Marketing Strategies for Creative Real Estate Investing
Email eCourse Lesson 2
How to Use Mailing Lists to Locate Motivated Sellers!
By Kathy Kennebrook®
"The Marketing Magic Lady"
Using the right list when doing direct mail campaigns to locate motivated sellers is crucial to your success. There are lots of different ways to find these lists and lots of different types of lists to choose from.
The easiest way to locate a list to use for mailings is to simply go to your property appraiser’s office or auditor’s office and have them create it for you. There are many different parameters you can use to create these lists. Some of them might be out of town owners, deed transfers, zip codes ranges or sale dates. These can all be a good lead source for you to find motivated sellers. Sometimes these records are available on CD and sometimes they are available as a paper copy. Every county differs in how they distribute this information.
There are also mailing list services that provide this service and usually you can locate them in your local yellow pages under mailing lists or mailing services. Just be sure that whatever list source you are using has a list that has current information. Otherwise you are wasting your time and money on list that will net you zero results.
Another way to find lists of motivated sellers is to go to the courthouse and check their records. One of the lists you can create is notices of default or lis pendens. These are people who are in pre-foreclosure. Another list you can create is people who are behind on taxes. You can get this list by getting a list of tax liens available for sale in your county. You would then mail them a neutral type of letter saying you are interested in buying properties in their neighborhood or subdivision. When mailing these letters initially, do not refer to the seller’s specific problem. All you will do is alienate them so that they will not want to work with you. I do a mailing every year to folks whose tax bills have not been paid and have purchased many properties this way. A lot of these folks are people who have a problem they need to solve, they just don’t know how until they are contacted by you.
You can also get lists of people who are newly married. In this scenario you will be looking for situations where the bride owns a home, or both the bride and groom own a home and perhaps they want to sell one or both and buy a home of their own. These can be very good leads for you that most of your competition simply won’t think about going after. Do that which your competition will not and you will have more motivated sellers contacting you than you can handle.
You can get lists of divorce notices, death notices, liens and judgments and notices of bankruptcy. Most of these lists are available in the newspaper or at your courthouse. These are all people with problems to solve who may have a home for sale.
Another great list to mail to is military transfers. These are people who are in the military, own a home and are being transferred somewhere else. These are excellent leads for subject to’s, or properties that the sellers will simply deed to you since generally there isn’t a lot of equity in these properties and not a lot of time for the seller to sell them.
Sincerely,
Kathy Kennebrook
Your next eCourse lesson will be titled:
Following Up With Semi-Motivated Sellers Can Make You Millions!
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