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 particular post is a continuation of that discussion focusing primarily on using direct mail to sell your house.
In step number 7, we’re going to discuss doing direct mail or flyers. Normally, I love direct mail. And direct mail is great; however, because you’re on such a confined time frame in order to sell this house, you really need to consider the benefits of direct mail versus having someone go out with flyers or the other type of marketing we talked about.
Let me just throw out some ideas of ways you can use direct mail in order to get your houses occupied. If you get enough lead time, you can actually go and send postcards or flyers out direct mail saying that you’ve got this house for sale, here’s the address, here are the details, here’s how the bidding process is going to work, call our 24-hour recorded information line for additional information. And you can mail that out to all the houses within a quarter mile or a half mile of your particular house that you have for sale.
How do you get that list? Well, a lot of the comp programs, like the comp program that we have used is RealQuest, you can actually go and pinpoint an address and say, “I want all the addresses of the houses in this area – within a half mile radius of this particular house.” You can also call on major list brokers to give you a list.
You tell them, “I want all the addresses of homeowners within a half mile or quarter mile of this address”, and they’ll give you a list which you can then upload to the US Postal Service website, and you can upload your letter and the list, and then you can have it automatically sent out for you to all the people that are in those areas.
Now you’re not necessarily looking for your buyer in there, but you could also be looking for them to refer a buyer. Birds of a feather tend to flock together. So if you’ve got people living in that area already, they know other people that are probably in that same income bracket that would probably want to live in that neighborhood, and they may refer someone to you. Now, I’ve heard of offering a cash reward if they find your buyer. They’ll come there and you’ll say I’ll pay you a $500 cash reward if you refer to me a buyer and they eventually buy the house. So you can do that if you want in your letter. I do not usually do that. I usually just advertise, and I make it a great deal – tell your friends if you want them to live here that this is the deal. And then I give them all the information about the house and they do it. Now that’s doing it via direct mail.
The other way to do it is you go and your print up flyers and you go door-to-door around your neighborhood putting out flyers and getting people interested in your house. I have sold houses this way. People come and look at houses and are interested in houses by getting flyers. We have tracked this; I know I have sold more than one house this way. You can be very effective by bringing flyers out and letting people know that you’ve got houses for sale using flyers. So between flyers and direct mail, either going door-to-door and getting the message out or using the US Postal Service to go door-to-door for you and getting the message out is a great way to sell houses.
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.
Want an additional way to get the word out to the neighbors of your property that you have a property for sale, for rent or available on a rent to own? Try the Postcards to Neighbors Checklist as an easy, cost effective way to contact a large number of the closest neighbors to your property.
While flyers like we discuss in the For Rent Flyer Checklist is an effective way to get the word out using flyers about a property that you have, using postcards is both cheap and highly effective.
In the checklist, we walk you through the steps of getting the list of neighbors from your mailing list provider and how to check for common mistakes you might make preparing the postcard like the wrong phone number or website address.
Then, we discuss how to get the postcards out quickly and painlessly yourself or with the help of your mailing house.
The nice thing about using the postcard system is that you can just as easily send out 10 postcards as you could 500 and we have found that since “birds of a feather flock together” neighbors are usually great referral sources for finding tenants for properties from their network of friends and family.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want more information about becoming the best property manager you can? Download, listen and implement the strategies in Secret Property Management Tips and Tricks now. It is a free download for a limited time.
Earlier this week I ordered my mailing list that I will be using to mail a postcard to people that have already loaned money secured by real estate in my county. The thought is that if people have loaned money secured by real estate in the past, they might be inclined to do it again. So, these could be good candidates to become private lenders for deals that I am looking to do.
For those of you that are wondering what my mailing list selection criteria was, here is what I used:
- In my county
- Private Party Loans Only (not institutional lenders)
- The properties they loaned money on were Residential, Duplexes, Condos or Townhomes
- They had a complete mailing address (why pay for partials)
- Exclude properties owned by corporations (we could debate doing this or not)
And that is it. The total number I found in my county for this search was 1,277 records. I plan on mailing to those as soon as I hear back from the Colorado Division of Securities.
Until my next post,
James
I was doing some research for doing another mailing campaign for our real estate investing business and happened to have a meeting with a local title company for lunch. Many title companies are offering investors great resources and services to attract new clients to their core services of title insurance.
During lunch today I was reminded of this as I talked to the title company rep about mailing lists for my newest mailing. In fact the prices on their mailing list was very good in comparison to what I would have paid elsewhere.
A good title company can provide you with these types of lists:
- Absentee Owners
- Foreclosures
- Lenders on Existing Properties
- Home Owners with Adjustable Rate Mortgages
- People that have purchased more than one property in the last X months (potential investors that have bought recently)
- And many more…
If you are looking to use direct mail to market your real estate investing business, I encourage you to contact a local title company or two and interview them to see if they can help with it and what other services they can provide to assist you.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Download our Real Estate Investor Daily Training Volume #1 real estate course (free for a limited time) to find out how I generated over a hundred motivated seller calls in a few days using low cost direct mail.
Your local Tax Assessor can be a great resource for you as a real estate investor (link a direct link for Real Estate Investor Bronze Members).
While many real estate investors will find the Tax Accessor and their website a great tool for helping to learn about the properties in their market, there is also another service that many Tax Assessors may provide that is extremely helpful for real estate investors: mailing lists.
If you plan on using direct mail at all to build your investor buyers list or to use it to get a list of potential sellers to contact to buy houses, your Tax Assessor may be able to provide you that data as well at, what is usually, a nominal cost. Of course, you could go and use a mailing list broker or a friendly title company to get these lists as well, but your Tax Assessor is also another great resource.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn how to use direct mail to find deals consistently and at a very low cost? Upgrade to our Real Estate Investor Bronze Membership today and download our training materials including Real Estate Investor Daily Training Volume #1 which describes just one example of how I’ve used postcards to buy houses effectively.
