Targeted Direct Mail lists

[Stuart Birdsong]

i am looking to increase my source of leads beyond just the internet and am looking for some guidance as to developing a good target list. I live in a very competitive market and home prices are on the rise. Aside from equity, can anyone recommend another potential filter that might help produce better returns on a direct mail campaign? Thanks

Stuart

[Jack Butala]

Great stuff, @Stuart Birdsong . 

Your best bang for the buck will be contacting the owners of tax defaulted property.  If there are back taxes associated with a property, there's almost always no debt.

We send thousands of letters out every month. The source of our data is a division of First American Title called Core Logic or RealQuest (we have no affiliation with them whatsoever).

They are the industry standard for real estate mailer data for all types of real estate, in my opinion. They have a direct feed from 98% of the 3150 or so counties in the US.

What is great about this data is that it’s usually super fresh (they tell you how old it is before you download it) and it’s in the same format for every county so it takes the mystery/difficulty out of scrubbing the data once you download it. You only need to learn their format once. As you may know, if you get it directly from each county, each one provides it in different formats. That can be a real headache unless you have formal data training.

As far as printing goes, please take a look on Youtube.com for any instructional video about completing a mail merge. It's well worth the time and effort of learning up front. The result is a custom letter to each person on the list.

Your response rate will double or triple with this method.

Hope this helps and please let me know if you have any additional help.