Whether you are a rookie real estate entrepreneur or a veteran, it is always beneficial to evaluate your current advertising methods. You should assess whether or not your methods are reaching the right market and if your message is being received with a positive response. In this article, you will find five effective advertising methods for your business.
Although this article addresses five methods, you only need to implement two or three of these methods. Set up a tracking system to measure the success of each advertising method. If after further analysis you decide you are not getting the success you were hoping for, institute a couple more of the methods.
Method 1: Door-to-Door Flyers
Door-to-door flyers allow you to get your full marketing message out to people in one step. Your flyer should also include a 24-hour recorded message hotline, so that sellers can be pre-screened and given the benefits of working with you prior to reaching your phone directly. Depending on your budget, you can either deliver the flyers yourself or hire someone to put out the flyers for you. Hiring someone will cost you about $7-10 per hour or 7 to 10 cents per flyer. To have the flyers printed, you can use your local copy shop.
Method 2: Door-to-Door Door Hangers
Similar to flyers, door hangers are mini flyers hung over the handles of doors. These can give you about half to a third of the space of a flyer, since they are usually printed two or three to a page by a printer.
Method 3: Postcards to For-Sale-by-Owners
Owners who are selling their houses without a real estate agent are potentially motivated sellers. You can either compile a list of for-sale-by-owners or use a service that can complete this task for you. A good way to contact for-sale-by-owners is to send postcards. You can upload your list to the US Post Office website to have the postcards mailed out. By using the US Post Office and a company to compile the list for you, you reduce the time spent on creating the advertising – time better spent on dealing with motivated sellers who are already calling.
Method 4: Postcards to Out-of-State Owners
Similar to the postcard you would send to for-sale-by-owners, you could also use the US Post Office website to send out postcards to non-owner occupied houses or out-of-state owners. Out-of-state owners have their property taxes sent to a different state than that of the house they own. With a postcard, you have a limited space to get your entire marketing message out. In this case, include your 24-hour recorded message line, so that the seller can get more information about your business prior to speaking with you.
Method 5: Over-Sized Postcards to Entire Neighborhoods
A saturation mailing of an over-sized postcard to every house in a neighborhood produces great success in receiving phone calls from motivated sellers. Depending on the size of your budget, it is recommended to send out 5,000 postcards to 5,000 different houses in certain zip code. A mailing of this size should result in 10-15 calls from motivated sellers. From those calls, about one or two will sell their house to you. The cost to mail out the 5,000 postcards can be less than $1,500.
Although this may not be the most cost effective way to buy a house, it is still an effective way of advertising. For example, if you target at least $20,000 in profit per house and spend $750 in advertising to buy the house, the $20,000 profit makes the cost of the postcards justifiable.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. For step by step checklists and systems for implementing your real estate investor marketing plus much, much more order a copy of the most excellent Real Estate Investing Systems from Amazon.
Last night I downloaded an updated list of Absentee Owners in preparation for doing another series of direct mail campaigns to buy houses. Before I started to download the lists, I did some preparation work to plan the mailing I am doing.
I am doing a direct mail campaign to my local area and so I selected the zip codes for the parts of town (and one neighboring town) that I am interested in buying in. In total, I had approximately 10 zip codes that I wanted to pull Absentee Owners from. Remember, Absentee Owners are home owners that have their tax bill sent to an address other than the property address. I further limited my search to only Single Family Homes. I am not interested in commercial, industrial, multi-family or anything like that for my personal portfolio and so I excluded those from my mailing list.
With the list provider that I use, I am limited to searching for and showing the results of 1,000 records at a time, so I couldn’t just ask for all Absentee Owners in those zip codes for all time. While this may seem like a limitation, it actually made it easier for me to plan and space out my mailing so that I am not overwhelmed with over 100 calls from motivated sellers in one week – like I’ve done in the past with Absentee Owner mailings (and vowed not to do again).
So, to break down the lists, I first made a list using Microsoft Excel with the years 1970 to our current year and then did a search for each year to find out how many Absentee Owners bought houses (and still owned them today) in those years. In the third column, I had a running total of Absentee Owners so far. Here’s an excerpt of my data:
- 1970 – 0 Absentee Owners – 0 Total
- 1971 – 0 Absentee Owners – 0 Total
- 1972 – 14 Absentee Owners – 14 Total
- 1973 – 23 Absentee Owners – 37 Total
- 1974 – 23 Absentee Owners – 60 Total
- 1975 – 28 Absentee Owners – 88 Total
Then, I took that list and broke it down into groups of about 1,000. Most of the more recent years had about 1,000 Absentee Owners in one year, but some of the earlier years I needed to group together to get approximately 1,000 in that group. For example, my first group, which I call Campaign 1 was all the Absentee Owners from 1970 through 1987. It had 937 Absentee Owners on it before I cleaned it.
