Originally posted by
@Darrell Shepherd:
First off, you can piss away some serious money on marketing if you dont follow up on the leads and/or cut the dead weight right away. Are you ready for the calls? Know what to say? What is a big budget?
My thoughts exactly. The advice I've received is that in the begenning you don't want to go too big because you really are still learning how to handle the calls and you don't want to learn while spending big money; start small where you can handle the loss of a few calls while geenrating enough leads at the same time. I have a 5k budget to get going but there is more if necessary. I've spent about $1500 roughly.
Mine used to be $4k/mo, I'm spending less than $1k/mo now, but mainly because equity is hard to come by in my town so I'm more into buying from banks than individuals right now, and I rehab them so only want about one a month. Your strategy will depend greatly on your market and appetite for working all the time.
You're on the right track, but you need to expand your motivating factors to get more volume if you're having trouble with that. Probate is one source, so are foreclosures, delinquent taxes, out of state owners, etc. You are looking for a problem you can fix more than a house. You hear "motivated sellers" a lot, but most newbies dont quite get what that means. There has to be a reason for someone to sell you their house for a substantial discount, that's what you are marketing towards. Not preaching, sounds like you get it from what you're doing so far.
I am not focusing on foreclosures at all right now. Too much competition and thats a great example, in my market, of where everyone is going. I'm trying to get the leads that take a lot of work to retrieve/get as well as implement some passive marketing so I don't have to be spending every minute at the courthouse and in the car driving for dollars...
Depending on your message, your phone should start ringing pretty quick on a 1000 piece mailer. Do you have a website? OnCarrot does mine and they've got their act together for $30/mo no contract. IMO you should give sellers the option to go there and check you out before calling, I got almost as many leads from my website as I did from calls on my last mailout, and they were definitely driven by the post cards. You can also set up an Adwords campaign and get some leads that way. I was paying about $30/per lead ($2+/- per click) when I had mine going. Pretty nice since you can target that one close to home. Probably need to set that back up now that I think about it.
My website should be up next week and I will definitly do Adwords. I like OneCarrot also. There is a guy in my market who is on the first page in he organic results and his website is managed by them. Not sure what package he is doing but I know they must be doing articles for hi etc. becuase his SEO is working.
You've got plenty of time right now because your phone isn't ringing. Not sure what you'll get in San Antonio with 1000 post cards, that's a pretty hot market, but if you mail out some volume you are going to get busy pretty fast.
You should also be working with a realtor you can send some business to for money or favors. You'll get plenty of people calling you that you cant wholesale that would make good candidates for them.
You're only doing about 10% of the business right now, I wouldn't worry about outsourcing until you're a little more in. Real hard to train someone how to do something you've never done before. When you've got leads coming in, houses to see, offers going out, houses to sell, closings to attend, etc, etc. etc. you'll run out of time and will want to add some people for the easy stuff. Cant outsource buying, though, that's where all the money is made.
I agree. I didn't want to sound like a "yeah-butt-er" in my last post, but truthfully I think I'm just in a somewhat awkward stage right this minute of waiting for that first postcard mailing to hit and not having a website yet. Even if I hired someone tomorrow I don't think I could supply them with enough leads to stuff envelopes for. I need someone who can go retrieve the leads, but that seems like a hard thing to train someone to do right ow when I haven't even tested all the lead sources yet for their individual fruitfulness. I did a 250 probate mailing that took a total of about 10 hours to retrieve the leads and another 8 hours to stuff/print/address all envelopes, and that went out Monday of this week and I've gotten one call so far! Probates are supposed to be the holy grail of lead around here b/c their such a pain in the *** to get.
Keep your expectations in line, too. Back when I was working foreclosures full time I would talk to 100 people to see 10 houses to buy 1. I imagine those numbers haven't changed much, depending of course, on how good of a deal you are looking for and if you are good at getting people to like you...
Best of luck, you are definitely doing the right things so far!
