All Forum Posts by: Dallas Martin

I conducted my first driving for dollars the other day.  I picked a small section in my target market and just drove around looking for houses that appeared abandoned or neglected.  I came away with about 30 or so houses over a 3 hour period (so about 10 per hour).  Anyone else ever try this?  Did I do OK with that return rate?  The plan is to direct mail to the property owners in hopes of finding a motivated seller in the bunch.  Anybody ever have success using this strategy?

@Justin Porco

I'm not part of the REIA group in Pittsburgh. I hope to attend their next meeting and will probably join after that. There's also another investor group in Pittsburgh with a slightly different affiliation called ACRE Pittsburgh. I imagine both groups probably do very similar things and are equally valuable.

@Matt F. 

I purchased the CD from the Office of Property Assessment in my county.  It was cheaper then purchasing a list from a 3rd party.  Unfortunately, the only valuable information I get is the name of the property owner, the property address, owner address, and purchase date.  Age of the owner and equity percentage are not included.  I also have to manually do a lot of manipulation of the spreadsheet in order to sort it (e.g., eliminate duplicates owners and find absentee owners).  

The only reason to target 300 and not 400 is because of cost (both time and money).  If it didn't cost anything to send out direct mail I would send letters out to everyone.  I'm planning to send one mailing per month.  The reason for 5 mailings is because that's where I understand the response rate really increases.  My goal is to get one deal out of this, so if I can achieve that I'll be happy.  If I don't get anything after 5 mailings then I would consider doing more to the same list.

I purchased the list from my county assessors office.  It is a large spreadsheet that contains info on every property in my county.  I've narrowed it down to a little over 400 properties, but that was a little more than I was hoping for; I'm trying to get it down to 300.  I plan on sending out 5 mailings to the targeted property owners.  That's when I realized there would be some owners with multiple properties.  In order to simplify the process I was just planning to send each letter using a standard template.  I am planning to write the letters myself, so I could customize them I suppose.

When sending out direct mail to property owners, do you send multiple letters to an owner who owns more than one property?  Or do you just select one of their properties and use that address in the letter?  My list right now has at least 36 owners that own more than one property with one owning as many as 10 properties.  I know ListSource.com allows you to remove duplicate property mailing addresses, but I didn't purchase my list from them so I don't know exactly how it's done.

Welcome to BP, Justin.  I'm also in the Pittsburgh area and just recently decided to start investing.  Wish I would have decided to do it when I was your age.  Good luck!  This website is a great resource.

Thanks for all the input everyone.  I don't currently have a title company, but now I know what to look for and what to avoid.  It looks like the consensus is a title search shouldn't take more than 2 weeks.

@Josh Caldwell - I've been meaning to check out a Pittsburgh REIA meeting. Maybe I'll see you at the next one.

Thanks @Jonathan Wyse.  That was the answer I was expecting to hear, but I didn't want to make any poor assumptions.

I was discussing cash offers with a fellow Pennsylvania investor today and he said that even if you make an all cash offer you still would not be able to close quickly because the title search is required and can take up to 30 days.  If that's true then it would slightly diminish the advantages of making cash offers because a good lender would only need a few more days to process a loan.  So two questions: 1) Are title searches required in PA for all real estate transactions (even cash offers)? and 2) How long do title searches take?  30 days seems way too long to me.