Summary: This introduction to direct mail for real estate video walks you through the steps of a direct mailing campaign to show you how direct mail works from start to finish. The concept of direct mail in real estate is that you are mailing a list of property owners in order to find the sellers that are the most motivated to sell. Usually the most motivated sellers are the ones that have some form of distress (hence the term distressed sellers). So when you are talking to sellers ask yourself this simple question: "Is this seller really motivated". 9 out of 10 will not be. You are looking for the 1 seller that is motivated to sell. That is where you will find your best deals. The first and most important component of your direct mail campaign is your list. You have to have a good list and your list needs to be targeted for your approach. If you are a landlord looking for rental properties your list will be different from a rehabber who is looking for properties to fix and flip. So put some time into thinking about your list. If you are wholesaling you are flipping houses to cash buyers. So ask yourself what your cash buyers want and the type of properties they are looking for will dictate your mailing list. Generally speaking if you are wholesaling your cash buyers are either landlords looking for rental properties or rehabbers looking for fix and flips. So one of the first steps of defining your list is identifying what you are looking for which can be very different if you are looking for fix and flips for yourself versus wholesaling to other investors. So your list is very important. You need to know what type of properties you are looking to acquire and then target those properties and the owners of those properties. When you first start out one of the easiest lists to obtain is List Source (http://www.listsource.com). Many new investors start out with an absentee owner list (also known as absentee landlords). If you are a beginner this is a great place to start. The concept is very simple. These are properties where the owner of the property does not live in the property. They figure this out based on where the property tax bill is mailed to. This is a very easy and cheap list to obtain and it's a great place to start. However it is also the most frequently mailed to list - so keep that in mind. Once you have your direct mail list, the next step is to figure out what you are going to mail. Postcards will cost you anywhere from 1/2 to 1/3 of what yellow letters will cost in postage. However, our results indicate that you will get anywhere from 2 to 3 times better results with hand written yellow letters than you will with postcards. If you are mailing 10,000 pieces a month then mailing letters makes no sense. However if you are mailing 500 pieces a month it might make a lot of sense. That is how I started out, by mailing 500 yellow letters at a time. And on average, I would get at least one deal per mailing. Some mailings I got zero deals and other mailings I got 2 or 3 deals but after a year of looking at the numbers we were consistently getting one deal per 500 letters mailed. With postcards, our numbers are 1 deal per 1,500 to 2,000 mailed. So make a decision on what your approach will be and decide if you want to use yellow letters or postcards. Once you have made that decision, your next step is to choose a mailing house. We have one for our students at http://www.lexdirectmail.com There are many direct mail houses out there (just Google Direct Mail For Real Estate). How much you pay will depend on how much you mail. If you are mailing postcards a few hundred at a time expect to pay around 50 to 60 cents per postcard. If you are mailing tens of thousands of postcards you can probably get your rate down to 35 cents (or less). Yellow letters will usually cost you around 99 cents a piece. So you can see that in scale with large volume the cost is almost exactly 3 times higher to mail yellow letters than to
