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How to Find Wholesale Real Estate Leads in Unique Ways

by | Lead Generation & Nurturing, Strategies

wholesale real estate leads

You might lose an excellent opportunity to create synergy with direct mailing and digital marketing.

How so?

You assume that direct mailing is better than digital marketing to find wholesale leads and vice versa.

You might also lose the opportunity to do something unique, giving you an edge.

Because every time you do what everyone else does in marketing, you will have much more competition and thus higher costs per customer acquisition.

This article will explain how the “traditional” direct mailing method works.

It will also discuss how it can help power your next online marketing campaign to find wholesale leads in real estate.

So, let’s start from the beginning and dive right into it.

Finding Wholesale Real Estate Leads with Direct Mailing

The traditional method of finding wholesale real estate leads with direct mailing consists basically of the preparation phase, execution, and analysis and qualification phases.

1) Real Estate Direct Mail Preparation Phase – Data Gathering

In the preparation phase for a real estate direct mailing campaign, you first need to know what kind of property owners or sellers you want to target and then generate a list of these.

In my last article, I mentioned already the types of motivated sellers there exist, such as:

  • out-of-state landlords
  • absentee owners
  • owners of vacant land
  • divorce attorneys
  • estate/probate attorneys
  • credit repair agencies and credit counselors
  • HUD/VA foreclosures
  • owners who have owned for 15 years or more
  • pre-foreclosures
  • properties purchased between 3k-20k within the last five years
  • specific zip codes
  • people arrested for violent crimes
  • realtors
  • laid-off employees
  • owners of section 8 approved properties
  • owners of properties with liens: mechanics liens, tax liens, HOA liens
  • bankruptcy court listings
  • CPA firms
  • people getting their cars repossessed
  • carpet cleaners
  • charitable groups/churches
  • city and county inspectors
  • people having garage sales
  • hair salons/barbers (because they are social hubs)
  • insurance brokers
  • owners of multiple properties
  • water, gas, and electric company shut-off lists

Where do you get these real estate sellers’ addresses and contact information?

You can use two methods: one is more straightforward, and the other means more work, more significant time investment, and less competition.

With regards to the easier route, you can buy the contact information from different providers, such as:

1) Datatree

This provider has a nicely designed and user-friendly interface and is probably the least expensive option on the market.

2) ReboGateway

ReboGateway operates on the county level, and it’ll give you access to unlimited data there.

So, this might be your ideal option if you are focused on one or two counties.

The “Investor’s Title Toolbox” provides you with nationwide access and the ability to search for all types of properties, including commercial ones, and filter by loan to value.

By using pre-defined criteria, you can filter and find specific types of properties, such as:

You can combine the search filters too.

So you get, for example, a list of properties where the owners are empty nesters, the property is non-owner occupied, and there is a divorce filing.

3) RealquestPro

This one has a much higher price point than other providers.

It’s a platform from CoreLogic that helps you see the latest recording dates, increasing the accuracy of the data you pull.

Besides the price, the other downside is that you will have to commit to a 12-month subscription.

4) ListSource

You might have already heard of ListSource because it is the most well-known.

Conveniently, you can quickly generate a one-off list without committing to a subscription.

The downside is that it doesn’t have that much functionality compared to Realquest or ReboGateway.

But it might be ideal if you are just starting and want to do a test campaign.

A general negative aspect of these data providers is that sometimes they have outdated and/or incomplete information.

On the one hand, they are convenient and can increase your time efficiency.

Still, on the other hand, the same convenience and lower barrier to entry mean other people or your competitors can use them too.

This brings me to the second less convenient data-gathering route with a higher entry-level working directly with your target county.

What are you looking for?

It’s the county’s delinquent tax list, which every county should have.

In contrast to the data providers mentioned above, the county’s data is usually fresh and accurate.

And the more accurate and fresh your data is, the more efficient your direct mailing campaign is, thus the lower the cost per acquisition.

But it must have some downsides, doesn’t it?

Absolutely.

Working with counties can be a pain in the ass because these lists can be a significant mess.

You need to put in quite some time and effort to organize and order them.

Sometimes they charge a ridiculous and campaign-killing amount to provide you with this list.

How much does it cost to get such a list from the county?

You will be lucky to get these lists for free (maybe if you play golf with someone from the county).

But usually, they will charge you something for that.

You can expect prices ranging between one cent and $1.50 per parcel.

So, you might look at a marketing investment of between $300 and $500.

The topic of using counties for that is an article in itself.

If you would like to read an excellent in-depth article about how the counties work with these delinquent tax lists and the bureaucratic process behind all that.

