Equity Percentage

[Davit Gharibyan]

Hello,

I am using listsource for direct marketing and wondering what percentage of equity is best to choose. Please let me know which percentage gave you best response/ returns. I am marketing to get motivated sellers to wholesale and/or flip.

Thank you.

[Curt Smith]

Read here in other threads on how to find motivated sellers.  Search in youtube finding motivated sellers (lots of great videos!!!).  Today its much harder to buy a list that zeros on motivation.   Listsource in my view is not that good a service to buy leads from.  Folks who do nationwide marketing, 2k-5k mailers PER MONTH buy from listsource and vacant leads from find motivated sellers now dot com etc.  They brute force find sellers IMHO.  Having done my share of mailings this is not what I want to do...

The shortest possible story re motivation is:

- you need to find sellers in ALOT of pain, something bad. That used to be NOD/LS pending foreclosure. Which IMO is a very specialized knowledge to salvage a deal prior to the Tue auction with days to a few weeks to pull it together. So don';t bother mailing NOD/LS lists just yet.

- divorce, get lists from the area county superior court.  Call, walk, find the person.

- delinquent taxes.  Call the Assessor, Commissioner find the lists.  Not all counties make late taxes available.  This is too bad, this is one of the BEST sources of sellers, late taxes.

- eviction court.  Another trip to the superior court.

- Probate lists.  Expensive lists and not as easy as you might think.  Families take a year to sell the house.  All squabling over some issue and they all have to sign to sell.  A pain and a waiting game.

- Absentee is just very good anymore.  Most are happy landlords.  Even vacant absentee is not very motivated in my experience.

I've just discovered rebogateway dot com. For some counties they have delinquent taxes, divorce, NOD, expireds and other lead types. I have not mailed these lists yet, just figured out how to use it. Its complicated and yes a monthly fee... Some $50-60/mo per the number of counties you sign up for.

Good leads are expensive.  Read up here in this forum!!   All said and done the cost of a deal typically is between $300 and $500 in direct marketing costs.  If pay per click etc I've heard of total over head to run an office to be $3k per sale.  Where on a $10k net wholesale, $3k went to marketing and over head.

For us small frys still figure $300 to $500 marketing costs or more for a deal.  This does not include any live answer service, cell costs or your personal time of hours spent on the phone talking to 100's of sellers.  Just letting you know.  Some folks delegate to cheap VAs to do the rough cut talking to sellers then you personally only talk to sellers closer to wanting to commit to a profitable deal.

[Claire Trammell]

Hello @Davit Gharibyan!

We use listsource.com primarily and we usually suggest 30%-100% equity when searching for leads. There seems to be good motivation in that range.

Good luck! 

[Davit Gharibyan]

@Claire Trammell I sent cards yesterday based on 40-50% equity. I will increase the range next time. Thank you.