Real Estate Investors: How To Find Lists For Mailing Postcards To Potential Sellers
Two Types of Lists
Let's talk about the list. The list is important. We've talked about two kinds of lists. One would be a group of houses in a particular area that you would designate. Two would be a demographic - what type of person - meaning people where the tax bill goes to a different address than the home address.
Those are two types of lists that you can acquire. They're certainly not the limit. There are dozens of other ways you can slice and dice this. You could get homes worth a million dollars or more. You could get homes worth $100,000 or less. You could get multi-family properties. You could say, "All I want is multi-family properties." You can get businesses if you want. Invest in shops and retail things of that nature. However you want to do it, whatever list you want.
Ways to Find Lists
What I would suggest is there are a couple of different ways you can get lists. You can go out to a list broker. There are two that I recommend. One is InfoUSA.com. They are a national list broker. There's also MelissaData.com. They're both on the course page tonight.
Both of those are national list brokers. I suspect that if you went to both of them and asked for the identical list you'd find that they'd be relatively close in cost. I don't know that for certain, but they compete head-to-head all the time so I'd gather that their prices are fairly close.
I would suggest you pick one of these, pick which one you like best, and go with it. It's always best once you've identified one of them that you get used to their website. Spend some time and get used to things.
You can call them on the phone or do it over the web. Tell them what you're looking for. They will call you or give you an estimate of how many people would be on the list.
That amount may be too many and you may need to use a smaller space or a smaller area. That's up to you guys. If you're looking for a list of 1,000 people and the first criteria you give them comes back with 5,000, then you may have to shrink down your criteria. You can play with that.
You can also go out to Google and Google up "list brokers." I'm sure there are dozens of others that would show up.