit range for our own company.. But we are mailing Vigo Co Indiana (Terre Haute).. But personally I'm going up to Springfield today to take a look at a 20 unit, and to visit our Springfield site.. But I'm pretty sure we will stay out of Champaign County in 2019 lol
@Ehsan Rishat excellent information, will definitely be implementing it right away!
@Michael Beeman you are targeting my old stomping grounds! Lol! I'm from Brazil, IN and went to ISU. Are you looking to get into student housing up there then? I've often thought about investing there primarily for the student housing market.
I have been trying to use a method similar to the one Chase so kindly outlined (below). I do this to search for owners of larger apartment complexes, however I seem to run into the same couple of roadblocks:
1. The property tax address listed on the county website is actually the address of the property management company instead of the property owner.
2. The ownership on the county website is in the form of a company, rather than an individual, which does not have a phone number.
If anybody has a solution to get around these roadblocks it would be greatly appreciated.
Some other strategies that may be helpful if you want to hustle in addition to direct mailing would be cold calling direct to owners. Here is an overview of how you do this, with a couple of helpful resources:
Look up property owner from local tax assessor website. (Google "*property county* real estate tax assessor" and it should be one of the first links)
Get owner information from there, If its an LLC see the next step
Look up LLC on *State your in* secretary of state. Will say Business entity lookup.
After getting the personal owners information, go to fastpeoplesearch.com (free) and search the individual
Call and/or email them if possible.
If you are having trouble finding property owners to lookup and need a "list" a couple of other resources to consider may be reonomy, or costar. They are a little pricier though.
Hope that helps but shoot me a message if you have any other questions
@Jamie Burns I am not currently targeting student housing. Altho we do tend to get some students into our Terre Haute In 8 unit property, What I'm actually targeting is the lower middle class, high cash-flowing Real Estate market. We have done amazingly well on 2br units in the Vigo Co. In market, and we are excited to add a large amount of them to the portfolio.
@Brett Kash one of my business partners used to be a lobbyist and then a campaign consultant for many local and state legislature elections.. 2 things he recommends to get a higher "open rate" .. On the outside of your letter, make certain that you do two things.. Do not use a generic flag type of stamp, and either do it yourself, or hire someone to hand write the addresses on the envelopes.. The third thing we are doing to try and enhance the "call back" rate is that I am personally signing the inside of each letter.
1. I know that in some cases, we have dealt with this issue as well, and we had to "clean up" the list that was purchased. I also know that we probably sent some letters that will never reach the owner.
2. Yes, that is an issue. Being owned in the form of a company instead of an individual is difficult, and all we can do is follow the same procedure outlined above and just mail a letter.
3. a completely new issue we ran into on some counties, was that there was no difference between Commercial listings, and Apartment or multi-family listings. So to purchase the list would mean that I would be mailing to every person who owns any type of Commercial building. That was unsuitable for our needs, and we moved onto a different county.
@Michael Beeman If you don't have any luck with direct mail, I would strongly suggest reaching out to brokers. They generally have a good jump on those mom and pop owners who are looking to sell as they have access to information that you may not.
@Scott Morongell We have done that. In fact that's how we got our 62 unit, and we are currently looking at a pocket listing this broker has on a 20 unit. But, we are also trying to develop a deal flow of our own outside of brokers.