Yesterday I spent some time getting another mailing out to a High Equity mailing list for my own real estate investing business. During the process, I ended up taking a good deal of time and upgrading some of the Real Estate Investor Database systems for creating and tracking marketing campaigns.
Here are just a few things I worked on and made improvements to:
- Created a new system for tracking who is included on the mailing list. Now we use Roles as a starting point for who should be added. If you want to mail to the 1,000 Absentee Owners that have been the longest since last time they were mailed? It is very, very easy to do that with the new system… just select the Role of Absentee Owner for that campaign and enter in 1,000 in the field for how many to add to that Campaign and it will automatically go through and add 1,000 records to that campaign to mail and log those records in the database.
- I also changed the way we provide the export list of records… now we automatically default to including the associated property record for that contact. This makes it much easier for us to import that mailing list right into Click2Mail to do our mailings.
- We also updated the interface so that when you enter in the date the mail is going to hit, it will go through and automatically update all the records with that date as the date last mailed. This is part of what makes it possible for us to use Roles and the date last mailed field to quickly make new mailings lists grabbing only the guys that need to be mailed next.
Also, as an update that I made this morning we have improved the ability to show the associated property records for a particular contact and added a new link right in that section for adding a new, associated property to any contact record.
Until my next post,
James
Whoops! Before we ended the webinar I was supposed to give you guys access to the Private Money Power Point and Bonus Videos from Patrick. Sorry about that.
Here is the link to download them.
Thanks again to Patrick for all the great information on finding private money.
Enjoy!
Sincerely,
James
If you are looking for the way to find virtually unlimited funds for your real estate deals, then tonight is your night. This evening I am having a special guest for our webinar who has raised millions of dollars for his own real estate deals and will be sharing with you exactly how he does it including what words to use and he is even going to be giving all of those that attend the power point presentation he uses.
I talk a lot about private money on other articles and posts, but tonight is an opportunity for you to hear about it first hand.
The webinar is free, just register for it and show up. I am really looking forward to it and I hope to see you there.
Until my next post,
James
Today I made some changes to the Real Estate Investor Database Search Results page and I had made some small tweaks to it earlier in the week.
The new change now has a broader reaching search capability searching both the primary and secondary contact name now.
Also, you have the ability to toggle the “Mail” or “Do Not Mail” field right from the search results page making it easier to go through a stack of undeliverable or otherwise returned postcards or direct mail pieces to update that list.
We also now list the number of properties that a particular contact has associated with their record right from the search results page making it easier, in some cases, to tell which contact you are trying to use.
I will be making some additional updates to the database in preparation for our next mailing either later this weekend or early next week.
Until my next post,
James
In some other recent posts I’ve been discussing selling your house in a weekend. This continues that discussion by talking about using your buyers list.
Step number nine is to contact your existing buyers list. We talked about this a little bit when we went over voice broadcasts, about being able to voice broadcast to all the people that have ever called in before on your properties. But let’s say you have a list of names, addressses and telephone numbers. You could do several different things; you could do a direct mail piece, where you actually send out postcards or a letter or something to people on your list to let them know that you have this property for sale. If you’re collecting email addresses, you could do an email blast to them to let them know you have this property for sale. If your list is small, you can go and look through and see the people that are in this price range that wanted houses before and call them specifically to let them know you have this house for sale, and you could do a personal call that way. I do not usually do ALL that stuff.
I use lots of simple tools to leverage my time. I use voice broadcasts; I would do a postcard mailing, because it’s easy for me to take my list, export it to the US Postal Service website, put together a quick postcard and have it sent out without having to worry about it. I can get all that done within 30 minutes to an hour. So it’s very time effective, and I can just get it done and put it out there. Make sure you contact your existing list in order to let everyone else who has ever worked with you looking at buying a house that you’ve got another house for sale.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. If you have not yet seen the special free downloads page for real estate investors, check it out now.
In some other recent posts I’ve been discussing selling your house in a weekend. This is just another part of that, very long, discussion. In this post we are talking about using voice broadcast.
