Wholesaling/Marketing Journal

[Brandon Foken]

This seems to be a pretty popular topic on BP these days so I thought I'd add to the wholesaling/marketing discussions. A little background and then we'll move on to the details.

Background
I started my journey in November 2012 when I realized I wanted out of my 9-to-5 and be my own boss. I spent the last 3 months reading and researching voraciously everything I could find on the subject. After much research, reading and commenting on BP I purchased a direct mail list from http://www.listsource.com using criteria that other BP members provided me, they are:
- Absentee Owners
- Alameda County, CA
- 2 to 5 Beds
- 1+ Baths
- Equity <$30,000
- Equity < 49%
- Last Market Sale Date: 01/01/1901 - 12/31/1998
- Less than 4 units
- Excluded Trust and Corporate Owned
- Deduplicated leads where the mailing address was the same for multiple properties

This resulted in 896 leads. I'm also mailing to probates and I've gathered roughly 55 leads from that source.

Education
Based upon the advice I heard from the Wholesaling bootcamp (thanks @Aaron Mazzrillo) audio recording and my own personal desire, I signed up for 9 credit hours at my local community college (CCSF) to both further my knowledge and get prepared to take the CA real estate license test. I'm taking real estate principles, real estate law and real estate appraisal. I have plans to register again the fall for tax consequences for real estate and maybe one or two other courses. After two weeks in school, I've learned a ton already and am excited to continue on this journey.

Action
Now that I had my lists created, I signed up for a free account with Zoho to manage my leads (I can't recommend Zoho enough - very easy to use and FREE). I also bought envelopes, stamps, paper, return labels and a printer. Over last week I printed out all 945 letters and envelopes which wasn't as bad as I expected. The envelopes took forever to print as I could only load 30 at a time. I dropped my first 250 letters on Saturday (1/26) afternoon - all probates and the first 202 absentee owners. I have another ~200 envelopes ready to go and will have all the envelopes stuffed, stamped and sealed by Thursday night.

To prepare for the (hopefully) large influx of calls, I created a questionnaire that is as brief as possible while still getting all the pertinent information from the prospect. I stole from many sources while creating this document so thanks to everyone who contributed and had no idea! I'm hoping my first phone call happens some time today. I'll be sure to keep the BP community up-to-date on any successes/failures I have so hopefully everyone can learn. Finally, I'm working on an extensive blog post for my website that will show A-to-Z how I created my mailer from selecting paper to lists to getting your marketing copy aligned to the yellow letter lines and more. I'll link to that when completed.

Any comments, questions, critiques or advice is more than welcome and very much appreciated. Thanks for making it this far.

-Brandon

[Jerry Puckett]

Originally posted by Jon Klaus:

I got about 10% response with that letter

Jon, you got a 10% response rate with a very similar letter, though not quite exact. Brandon Foken, the copy in this letter was designed to appeal in Austin, although it is a good general letter. You copied the first paragraph verbatim, but pupped out some on your call to action in the second paragraph.

The call to action in the letter that got Jon 10% response was this:

"Your house at Blake-Manor Rd looks like a good fit...would you like to sell it to me? 512-666-xxxx. Call me and let's talk it over."

In your copy, I would get rid of the word "generally", and as a call to action, don't just offer talk..."Give me a call at (415)926-9370 to talk more." Try changing that to an embedded command: "Call me today at xxx-xxx-xxxx.

I know this is splitting hairs, but in my split testing, I've noticed that even the placement of a comma can make a big difference.

Another thing....I'm not fond of generic # 10 envelopes. Try going smaller, the type people actually use when they write letters to family and friends. I use 3 x 6.5. I get a box of 500 of them from Sam's for about $14, so they cost about 0.03cents apiece.