All Forum Posts by: Amanda Fox

@Gary Parker Would love to give you an update! Check in with me in a few weeks in case I forget. We won't mention the condition, I feel like it would insult 1/2 the people we'd be sending to.

And, this may be a bad idea :) but we wrote down vacant as well as distressed home addresses. In one neighborhood there was only one vacant house, but 21 distressed and we theorize (we'll see) that some owners with a distressed home are also in a financial or other hardship and may be open to selling.

Amanda

@Shaun Reilly I know, right?! I have to say, I don't know if it has to do with having a Mac, but I haven't seen any issues. However, still seems pretty sketch.

@Account Closed we use listsource.com worked great and really reputable. Like 60$ for 600 addresses.

@Tony Legendre I'm always amazed at how helpful so many people are on BP. So helpful!!

@Travis West @Gary Parker Whoa, didn't even cross my mind and I'm usually pretty savvy myself when it comes to avoiding viruses, etc. @Travis Lauchman would be good to read their posts as well - freaky!! @Thomas Morgan thank you so much and to everyone else who has been so helpful on this thread!! We opted not to use a typed version, only the two handwritten that I attached. There is so much evidence on BP that handwritten is best, that we went that route. We did purchase out of state absentee, high-equity addresses. If you have a large marketing budget, it would be good in my not at all experienced opinion to go that route and also do research to get a better, more focused list (i.e. inheritance, probate, etc.) It would require searching public records, maybe going to the courthouse, etc. However, if you have a smaller marketing budget and can only send maybe 1000 letters, I would focus on using only the higher quality leads. Everyone buys the list, it's easy, there's a bunch of other investors who will mail to your same addresses. We have 7 other investors at least according to one of our calls.

We started driving for dollars last week and will send typed letters with a picture of their house in the letter and on the envelope, handwritten "notes" on each letter and handwritten addresses (ala Driving for Dollars Bible in the BP blog). Look for my next BP blog (dropping sometime this week hopefully) when I detail all of our efforts so far and the leads we've gotten. Good luck everyone!!

@Travis Lauchman I wish I could say we are kicking *** in Denver, but man it continues to be a rough road! I do have some updates on the direct mail. We sent 300 yellow letters (we bought canary yellow paper and printed the lines and text on the paper. turned out super realistic. I posted the lines in the fileplace you can find them there under my name. It's just a word doc.) You can transfer your handwriting to a font at http://www.myscriptfont.com/ the site was super easy and the font turns out awesome (and it's free)

! We also sent another 300 white letters (attached also) Surprisingly the white letter did noticeably better. We received 1 phone call on the yellow letter and 5 on the white. There are unfortunately some other factors involved, though. The white letter mentioned that my husband was a former real estate broker and the yellow doesn't. There were also 7 other investors sending letters to at least a bunch of our addresses and if those were yellow letters our white letter would have stood out. In all of the addresses we use a small 5 1/2 BAR type envelope and our letters are 5.5 x 8.5. Good luck!!!

@Shaun ReillyGreat response Shaun! I've already talked to a good billboard company in Denver and we can do a 1 month only program. We may still give it a shot down the road once we've flipped/wholesaled a couple of houses (we will get there one day, right?!) just to test the idea. I'm still pretty curious, but for now we'll focus on direct mail (working on focusing in on better addresses), drive for dollars, street signs (pretty sure we're going to phase this out, the responses have been terrible in our area), email blasts with a referral program, internet marketing, and craigslist. We're still in the mode of rolling out 1 at a time to make sure we're well organized, and tracking really well.

Have you had an easier time in Massachusetts? What are your favorite marketing strategies? Are you able to do this gig full time?

@Ellis San Jose Thanks for the input on the billboard! I kinda love the billboard 'cause it's one big LEGAL street sign. Such a good point, though, on narrow and deep, vs. wide and shallow. I gotta rethink that strategy. We did, incidentally, start driving neighborhoods yesterday and are going to start testing that strategy soon. We just need 1-2 deals in the next several months to keep us going, but it sometimes seems so far away!

@Sharon Vornholt I didn't see the "peek" at the whiteboard. We have one already that we do a lot of brainstorming on, but I would LOVE to see the "peek" to help us maximize our brainstorming/planning sessions. Thank you!!

@Kevin Brown thanks for the input! I think based on what you're saying, we're on a good track. Really encouraging to hear your words a couple of steps ahead of us. We are closely tracking/testing all our marketing strategies and make small tweaks each iteration to try to increase our success rate. I think we need to just keep going and not panic and quit doing something just because it isn't working awesome yet. But freaking out is a natural tendency. :)

@Sharon Vornholt We had started tracking everything on our computer calendars. However, we can DEFINITELY see how having a calendar on the wall in front of us every day is much more effective. I've got the order into Amazon already!

@Chris Lipumano We are very similar in our journey! One piece of advice we have found to be really helpful is to have 5 marketing strategies, to roll them out well-organized one at a time and to be consistent. I can definitely attest to the fact that it is hard to be consistent when you don't see results, but we gotta keep going. Good luck and keep us posted!!!

@Karen Margrave Yes, definitely a huge issue as you described. Not only are we new in general to investing, but new to this area. A big reason we moved here from San Jose was that the market was ridiculously fierce there and not nearly as much here, so hopefully that was a good decision. Before getting into investing I had always imagined the hard part would be getting the funding and rehabbing the houses. Hah, what a wake up call this has been!! There's nothing better than being desperate, though, and we are definitely there! We left a well-paying job in CA and have 7 mos living expenses to at least close 1-2 decent deals to get the ball rolling. Thank you for the REALLY good advice, I'm taking it all and applying as much as I can.