Real Estate Investor · Keller, TX · Member since 2016 · 26 posts · 4 votes
I have my post cards (specifically marketing to people facing foreclosure) just about ready to print, but I have no where to send them! Are there companies that can provide me with a list specifically of houses with missed mortgage payments that are about to enter or are in the beginning stages of foreclosure? Thank you in advance!
@Andrew Smith I personally do not like to purchase lists per se. They are heavily used by a lot of investors and a lot of potential deals fall through the cracks.
Find out from your county where you can access the database of all the Notices of Defaults (I found this link for Delton County, for example: http://dentoncounty.com/Departments/County-Clerk/F...). If they publish in a legal paper or some online database, you can access the information digitally (legal papers have also online subscriptions,) and sort the data by zip code, foreclosure date, etc.
Once you have the information, call the owner, followed by an email and last a letter. Nowadays you need to be a little more pro-active than just sending a letter or card. It is much more cost effective and a higher response rate. I use WhitePages Premium. I get phone numbers and emails - out of 10 leads I can reach at least 6 via phone.
You can hire a virtual assistant to help you assemble the data on worksheets and all you do is call (Tuesday through Thursday between 6pm and 7:30pm is my "window".)
It's a process and more work (which you can have a virtual assistant do,) but if you follow this process and contact at least 10 people a day, you will have a deal under contract in days and several deals the first month under contract.
I can statistically prove it :) and I have a lot of investors/students in Texas who are being very successful doing just the steps I outlined.
@Andrew Smith I personally do not like to purchase lists per se. They are heavily used by a lot of investors and a lot of potential deals fall through the cracks.
Find out from your county where you can access the database of all the Notices of Defaults (I found this link for Delton County, for example: http://dentoncounty.com/Departments/County-Clerk/F...). If they publish in a legal paper or some online database, you can access the information digitally (legal papers have also online subscriptions,) and sort the data by zip code, foreclosure date, etc.
Once you have the information, call the owner, followed by an email and last a letter. Nowadays you need to be a little more pro-active than just sending a letter or card. It is much more cost effective and a higher response rate. I use WhitePages Premium. I get phone numbers and emails - out of 10 leads I can reach at least 6 via phone.
You can hire a virtual assistant to help you assemble the data on worksheets and all you do is call (Tuesday through Thursday between 6pm and 7:30pm is my "window".)
It's a process and more work (which you can have a virtual assistant do,) but if you follow this process and contact at least 10 people a day, you will have a deal under contract in days and several deals the first month under contract.
I can statistically prove it :) and I have a lot of investors/students in Texas who are being very successful doing just the steps I outlined.
Great question, @Andrew Smith. We send thousands of letters out every month. The source of our data is through Core Logic or RealQuest.
While there are many ways to get data, I feel that Core Logic is the industry standard for real estate mailer data for all types of real estate, since they have a direct feed from 98% of the approximately 3150 counties in the US. That's huge.
What I find so great about this data is that it’s typically incredibly fresh, and they even tell you how old it is before mailing it. Also, it’s in the same format for every county so it takes the guessing and difficulty out of scrubbing the data once you download it. As you may know, if you get it directly from each county, each one provides it in different formats. This can be very hard to go through and make uniform.
Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions!
@Andrew Smith Yes, Core Logic and List Source are the same thing. I have used ListSource recently with no success. The list was heavily used. The problem is timing. By the time they get the data and distribute it at the same time, a lot of investors are having the same information. I like to get ahead of the competition and that is why I go straight to the source. :)