All Forum Posts by: Sean OToole

Hi @Kyle Marek,

1. Yes, there are a lot of investors in CA, and unfortunately the heard mentality of following gurus means that most absentee/foreclosure/tax/etc owners get a bunch of mostly the same yellow letters. How anyone expects that to work is beyond me. So the problem is partly that is competitive, and partly because investors don't take the time to differentiate themselves.

2. Number of leads depends a lot on your approach. If you plan to send the same yellow letter as everyone else, you are going to need to send A LOT. If you door knock, cold call, send fedex letters (expensive, but definitely gets attention), then you may do deals with far fewer. It's less about the list, or the quantity, then it is the quality of the impression. I'm not saying it is just about the method, it is also the message. For example, if you get a fedex letter you will of course open it and read it, but it will be a complete waste of the senders time and money if what the letter says isn't also compelling. As for "requires 6 follow up mailings", focus less on that, and more on the underlying point - people naturally gain trust with recognition. So on that 6th mailer, they aren't thinking wow these guys are persistent - instead they typically don't remember the earlier mailings at all. What they do think, is I've heard of these guys, maybe I can trust them. Now extrapolate that and understand it is about impressions - not mailings. So if you can get in front of them via a mailing, a cold call, an online ad, and an email, you may be able to get to that point of familiarity faster and cheaper then mailing alone.

3. Two benefits to first class 1) faster delivery, 2) free forwarding and return, 3) a belief that it is more likely to be looked at by recipient. The first is obvious, faster is faster. The second allows you to get mail returned letting you know an address has changed or is undeliverable. Years ago, you could build a whole business around sending lots of mail, and only focusing on the undeliverables, as there was essentially no competition on those deals. Find the undeliverable, skip trace the owner, and you'd likely be the only one working with them. These days you can use mail services to determine change of address (NCOA), deliverability (DPV) and even vacancy. So not as strong a reason to pay extra to have mail sent back (though it will pickup real time changes the services may miss). Finally, the impression - a hand written letter with a stamp, is probably more likely to get opened than a machine letter with bulk rate imprint. I think that is valid for letters. For postcards, I truly don't think it matters - they will see your message, even if only for a few seconds on the way to the round file. Can't say the same for most other forms of marketing.

4. I personally don't think it matters as much as many vendors make it out to. If your cheap crappy postcard has a headline that grabs their attention, and a message that intrigues them enough to call, it will FAR outperform the most elegant hand written letter that says nothing compelling at all. The questions you should be asking yourself are: 1) will they see read/my message, 2) will it inspire them to take action? If your message / offer can't be delivered without a long explanation, you may need a handwritten letter to get them to open it and read.

A few other suggestions:

1. Don't start with direct mail. If you are local to your list start ideally start by knocking on doors until you've talked to at least 5 people. It is very unlikely you will write a compelling message without getting to know the folks you are targeting. Don't go in trying to close the deal, go in trying to learn. Ask a ton of questions. Ask about the competition (do they get mailers, calls, people knocking on their door, etc). Get copies of your competitors mailers. Ask them if and why they would sell. You get the idea. And don't expect them to do it for free. Offering someone $100 cash for 30 minutes of their time works almost every time.

2. Remember the point of your mailing is to get them to call. Don't lay out your whole offer in your mail piece, instead give them a compelling reason to drop everything they are doing to call you right now. That is the goal of your mailing piece. Not to tell them you buy houses, you buy ugly houses, you pay cash, you, you, you. Clickbait works in directmail too.

2. Think about the big picture. It is not just the list, or just the marketing channel (direct mail, phone, online), or just the message, or just the offer. It is the combination that will determine whether or not you our successful.

Hope that helps.

@Jeff C. - The closest thing would be the combination of Listsource (for making lists), and RealQuest, for qualifying deals, doing initial due diligence and reviewing property details. Best, Sean.

@Joe Yobaccio we currently only offer basic mortgage list criteria. We do have a lot of note investor customers, but for now they just use us for initial deal due diligence / qualification.

@Cody L. Did you read the content at the link?

Public records is why the US doesn't have the level of corruption countries like Mexico and so many others do.

Imagine if property ownership and debt information wasn't public.

• All kind of scams around debt
• Tax assessors giving breaks to friends
• Straight up theft of property (this happened to someone I met in Mexico - drug lord paid off officials to change record and steal his multi-million dollar beachfront villa - no public record to disprove, he's tried fighting for ten years to get it back with no luck)

As you noted, LLC's don't provide any real privacy - there is no security through obscurity. That said, I'm with you and hold things similarly, to at least make them work a little.

Bigger picture, I'd argue that protecting our privacy isn't about creating anonymity - it's the opposite. Not letting people contact us using ephemeral, or even faked, caller ID's, or anonymous and spoofed emails (the opposite of anonymity), etc. is how we best protect privacy. If we always know who is trying to reach us, then we can simply choose to let them or not, or use services to filter on our behalf. The idea that our addresses, phone numbers, emails, or even social security numbers are private is completely misplaced. They simply aren't in EVERY real sense - no matter how hard we clutch onto the idea. And no law or regulation will ever change that. Problem is that in order for them to be useful we have to share them. And the idea that everyone we share them with will be able to protect them is unachievable nonsense. We see this over and over again with data breaches, yet people still haven't grasped you can't possibly stop it, and that the best defense is to simply make the data public - and instead hold people accountable for what they do with it. For example "Do not call" rules would be a lot more effective if phone companies were required to disclose the real person or real company behind every number. That would pretty much put an immediate end to the problem, because every person making a call would think seriously about whether the recipient would want to hear from them or not.

