Direct Mail List Question

[Jonathan Morris]

I have been reading so much of the forum discussions on wholesaling and wanted to take action. So I decided that I would begin with my marketing. As I have read, this is truly a numbers game. I have read of people sending out anywhere from 1000-5000 pieces of marketing per month. I went on to Listsource.com today to research the area I want to focus on. I live in Chicago and want to focus on there. Chicago is such a big city with so many diverse neighborhoods that I want to focus only on certain zipcodes because I know those areas really well. I entered these criteria:

Geography: 6 zip codes

% equity: 40-100%

SFR

Absentee owned (out of state only included), Exclude trustee owned and exclude corporate owned

The result was something like 80 properties. So I did the search over and changed the geography criteria to the entire city of Chicago. The results were 322 properties. Out of curiosity I did the entire Cook county. The result was 833 properties.

Am I doing something wrong? If it is a numbers game, I should have a list of at least 1000, not 322 (I am sure I don't know all the areas that some of those houses are in since Chicago is so big). If this is accurate, how are people getting lists that are so big and are close enough to your area that you can view the houses?

Any thoughts/suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you very much.