Best Mailing List to Buy First

I just want to know everybodys imput on which specific mailing lists I should buy. I stay in Newport News, VA so I have 7 cities surrounding me Hampton, Williamsburg, Chesapeake, VA Beach, Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Suffolk. Just want some help on where I should start. I was told to pick a specific demographical area but which area would that be? How do I find the non-owner occupied houses that aren’t on the mls and how do I find out if the owners are multiple home owners, and how do I find out their age. Or does the listing broker give all this info. Whatever help you can give I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks

List brokers have all this information. You can get the information online as well from sites like infousa.com, usadata.com, melissadata.com and so forth.

As far as demographics, it highly depends on what you’re looking for. For example, if you’re looking for cheap fixer uppers then you don’t want an expensive area or houses that were sold this year (define your parameters).

This comes from experience and testing. Lots of testing… But to give you a short cut do this:

  1. Write down what would be an ideal deal. Not best deal, but an ideal deal that you can find many of it
  2. Identify the price range you like to work in, amount of rehab, amount of discount you want
  3. Based on the above 2, which houses would most likely fit these criteria. New houses, old houses, old mortgage, new mortgage, people behind on payments, people with many credit cards, married, single…etc.
  4. Find a geographic location in your area that has houses matching your criteria
  5. Run marketing test on 500 to 1000 lists
  6. If it works, repeat
  7. If it doesn’t work, find out what went wrong and fix it and jump to step 5

No one can truly tell you get this list, send them a post card and you will be rich.

You don’t need to buy lists - you can create your own using local tax assessor data (which is usually online). Just search for the local official website of any jurisdiction. From that website, you can usually find a link to the Treasuer or Tax Assessor. Eventually you’ll come to the searchable Tax Assessor’s database. It may be called something else.

Once there, if you know which street you want to search ahead of time, do a tax recod search by street. You should end up with a list of addresses on that street. Then, just click on one property at a time. The info you’ll get on the house will include all the dates that home sold and what price. You’ll get the age and description and of course the assessed value. Any owner listed with a mailing address which is different from the property address is a landlord. In other words, you’ve found a non-owner occupied house. Start adding these homes to a database and mail to your database every month. Postcards work.

As you add landlords to your list, you may realize that some own more than one house. These people are more than likely investors. They may want to buy more houses or they may be tired of landlording and may be very motivated sellers. You won’t know this - just mail to them.

DemosL - this is exactly what I am doing. It does take some time to get the information because you have to click in each parcel, but I enjoy doing it myself.

Right now I am identifying (and mailing) to out of state owners and owners that are late in their tax payments. I just started doing this this month. I mailed to approximately 60 people. Got two returned cards (post office could not forward them) and one out of state investor trying to sell his house. I am planning to continue doing this for the next few months and see what happens. My next step will be to buy a list and mass mail to a bigger area. I will probably do this once I have completed my first deal.

Good luck!

Buy the stinking list, it is cheap and saves you time. Unless you plan on mailing 50 letters a month and spend few hours compiling them, buy the list.

Marketing is numbers game, mail hundreds to thousands not 10s and 50s

Which company do you use to buy your list? We live in North Carolina. You are right - it is a numbers game & you have to mail out in mass. Thanks for your help

Depends on the type of info you need. pre-foreclosure, look for local company if possible. You can also try local list brokers (mail houses sell them usually).

Online, I usually check 3 sites and go with the cheapest after I compare the numbers:

www.infousa.com
www.usadata.com
www.melissadata.com