All Forum Posts by: Richie Thomas

Thanks all.  This is more than enough info to unblock my progress.  I appreciate the thoughtful responses and will be re-tooling my direct mail campaign as a result.

@Ian Walsh sounds like for my first few deals, I'm better off refraining from calling myself a cash buyer until I actually have the cash.  Better safe than sorry.  That said, I hope to find a lender who moves as fast as you describe (as do a lot of people, I'd guess).  Thanks for replying!

I'm starting my first direct mail campaign, targeting motivated sellers who are seeking a quick cash sale.  I'm planning to fund my first deal with a hard money loan, through a company like LendingHome or similar.  From this article, I read that these kinds of loans are "very quick to close".  I'm still a beginner, but my understanding is that "quick to close" is the attribute that my target sellers would be looking for, and that they wouldn't perceive a difference between a sale financed by a hard-money loan and one financed by cash in my checking account. 

Is my understanding accurate, or are there important factors I'm not considering?  My goal is to treat my sellers as well as possible, and I don't want to give them the wrong information or present myself in a way that's less-than-honest.

Thanks for the response @Tom Shallcross.  I agree it'd be a good problem to have and I'm trying not to get too far ahead of myself haha.

I love the idea of offering to refer them to an agent if an all-cash offer isn't for them.  Sounds like a great way to establish trust.

@Robert D. somewhat far, but I've still got a ways to go.  I've found the bottleneck is collecting the necessary data- there are about 1560 business categories I'm interested in, and about 11,500 zip codes I'm checking for each category, meaning I'm collecting about 18,000,000 data points every month.  But the data needs to be seasonally adjusted in order for it to be statistically significant, meaning I need at least a year's worth of data.

I got the idea from reading the following story:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/04/starbucks-openings-predcit-higher-home-prices-says-harvard-study.html

But I figured the authors of the study took an educated guess on which categories to check, and probably didn't happen to pick the best category out of 1500.  One of my goals is to see if coffee houses are the most accurate predictive business category, or if there's another one that's an even better gauge.

I'm about to embark on a lead gen campaign (direct mail + social media and Google ads).  If I do my job right, I expect to eventually see some inquiries coming in, which I'll then need to convert into appointments.  When scheduling these appointments, I know time is of the essence, but I also can't control when these leads will arrive.  If they come in on a Monday, I can't imagine I'll be able to wait until Saturday to go visit these prospects; if I do, the leads may be cold by the time I arrive.

How have y'all dealt with this obstacle?

Nice to meet y'all.  I'm a Ruby on Rails developer in San Francisco, looking to close on my first property by end-of-year.  I'm working on a hobby app which collects Yelp data about various business categories (coffee houses, yoga studios, etc.) and uses deep learning to try and predict gentrification in various zip codes throughout the US.  Hoping it will help inform my decision of which zip codes to pick as my farm area(s).

I'm just about to begin my first direct mail campaign with the DealMachine app, but before I hit the "Start" button, I want to make sure I'm in compliance with any and all direct mail laws, and that the addresses which the app sourced for me are not on any "Do Not Mail" lists.  Anyone know the answer?

I'm looking for a website that lets me plug in an address and estimate its utility costs, ideally by breaking them down into electricity, water + sewer, gas, and other city services like trash disposal.  I found MyUtilityScore via a Google search, and it seems to estimate on the high side based on the one data point I collected (my own address).  An estimate that's too high is better for my purposes than one that's too low, but the ideal outcome is estimates that are pretty close to accurate.  Does anyone have experience with this site?  Alternately, if you have another website you like for this purpose, feel free to share that too.

Updating this thread since the last post was 7 years ago.  I'm also not associated with wix.com, but I just built a website with them and it took me a few hours to create one I'm quite happy with.  I actually build and maintain web apps for a living, and I think their interface and feature set is quite nice.  I wish I had access to a tool like this years ago, when I didn't know what I was doing. :-)

I'm in the process of setting up a direct mail campaign, and I'm looking for a service which can set up my phone number along with multiple recorded messages.  My goal is to randomly play one of the recorded messages for each call that comes in, so I can measure the relative success rates of each message.  Does anyone know of a service like this?