Hey everyone. I was coming up with different messages to put on my postcards. I wanted to have one that is very general so it doesn’t target too specific of an audience(foreclosure, probate, etc). What do all of you think about this one(Keep in mind the formatting such as font, size, color, etc. are different):
Have A Home That You Want To Sell?
We Buy Houses in Almost any Condition or Situation
Even if It’s Vacant or Currently Rented
We are not Realtors and we DO NOT want to List Your House. We want to BUY your house. Don’t Pay Commissions.
It looks good…However…what makes yours any different than all the others I see?
Effective marketing means you’re not just another one among many. Why would someone call you over all the others that say essentially the same thing? You might want to consider ways of separating yourself from the rest of the pack.
I don’t know of any other investors in my city that use direct mail postcard marketing. I live in a city of only about 40,000 people. So, I don’t have a whole lot of competition. Most of the investors in my town seem to stick mostly with pre-foreclosures. I don’t market to pre-foreclosures because of that, too much competition.
I sent out about 30 this last Saturday. I have white postcards with a blue color scheme with my business logo on it. I sent them out to “targted” home owners dealing with delinquent taxes, divorce, vacants, ugly houses, judgments, probate, absentee owned, and properties owned in a living trust.
Please excuse my not being up to par on this subject. I have never done any marketing but would like to consider trying it. How do you get your information on who is going through a divorce, who is an absentee investor, which properties are vacant etc.?
Divorce, probate, bankruptcy - courthouse.
Absentee owner - Dataquick or other list service.
Vacant - Driving neighborhoods (not necessarily you) or blanket “farming” mailings, look for those that come back like undeliverable (e.g. no mailbox, my favorite) or owner moved with no forwarding address. That last one is expensive though.
I just got a lead for a house that I sent a postcard to that was listed, but the listing contract is about to expire. So, I was thinking of adding this to my message. What do you guys think?
If Your House is Currently Listed With an Agent and Isn’t Selling
Call Us When Your Listing Contract Expires
I already had “Don’t Pay Commissions” in the original message.(See original post at top).
Another investor on another RE forum said that I might make a few enemies with agents if they see that I sent a postcard to a listed seller with that in the message. They’ll see it like I’m trying to take business from them. Which makes sense. He mentioned just sending the postcards with my original message as is, without that extra line added. If they receive my postcards and their house doesn’t sell with the agent they’ll probablly end up calling me anyways.
Another investor on another RE forum said that I might make a few enemies with agents if they see that I sent a postcard to a listed seller with that in the message. They’ll see it like I’m trying to take business from them. Which makes sense.
If you intend to sell a property via the MLS (i.e., buyers having RE agents), I can understand the apprehension, but even then I don’t think there is a huge amount of agents that keep tabs on “this investor” and/or “that investor” for this particular issue, so I think you’re still safe.
If you plan to buy to sell or hold without the need of agents at all (i.e., lease/option or owner-finance yourself), I’d definately not be worried about it.