After I cleaned Campaign 1 of duplicates and records that did not have valid addresses or names, the list was down to about 672 Absentee Owners. Then, I went on to the US Postal Service website, uploaded that list and the post card I am using. I then scheduled it to be sent out.
I will do a mailing list like this every 5 days or so to keep a steady flow of motivated seller calls coming in, but not too many that I can’t keep up with the research and purchasing of the good deals. If I start to get overwhelmed with too many, I will increase the interval between the mailings by a few more days. If I am not getting enough calls, I will mail them a little closer together. In this way, I can turn on and off lead flow like you would turn on and off a fire hose.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. If you have not joined our mailing list to receive information, articles and resources about real estate investing you should do it right away and you will be taken to a special page with free course downloads plus special reports.
Let’s discuss the sales process for selling your wholesale deal, but before we do that, let’s review how we got to this critical point.
Through marketing to find motivated sellers you’ve found a great real estate deal. While finding your deal you’ve been actively building your real estate investors buyers list so that you’ll be able to sell your property quickly with minimal expense.
You’ve placed this great real estate deal under contract with the seller. You’ve used either a purchase agreement or an option so that you have the right to buy the property at a pre-agreed price, for a specified duration of time (either the inspection period or option period depending on the type of paperwork you’ve used). You have the right to assign your rights in your agreement to another investor for a fee. This will be your wholesale fee.
After you gained control of the deal, you started to market it actively to your buyers list. Additionally, you are marketing it using yard signs (if you’ve received permission to do so), CraigsList, direct mail to Absentee Owners, a classified ad in the newspaper and perhaps even flyers to neighbors.
Now you have found an investor buyer who has driven by the property, viewed your photos of the property on your website, checked your comparable sales data versus his own research and is ready to inspect the property. You coordinate with your seller to get your buyer to walk through the property with you. Once your buyer has done that, you both agree that you’re ready to complete the assignment of contract paperwork. This is the paperwork that assigns your rights to buy the property to your buyer for a wholesale fee.
At this time you collect an earnest money deposit, part or all of which you will most likely be giving to the seller to cover your earnest money requirement.
Finally, you will turn in your paperwork, and any other required documents to your closing/escrow agent or title company. With their help, you will receive your wholesale closing fee when your investor buyer closes on the property with your original seller.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. You know how to do it, are you ready to implement? Become a Real Estate Investor Bronze Member.
While having a huge list of investor buyers that you’ve been building all along is the best way to find a fast buyer for your real estate wholesale deals, I will be covering what I believe is another great method in this article: using direct mail postcards.
So, who will we be mailing these postcards to? Absentee owners.
What are absentee owners? Absentee owners are property owners whose address of where to send their property tax bill to is not the same as the property address. This usually means that the owner is not living at the property since most property owners have their property tax bills sent to their home address.
Why absentee owners? Absentee owners are usually real estate investors that have purchased other real estate investment property. If we limit the list of absentee owners to people that have bought their houses in the last 6 months, your list will reflect active investors more accurately.
Where do you get your absentee owner mailing list? Many county assessor offices will sell you the absentee owner list for a very small amount of money. Or, you can order it for about 15 cents per name from a mailing list company like ListSource.
What do we typically mail to them? An inexpensive white (or yellow) 4″x6″ postcard with simple black text. I prefer to use the US Postal Service’s Click 2 Mail website, which makes it super easy to send these. You upload your mailing list, upload what you want to have on your postcard and then the US Postal Service will print and mail the postcards for you at about only 30 cents per postcard (yes, that includes printing and postage).
What do I put on the postcard? I have tried several different approaches, but I usually like to put my website and a telephone number for them to get more info about the deal, as well as a little info about why they are getting the postcard. For example, I might say: “I see that you purchased a property at 1234 Main Street on March 17th earlier this year and I have a great real estate investor deal that I need to sell significantly below market at 5678 Apple Lane.” This way I reference that they bought a property recently and then I tell them why I am mailing them.
Be sure to give people multiple ways to respond to you. I was recently reminded of this when I sent out almost 10,000 postcards with just my toll free number on it, only to find out that my toll free provider had technical difficulties the day my mailing hit. I was not amused, but learned my lesson to always put multiple types of contact information on every mailing.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Need help doing this? Sign up for our Real Estate Investor Bronze Membership.
In several articles I talk about many low and no cost methods to build a buyers list of investors that you can wholesale your real estate investor deals to. Sometimes, it is worth it to spend a little money to build a much higher quality list of investors. That is the topic for this article.
