All Forum Posts by: Ray Lai

@Max Shindler

Welcome to BP! What made you decide to start owning rental properties when you used to just sell them? That's a nice transition. 
Do you use DM for your real estate brokerage business? You'll have to update the language if you're using DM to pick up properties but it's great that you can help people sell both houses that are fully rehabbed and those that are distressed now with your new strategy.

@Antiwan Wright

Welcome to BP! The question sounds simple but is actually a bit complicated. Oftentimes gurus love to get their students to spend a lot of time building a large buyer's list when truly good deals are easy to market if you just make some personal connections at your local REIA. There are also other better ways of creating a buyer's list like checking out cash purchases in the area you're marketing to, if you have MLS access.

Before building a buyer's list or finding motivated sellers, you should do a lot of research and preparation and know what your goal is and the what should be important. 

Too often people are gun-ho and quit after a few weeks because their Why isn't strong enough. Or they do one mailing and they quit because they don't realize consistency and focused effort over time is crucial.

Good luck!

Simple to use direct mail software that can get your direct mail out with a few simple clicks and selections with free built in analytics as well! reSimpli has proven templates that get you responses, or we can support your own custom design with full printing, packing, and mailing with postage.  Our price is the best value for the quality - as low as 40 cents for postcards and 50 cents for letters with postage! 

Full pricing:
https://resimpli.com/pricing

Here are a some reasons why you should choose reSimpli for full service direct mail:

- The BEST service, period. Ask our clients, we have many testimonials with a proven track record of success.

- No hidden fees! Our prices are all inclusive whereas other companies that have hidden fees like membership dues or 'discounts' that end up costing more. No extra costs for custom templates, etc.

- We provides tips and coaching that have helped complete newbies pull down 5 figure deals in their first few months using our service!

- No other service helps you deal with the responses that you'll get from your campaign. We have scripts that can aid you and also have a CRM for you to use to both process and follow up with leads to MAXIMIZE your response and conversion rates!

- There are also other useful free modules in our software for your real estate investing!

So shoot me a message or check out www.reSimpli.com and let's get your direct mail campaign done the right way at a great price!

@Patrick Wilcox

Perhaps the agents whose livelihoods depend on selling you properties that's sitting on MLS might be a little biased and have all the incentive to actively discourage you from looking off market by saying DM/D4D no longer work when it does might be more plausible no?

D4D does work, especially in secondary markets. Competition is fierce in all the primary markets this late in the cycle. I've met many newbies who screwed things up but managed to do their own market and picked up a deal are able to flip for 5 figure profits easily right now.

Are you doing this properly?

https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2013/05/03/driving-for-dollars-bible-part-1/

If you want to start direct mail and you need some help getting started, I can help. I can send you a free game plan, checklist of things to prepare to increase your chances of success, scripts on how to talk to different types of sellers, free software to use for your real estate investing including CRM, templates for your direct mail, contracts, calculators, you name it and answer questions.

Free - but when you pull down that first 5 figure deal you should buy me a meal - many people owe me meals :)

I've been helping many new wholesalers and flippers start or increase their deal flow. Just shoot me a message or email with where you're at in your education process and I'm happy to mentor as I have some pretty awesome mentors myself

Add me as a colleague and shoot me a message or email me at [email protected]

@Daquan Johnson

Welcome to BP! Great job taking action and utilizing your day job to your advantage. Driving for dollars is a fantastic way to compile a list to target and works very well with another targeted approach. If you are great at speaking with people and want to go the extra step of finding their numbers, you could try cold calling. Most people probably want to take the more scalable approach and target that D4D list you compiled with direct mail. Here are a couple of protips to help you out if you go down the DM route:

Pro-tip: Use 1 batch of postcards with first class mail then and then switch to yellow letters. Why? The first class postcards will bounce and save you a lot of money from mailing a bad address from subsequent batches and you can skip-trace the bad addresses for very valuable leads. Also, switching to standard mail afterwards saves money.

Pro-tip #2: Your campaigns will typically yield a response rate of 0.5-2% (typical but depends on the quality of your campaign and your competition).

Pro-tip #3: Make sure your market size is big enough (AT LEAST 200 targets) and that you can sustain a campaign for at least 4+ mailings. First couple often get thrown away and a lot of responses come after 4. Common mistake is that newbies make is mailing to a big list once. You'll get a better response mailing 300 good targets every 4 weeks, rather than 2000 good targets, once.

Pro-tip #4: How do you improve your response rate? Split tests and tracking your results. There are many things to try from code violations to unpaid taxes. In general, people with more equity (typically older home owners) are more likely to yield deals. But you need to test between all these different types and see what works best for you in your market (driving for dollars/absentee, probate, etc.)

There are many more things you can do to increase your success, it's great that you're taking action. Hit up your local REIA and start networking and listen to the BP podcasts too, some are very solid.

reSimpli has launching our beta for the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) module with built in seller-intake scripts to process marketing leads - using this will boost your conversion rates!. 

Now available at:

https://dashboard.resimpli.com/

Our CRM module is free and we'll always support a free version. More capabilities will be added in future releases as well.

Current features include:

- Script on questions to ask sellers of properties in order to capture accurate information for follow-up

- Ability to schedule and track appointments to enable efficient follow-up for responses and reminders to follow-up

- Google API functionality for fast and easy sign-up

- Zillow API functionality - just pop in an address and it'll auto-populate the data for the property for you using the Zillow database

- Google street view functionality so you can virtually walk around the potential home and it places a pin where your house is so you can tell where it is in relation to other properties on the street as you virtually walk it.

If you want a higher conversion rate for your direct mail and other marketing campaigns, try our free CRM! It'll help you schedule and perform adequate follow up which will bank you more profits. Follow-up is key in our business. It'll also help you ask all the right questions to sellers so you won't drop the ball ever again on inadequate follow-up.

reSimpli is offering full service direct mail with postcards as low as 40 cents, yellow-letters and business letters as low as 50 cents. The prices include printing, stuffing envelope, packing, mailing (which includes postage). We also offer mentoring as well - our service is unbeatable! We even have a free CRM to increase your conversion rates! Our direct mail product is high quality and get you solid responses!

You need to choose reSimpli.com for your direct mail because:

All you gotta do is upload a list and a few clicks and you can have a professional and expertly run direct mail marketing campaign. 

Additional Pricing info:

Postcards:

$0.60 for less than 200

$0.45 for 200-1,000

$0.40 for more than 1,000

Letters:

$0.70 for less than 200

$0.55 for 200-1,000

$0.50 for more than 1,000

@Joe Davalos

The CRM is located at: 

https://dashboard.resimpli.com/

It's separate from the other modules at the moment so you need to create a new account. Eventually it will be integrated after the beta.

Thinking of starting direct mail? I can send you a free game plan, checklist of things to prepare to increase your chances of success, scripts on how to talk to different types of sellers, free software to use for your real estate investing including CRM, templates for your direct mail, contracts, calculators, you name it.

Free. I've been helping many new wholesalers and flippers start or increase their deal flow. Just shoot me a message or email with where you're at in your education process and I'm happy to mentor.

[email protected]