Wholesaling First Successes!

Hello! Since this is my first blog post, I'll tell you a bit about how I got started. I knew that I wanted to get into real estate after I saw the potential in 2007, but I figured I was too young to get started. In 2009, I decided to try my hand at being an RE Agent. Being young and not knowing exactly what I was doing, I gave up after a few months with nothing to show for it except getting the license. I stayed out of the game to complete my PhD and got back to it at the start of this year. I wanted to get started in wholesaling to build a cash base, but got tied up in the research. I didn't take ACTION until July! Over six months I wasted time twiddling my thumbs being uncertain of what could work. 

In February, I subscribed to a county court service that allows me to access filed documents. I did this thinking I could find deals by scouring the documents. Boy is this method time consuming. NoDs can be found, but it just took too long to do it this way. I decided that I had to find another way. Two more months went by before I took the next step.

Finally, in July, I started my first Direct Mail campaign. I bought an equity list for my target market from ListSource. 20 cents per name is a lot cheaper and faster than doing it manually. I added quite a few factors to limit the potential pool. Now, $.20/name may seem expensive, but I'd rather spend a few cents per name more to get a better return than waste $0.50 per mailer trying to target an unwilling person. Just my 2 cents...

First mailer was to 250 names in a small market that I found to be less competitive than my local market. I did yellow letters at a cost of $0.60 per mailer. I got 6 call backs (Woohoo!), but mostly just to be removed from the list. One caller left a message saying,"If you offer the right numbers, it's yours before sunset". My big mistake was waiting a couple days to respond back to her message. She sounded so excited on the phone, but when I called her later, she seemed disinterested. I shifted her to a second, separate mailer list. One interesting thing was that one of the mailers was sent back with a "MAKE ME AN OFFER" written by hand. I decided to write a specific letter for people that want a site unseen offer and mailed it back to the seller. 

Second mailer was just sent out wednesday! I'm switching to doing 1,000 mailers/month, changed up my phone number to go to a recorded message on Google Voice, and will do mailers once/week in 250 batches. I also switched to two types of professional letters to do split testing for marketing.

That's all I have for today. I've made some mistakes, stumbled and learned a lot in the process. But I stand by my guiding phrase, Fail and fail again, but do not fail to take action.