Critique My ListSource Criteria... First Time Doing This

[Kyle B.]

Hello BP. I was hoping to get some advice from the direct mailing experts out there. I will be purchasing an address list from ListSource, and after running through their options, below is the criteria list I came up with:

- Equity %: 40%-100%
- Property Type: SFR, Duplex, Triplex
- Last Market Sale Date: Before 2000
- Owner Occupied Status: Absentee Owned (both in and out of state)
- Corporate Owned: Excluded
- Both mailing and property address complete

Please let me know if I am missing anything obvious. I believe the important criterion are the equity stake and absentee owned fields. One specific question I do have is if the Last Market Sale Date is necessary. Since I'm already targeting a certain equity stake %, is this additional criteria redundant (since it would be used to exclude recent purchases with low equity)?

Thanks, and look forward to hearing any input.

Kyle

[Brandon Foken]

Kyle B.

I chose 15-years mainly to whittle down my list. Without that criteria, there were about 2,000 leads so I just kept moving that down until I could get it under 900 leads. I wanted it under 900 leads for monetary and sanity reasons - didn't want to extend myself too far on my first mailing.

I'm printing all the letters on yellow lined paper that I got from Amazon. I use a font I found on www.dafont.com called Nothing You Could Do. I bold the font to make it stand out more. Finally, I use a custom color that makes it look like blue ink - 0/35/102 in MS Word (Thanks to Jerry Puckett for that recommendation). And you are correct, getting the text aligned with the lines on the letters was a pain. What I finally did was create a table whose lines were the same width as the yellow paper lines and place text in each row of the table. Then I hid the outline of the table and I got a nicely spaced letter that is 95% on the lines. Oh, I almost forgot, I had to fiddle around with the margins to get the text to start after the left margin. Overall it took about 45-60 minutes and 15 pieces of paper to get it looking right. I don't want to advertise, but I plan on writing up an extensive blog post about this process with pictures of finished products and can shoot the link your way when I'm done.

Exit strategy is to initially wholesale these properties to gain experience and capital. My plan after I wholesale a few of these is to offer one up to an experienced rehabber without an assignment fee and in return I get to shadow the flip/gain a mentor. Time will tell if this strategy works.