Whew! What a holiday season I've been having. I have to admit the bulk of my time off has been spent with family matters - mostly getting ourselves prepared for the arrival of the twins.
As far as REI is concerned, I've been doing a lot with any spare minute I have. I've compiled my own lists of homeowners for marketing purposes: out-of-state owners, in-state-out-of-area owners, and regular homeowners. I may - repaeat, may - create a CD with the the most up-to-date tax appraisal information for my county and charge others for it as an aside, but my main goal was to devise an automated way of getting the information myself, AND partitioning it into out-of-state, out-of-area, and regular homeowners for my own use. That was Step #1 of my plan during my vacation.
Step #2 was finding a way to automated as much of my marketing as possible. I had listened to Richard Roop audio CD's for a few weeks before my vacation, and he had a lot of good information. One thing in particular was using usps.com to both create and mail postcards. I completed my initial 5"x7" postcard, and have it ready to send to the people in Step #1 above. It will only cost my $0.29 for each postcard. Since the regular homeowners were whittled down to about 2,000 in my list, I figure that will be about $580 total. Of course, I'l lprobably split the mailing into 4-month chuncks and then repeat the cycle again every 4 months. This will save me in costs, and it will give some repetition as one part of my marketing campaign. I think I can handle $145/month.
Step #3 is cementing both my acquisition and exit strategies. I talked about these extensively before, and I'll reiterate them here. I plan to acquire most of my properties subject-to the existing financing (or, simply, Sub2). I've researched the strategy to death during my time off, and believe I have it down pat (we'll see). As far as an exit strategy, I will do one of three things depending on circumstances at the time: wholesale flip, buy-and-hold (rent), or sell via owner-financing.
Bascially, that's what I've done as far as REI is concerned on my time off thus far. I met with my CPA the other day to drop off the remaining receipts for our business this year. Even without paying property taxes, I'm seeing about an $8k loss, so it hasn't been a good start. She recommended we pay the property taxes next year, since we won't be having a lot of expenses in 2006.
Now to get cracking with the goals for 2006 ...
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3 comments:
the site is very un-user friendly. that was after the day it took me to get the postcard to fit after changing the margins about 45 times.
Use the document editor with the sample it gives and change your postcard that way. It makes things a LOT easier. As far as the list, you really have to understand how the site "reads" the information. Once you get a handle on it, it really is easy to understand. But I agree the help on that site is severely lacking in a lot of respects as I had to do a lot of trial-n-error stuff myself to get a feel for what they were doing.
Actually, you're right, Bginvestor. I was thinking of the 4"x6" for $0.29. I believe they have a 5"x8" postcard option also, but I think the price jumps to $0.309/postcard (plus ~$2 total processing fee). And that includes printing, labeling, stamping, and sending. Pretty good price.
I use USPS.com for all my foreclosure mailings. Yes the site is a bit clunky and its kind of slow but it works for me.
I have a MS excel spreadsheet dump that I upload into the USPS website and then have it spit out a mail merge.
Currently I send out about 1000 pieces of mail a month and it costs me about $380 or so.
Good luck!
Tom @ "D"igital Breakfast
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