Driving for dollars

[Dillwyn Mathurin]

I am a newbie just trying to get started with little money and no computer skills.  My strengths are analyzing deals and I have good financial acumen.  I drove for dollars 3 hours last week and found 45 properties.  I researched all the properties in the tax records and found 95 percent of the owners addresses, however, I am stuck because I don,t know what to do next.  I don't want to write all the yellow letters to all these addresses by had so what do I do now.  This is where I need help to automate the process to make it more efficient for me.  Any help is appreciated.

[Jill DeWit]

Hi @Dillwyn Mathurin,

It is great that you have figured out your strengths.  Plus you already understand that to make this work and grow, you probably should not be hand writing letters and overspending on postage. If this really takes off for you, are you really going to hand write hundreds or thousands of letters each month? No way.

So - a few tips... (We've done 15,000+ deals so I have some good ones.)

First, get great data from the county or another live feed, not an old list for sale somewhere online. Instead of spending 3 hours to find 45 properties spend that time isolating the 300 or 3000 in that area that meet your criteria and send them a letter. But only send it to the ones that you really want - like 3/2, no pool, no mortgage, assessed value of less than $130,000... You get the idea. Of those that you just isolated, do you know how many have a mortgage? Because you want to be able to make a deal and that is hard with a bank involved. 

Next, send a cash offer and make it respectable. If you don't have the cash, find a partner that does. There are plenty of folks out there with tons of money that do not have the "acumen" like you nor want to do the work. But they will happily spend $ to back a great flip to get an awesome return! 

Finally, you are 100% on track to automate this. Easy to download the ownership data into a spread sheet and then merge into a word file that contains your offer letter. And mail that final 1,500 offers (or whatever your # is) via a cheap printer. You can get this down to less than the price of a stamp (they have bulk rates) and that totally justifies this process.

Hope that helps! 

Jill