Now that we have our first direct marketing campaign behind us (which looks like it may result in a deal for a rental property that we’re passing to an investor-friend who does a lot of buy-and-hold), we’ve been doing a lot of brain-storming and planning for our future marketing strategies…
While I don’t want to go into too much detail on our specific strategy at this point in time (it’s still evolving, and with the number of investors increasing in my area, I don’t want to invite any additional competition these days), I will say that we’re planning to focus predominantly on distressed sellers and we’re going to be leveraging the fact that both my wife and I have our real estate licenses. Whether our plans will pan out or not remains to be seen, but we’re always happy to try new stuff, and we’re hopeful that we’ll either be able to help fill our investment pipeline and/or add a new revenue stream.
We’ve spent the past couple weeks figuring out a marketing plan, a branding strategy, generating marketing lists and putting together the team we’ll need to carry out our plan. And we’ve spent the past few days actually creating our first direct mail campaign ourselves — we’ll be sending about 2100 pieces of mail over the first week. Hopefully we’ll get at least one or two calls. 🙂
I’ll post more about the results of the campaign, and perhaps a few more details about our strategy next week after we see how the first mailing goes…
where have you found most of your deals up till now? mls? since this is your first direct mail i was just wondering . thanks man.
cliff
Hey Cliff –
Yup, with the exception of a probate sale that fell in our lap, all of our deals have been right off the MLS, either REOs or short sales.
so are you seeing the mls dry up with deals and thus your direct marketing or are you just trying to expand the number of deals you are doing?
Cliff –
Two reasons:
1. While the MLS is not “drying up,” there seems to be a lot more competition these days for the deals. I guess there are a lot of homeowners out there right now looking for houses as well as new investors, so while there are plenty of deals on the MLS, there is a lot more competition for them;
2. We are looking to start doing a lot more deals than we have historically done. We’d love to do 30-40 per year, and just can’t find that many via other means.
thanks for your replys man! yeah, when i am doing 4 or 5 a year i will be really happy. i know what you mean, the mls is very competitive. i live in colorado springs. lots of investors here. i’ve been marketing to probates. very high response rate. no deals yet but i’m actively marketing to them and making mls offers. you inspire me bro. thanks.
Cliff
Can you give a break down of costs for the direct mail project? Are you going with standard postage? Any tips on how to scale to thousands of pieces of mail?
Hey Sean,
I plan to do a few posts on how we’re working on scaling the direct mail work (we’re still figure out many of the details)…I’ll also go into all the costs once we have those figured out as well… 🙂
Hey J,
Are you using the same mailing service as the first campaign for this round of marketing? Interested to hear an update as I’m about to do something similar in my area…
Hey Chad –
For this one, we’re going the opposite direction — we’re doing EVERYTHING ourselves. This should give us an idea of the process, how to streamline it, etc. In the future, this will help us decide whether we should outsource everything, nothing, or part of the job. I’ll be posting more updates in the next few days…