All Forum Posts by: Brandon Foken

I am now!

Thanks for the insight, Braden C.. I'll have to check into that the next time I buy from Listsource.

2 quick updates:
#1 - I dropped off another 200ish letters in the mail this afternoon.
#2 - I wrote a blog on my site detailing the money and time requirements/commitments when doing direct mail campaigns. Should be a good read for anyone wanting to get into wholesaling.

www.shiftinvestments.com/2013/01/29/direct-mail-time-money

Kelly Reed I do use Avery labels and mail merge in combination for my return address, but I think the "handwritten" font directly on the envelope is more likely to get opened than a printed label. I haven't tested that assumption, but just my guess.

Steve Babiak It's apparently been too long since I took a math class. You are correct, both of those should be ">" or greater than. Thanks for catching this.

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

Thanks Michael Galloway - I really appreciate the offer. I just sent out my first batch of 250 letters on Saturday, will be dropping another 250 tomorrow and another ~450 throughout the week. Hopefully get some nibbles from my first mailer and I'll definitely keep everyone in the loop.

Just wanted to give a quick update that I printed 896 yellow letters and 896 envelopes over the last two days with my HP printer. Printer preformed pretty well and was relatively fast at 2.3 ppm.

I was concerned about the quality of the yellow paper, but found that it held up quite well. I found it best to stick to printing in 100 page intervals, not sure why but that seemed to help. The paper was still semi-stuck together on one end so I had to break those apart or my printer wanted to grab 10-15 sheets at one time. Other than that, I can't recommend that paper enough.

Kyle B.

I chose 15-years mainly to whittle down my list. Without that criteria, there were about 2,000 leads so I just kept moving that down until I could get it under 900 leads. I wanted it under 900 leads for monetary and sanity reasons - didn't want to extend myself too far on my first mailing.

I'm printing all the letters on yellow lined paper that I got from Amazon. I use a font I found on www.dafont.com called Nothing You Could Do. I bold the font to make it stand out more. Finally, I use a custom color that makes it look like blue ink - 0/35/102 in MS Word (Thanks to Jerry Puckett for that recommendation). And you are correct, getting the text aligned with the lines on the letters was a pain. What I finally did was create a table whose lines were the same width as the yellow paper lines and place text in each row of the table. Then I hid the outline of the table and I got a nicely spaced letter that is 95% on the lines. Oh, I almost forgot, I had to fiddle around with the margins to get the text to start after the left margin. Overall it took about 45-60 minutes and 15 pieces of paper to get it looking right. I don't want to advertise, but I plan on writing up an extensive blog post about this process with pictures of finished products and can shoot the link your way when I'm done.

Exit strategy is to initially wholesale these properties to gain experience and capital. My plan after I wholesale a few of these is to offer one up to an experienced rehabber without an assignment fee and in return I get to shadow the flip/gain a mentor. Time will tell if this strategy works.

Welcome, Sorab, from across the Bay. Do you attend any meetups or REIAs in Alameda County?

Looks good to me, but I just got done printing my first batch of letters from ListSource - 896 of them - which wasn't that bad, but we'll see how stuffing them goes though.

I had last sale date at 1/1/1998 for a solid 15 years of ownership. I also excluded trust properties but that is only because my list was too large as I was aiming to keep it under 900 (I'm also mailing to about 60 Probates at the same time). One last criteria I put in was equity at a minimum of $30k. I read this on another thread and thought it was a good idea to immediately toss out any real junkers.

What is your plan after you purchase the list? Yellow letters? Handwritten? Outsourced? Post Cards? Etc.? Sorry for all the questions but as a fellow newbie it's good to see what others are doing as well.

And because I know I'll get this question back, here is what I'm doing. First round of yellow letters will be dropped tomorrow. 2nd mailer in 30 days will be another yellow letter but lengthier. 3rd mailer will be a postcard 60 days after the 2nd(testing different strategies). I will repeat that loop a total of 3.3 times for a total of 10 touches spread across 20 months. All will be done by me besides the Post Cards.

Hope all that helps. Let me know how your mailer turns out. I plan on starting a BP thread on my efforts sometime tomorrow after I drop everything off at the post office. Best of luck!