Sure, building a buyers list of 300 people in a month is great, but how many of them are truly serious buyers? If you are primarily using e-mail as your media for communicating with them and you have a great e-mail service (like what we recommend in our free Special Report: Autoresponder and Email Broadcast Services that we give away to mailing list subscribers) to get those e-mails out quickly–regardless of the number on your list–then having a big list is not much work and is a great base. But, what if instead of having 300 people that are interested in deals, you had a list of 30 people that have bought a deal as an investor in the last 3 months? Wouldn’t that be a small, but higher quality list?
Well, that’s the beauty of what I call the Absentee Owner Goldmine.
There is a way to easily get a list of all the people in your market that have purchased a property in the last 3 months (or any time period you define) where they are having the tax bill for the property sent to an address other than the property address. This list is called the absentee owner list.
What does that mean exactly? Well, most people that are living in the house as an owner occupant have their tax bill for the property sent to the address of the house. The people that tend not to have the tax bill sent to the property are the people that are not living in the property themselves. Folks not living in the property are usually investors. So, what you are getting is a mailing list of investors when you get a list of absentee owners.
Why is this list so valuable to you and me when we are building our wholesale buyers list? Investors tend to buy more than one investment property and have a high probability of being interested in deals you find as a wholesaler. So, this list is a list of people that likely invested before recently and are likely to invest again.
So, how do we dig in and extract the gold from this mine? I prefer to do it by mailing a post card to them with a particular deal that tells them to contact me if they are interested in.
Then, once they contact me, I get their permission to put them on my investor buyers list. I make sure I have their e-mail for e-mail blasts, phone for calling or voice broadcasts, fax for fax blasts and updated address in case the address I have was not the best one.
Once I have their permission and their e-mail, phone number and fax number I can send out deal notifications to them at a much more cost effective rate than having to do a postal mailing to a larger list. The people that have responded become your highly qualified investor list that you can share your deals with.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. For additional information on how to profitably use direct mail and absentee owner mailing lists in your real estate investing and real estate wholesaling business (plus much more), sign up for our Real Estate Investor Bronze Membership.
I am a huge fan of using poor methods (where you have more time than money) to build your buyers list at first, but at some point you will realize that spending a little money on marketing to build a list of serious buyers is well worth the expense. That’s when you should seriously consider using direct mail postcards to quickly and cost effectively build your buyers list.
First, I want to tell you that I and many other marketing savvy investors have built huge buyers lists with this method. It is not theory. It is a proven method to generate a list of buyers. Here’s how to do it.
You need to get a mailing list of investors. The list you want is the Absentee Owner list, which is comprised of owners that have their tax bill sent to an address other than the address of the property that they own. This usually means that they are not living in the property and are probably investors.
So, where do you get this list? Right now, I get mine from public record data via my Multiple Listing Service (MLS) subscription, since I am an inactive licensed real estate broker associate here in Colorado. However, before I had my license, I did not have access to the MLS and I got it from alternative sources. I have also used a subscription service like RealQuest. If you don’t want to commit to paying the monthly fee for RealQuest you can also use a mailing list broker. Current Real Estate Investor Bronze Members can contact me for a current recommendation on what list broker I recommend when you are ready to purchase the list.
Once you have your list, you need a service that will allow you to upload your list and the message that you want printed on your postcard. This service should then print, address, and mail your postcards for you. Trust me when I say that you DO NOT want to do this yourself. It is cheap to have companies do this for you – but very time and labor intensive to do it manually. I have personally used the US Postal Service Click 2 Mail service and have been extremely happy with them. You should strongly consider using them.
I recommend you use a small 4 by 6 post card. You might see a bump in response from using a yellow card stock, which tends to cost a little more, but you will still get a good response from just using white with black text. You don’t need to use fancy colors, photos, glossy paper or image advertising. I use a “typewriter” font message to my list of investors.
What does my message say? I’ve tried various messages over the years and many different mailings. If you have a particularly great deal (or have one you can borrow with permission), you can send out a message telling your list some very basic info about the deal and ask them to call you.
On the call, you can tell them about the deal, but be sure to tell them that you come across great deals for investors all the time, and ask them what they are looking for. Listen very, very carefully as they tell you what they want in a deal. These are the types of deals you must find to become a successful wholesaler. Once they tell you what they are looking for in a deal, then ask them if you can notify them of great deals as you, and other investors you work with, find them. With their permission, you can then add them to your buyers list.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Real Estate Investor Bronze Members can get access to a wealth of additional training materials including access to my actual postcard for building an immensely profitable wholesale buyers list plus much, much more.
