All Forum Posts by: Chris Oshea

zoho.com CRM for free, gets my vote!

At first I was gonna say "Skip the cold calls, just do direct mail" but it actually might be good practice to get used to talking with sellers and qualifying them quickly. Go for it!

As for specific steps to finding absentee owners from the tax records, unless theres some sort of field where you can choose options (absentee owner perhaps?), you'll have to figure a way of comparing the mail address vs the property address and just getting rid of the ones that are the same.
There may be software that can do this for you (might be a feature in Excel for all I know), or you could do it yourself one by one.... Might not be so bad if theres large chunks of same address ones that you can easily see so you can select a bunch to delete at a time, but still... might take some time that way :-P

*edit* Oops! You said pre-foreclosure list? I'm confused, are you looking for an absentee owner list or a preforeclosure list....

I'm licensed in MA and the MLS here (MLSPIN) you can search the public records and you can add criteria to the search, including "absentee owner" (Y or N)

Maybe we're lucky here? :-P (and you can't add criteria from the tax assessors databases online, only through the MLS website as far as I know...)

Check out the list of "Associated REIAs" on the BostonAREIA website for a whole bunch (7+?) of the local REIA's

My websites are done with RealInvestorWebsite.com and I'm quite happy with them. I had first tried putting my website together myself with Dreamweaver (I have some experience with graphic design and building websites as a hobby), then switched to a Wordpress based site, then subscribed to RealInvestorWebsites.com for the simplicity of it and how easy it is to set up new sites and customize them. For the price, you get up to 10 separate websites, and the forms for people to submit info are easy to work with. I recently signed up for Real Prospect (same person/company) and will be linking the two together so if someone fills out a form on my site the data is imported to Real Prospect.

I haven't spent much time working on my websites like I want to, but you can check it out at [LINK REMOVED] just remember it's a work in progress.

Good luck with whichever you choose!

http://chris-oshea.com/2010/03/18/how-to-yellow-letter-marketin-tutorial/

All you need to do after you have it set up is put some yellow notebook paper in your printer and mess around with the margins and spacing until everything lines up fairly close with the lines on the paper. Don't worry about making it perfect. The way I see it, if you're printing the yellow letters yourself it's because you don't have the $$$ to outsource the job and you're sending too many to be hand writing them yourself. I got a 4% response with hand written letters to ~75 ugly houses (and believe me, that SUCKED writing 75 letters by hand, I don't care HOW short they were), 5% response with a slightly longer letter that I printed on the computer, and an 8% response from nearly 500 letters to absentee owners with equity... so maybe printing them doesn't squeeze every last % response rate out of your mailing, but 8% from 475+ letters that took me an hour and a half to print (slow printer + ran in to a few problems with my computer) sure beats writing them all by hand! :mrgreen:

For the series of letters/post cards that you send out to different lists, do your letters actually flow from one to the next to the next, etc., or are they just several different letters that don't make any reference to previous mail you've sent them?

Muchos Gracias!

(Thank you!)

...
After I spent $75 on 200 B&W postcards this morning.

DOH!

Thanks for the link though!