Yellow Letters

[Walter Young]

In the most recent podcast (#33) Sam Craven mentioned mailing yellow letters to motivated sellers with high equity. How does one find these sellers or anyone else who would be a good prospect to receive the yellow letter?

[Chris Feltus]

You can query the information from your local appraisal district for free, or you can purchase lists from List Source (core logic product), amongst others. List Source and other list generating services will approximate equity with relational databases. The keyword there is approximate the home owner could have refi'd and pulled all the money out yesterday for all you know. Personally, I like to use deed date as an approximation of equity I do deed dates 15 years or more back.

There are many lists to hit, it becomes a matter of preference really.

• Tax delinquencies
• Code Violations
• Absentee Owners
• Probate
• Inheritance List

The list goes on. The fact of the matter is this is a numbers game. Also for the record, I personally prefer post cards. I have been split testing for awhile now and have found in my marketing yellow letters generate more calls, but they are frequently of lower quality.

At the end of the day its about mailing your list consistently. No matter how targeted your list becomes there is no "sell my house right now!" list to mail. Red flags (such as code violations etc) generate motivation, combined with equity generally lend themselves to producing deals. When the going gets tough, keep mailing.

Hope that helps.