Marketing Efforts - Recommendations for Newbie Investor?

[Mark Henderson]

This is my first post on BP. I'm 41 and a newbie investor. I own a small business that is starting to do quite well and I'm devouring as many books and lurking around here on BP to sponge up as much information as I can regarding real estate investment.

In few months I will embark on what I can only hope will be a successful investment career. I will continue running my company - and have a little freedom where I can leave the office during the day to work on investments, however, I feel as though I need to automate as much as possible my marketing efforts so I don't lose focus on my primary source of income (my company). I will be setting aside roughly $1,000 a month for marketing efforts to locate great deals. My strategy is to buy and hold rental properties.

My question to the BP community is this:

With a limited budget of $1,000 per month - what brings in the biggest bang for the buck? In other words, where should I focus my marketing efforts? And what kind of response rates/ conversion rates are you finding from these efforts?

[Jennifer Beadles]

Since you are doing buy and hold properties, I suggest you call all of the landlords that have their properties listed for rent on craigslist. We had a hard time finding good buy and hold deals this year, and I did not want to spend a bunch of money on direct mail so I paid a virtual assistant to pull all of the data from craigslist and into an excel file (only landlords not property management companies) and I paid for mojo sellers which is an auto dialer for $89 per month and we started calling those landlords and asking if they wanted to sell. We found that quite a few were interested, especially the ones that had just gone through the pain of a bad tenant leaving (hence the reason why they were advertising for rent again). This would put you under your budget of $1000 per month and you'll get a lot of leads.