I plan on sending out oversized postcards just like Richard Roop teaches. I’ll have enough money to send out three batches to my market. It will be right around 10,000 homes per month. Plus I’ll advertise with my car signs and in the paper with classifieds and an advertorial twice a month.
Now I’m sure that I’ll get a response with my direct mail but I’m curious what others have expereinced in terms of how effective it was on the first mailing. Maybe I should break down my market in half and then I’ll be able to market consistently for six months.
And can anyone chime in on how effective their newspapers are? Mine has a circulation of 10,000 in the area I want to target. With the classifieds I don’t expect much of a response, but 1 deal a year from it is enough for me to keep it in there. And I hear good things about a display ads. Anyone with experience?
My target market is roughly 20,000 homes. But in the areas I would want to buy I can narrow it down to 12,000 homes. With rough guesstimations from others experience I can assume 35 calls from the direct mail/10,000. Yet with the display ad I just don’t know? Even with a response of 1/57th of a percent on the circulation of 20,000 per month that’s 35 responses. And if I get 1 call every 3 days from my car signs then that’s another 10 calls a month. So that’s roughly a guesstimated 80 calls per month. And with 1 in 20 calls being a deal then that equates to 4 per month.
Would anyone mind sharing their experience. It’s kind of funny because I see peoples classified ads in the newspaper come and go. But really it just makes me a little suspicious because if there’s good deals there for the taking then why aren’t there people in the newspaper advertising for it?
I did use bandit signs with roughly 30 of them spread out over my whole area and got 1 deal. But te sign police began ticketing me and told me that next time the fines will be for the whole lot instead of how small of a citation I got away with.
Perhaps I’m just the person to cultivate this farm area and start turning a great harvest.
You will find with this approach that your response will be limited as you are basically fishing in a pond not knowing if it has fish and you have no bait.
You need to market your farm area in a more motivated sector. You should research your market area and find subdivisions that have a high foreclosure ratio and farm that neighborhood.
How about a little direction. I send mail to preforeslocures. I’ve tried many times to get the eviction notices, I’ll try again tomorrow. Property owners under 5 years is a good one. I’ll do that.
I guess I just see it a different way. I could go find all these people and then mail only to those in my farm areas, and the costs would be a little less. But if I direct mail to my whole farm areas then I’m sure that’ll there be some preforeclosures, some divorces, some people just wanting to move that don’t have equity, some landlords in the wrong business, etc. And the more I continue to mail to my farm area the more credability I’ll get. So with time people will recoganize me as the first person they want to call because I have an image. And of course the cost would be more, but it would have a tremendous value…
But hey, maybe people have tried this and it just didn’t work and was a major waste of money. I’d love to hear opinions from people that have done this, and share their results.
You can also contact your county clerk to get on their mailing list (at a cost of course) for lists of people filing for divorce, bankruptcy, quitclaim deeds.
Watch in the paper for legal notices, either from individuals, or local governments posting notices.
The information is out there, it all depends on how much you want to spend. I would think you’d want to target your target audience, rather than blast a large farming area, just to become a known name for sending “junk mail”, because it is “junk mail” unless you’re in need of your service.
Thanks Kirk.
You’re absolutely right. I need to focus more on people that would be wanting to sell rather than waste my marketing dollars to send junk mail to lots of people just happy where they are. That’ll help me stretch my marketing budget out a LOT more.
Now I just need to go back to the county clerk office and ask again where to get all these names of people. I’ve asked multiple times but they can’t seem to point me in the right direction. Which is a good thing. “Once I find out of course.”