All Forum Posts by: Eric Z.

I'm helping a realtor friend doing USPS EDDM. Almost 1000 postcards, printed through click2mail per their EDDM spec. Dropped off and paid the postage in the post office last Tuesday. 

They have not mailed them out(I knew this because I live in the same community we mailed to, and the website has no hits). I went to the postal office Saturday morning to find out when they will be mailing them out, and the carrier supervisor told me they can't find the package anymore.  

It's not cheap to design, print and mail 1000 postcards. Anyone else experienced this when dealing with USPS's every door direct? I'm going to the post office again tomorrow, any suggestions as to what to ask? I'd be pissed if one of the guys there got lazy and just throw the postcards away(instead of delivering them).

@Romeo Trocino   welcome. Same boat here, daughter is 4 month old. Definitely a challenge to start a business at this time of life. But be focused, and don't give up. 

@Aaron Mazzrillo thx for chiming in. That's a good point. Assume I can find these lists somewhere. Would you suggest change the list since we are just started? 

@Eric Giovannucci thx, 

@Rene Martinez txt might not be a bad idea, there is no way to know if they are calling from a cell or not, but worth a try. thx

@J. Martin 

Man, BP really needs to fix this name mentioning thing. 

I’m starting the new year with a 6 month yellow letter direct mailing campaign.

From what I read on BP, looks like the consensus on yellow letter is they do work, but needs to be consistent and persistent. However, the Bay Area is a different market entirely. Through conversation with many local wholesalers and flippers, I’ve not heard any success story in mailing yellow letters.

With that in mind, the campaign is designed to run at least 6 month, I will extend the campaign to 1 year if I’m getting 2-3 quality leads. @Jerry Puckett who I met during Martin’s awesome Real Estate Summit in November is helping me out in designing the letters and campaign.

Here is some quick facts:

Target list: a mix of list of long stay high equity, absentee owners, and inherited owners

List size: about 1400.

Area: 10 mins drive from where I live (most of the them are tract homes built during 50 - 70s)

I will keep a weekly summary here to get myself motivated, of course any feedback is welcome.

Jan 4 - Jan 10

Letter : 1/3 of listing

Calls received: 18

Answered: 10

Left voice message: 0

Response rate: 4%

Quality Leads: 0

Comments:

Letters are mailed out on Saturday. Calls started coming in on Tuesday. A couple observations:

a. Most of people call between 1pm - 6pm, I was expecting more calls at night, that was not the case.

b. Call drops significantly after Wednesday. I have only received 1 calls after Wednesday

c. Most of them just want o tell me they don’t want to sell. Some tell me they will sell if the offer is right, either way, not motivated

Interesting:

I have one person actually texted me. Google voice actually works pretty well with SMs. 

Questions

For these unanswered calls, do you call them back? or just assume they are not motivated enough?

@Jerry Puckett 

@Johnson H. I was working late that friday, sorry miss out the meetup. Hope to you see you guys next time. 

Buyer usually aware the price you give them includes the assignment fee. So you can just tell them, it's 320k including my assignment fee. 

I assume your question really is "should the buyer know how much my markup is?".  Good buyers doesn't care how much you make as long as the number works for them.

@Jessica Skupien welcome to BP. I'm sure @J. Martin  and @Arlen Chou will disagree with you here on no cashflow deals in Bay Area. :) 

I like your short term goal, very aggressive. Keep posting here so we get updated along the way ;)