Real Estate Investor Articles

Last night I downloaded an updated list of Absentee Owners in preparation for doing another series of direct mail campaigns to buy houses. Before I started to download the lists, I did some preparation work to plan the mailing I am doing.

I am doing a direct mail campaign to my local area and so I selected the zip codes for the parts of town (and one neighboring town) that I am interested in buying in. In total, I had approximately 10 zip codes that I wanted to pull Absentee Owners from. Remember, Absentee Owners are home owners that have their tax bill sent to an address other than the property address. I further limited my search to only Single Family Homes. I am not interested in commercial, industrial, multi-family or anything like that for my personal portfolio and so I excluded those from my mailing list.

With the list provider that I use, I am limited to

Follow up:

searching for and showing the results of 1,000 records at a time, so I couldn't just ask for all Absentee Owners in those zip codes for all time. While this may seem like a limitation, it actually made it easier for me to plan and space out my mailing so that I am not overwhelmed with over 100 calls from motivated sellers in one week - like I've done in the past with Absentee Owner mailings (and vowed not to do again).

So, to break down the lists, I first made a list using Microsoft Excel with the years 1970 to our current year and then did a search for each year to find out how many Absentee Owners bought houses (and still owned them today) in those years. In the third column, I had a running total of Absentee Owners so far. Here's an excerpt of my data:

• 1970 - 0 Absentee Owners - 0 Total
• 1971 - 0 Absentee Owners - 0 Total
• 1972 - 14 Absentee Owners - 14 Total
• 1973 - 23 Absentee Owners - 37 Total
• 1974 - 23 Absentee Owners - 60 Total
• 1975 - 28 Absentee Owners - 88 Total

Then, I took that list and broke it down into groups of about 1,000. Most of the more recent years had about 1,000 Absentee Owners in one year, but some of the earlier years I needed to group together to get approximately 1,000 in that group. For example, my first group, which I call Campaign 1 was all the Absentee Owners from 1970 through 1987. It had 937 Absentee Owners on it before I cleaned it.

After I cleaned Campaign 1 of duplicates and records that did not have valid addresses or names, the list was down to about 672 Absentee Owners. Then, I went on to the US Postal Service website, uploaded that list and the post card I am using. I then scheduled it to be sent out.

I will do a mailing list like this every 5 days or so to keep a steady flow of motivated seller calls coming in, but not too many that I can't keep up with the research and purchasing of the good deals. If I start to get overwhelmed with too many, I will increase the interval between the mailings by a few more days. If I am not getting enough calls, I will mail them a little closer together. In this way, I can turn on and off lead flow like you would turn on and off a fire hose.

Until my next post,

James