Direct mailers

[Mike Flora]

I'm a wholesaler in inland empire area in California and over the last few weeks I have sent out 3250 direct mailer post cards to absentee owners with equity and all LLC were removed from my list. I have only received 5 calls, which is a horrible response rate, but did get one deal out of it. It's a good card as well, so I know that is not an issue. Since I'm pretty new I'm not sure if anyone else has experienced horrible response rates like this with absentee owner lists? I'm going to start adding probate, divorce, pre foreclosure to my lists as well but from my mailers before my last 2 I had a much better response. THOUGHTS??? Just trying to see what I might be missing here.

[Sean McNamara]

Mike,

I sent a batch of about 2,000 postcards to Absentee Owners in select Denver zip codes w/ over 50% equity, whose homes had not traded for at least three years. As you may have heard the Denver market is extremely hot right now, absolutely a seller's market and it is becoming harder and harder to find deals on MLS. We received a similarly dismal response rate from those postcards which were well thought out and clearly came from a RE pro. We were able to close one deal from that first batch but the response rate was about 1%.

About 2-3 weeks later we mailed Yellow Letters to that same group of owners and our response rate essentially quadrupled. Still not the huge response rate many people claim when using these types of "handwritten" letters, but I attribute that to the market conditions here. Just about every owner I spoke to had been inundated with mailers from guys like myself. We found that because we were targeting such highly sought after neighborhoods, we were far from alone in trying to make on offer on their home. 

However, I am still receiving calls from those letters months after sending them while the postcard calls stopped coming a long time ago. Postcards, especially when yours isn't the only one in their mailbox that day, are easily thrown out. Our letters on the other hand were able to stand out from the rest. I've had numerous people tell me they kept my letter on their desk/fridge/etc for weeks before deciding to call me.

Hope this helps your mailing efforts! We are going to start pushing out to the neighborhoods that likely receive less interest from investors like myself and see if we can drum up more deals there. 

Good Luck!