Let me steer you in the right direction.
Imagine you buy a list with the address of vegans, that are also animal rights activists.
Your company sells baby-cow burgers. You send mailers and attached to a mailer is a sample of your latest baby-cow rack of tenderness.
You send all these vegans a mailer asking them to buy your baby-cow burgers.
Half of your mailers get returned.
Now, do you really think the accuracy of any skip trace company is going to make a difference getting any of your burgers sold?
No! Right?
So far this makes sense yes?
Sweet.
Now you will ask, what in tarnation has this to do with real estate investing?
Well... exactly EVERYTHING!
Pick 10 people that are in foreclosure, and ask them if they want to sell their house or keep it.
Correct. 10 out of 10 will say: "keep it".
Now pick 10 tax liens people from your amazing tax liens list.
Same equation, Do you want to sell or keep?
10 out of 10 will say "KEEP".
You are targeting people that do NOT want to sell their house.
How is this example any different from the baby-cow example? It isn't
Now, the next concept.
Let's talk about "luck".
Toss of a coin, heads or tails? 50-50. That is luck.
Now, for every 5000 mailers you send (let's say) you get a deal.
That is a 99.98% failure rate. This means 99.98% of the people you paid to reach AND then on top of that, paid to skip trace, are absolutely not motivated.
50% is luck. What do you call 0.02%? That is not luck, that is not random, that is suicide.
So conclusion, the people you are trying to skip trace (and pay money for to skip trace) are not just "a bad " audience.
They are the worst possible audience. Let me repeat, there are not WORSE audiences than these. These people EXPLICITLY do NOT want to sell their house. YET those are the people all the "experts" are telling you to chase.
OK so what does this translate to?
I'll tell you.
You have a fork in the road. You turn left, and you chase foreclosures. You turn right and people willing to sell below market value chase you.
You turned left.
So you complain to your favorite Guru that you are not getting much luck with your mailers calls and texts.
3 guesses what EVEY PERSON on Bigger Pockets is going to tell you?
"If you are not making deals... you need to send MORE mailers, you didn't do enough"....right?
So translate this into a language that is easier to process.
You made a mistake and turned left.
In order to FIX your mistake they are telling you to... check this out.... HIT THE GAS PEDAL!
No my amigo!
If you need to skip trace anyone per definition that are not motivated.
If you need to chase and pay for "leads" , they are not motivated.
Why?
If there WERE motivated you wouldn't be able to chase them because they would be chasing and looking for a solution to their own problem. They would have been on Google hitting up people like me, with a #1 ranking website.
Motivated sellers, chase you. If you need to chase people, per definition, they are not motivated!
Process this, and be take the next steps wisely. Your future in REI depends on it!
