All Forum Posts by: Brandon Foken

Joshua Dorkin: I've been able to find all the slides for the presentations I've listened to but Aaron Mazzrillo's & Ryan Webber's Wholesaling presentation is nowhere to be found. Were there slides for their session? Thanks in advance.

Kyle B. $.18 per lead. That can go up or down depending on what information you want from them. For instance, I can pay $.03 additional per lead if I want to know how floors the house has.

John Jackson I love the passion and enthusiasm!!

I agree, 14k leads is outrageous. I've been messing around with the filters since my post and have whittled it down to 1,500 owner occupants that own their SFR free-and-clear.

To answer your question - I will initially be wholesaling deals while I build up my cash reserves for flipping. In addition, my hope is to find a property that I can offer up to an experienced investor without an assignment fee for some mentoring.

With those answers in mind, what are some of the criteria you use when building out a lead list? Tarrant County is more populous than Alameda County (surprisingly) so how do you filter 14k leads into a more actionable list? I feel like I'm leaving good prospects off the table by not including those with very low LTVs (less than 30%) but can't find a way to structure my criteria to knock down the number of leads. Any wisdom you can impart from your 10 years vs. my 2 months? Very much appreciate the response.

I'm in the process of preparing my first batch of direct mail slated to go out the first week of January. I'm using Listsource to build my lead list and I wanted to get the community's opinion on my criteria. I am targeting to main groups: Owner Occupants with Equity and Absentee Owners. My criteria for each follows.

Owner Occupants
-Specific Cities in Alameda County (CA)
-LTV less than 40%
-2 or more Beds and Baths
-SFR & up to 4 units
-Exclude Corporate Owned
-14,280 total leads

Absentee Owners
-LTV less than 60%
-All of Alameda County (CA)
-Beds/baths/units are all the same as above
-Last Sale Date before 2001
-Including absentee owners that live in-state as California is quite large
-731 total leads

So, is there anything that I'm forgetting? Anything that doesn't make sense as a criteria? Also, for the owner occupants I don't have the time or money to mail to 14k people so I'll be doing a random subset of roughly 1,000 leads. Any insight, thoughts, comments or critiques are very much encouraged!

I've read about people using everything from ZoHo to SFDC to Sage. In the end, they are all pretty similar. Are you wanting an on-premise CRM or a cloud offering? I'm signing up for the 14-day ZoHo trial next week mainly because it's a) in the cloud and b)really cheap for SMB organizations - roughly $5/mo. if I'm not mistaken. Let us know when you decide on a CRM and how it works for you.

Excellent, I was hoping Sharon Vornholt & K. Marie Poe would jump in as I've read and learned a lot from you both. Sharon - looking forward to reading the blog post come Monday!

As for mail intervals on absentee owners, after the 3rd touch are you mailing once a quarter or even further apart than that? I'm working on pricing out the cost of doing a mail campaign of 10 touches that would run for a total of 20 months. Does this seem like too much mail in too short of a time-frame, too little or like Goldilocks - just right? Also, after running some rough numbers and not accounting for the price of a PO Box I'm looking at roughly $3,300 in expenses for the life of this campaign (purchased list, envelopes, paper & stamps). Which at first glance seems like a lot, but one wholesale deal covers the entire expenditure for the campaign.

Final question - when mailing to probates, how often are you sending mail their way. I'd imagine it'd be different than absentees as there is a very strong emotional component. Thanks again for all the help!

Bump. I know there are a lot of people here that send direct mail and am hoping to hear from them. Thanks!

Okay. Well now I have all sorts of questions. I plan on sending my very first round of yellow letters to absentee owners right after the new year. Probably a round of between 500-750. I've been doing tons of reading on the subject and reading a lot of what Sharon Vonhort (can't get her name to link) has to say on the subject. The main takeaways I get from her is that a system needs to be set up for tracking metrics and for systematic mailings in addition to multiple, consistent mailings. She talks about marketing to these people for a long period of time, sometimes up to two years.

With that in mind, my initial plan was to send direct mail to the same group of people a total of 8 - 10 times. The intervals would look something like this:
- Initial Mailing - Day 1
- Second Mailing - 30 days after initial
- Third Mailing - 45 days after second mailing
- Fourth Mailing - 60 days after third mailing
- Fifth Mailing and On - 90 days after

But after reading this thread, it seems that would be overkill and a potential waste of time/funds. Does anyone have metrics/stories about marketing successes after three to four mailings? To those who only do one to four rounds of mail, what are your conversion rates for both call-backs and houses you make offers on? Finally, are you sending out "handwritten" yellow letters, postcards, typed letters, etc? Is there one method that you find attracts more call-backs than others? Reading on here it seems the vast majority send yellow letters, but would love to get further feedback.

I found this website in a previous life, really good for looking for different font types: http://www.dafont.com/search.php?q=handwritten

Some good options in there. Thanks for a copy of your letter, Jon, very helpful.

Jon - are you actually handwriting or are your printing them off using a typeface that looks like it was handwritten? I ask because hand-writing 750 mailers and envelopes seems like it would take days to complete. I'm going to send out roughly 800 letters to absentee owners/probate just after the New Year and am trying to compile best practices through any and everyone. Thanks in advance for the reply.