Direct mail? Driving around to find vacant properties? Etc?
Which company has the best deals on direct mailing? Who do you mail to? Only preforeclosures or just hit a whole block?
This question is asked pretty much every week, if you do a search you’ll find mountains of information.
I do Lease Purchasing and I find telephone prospecting the best method of finding deals. It’s very efficient and productive. I call sellers and ask them pointblank: “Would you be interested in selling your house on a rent to own basis?” In my area nearly everyone understands the concept of “rent to own” so this little 2 second question does the bulk of my screening for me. Few people ask: “What’s that?”. Most just say no and let me move on to the next lead.
When they say YES (which happens on about 1 in every 25-30 live calls) I know several things right away:
- They know what it is.
- They’re interested.
- They don’t need their money out right away.
- They’re motivated enough to change their plans (they were going to sell but they’re also willing to rent it out for awhile)
From there it’s just a matter of finding out if their price and payments work for my investment criteria. Then I head over there to check the place out and sign it up.
The hardest part is getting the nerve up to make the calls and to keep on plowing ahead when everything looks good but the deal just doesn’t work out for some reason. For example, last week I made 4 offers that weren’t accepted. The numbers worked but the sellers just didn’t go for it. So on to the next 100 calls!
I have a direct mail campaign that I use that is returning between 11-15% response rates. Dont’ expect that, as I have a decade of doing direct mails under my belt.
However, I feel direct mail is by the the most cost effective way.
Ryan, so you get 11-15 calls per hundred direct mail pieces. How many of those calls does it take to find a deal?
Believe me, I don’t “enjoy” making calls. It’s just that I can’t justify the cost of mailing when the quality is the same or less than when I make the calls for free.
I like the newspaper adds. I run adds to pay bird dogs.Get alot of calls and deals. Birdogs do 80% of my business. I am filming A TV commercial next week to basically say" Let me make you an offer for your home". Should be interesting to see what happens.
What area do you work in? What does your ad read.
Most of my leads come through the internet. Expensive service, but looks like it is working ok so far. I might cancel it because I can get better return using direct marketing.
My other method is direct marketing. I do not get 11 percent, I actually get the traditional 0.5 to 1 percent on my post cards, enough to get a deal out of 5000 post cards so far. I need to improve on my conversion ratio, but right now I am just testing my message.
I am going to try new marketing concept come august 1st, I am betting I can get leads extremly cheap, we’ll see