Yellow Letter Frustration

[Niki Cunningham]

I've learned a very expensive lesson: to get my list myself! I placed my first yellow letter campaign with 500 letters, sending out 100 per week. What I thought I was getting was an absentee owner's list for my county. What I actually got was 30 absentee owners out of 500. I'm starting week three of a five week campaign and I've had four calls my first week of owners saying my property isn't for sale. Week two, zero calls. I just got off the phone with the company I used and they said, well next time get all absentee owners because you ordered absentee and owner occupied. From the beginning I knew all I wanted to order was absentee, so I'm not sure what happened...but it will never happen again. The Lesson: I will always get my own list so I know what I'm getting.

[Seth Williams]

I think there are a couple of issues going on here:

1. You need to take more control of your list organization. Just because a service out there will make your lists "easy to get" doesn't mean the information will be accurate or up-to-date. Some of the best mailings I've ever done required me to do quite a bit of hands-on work with a list that was a total mess in to begin with. I had to get it from the right source (directly from the county) and spend a lot of time fine-tuning it to be perfect. Was it annoying? Yes. Was it worth the trouble? ABSOLUTELY.

2. You're relying on an imperfect system to give you a perfect list. It doesn't matter what service you're pulling your lists from, places like listsource, usleadsource, salesgenie and the like are really just the intermediary. They pull their information from whatever the county makes available to the public.

If a county doesn't update it's records in a timely fashion (and many of them don't), then these services won't be able to do any better. They can only provide the information they have available from each individual county (however outdated it may be).

There are several rural counties in my state that literally take more than a year to update their databases (it's pretty pathetic). If you're trying to get current information in a county like this, you're gonna have a bad time.

In my experience, most counties that are near a major metro area tend to be relatively current, but the more rural they get, the worse the information is (this is a very broad statement, of course - every county is different). I think it has a lot to do with the county's budget. The less tax revenue they have available, the worse their systems are going to be.

If you want the most current information possible, I've found that it helps to order your list directly from the county. It doesn't get any more current than the information they have in their computers. It's definitely not the most "user-friendly" method, but it tends to take most of the uncertainty out of the equation.