Month: November 2004

Resources For Creating Mailing Lists

One of the Questions I am frequently asked by students wanting to implement a direct mail campaign is where to get the lists of sellers to mail to. While there are several resources available, I find they vary greatly in price quality of the lists.

There are a couple of resources for lists that I find to be especially reasonable in price and the quality of the lists are excellent for our use. One of those resources is very easy to find and use. Simply go to your property appraiser, auditors, or assessors office and ask them to put the list together for you. If your county is online this is usually pretty simple for them to do. Another source of lists is mailing list services which you can locate by going to your local yellow pages and looking under “mailing list services”.

One of the best sources of mailing lists I have found comes from a program called Real Quest. This program is a part of the services provided by First American Real Estate Solutions. Their program is designed to do a variety of things and mailing lists is just one part of it. Some of the things this program does is regarding lists to help you find the owners of properties that are vacant or rented, in divorce or partnership splits, properties recieved in an inheritance, properties in foreclosure, out of state owners and more. You can custom create your mailing lists in your own office or home at your leisure.

Some of the other attributes of this program are that it gets comprehensive information on any property including mailing address, phone number, purchase price, taxes, assessments, legal data, and mortgage information, all of which can help you determine what kind of offer you will make on a property.

Also available with the program are Document Images, Automated Valuation Models, Flood Maps,Neighborhood Demographic Profiles and Comparables.

Basically, this program provides you with a one-stop shop for all the items you need to create mailing lists, finding sellers who need to sell, and the information you need to create a win-win solution for yourself and your seller.

For more information on Real Quest, go to marketingmagiclady.com and click on “Information on Mailing Lists”.

How to Use Promotional Items to Locate Motivated Sellers- Part 1 (Business Cards)

Finding ways to attract motivated sellers in your business is one of the most important tools in your business, since without the motivated sellers, there are no deals.

There are several different ways to find motivated sellers using a shot gun type of approach to locate as many sellers as you can. Some of these are yard or vehicle signage, business cards, t-shirts and hats, door hangers, pens, buttons, business card magnets, flyers or auto shades.

One of the things I did early on in my real estate business was to order 1,000 business cards. I will tell you that if your business cards are sitting in the box, they aren’t helping you find any motivated sellers. The first thing you need to do with business cards is to give them to everyone you meet- your grocer, cashiers at stores, toll takers, vendors such as your pool person, your lawn care provider, pest control person, waitress, etc. You can give them to your children’s teachers, other parents at sporting events or PTA meetings, healthcare providers, pretty much everyone you come in contact with. Make sure you stick one of your business cards in your bills when you mail them out.

If you have signage on your vehicle, I would suggest putting cards under your windshield wipers and in the slats by your windows every time your vehicle is parked. This makes it much easier for a potential seller to get and hold onto your phone number when they need you. As they pass your vehicle in a parking lot, they will simply pick up your business card.

If you have magnetic business cards, you can stick them to soda machines, or on metal cash registers at your local dry cleaner or butcher shop. If you have rental properties, be sure you have a magnetic business card on the refrigerator. Tenants can be a good source of leads for you as well.

You can give a stack of business cards to vendors who are out seeing people all day such as your pool person, pest control person, lawn care person, carpet cleaner, surveyor, home inspection person, anyone who is in contact with people, especially those who might be moving.

Just remember that business cards are one of the cheapest, easiest ways to reach motivated sellers, so make sure they are not left in the box. You can easily go through 500-1,000 cards per month and do lots of deals just from business cards.

The main resource I use for business cards including money cards, magnetic cards and the florescent cards is a company called Planit Promo and Design. Barbara does a great job, her prices are reasonable and she has all the verbiage on hand for the real estate investor. Take a look at some of the items available at Planit Promo at marketingmagiclady.com. Click on “Promotional Items”.

How To Find Motivated Sellers in the Spanish Market

One of the things I have discovered in my business as a real estate investor is that there are many ways to reach many types of motivated sellers. The main way I like to reach specific sellers in my market is by using a very targeted approach, which for me is primarily direct mail. I also discovered that there is a whole other market place outside the English speaking market with folks who have homes they need to sell for a variety of reasons. The market I am talking about is the Spanish speaking market. The obstacle was that many of these folks don’t speak any English and I don’t speak any Spanish.Many of my students had also contacted me to find out how they too could use direct mail to reach the Spanish speaking market in their areas. They are finding, as am I that these folks have homes they need to sell and no one is tapping into this market. Part of the reason for that is the difficulty caused by not speaking the language and not being able to make ourselves understood. I found the way to solve that problem.

I have recently taken all of the direct mail campaigns that I do to find motivated sellers and had them translated into Spanish. Then I send these letters to the specific market areas where I want to buy houses. I send them out English on one side and Spanish on the other. One of the things I discovered quickly was that while I was getting a lot of response from the Spanish market, I couldn’t understand any of them.

I solved this problem in two different ways. The first was to send the calls to a 24 hour recorded message I had recorded in Spanish. I used a professional interpreter to do this for me so that the grammar and the language were correct. The other way I solved this was to use a Spanish answering service to take the calls and translate the responses into English so I could read them. I then used an interpreter to put the deals together with me. They are very reasonable in their costs and easy to locate. I found mine in the yellow pages. By putting a system in place to deal with this market, we were able to do deals, make money and solve the seller’s problems.

The other thing you can do is to use a Spanish speaking realtor to help you with your deals and then pay them a fee for doing this for you. If you already have a realtor on your team performing a variety of services for you, this shouldn’t be difficult to do.

Once you get past the language barrier, there are lots of great deals to be made. I also had Spanish business cards and signs made to increase the number of motivated sellers I could locate. In my system, Marketing Magic-Spanish Upgrade, I have samples of all of my marketing pieces, both in English and in Spanish. I have basically done all the work for you so all you have to do is get busy and find some houses to purchase.

Check out this and other products at Marketingmagiclady.com