I love voice broadcasts. It’s cheap; it’s easy; it’s effective. If you go on the Real Estate Investor Wiki, I’ve got a whole page devoted to voice broadcasts.
First, let me explain what a voice broadcast is. The best way I like to explain it when I have live seminars is: have you ever gotten a political message from the president or your senator saying just wanted to remind you to go out on election day and vote for us or vote on this particular issue. That is a voice broadcast. The president did not call you personally. They did a recording one time, and then they hire a company to send that message out to ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million answering machines all at the same time or very quickly over the course of a day for thousands or millions of people. You can send out thousands of calls very, very quickly with voice broadcasts.
So, here’s what you do when you want to use voice broadcasts. You record a message, and I’ll give you some ideas of what I would send out for an example like this. And then you send that message out to your list of telephone numbers. Now you do need to be careful. You can’t just send it out to every telephone number in a telephone book. You gotta be concerned about the do not call list to make sure people are not on your do not call list; however, if people have called you recently then you have a relationship with them, and you can call them back. So, if you’re capturing telephone numbers of people that have called and are interested in the particular open house you have, you’re allowed to call them back. You can check with your attorney to make sure it’s legal and you are in compliance with local laws in your area, but that’s my understanding and that’s what I do.
So when someone calls me about a house I have for sale, I capture their telephone number and then I can send out a broadcast the day before my auction or the day before my round robin bidding process and actually send them a message. And this is the type of message that I would send out. By the way, you can send out different messages – different companies do different things. And I talk a little bit about this on other posts and in the wiki (linked above). But different companies can leave just on answering machines, just when people pick up live or they can do both. And you can have a different message given if they leave it on the answering machine versus when they pick up live. Their computer software can sense whether someone is picking up the phone live or whether it’s an answering machine. I prefer to leave messages on answering machines. Although, I do both. When someone picks up live, they do get my message, but I like it better when it gets on their answering machine.
Here’s why: my messages, I try to make them sound like I just left it for them. I don’t want my message to sound like I’m doing a voice broadcast. I want it to sound very personal – that I’m calling just them to let them know about the house. Sometimes that’s harder to do than others. When I’m trying to buy houses like this, I use voice broadcasts to buy houses too, I have a pretty good script for that. But let me read you my script that I would use, just an example one of one that I would use to do a round robin bidding process that’s on Sunday night. Here’s how the message would go:
“Hi. This is James Orr. You’d expressed an interest in a home we had for sale in the past, and I have another home you might be interested in that we’re selling this weekend. The house is worth about $320,000, but we’re selling it to the highest bidder on Sunday night with a starting bid of only $208,500. Call our 24-hour recorded information line for detailed information at 1-800-555-1234 ext. 25. Thanks, and I hope to see you there.”
So now you’ve told them that you’ve got this house for sale below market, with an opening bid below market, and that if they want more information they can then call you back on their 24-hour recorded information line. And then when they call you back to get information on the house, you could do it that way. I might do some different variations on this depending on how I feel about the list I’m sending it to. I might include the address of the property; I may not include the address. I may include a direct telephone number for them to call me – it depends on my relationship with the list. The one that I just read you would be one that I would send out to people that have called on houses for sale in the past, not necessarily this house. It could be on a house that I had for sale last month or two weeks ago or three months ago. So I save all the telephone numbers, and I send that out. Now, when people call back and they’re like just remove me from your list because we’ve already bought a house, just remove them. You’re going to get calls like that. But voice broadcasts are so cheap to do. I think it costs like four to six cents, somewhere in that ball park, in order to send out a voice broadcast to somebody. So if you get a list of a couple hundred people times five cents each costs you $10. It’s so cheap to do, and it’s so effective especially when it lands on an answering machine and people get the message and they’re interested or they know of someone that would be interested in the house. So go ahead and use voice broadcasts to build up interest and to get people to come to your round robin bidding process.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. If you have not yet seen the special free downloads page for real estate investors, check it out now.