In that case, I highly recommend you this article from Seth Williams.

He is a coach in the land investing business.

2) Real Estate Direct Mail Preparation Phase: Your Marketing Material and Lead Capture System

Now that you might have a target list, you can start to create your marketing material, meaning your real estate direct mail piece, such as a postcard, lumpy mail, brochure, or letter.

You need to give your target customers some contact information to reach you.

In that case, you might also want a specific landing page or squeeze page ready for this direct mail campaign and, ideally, already a marketing funnel.

This will be for people who dislike using the phone and check you out online.

If you have a specific landing page or squeeze page for this campaign, tracking your leads will be easier (in case this is not your only marketing campaign).

You don’t want to ask yourself which marketing campaign came which lead came from.

A phone lead acquisition system is the other thing you want to have ready before sending out the mailer.

This can be a Google voicemail or any other voicemail system or a virtual office provider with a dedicated phone number for this campaign.

 
3) Real Estate Direct Mail Execution Phase: Now You Send the Mailer Out
 
This phase is pretty straightforward. You now just send your mailers to the targeted addresses you gathered in the previous stage.

To send out your mailers, you can use one of the following service providers:

 

4) Real Estate Direct Mail Analyzing and Qualification Phase

Organize, Call, and Qualify the Wholesale Real Estate Leads

So, hopefully, you will have an excellent response rate with your direct mail campaign.

You will get contacted via the landing page you put in place or by phone if you do.

Each lead should be put in a database such as a CRM or a simple list. Hopefully, they can and should be called back if they leave you a phone number.

By calling them up, you can qualify them by finding out the following:

  • The reason for wanting to sell
  • Where the property is located
  • How long they’ve lived there
  • How long have they been trying to sell
  • How much they’re looking to receive from the sale
  • What improvements have been made
  • Who’s on the title

 

wholesale real estate leads

Using Real Estate Direct Mailing Methods To Power Online Marketing Campaigns?

The short answer is yes, especially with Facebook ads since they have the most targeting options.

To avoid making this article longer than it already is, let’s stay with Facebook.

Still, you might be able to extrapolate the idea to other online marketing channels.

Use the Real Estate Zip Codes You Gathered For A Facebook Campaign

You can use the seller contact information you gathered above to create a specific target audience for your Facebook campaign.

You do this by using the zip codes for your Facebook ad geolocation.

You can do this instead of the direct mailing campaign. It all depends on your budget.

Do Real Estate Profiling to Get More Creative With Your Facebook Targeting

The other approach is a bit more creative and needs more logical deduction.

You need to become a real estate profiler to creatively find different targeting options for your campaign.

Look at the list of motivated sellers above (e.g., absentee owners).

Now, you can just ask yourself what it means to be, for example, an absentee owner.

Applying logical thinking, you can arrive at interesting and different targeting options.

You put yourself in the shoes of an absentee owner. What do absentee owners do?

They probably have to travel back and forth to the property.

Translated to Facebook targeting, you would look for behavioral targetings, such as travel intention or frequent travelers.

They might also need someone looking after the property occasionally, such as a caretaker.

So, you could try to find the names of companies in the area.

Then, you could check if they have a Facebook page.

Maybe you can then see if you can find this company’s Facebook page as a targeting option in the Facebook ads manager.

They might also have looked for realtors and real estate brokerage firms in the past but weren’t lucky with them.

Here, you can find the names of the different realtors or brokerage firms.

And then, you can check if they have a Facebook page, which you can add as an interest in the Facebook ads manager.

You might also want to consider the typical or average age of absentee owners in the state or county you are targeting.

If you can’t find statistics, you can try to guess. Then you can use the age range you find in your Facebook campaign.

Absentee owners might have moved to another state because of a major career change.

This can also be exploited in the Facebook ads manager with the targeting option “recently moved.”

You could also check moving companies in the area and see if you could target these sellers by using the company names as an interest.

You could combine all these interests with the zip codes and narrow the potential audience.

It might even be too small of an audience in the end.

Therefore, I wouldn’t put them all together in one ad set for testing reasons.

I would create different ad sets for each targeting idea to better test the campaign.

Now, these were just some ideas for absentee owners.

For motivated sellers who recently divorced, you could do another profiler session to find targeting options for Facebook ads.

One thing you could do is create an audience of people in the zip codes you gathered who recently showed interest in divorce attorneys.

Since you are smart, I don’t think I need to get into more examples of this real estate “profiler” approach.

Using this approach and a bit more creativity, you avoid doing what everyone else is doing and can combine the power of the direct mailing method with Facebook ads.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

Tobias Schnellbacher
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