All Forum Posts by: Lucas Machado

@Chris Adamski Although I'm no attorney, my understanding is that the petitioner and the personal representative in many cases are the same person.

Hello Upstate NY BP members! I'm looking to connect with an experienced and reputable wholesaler in the Coeymans, NY area. If you are one, please leave a comment, or reach out via PM/phone/text/email. If you aren't one, but know of one, please pass my info along to them! 

Thanks, and stay warm up there! :)

One thing I'm experimenting with, and I'm not exactly sure this is testable in a traditional sense of an A/B, is I am just writing a completely unique, tailored, and up to date letter every month. Hand-written signature, envelope, business card (I don't actually do the labor).

My letter goes into quite a bit of detail about recent deals I've closed, my experience, how to confirm cash reserves, recent blogs/articles I've written and/or my business has been cited. Mail merge with lots of details of the property. Hell, I may even add in some clip art of my logos and photos of testimonials from my deals.

DMM is so saturated, I've been feeling like I literally just need to just completely stand out. My market is highly highly competitive. Anyway, something to consider to fight "ad fatigue" verses let me send the same letter 6x to the same lead. 

@Damien Dupee Like at @Andrew Michael, excel is all you need to track your DMM results.

The "bigger" issue is deciding what to track. I track: mail pieces sent, cost per mail piece, cost per total lead, cost per seller lead, response rate/seller response rate, revenue/profit. Then multiple that for each 3 counties I mail in and all the lists I mail.

The thing about revenue/profit, for DMM in particular, the leads can take a long time to mature. I think probate is always the best niche. I am dead serious when I say if you're making decisions based on even just 12-months of DMM you could totally be missing your pay day. My last two deals were actually both probate mailings, from 2 years ago. That was after 1 year of not netting a probate deal. Gotta be in it for the long game.

@Christian Souza Do you mean other avenues of marketing like SEO?

@Cody Evans People don't answer their phones pretty frequently. Hell, I don't answer my phone half the time even if I know the person calling. If the idea is to contact them directly, try a couple calls with voicemails - if that fails try e-mails and text messages scheduled. You can even build the message overtime.

If people are motivated by what you're selling, they will respond. If they aren't, they will tell you to get lost and stop bothering them. That's sales in general, real estate or otherwise, really.

I wouldn't over think it about studying your market to figure out what will get you the best rates of turn. SEO is essentially a bit time consuming but lower cost. I would not skip that - I even get leads for "older" people from their children/family (this is not rare at all). Could be competitive, but everything is competitive.

I also wonder how that works . . . running a legit online marketing campaign takes time . . . direct-mail takes time. The pay-off for everything is delayed. I just got a pretty excellent deal from a probate letter I sent nearly 2 years ago. Need to be in it for the long game for DMM.

The one thing about direct-mail, the leads are so unmotivated, you need a solid volume to find the good ones. Only small volume things that consistently land deals is probate in my experience. The idea you can send 500 letters to an out-of-state owners or general list and expect to land a deal . . .I don't want to say impossible. You probably need a bit of luck and a low competition market to land solid deals on spending $500/mo.

One suggestion regarding wording is provide more detail than competitors.

Thing is, depending on your targeting, you either need to be very creative or stand out. If you're just buying a list and sending generic materials, most likely it will be thrown away or not noticed.

Like all marketing, you need to be known. The prospect needs to notice you - that's first and foremost. There's ways to do that, such as a real hand-writing envelope.

@Michael

@Michael Knaus I called vendors for hand written envelopes, it was going to be $2.25 per actual hand-written (not even including hand-written signature on letter, real stamp, adding business card. I built a small team to get it done for $1.14 per letter. I'd like to hire your sister for $8/hour! (I'm kidding, but that's an awesome rate) for physical labor. Given the level of customization, I was happy to get the $1.14 with the regular postage stamp - about $1.10 less than vendor - but I don't think I beat $8.00/hour!

@Andy Kozlowski The thing about direct-mail, if you want to be effective on a large scale, you need to be in for the long game. Long like 6 to 12 months.

I recently got what promises to be a $30k+ deal 14-months after the initial contract and 16-months after I sent the letter. It was from a probate campaign that costs about $7000/year - and averages $25,000 profit per year. However, I went one year without a probate deal. If I had looked at the campaign like, oh I spent $7,000 and didn't get a deal, I'd likely be missing the 300% ROI on total probate spend.

If your going to do 3 to 6 months of $1,000 per month budget, and you haven't gotten closed +$10k deal, that shouldn't really surprise you.

@Cody Evans SEO's financial cost is the cost to build your site, or rent a site. You can test a service like InvestorCarrot or LeadPropeller. I pay $50 / one site. There's some higher payment plans if you think you need extra services - though that will increase your budget by up to $150 - no cheap amount if you're really focusing on one site. InvestorCarrot has solid customer service. There are some limits, but for the most part, I recommend it (i have no financial stake at all) because we're investors not web programmers. 

One the issue of investors v. website managers, you also have to consider, when choosing whatever site you choose, if you go the route of having your own site designed (and there are plenty of reasons for that as well), if something breaks, you're going to have to keep hiring your web guy. That is likely annoying and time consuming. On the other hand, if you build your own site you have complete freedom: including getting an https as opposed to http, and word press plugins.

Although I haven't done a side by side dual test sites, my conversation rates have been off the charts on Google Adwords once everything was properly set-up 10 to 20% depending on the time periods (averaging around 15%). Google Adwords in my opinion is the ultimate test because you control your traffic. In SEO, lord knows who is finding my site. I get people from India trying to sell me their property. Maybe one day I'll be international!

As far as the costs to hire someone to manage your Google Adwords, I've seen quotes for around $400 to $1,000. I have no opinion whether that is worth it, it depends on too many things. If you have no idea what you're doing with no tech background, very well could be. That being said, $1,000 is essentially my goal monthly budget. So the concept of me paying half my budget to have my account overseen, doesn't seem particularly logical. Additionally, many "gurus" won't work with you unless your putting your budget in a decent range. It's definitely something you need to reach out to several services, find out their costs, how they will work with you, price minimums, evaluate your own ability - and take it from there.

In terms of how much does Adwords cost to actually do it, you have complete and total control. I would say tho, if you are spending less than $500/mo, it's hard to imagine getting much results in terms of deals.  You could get lucky but it's math: say you spend $500 - you probably get 50 clicks ($10 is quite a low cost per click). You convert at say 10% (pretty good number) down to 5 leads. Getting a deal every 5 leads . . . nothing I've ever experienced.