All Forum Posts by: Cornelius Garland

@Candice Brown In addition to the questions asked by Brandon, I'd like to know which list you're targeting? Also, what is your typical response rate per mailing? I'll be able to provide some guidance once I know the answers to the two previous questions. I know it is discouraging, but I feel like you and your partner may just need to tweak a few things to start getting deals!

@Tony Zheng If you were to send 1,000 yellow letters, you may have gotten a higher response rate, but they are more expensive. What message did you use on the postcards, and did you use a local phone number? Also, I found that adding the "length of residence" filter on List Source will generate more motivated leads. I like to target homeowners with a 5 year or higher length of residency. This allows enough time for them to have a problem with tenants and you're also filtering out new investors. If you don't filter by how long they've owned the home, you could potentially be marketing to other investors. I'm happy to help!

@Tony Zheng Hello Tony, how many postcards did you send out? Nationally, direct mail has a low response rate, like around 1%. Some areas are better and I've been able to get a higher response rate depending on the list that I mailed. However, the higher response rate didn't necessarily translate to a higher-quality seller. For instance, the mortgage late list is great to target if you're a short sale realtor or investor and you'll get a great response rate. However, none of them will have equity and will call you at the last-minute before their property is going to auction. I've mailed several lists but found that the absentee high-equity list is by far the best list to market to. The reason being is because you know as soon as you send the mail out you can most likely get a deal if the seller is motivated. It is critical to be able to filter by equity. Nothing is more wasteful or frustrating than purchasing a list and not knowing if you can even help the sellers. I found that a lot of list brokers aren't able to provide equity filters and it's a shame that they sell them to investors because that is such a critical component to getting a deal. For postcards, you can expect a 1% response rate so you should be sending out at least 3,000 at a time to get a decent number of interested sellers. I work with a client that was using direct mail and received a .5% response rate and an abysmal closure rate. The market is saturated with new "investors" and all of them are sending direct mail. You need to be consistent and send large quantities to be successful. Keep your head up!

@Jay Hinrichs Wow, 881 Ashley is selling for 720k? That's awesome and congrats! You should really think about moving here Jay :)

@Varinder Kumar If you're doing direct mail along with driving for dollars, then I would wait until you have a lot of property owners that you can skip trace at once. I found that this prevented me with getting fixated with locating only one property owner and also increased the chance of a response. A lot of the free or paid services that allow simple registration are not have poor data. I do like using on free service that has updated addresses. Check out Family Tree Now; I've had luck finding relatives and updated addresses for them.

@Ray Agosto I apologize for the delayed response! BP didn't give me a notification that you motioned me. I only noticed after I was going through some of my older posts. But to answer your question, both Been Verified and White Pages' data is horrible. Just plain bad and out-of-date! It's a shame that they offer their data as a paid service. 

The only true way to get updated phone numbers and addresses is by reaching out to the premium sources, such as TLO. However, TLO still isn't the best. I have my own private database that I've built and it allows me to verify contact information and it's all up-to-date. Essentially, there isn't an easy or inexpensive solution for sourcing phone numbers, and anybody offering a service to you for a low price has bad data. 

Hello @Sean C.,

I understand your frustration. During my first couple of years investing, I received ample of returned letters. Last year alone, we had thousands of returned yellow letters and postcards! We sent out about $30k in mail. While we returned a profit, it was very tedious having to go back and skip trace the correct addresses, re-address the letters, then send them out again. I'm still receiving returned letters from our direct mail campaigns from 12 months ago.

The short answer to your question is that there isn't a company that offers a flat-rate subscription where you're able to skip trace as much as you'd like. If any company is offering this, the data is significantly inaccurate. Tools like Spokeo and White Pages may offer "unlimited" plans, but the numbers are outdated. As a workaround to this issue, I applied for access to TLO and a couple of the premium data sources. Once we skip trace all of our lists, we cold call all every lead and gauge them for motivation. I researched this topic exhasuvaiely last year and found that the only way to do w efficiently is to have everything set up in-house.

@Jessop Adams I mailed about 2,000 property owners last year who got their properties bought at the tax auction. In my state of South Carolina, homeowners have a one-year redemption period from the tax sale to redeem their taxes, and we were trying to snag a few deals out of this campaign. In short, it didn't work out too well. We hand addressed every single envelope and printed all of the letters manually. It was a hassle. Then atop of that, the tax auction list from the county assessor didn't have mailing addresses on it so we had to manually skip trace all of the owners. We got a lot of calls in, but most people that called had no idea their properties were sold at the auction and wanted to keep them. Unfortunately, a lot of the older people thought their children or a relative was taking care of their taxes. It felt good  informing the owners, but we didn't recouperate our expenses we spent on marketing.

It's not all doom-and-gloom, though. There is a way to leverage this list. I suggest that you find the leads that are on your high equity list or on any of your other lists and personally call or fedex them directly. These individuals may be more motivated to sell.

The issue with this list is that you may get property owners with other liens against them or they may have no equity in the property. This is why I always suggest to cross-reference this list with an existing one to see if there are any matches. I hope this helps!

@Teresa DelaMater Hello! Definitely buy lined paper because it actually looks like a hand-written letter. I've encountered issues before with my printer when doing mass-mailings, and it was a pain. Last year, I manually printed and stamped 1000 property owners of a tax delinquent list and my paper kept getting jammed in the printer. The printer was also cutting off the top of the letters. It was a mess and took me like 8 hours to print all of those letters. Then after I did that, I needed to sort the letters carefully to ensure the correct letter matched the right envelope. Then I needed to stamp and mail the letters. The whole process took a week, and I was doing this 8+ hours per day with a group of guys helping me. How many letters are you sending? I highly suggest outsourcing this if this is above 200 because you'll need to send mail EVERY month to see a response rate. We found that we get a lot more deals under contract after about the 5th mailing.

I also like to keep the message very simple, but relevant to my list, on the first mailing. So I might say something like "I want to buy your house at 123 Main St for cash". Then on the second mailing, I'll make a bit longer. I'll say something like "My name is Cornelius and I drove by your property at 123 Main St, and think it will make a great home for my family. Please call me at 'My phone number' if you ever thought about selling." I like adding that caveat "if you ever thought about selling" because then it reduces the number of unmotivated people who call. I actually moved from direct mail completely. After spending $30k in mail last year and getting thousands of returned letters, I decided just to cold call now. It saves so much money and is much more efficient! 

@Christos Philippou Absolutely; I've been in that situation and was so lost the first time I encountered it. But I know exactly what you mean regarding the property being a gold mine. There are so many like that in my city, but I just don't have that much patience to navigate through those issues. The sellers can get real clingy, too. Not that it's a bad thing because I like helping them out. However, it is time-consuming and not monetarily beneficial to nurture one lead when I can go get dozens of deals by in the time it will take to close that one probate deal. Sometimes, I structure the deal and work with my attorney to draft the necessary paperwork then send the deal to a buyer that wants the property. I hope this works out for you because it sounds like a good spread!