Joe McCall:
Now, what does my marketing say? I already said this. I keep it as simple as possible. I don’t have a website, I don’t make it sounds sales-y. It’s just really simple. “I saw your house, I was wondering if it was available for lease purchase?”
If the guy has mobile homes he can say, “I was wondering if you have any mobile homes you want to sell.”
Postcards – I’m going to go through this really quickly. What do I look for in each market? Where are the buyers? Let me show you something that’s really cool. When I’m doing research for a market and I do this all the time, actually.
I wanted to do some marketing in Riverside County in California. I go to Google and I’m going to type in Riverside County Heat Map. I’m talking about direct mail now because I’ve shown you how I do all my Craigslist marketing.
By the way, my VA also sends emails but I wasn’t going to show you how that was done because everybody knows how to send email.
Now I want to do some postcards. I want to know the best zip codes to send these postcards to. I want to target the median priced areas in a county. What I’m going to do is find out where the median priced homes are. Where do I want to target my marketing?
I’m going to type in the county that I’m looking for, Riverside County, and I type in heat map. It’s going to give me Trulia link right here. Trulia is a website. It’s going to take me to the county and it’s going to color code this county. This color code is really powerful because it shows you in the yellow where the median prices are.
This is giving me the average listing prices. You’ll notice the average listing price in this county is $207,000.00 to $252,000.00. There’s always a difference between listing price and sales price. If I click on “Median Sales Price” it bumps down to $162,000.00 to $198,000.00.
I want to know which zip codes should I mail to where there’s the highest demand for housing. The highest demand for housing is always going to be right in the middle. It’s a bell curve. This is the median sales price for a reason, because this is where most of the houses are being sold and this is where the most affordable houses are, that people want.
You just put your mouse over here and you find the zip codes. It’s 92509, so I’m going to write that zip code down. Here’s another one, 92521, I’m going to write that one down. 92555, I may go for the light greens, so this zip code right here, 92571, 92582, so you get my point. I’m just going through here and finding where all the hotbed of activity is. These are the counties I want to target, the yellow, the light greens, and maybe the oranges.
Now what I do is I go into ListSource. It’s my favorite place to go to get leads. I’m going to do a few things here real quickly.
I’m going to build a list. You go to ListSource.com, go to Build List and I’m going to look for, let’s do 92509. I want to know how many cash buyers are in that zip code. I’m also going to do another search here for 92501. I’m also looking for where most of the investor activity is. I’m going to show you two ways to do this.
I’m going to make a list of 20 zip codes. I’m going to go in here to ListSource. I’m going to do Geography Criteria, I’m going to go down to Zip Code. You select a state, California in this case. I’m going to type in these zip codes one at a time – 92507. I’m going to add that in here.
Then, I’m going to go to Options and I’m going to say, “Give me absentee owned properties only.”
It was at 9,000 and it’s going to drop down to 2,500 absentee owners in that zip code. Right next to 92507 I’m going to write 2,579.
I’m going to go back to Geography here and I’m going to remove that zip code and I’m going to add in the next one, 92509. Add that in and that’s going to give me a count. 92501, add that zip code in. That gives me 1,243 absentee owners.
I forgot something very important. You go to Property and you also want to search for “Last Market Sale Date”. You want to click “Last Six Months.” I’m looking for the zip codes that have the hottest activity in the last six months and then I add that last six months into here.
It’s going to drop this down to 37. That zip code at 37 purchases in the last six months.
I’m going to go back here to Geography, I’m going to remove that zip code and I’m going to do a new zip code here. You just go through the top 20 zip codes that you wrote down and find out what are the best five or seven zip codes that you’re going to mail to because that’s where most of the investors are buying homes.
I’m going to type in the other one here, 92507. You do this and you’ll get a list. You can rank and sort the list. 92507 will have 83 cash transactions or absentee owners purchased homes – 83 in that zip code.
I’m not trying to sell FreedomSoft, but there’s also a thing in FreedomSoft called Cash Buyers. If I go into Cash Buyers I can do a search for all of the recent cash transactions by zip code in a certain county, and then I can export that into a spreadsheet and then I can find out what are the hottest zip codes for investors. You select your state, California. You select your county. Not every county in the U.S. is here. In the last six months, I click search. This is going to take about five minutes so I’ll come back to this later.
This is going to give me then in that county all of the cash buyers in the last six months, and then I can break that down by zip code inside the spreadsheet and find out where all my hot activity is.
Then, why did I say all that? I’m going to go back into ListSource now. Let’s go into Property. I’m going to remove this date. I know now I want to target zip code 92507 and I want a list of all of the absentee homes in that zip code that were purchased over five years ago. Then you just manipulate the dates. I won’t do that right now, but you manipulate the dates.
These are now all the absentee owned properties in that zip code purchased over five years ago, let’s say, or you could do 10 years ago. Then what you do is you go down here and you purchase that list. It works out to be about $.06 to $.18 a name.
Now I have 950 absentee owners right there in that zip code that I know has a lot of activity, and I can go now and I can purchase that list for about $.10 a name. Now I can send postcards.