Sending targeted direct mail to sellers has been one of our primary marketing strategies to find great deals over the years. We have a three step foreclosure mailer that we send once a lis pendens has been filed on a property. We have an out of state mailer we do. And one of our more successful seller lead generators was mailing to owners of properties where the sale price was $100 or less. These are transfer properties. . . could be from divorce or inheritance among other reasons.

Anyway, direct mail could be a good additional component to your marketing plan. If that’s the case, one of the first questions that you may ask is, “Where do I get the list?”

I’ll tell you what you don’t do. . . don’t call one of the list companies out there! These companies will charge you an arm and a leg for something that you can get for MUCH cheaper if you just know where to look.

For example, I was on the phone with one of my students in my mentoring program the other day, and he had just bought a list. I was too late! You wanna know how much they charged him. . . $1,200! I didn’t want to tell him that I could get him a more targeted and better list at about 1/10 of the cost.

“So Patrick, Where do I get my list if not from a list company?

Your list can be generated from public records from your county. Depending on what kind of list you want, you go to one of a couple different county offices.

Your county appraisers office is a great resource for you. In some counties they call it the tax assessors office and some the registrars office. Whatever they call it in your area, it’s a great place to get a list.

That’s where I generated my out of state and transfer lists from. And guess how much I paid for each list which had thousands of names. . . only $50 a piece! That beats the heck out of paying $1,200, doesn’t it?

Some of the information that I had them include in the list were. . . property address, owner name, mailing address (if different), last sale date, last sale amount, and assessed value. Oh yeah, here’s another tip. Make sure they exclude out of country addresses. Not worth the expense to mail to them.

To generate a list of people facing foreclosure, call your county courthouse and tell them that you want to search public records for the latest lis pendens (a lis pendens is the first step in foreclosure and is Latin for “suit pending”). They’ll direct you where to go. You’ll most likely have to do this research yourself and write down the information you need for each lead. That’s how we’ve always had to do it.

Some counties have all that info online, but we would still actually go to the courthouse because we found there was about a weeks difference between when a lis pendends was filed and when it showed up online. Lot’s of investors mail to these leads in my area so we want to get our letter in the homeowner’s hands as quick as possible.

If you run into any problems geverating your list or have further questions, leave them in the comment area. . .

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