All Forum Posts by: Kyle B.

In general, are the majority of absentee owned addresses (purchased from ListSource) going to be rental units or is there balanced mix of homeowners who just are not currently living at these addresses. If it helps, I'm specifying SFRs as a criterion.

Thanks,

Kyle

Sorry... looks like I got a little carried away.

These are great results to read about from everyone. I'm just about to start direct mailing absentee owners for the first time, so hopefully I will be summarizing my 2013 results a year from now.

I had a few questions for the group. When you go to look at a house, do you have the exact end buyer in mind before you make an offer? My guess is the more deals you've done, the better idea of exactly who your end buyer will be (whether it's a rehabber or landlord). Has this changed from your very first deal to where you are currently as a wholesaler?

My other question is about marketing costs and methods. For this group, what does your average marketing spending come out to per deal and what is your return on investment from marketing? Also, what methods are you using to get to motivated sellers?

Looking forward to hearing more about your experiences.

Brandon - definitely sounds worth your while to figure that all out. I think I'm going to do half handwritten and half using the method you descibed. Most on this subject say handwritten rules, but using a font that looks hand written would save tons of time. Regardless, I'll be able to track the results of each method and determine whether handwritten is worth the extra effort.

Ryan - my guess is that ListSource is missing sale date data for these houses, so when you enter in a specific date range, homes where this data is missing are automatically filtered out.

We'll see if Michael makes his way back to this forum though and provides additional insight.

And by the way, I'm looking at towns in NW Indiana.

Michael - actually had a quick follow up question for you. When I enter in a sale date over any time period (the exact criteria I'm using is "Last Market Sale Date: 01/01/1900 - 01/24/2013"), the number of addresses decreases by about 1/3.

Do the 1/3 that get filtered out represent homes that have never sold after the builder sold it to the inital retail buyer?

Thanks Michael. I will use all of your suggestions. I've read a number of your prior posts on the topic and you seem to be the expert.

Brandon - thanks for the detailed response. I'll add some kind of minimum equitiy to the screen. The amount is obviously dependent on what region/area you're targeting, but I get the logic behind it. What was your rationale for the 15 years of ownership. Is it that people are more likely to sell the longer they have owned the property? That seems to make sense.

I was planning on handrwiting the letters. We'll see how long I last before my hand starts to cramp up though. Looks like you're doing it by yourself as well. Are you handwriting or using a printer for the letters? Do you happen to know how easy it is to use a computer to get font that looks hand written? I imagine the difficult part would be getting the computer text to align with the lines on the letters.

One last question - what is your exit strategy for the properties? Are you wholesaling, rehabbing, buy & hold, ect.?

Thanks, and good luck to you as well.

Hello BP. I was hoping to get some advice from the direct mailing experts out there. I will be purchasing an address list from ListSource, and after running through their options, below is the criteria list I came up with:

- Equity %: 40%-100%
- Property Type: SFR, Duplex, Triplex
- Last Market Sale Date: Before 2000
- Owner Occupied Status: Absentee Owned (both in and out of state)
- Corporate Owned: Excluded
- Both mailing and property address complete

Please let me know if I am missing anything obvious. I believe the important criterion are the equity stake and absentee owned fields. One specific question I do have is if the Last Market Sale Date is necessary. Since I'm already targeting a certain equity stake %, is this additional criteria redundant (since it would be used to exclude recent purchases with low equity)?

Thanks, and look forward to hearing any input.

Kyle

Thanks for the explanation. I will have to look into that. I am probably going with the letter route as I've read it is more effective than postcards (although I'm sure you have a good reason to go with postcards).

Using this service though, you wouldn't have the letters hand written, would you. Do you have any experience in the effectiveness of hand written vs. printed? It seems the former creates more call backs but you're of course giving up a lot of time writing each letter.

Thanks,

Kyle