Absentee Owner
Hey everyone. I'm currently putting together my first direct mail marketing campaign and want to include high equity absentee owners in my target group. Does anyone have a list of criteria they would recommend to narrow down?
Hello @Jacob Lewis! Welcome to the BP Community!
You're going to get a lot of different answers to this question, but I'm going to throw my $.02 in anyways. I like using Listsource.com and this is the criteria I recommend:
- 1-3 Bedrooms
- 30%-100% Equity
- 4 yrs. Ownership
- SFR
- Median Price Range for your area
- Absentee
- Owner Occupied
- No Corp
- No Trust
Hope that is helpful!
Thank you Claire! I didn't even think of a few of those. Are you getting good deal on under 50% equity?
Yes. 30-100% just depends on the level of motivation.
Good to know. Thanks again Claire.
Claire pretty much gave you the catchall, but I'll include two things: 1. listen to the 'direct mail marketing' podcast with Micahel Quarles (not a BP podcast, it's own thing), and in episode one he breaks down basically every mailing list available and gives you a picture of the criteria that can be used. 2. Choose a specific geographic region. Someone recommend I do this before I started mailing (which of course I didn't), and I'm learning as I go (I just sent my first marketing a month ago, and am finalizing the second mailing) - but I'm mailing an entire county, a metropolitan county at that - and I'm finding that most of the leads are... cheap. What I mean is that almost all of the leads are very undesirable properties to begin with, and then they're just bad leads for the standard reasons. While these leads can work for wholesaling, someone with the intention of flipping houses would be wasting their time marketing where I am. So, take that into account. Better areas you might get less calls and less leads, but the properties themselves might be more desirable or have a higher margin if you can get a deal out of them. The ARVs on most of the calls I'm getting are 15-25k (for the cash buyer), and in some cases they wouldn't be deals if people gave me the properties. In any case, just a thought.
Learn as we go.
Best,
JTM
Thanks for the info Joshua. I'm going to put on that podcast tonight. One thing that's strange when I'm narrowing down a list on listsource.com specifically is when I add the 1-3 bedrooms criteria, it goes from almost 1400 properties to 0. I don't know if this is a glitch on listsource or I'm doing something wrong, but I get 0 leads even if that is the only added criteria. Any experience with this phenomenon?
Be sure to choose the range of age (owner's age). 55+ will be more motivated than a 35 year old.
I was thinking of doing age criteria, but wasn't sure. Thanks for the input Johnny!
Originally posted by @Jacob Lewis:
Thanks for the info Joshua. I'm going to put on that podcast tonight. One thing that's strange when I'm narrowing down a list on listsource.com specifically is when I add the 1-3 bedrooms criteria, it goes from almost 1400 properties to 0. I don't know if this is a glitch on listsource or I'm doing something wrong, but I get 0 leads even if that is the only added criteria. Any experience with this phenomenon?
Jacob, the numbers drop to zero because that must be something that isn't recorded in your area. The results are the properties that meet all your requirements, so if a bedroom count isn't included in the property records, Listsource will remove it from your results since you searched for it. My suggestion is just leaving it out. When that happens to me, i just remove the bedrooms and continue with the rest of the criteria. Still yields a good list.
Thanks for bringing up owner age Johnny- for some reason I rarely hear people suggest this filter when talking about absentee lists, and I'm considering using it myself. Here's the problem tho- applying ANY age filter in my absentee search (I tested this by trying age > 1) cuts the results by 80%, telling me that my list providers (I tried this on both ListSource and TitlePro247) only have age data on ~20% of absentee owners - and this cuts my list size down way too much. Have you run into this issue in your region (I'm in CA- looks like you're in NY)? Is there any workaround/some other list provider you're aware of?
Yup, I'm in NY. Yes, that will drastically reduce the # of leads, but the thing is, I don't exclude owner-occupied. My thought is, whether a property is owner-occupied or absentee owned, when a person reaches a certain point in their life, they're going to make changes; some want to down-size, others want to move closer to their grand kids, move to a place with nicer weather (it'll be kinda hard to beat CA weather though lol), etc. In fact, I've done more deals with owner-occupied properties than absentee. (It helps that we have a friend who has a moving company, so we arrange the whole move for the seller so they're not overwhelmed).
If you want to separate from what everyone is doing, you have to do things differently from others. Keep in mind, "absentee" leads are well known because at some point, someone figured there was a higher probability of motivation to sell. But now it's gotten to the point where that's what everyone is doing, without really thinking about the increased competition. So you have to think outside the box and put together lead sources that translates to "motivation." Just put yourself in their shoes, you'll be amazed at the # of different categories you can come up with.
All good points. And yep, I mail owner occs too - although for some reason, the age > 1 filter only cuts the list by about 30% there (no idea why owner age data would be harder to get for absentee than owner occ, but apparently it is). Anyway thanks for the input!