Mailing Campaign software

[Dominique Gunderson]

I'm a flipper in the New Orleans area, more specifically on the Westbank. I'm doing a flip right now that I bought on the MLS, but lately I'm noticing less and less investment inventory coming up on the MLS, so I want to do a mailing campaign to target more sellers.

I was curious if anyone knew a good software to use to pull records for mailing campaigns? I'm looking for something that you can pull mass lists with a search by zip code or city, with criteria such as year built, home size, etc. Also looking to be able to export that list to an excel spreadsheet. Would like to have the owners living address as well as the property address, if different. 

If anyone has any suggestions of companies that have data for this area, that would be awesome. Thank you!

[Account Closed]

From Hermosa Beach to Florida? I live in Gardena and ride my bicycle through Hermosa Beach every S. I just built the Shade Hotel next to the Cheesecake Factory. Very pretty picture on your profile! I ride my bicycle every Sunday from Gardena, through Hermosa Beach and to the Del Amo mall to wait for my wife to do her weekly purse shopping. Women sure love to buy purses!

The best service you will find with the best search filters is search on Google for Haines List. It will come up as Haines Criss + Cross Directory. You can pull up tens of thousands of properties at one time and you will get all the property info you need including property owner names, addresses, mailing addresses, baths, size and everything that every other list includes.

One thing to expect is the services is something like $1,300 per year. I use the list every 2nd or 3rd year to download about 150,000 records and then I don't use the service for a few years. I pay workers in the Philippines $3 to $4 per hour to do my data mining and they do a beautiful job. Purchase a used computer on Ebay for $69 to $79. Set in up with only what you want your workers to do. Use Teamviewer and you can watch your worker(s) on your monitor as they work. Usually in the late evening because they are 13 hours ahead of us in California. Maybe, 16 hour difference in Florida.

Direct mail is not what it is cracked up to be. Especially, at a cost of 60 cent each with envelope, stamp and paper plus your labor. I send thousands of direct mail pieces and the results are less than 1 response for every 1,000 pieces and that response does not necessarily result in a sale.

Now, I already know what people are going to say. My message is bad, or whatever, but I have been doing more than 500,00 flyers every year for almost 50 years, 80,000 direct mail pieces every year and the results you get depends on many factors. When my advertising is to give something for free I get about 3 leads for every 200 ads. Trying to purchase a $500,000 home does not get you the same results. I will stick with my have a lot  Until someone provides a better mail piece with absolute proof I will stick with my 1 in 1,000, or less until someone provides a better ad copy and absolute proof.

The cost to send direct mail to everyone is too expensive. I send direct mail to homes in pre-foreclosure, but about 95 percent of the foreclosures get canceled. That means, 95% of the stamps, envelopes, paper, labels and labor is a waste.

A better, less expensive, and more effective option is sending bulk email, but this still takes a lot of work and technical knowledge regarding how to get the names of the properties owners and then you still have to get their email addresses from another website. You can get a free list of foreclosures from Auction.com on an Excel file. Then, you need to find the property owner's names and email addresses. This requires either looking them up yourself on Haines List or another service i.e. parcelquest.com. You still need to find the email addresses and I use datazapp.com at a cost of 3 cents per email address lookup. A list with 3,000 addresses will return about 1,000 email addresses for $90. So, 5,000 email addresses will cost you about $450.  To get the names, property addresses and email addresses and doing the computer work to send the bulk email takes about 3 hours when you know what you are doing. 

The best part of email is I send 90,000 emails every month and my cost is $450 to get the information and $16.00 per month to send the 90,000 emails in-house. Then, instead of sending a property one letter at 60 cents per letter plus a lot of stuffing and licking envelopes you can send 3 to 5 emails to 5,000 property owners for about $466. To send 5,000 letters 3 times your cost would be about $9,516.00 plus your labor and I pay my workers 20 cents to stuff each envelope. So, my cost for 5,000 pieces 3 times is $12,516.00.

To get a list of pre-foreclosures from auction.com enter in the search box the city or zip code you want.

Click on any property that says "Foreclosure Sale, In Person".

Then,  look to the right side of the screen and click on "Other Properties At This Auction".

Now, you can load a list of all the properties onto an Excel file.

This is what I do. I download the list and filter out the properties I am not interested in. I send the properties I like 1 letter. Then, I send each property 3 emails. I drive by properties I am interested in, knock on the doors and talk to the owners. Then, I try to get the property at the auction.

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO BUY FROM THE ONLINE AUCTIONS. Read up about the very bad things that happen even after you win the bid. The live auctions are a whole different ballgame and you usually get clear titles, but there are a few exceptions. I have always had great luck at live auctions and the most profitable properties are those that go for about $1 million because there are less bidders and the spread between what you pay and what you can re-sell for has always been about 30%. You are lucky when you can get a 20% spread for a home around $300,000 to $500,000.