Driving For Dollars is a Lot of Work

[Anthony Gayden]

Good morning BiggerPockets,

Last week I started my first direct mail campaign. I bought a list from ListSource and sent out postcards to a few hundred absentee landlords in the area where I want to invest. The postcards will start to go out next week.

Rather than sit on my butt for the next few weeks waiting for responses, I decided to be proactive and go driving for dollars to build my own custom mailing list. 

Well it didn't take long to realize that this was probably the slowest and most tedious way to build a mailing list. I spent 2 hours driving around yesterday and getting addresses. When I got home I had to look up each address on the county assessors website and manually type it into my Excel database. That took an additional 4 hours.

So what did 6 hours of work get me? A mailing list with 25 names. I honestly can't even imagine trying to get hundreds of names for a good direct mail campaign.