Public records are a bright beacon of light that protect us all.

@Cody L. There is an unfortunate move towards making public records less publicly accessible in the name of privacy protection. I'm hoping the benefits to society of public records remain clear enough so that isn't taken too far (we've touched on that here: https://help.propertyradar.com/getting-started-with-propertyradar/public-records-overview). Bottom line, owner information is rarely available directly from the counties online in CA and quite a few other states that have leaned in this direction.

@Joe Yobaccio while we can estimate them, actual loan balances are considered credit data and are not publicly available. Note the payment is based on the original loan amount, so better to use that for what you describe anyway.

@Declan Shanaghy, not quite. For CA "preforeclosures" you really need to separate Notices of Default from Notices of Trustee Sale. You should NOT use auction date for Notice of Default - there is no such thing (well we actually estimate one based on the earliest date it could legally go to auction, but you still should not use it). Pretty sure it was acting as a filter on your Listsource list and eliminating all Notices of Default - which is probably not what you want.

Instead for Notice's of Default you want to pay attention to "Recording Date", and only look at those filed within the last 180 days, and then only those that haven't already been sold, and which haven't had a Notice of Trustee Sale filed. From there feel free to use other non-foreclosure criteria like beds, equity, vacancy, etc - but you are likely only working against yourself by adding something like auction date.

Now for Notices of Trustee Sale - it's completely different. For those you want to pay attention to auction date, and then only if the vendor keeps that list of active auction date up to date with postponements, cancellations and sales. Only two vendors offer that service widely in CA. Sorry, but forum rules don't allow me to share who they are. :-(

I ran some quick queries using a service I'm very familiar with. ;-)

Here's what I found in Preforeclosure (meaning ACTIVE Notices of Default, which have not yet been cancelled, sold, or had a notice of trustee sale filed - something you can't do in Listsource).

Alameda County = 451

Contra Costa = 470

San Joaquin = 375

Solano = 262

Added targeting criteria = Preforeclosure & SFR + Condo + MFR2-4:

Alameda County = 427

Contra Costa = 458

San Joaquin = 341

Solano = 250

And for giggles (and to get really targeted), I added Absentee Owner that does not live in the same county, 30%+ Equity, Owner Age > 65 in addition to Preforeclosure & SFR + Condo + MFR2-4

Alameda County = 3

Contra Costa = 3

San Joaquin = 2

Solano = 4

I actually prefer creating lots of small lists (under 100!) that are very targeted. Makes it sooo much easier to write copy that is very specific to their situation and resonates. Especially because I know everyone else is just sending a generic blanket yellow letter saying the same thing with the only differentiator being their name and phone number.

Much better to have ten segments of lists under 100 getting individual messaging specific to their situation than just one list of 1,000 all getting the same message. Easier to manage smaller lists across channels with mail, phone, social, etc. The more you target, the more money you save and get better results.

I wouldn't use "auction date" for preforeclosures. Notices of default don't include an auction date, and that is the bulk of preforeclosures. So once you included that criteria you limited yourself to just Notices of Trustee Sale,  of which there will be far fewer

Hi Hunter,

I'd recommend taking the following approach:

1. Find 2-5 properties that you know to be 5-16 unit apartments, ideally of various ages, and get their addresses.

2. Look those up at the county assessor (likely online), and see what data your local assessor provides. This is really smart because aggregators like Listsource can only provide what the county actually has. If available pay particular attention to  land use, zoning, square feet, bedrooms, year built and units.

3. Figure out which criteria work best in your area. This is the tricky part. Some counties don't offer units, but you can make a pretty good guess based on square feet and bedrooms. Others may have units, but only for apartments built after, for example, 2002. This is why it is so important to have those sample properties from step 1. 

4. Once you have your criteria, look for a provider, that can provide you that list, with the data you want, and get the list - or maybe a just a small subset of the list at first if you have to pay per record.

5. Check the properties on the list to make sure your criteria actually worked. We call this "back testing", and it is critical to making a great list. If it works, then get the rest of the list. If not, go back to step 1.

Two reasons to use a paid service like Listsource, or us when we expand to your area:

1. Your county doesn't offer the ability to pull a list, or doesn't offer the criteria you need. The county websites tend to be really bad at this, but that varies a lot by county, and there are 3,142 of them, with no great list of which are good and which aren't - so just go look. Also some won't offer the info you need, for example, the owner name. 

2. You want to include criteria the county assessor doesn't offer in their search tool. Value (mostly sfr/cnd not apt), debt, equity, loan details, transaction history, parcel maps, etc. Most assessors that offer criteria based search have maybe 10 criteria - service providers like us will typically have 100+.

Hope that helps.