Marketing and texting on a budget for flips and rentals.

[Trent Rogers]

My wife and I live in a fairly rural county and rarely do wholesalers send us properties where we want to buy. I think this is because of how archaic our county records system is, not much data is available online. We really want to target flips and rentals in our area so I have considered doing my own marketing. 

In our case we won't be sorting through large amounts of data and generating thousands of leads like a traditional wholesaler does. For example, we spent two hours driving for doors yesterday and came home with 45 leads. Same thing if we go pull lists at the courthouse, it won't be tens of thousands of people. 

Because this is really just a lead source for our own purchases and the volume of leads will be low I'm struggling to find a fairly cost effect solution for texting. It's my understanding that under the new regulations carriers are requiring these texting platforms to register businesses using their EIN. Most of these texting services can be pricey and LLC's aren't cheap in TN. I really don't want to set up a separate entity just to generate leads, especially when my low volume of texts isn't likely to get flagged by the algorithm if I'm careful about keywords.

I don't want to use my own personal sell number and being able to text from my computer would be a plus.

Can you guys and gals suggest a good solution for sending out a few hundred texts a month?

Edit: The more I read, the more it sounds like cold texting is now flat out illegal. So is every business getting an opt-in or are some just simply ignoring regulations? Very confusing. 

[Austin F.]

Quote from @Trent Rogers:

Quote from @Austin F.:

In a similar situation I had very good success with direct mail. I sent out a similar number of mailers and was able to write a somewhat personal sounding letter, return address it with a local address, use stamps I stuck on myself, and make it look the opposite of a direct mailer. I had a very high response rate (16%+), and ended up buying a few deals because I took the extra time.

As a contrast I had run my list through a phone number generating service, and I checked what number the lead called me from against what the service said their number was, and only one or two were correct.

 Nice, thank you for the feedback! Did you print the mailers yourself? It seems most good mailer services have some minimum order (500) and I currently don't need that many. 

It's also interesting that so few numbers actually correlated to your skip tracing...what skip tracing service did you use?

Printed it all myself on my home printer. There is a way to do it where you can build your list in Excel, then export it into Word and it will auto fill names and addresses as it all prints. So you can click print, and it will rattle off 50 or however many of the same letter each with a different name printed in the "name" field. Same with envelopes for addresses. Once I figured out how to format my Excel doc the right way this was very easy, but it took a bit of research to get right.

I can't recall the name of the skip trace service I used, but it was highly recommended here.