Transcription
Hey there, my name is Ryan Dossey, and in today's video, I'm going to show you a piece of mail that all but guarantees that your sellers are going to pick up the phone and call you. Let's dive right in.
So, I'm going to show you a technique that I use that I kind of call like "double dipping." It's basically a different angle that you can hit the direct mail list that you're already hitting from and get people that are never going to call you.
At the end of this video, I'm going to give you a variation or a spin of this that, like, pretty much guarantees you're going to hear from that person one way or the other. Like, super secret ninja tip, I've never shared this before on social media, so make sure you stick around to the end so you don't miss out on that.
So, first thing we're going to do here in PropStream is just pull a direct mail list to use for this example. And let's assume, because we're double dipping, that it's something that we really, really want. If you've followed me on YouTube for any length of time at all, you know that I really like the stuff that I call like "vinyl villages." These are your like newer, nicer 2000s built houses with the attached two-car garage that start to look a little like step-free, like everything's the same, right? Reason I like them? Everybody wants them. They're super easy to rent, and they're super easy to sell on the market should you ever decide you want to get out of it.
So, we're going to go and just throw in kind of that criteria real quick. So, we're going to go single family here. I do minimum bedrooms of three, minimum baths of two. Reason why I do that? I really prefer properties that are one and a half bath or more. A three-bedroom, one-bath just doesn't compare to a three-bedroom, one and a half, or they've got like a guest bath and, you know, people don't have to walk through a bedroom to get to it or anything goofy like that. Minimum square foot I normally do is a thousand as well. I'm not looking for that like tiny block house. I'm looking for kind of the newer, nicer setup. And then we'll also throw in a year built of 1990 or newer. You know your market better than I do of when they started building these, but this is just an example of a list that I really like.
Now, we need to make sure that these are also people that have equity. So, we're going to scroll down here to evaluation and equity, and we're going to do an equity percentage. I always do 35 to 100. In my experience, we get like two kinds of calls: people that can like just barely afford to sell to us, like we're just paying off their mortgage, they're like the 35. And then we also get people who like, they just own it free and clear, they want kind of the easy transaction kind of a thing. So, we've got that data plugged in there. And then I'm also going to do non-owner occupied kind of just for this example. So, that gives us 168 properties. Now, obviously, this is pretty specific in a pretty small market. If you do this search in your market, chances are you're going to have a lot larger list than what I'm playing with here. But we're going to click this. I'm going to click "Add to List," and we'll call this "Vinyl Village YouTube Demo," and we're going to click "Save."
Now, if you've never used PropStream before, they actually allow you to export out the mailing lists that way you can then mail to them. So, we're going to come over here into the "My Properties" section. We're going to go down to that YouTube demo list we created. I'm gonna check the box here to select all of them. You can see it says 168 selected, and we're going to export all of them out. Now, it's going to save here to the computer.
Now, let me show you the piece that we're going to use in this instance. I'm actually gonna kind of finish building it while you're watching. You might notice we have a printer next to us here. Part two of this video, so make sure you subscribe so you don't miss it. I'm gonna show you how to actually print your own direct mail at home, so make sure you stick around for that.
So, we've got the list now downloaded to the computer, and this is what we're working on here in Word. So, "Dear," we're going to put the seller's name there, and I'm going to show you how to do that from your Excel. It's called a mail merge, but something I'll teach you here in a second. "My name is Realtor Name with Realtor Brokerage, Brokerage. I have a client that is interested in purchasing your property located at Address. I know this is a bit unorthodox, but they've been looking at a ton of properties in City. They're a cash buyer that I work with regularly. They're looking to purchase as-is, and the best part is that they pay for my realtor commissions. You can sell your house fast without repairs, showings, or having to pay realtor commissions. Please give my office a call at [blank] for your earliest convenience. Sincerely, [Spot for signature]." PS: Feel free to shoot me a text if that's easier for you.
So, here's the thought process and the psychology behind this. Whether you and I like it or not, there are people that will not sell a property without a realtor being involved. So, folks that think the typical investor mail, like what I normally do, "Hey, what are your plans for Address? I'd like to make you a cash offer," that might be a turn-off, or it might feel like scammy or sketchy, or "How did this person get my info?" By doing it this way, we're having it come from a realtor. There's that, "Oh, okay, well, it must be legit if there's a realtor involved."
Now, obviously, in order to make this strategy work, you do have to have a realtor that's willing to work with you on these, which really is not all that hard of a sell. If you have a realtor that you've worked with in the past, or somebody who's like newer, hungrier, great way to present this is, "Hey, I'll tell you what, you can have any listings that come out of it. You might not even have to actually pay them a commission for any properties that you buy, or you might negotiate something like a flat fee, you know, hey, $500 to a thousand bucks." Also, if you're investing out of state and working with like a local realtor, this could be a really good way to structure you getting deals, them getting listings, and having it be very mutually beneficial, where the seller is already expecting their realtor to come over anyway, not you. So, it's a really, really cool strategy that we've used in the past, and we're getting ready to start implementing again. The neat thing with it, there's not really very much of this kind of marketing going out. I actually don't know anybody other than us that's doing it.
Now, my personal recommendation with these is to have Ballpoint Marketing do them for you because they can add in a wet signature, like actually done with ink, so the whole thing's not printed. They can also do that on the envelope. But be blunt. Early on in my career, I was kind of in that position where like I had more time than I had money. And if you're in that position that like saving, you know, 20, 30 cents a piece is super important to you right now, and part two, I'm going to show you how to print these bad boys.
So, let me show you how to do a mail merge. Um, what a mail merge is, is you're basically connecting an Excel file to a Word document to personalize the letter. So, they actually make this really easy, but if you've never done it, it can be a little bit like confusing. So, what we're going to do is we're going to click on "Mailings" up here, pull open this kind of tab here, and we're going to do "Start Mail Merge" and we're going to use the "Step-by-Step Mail Merge Wizard." Why not let them do it for us right now? Don't really worry about like letters or emails or envelopes or all this. I just always use the one that says "Letters." Gonna click "Start Document." You're gonna go to step two here and click "Select Recipients." You're gonna do "Use an Existing List," and you're gonna click this "Browse" button.
Now, I realize that this is a little bit technical, so I'm going to kind of go pretty slow, but if you're wanting to do your own mail at your house to like really, really kind of scrimp and save on your budget, this is absolutely how you want to do it. So, click "OK" here, click "OK" again, and that'll actually like connect the data. Now, we have to click "Next: Write your letter here" on step three, and we need to insert our mail merge fields. So, up here where I have "Dear," I'm going to click "Insert," and that'll now give me all of the different fields that are in that Excel file that I downloaded from PropStream. So, what those look like, it's going to be all of this data in here that we've got in Excel. I might open it up, but Word freaks out if you open up a file that you've got it connected to. So, we're going to now go personalize uh this piece of mail that we're working on, and we're going to insert "Owner One's First Name," and it'll look kind of like that, kind of goofy. Don't worry about that, though. I will deal with that in a second. Um, "property located at," so we need to insert the address here now. So, we're going to do "Address." "I've been looking at a ton of properties in," I'm going to click "Insert Mail Merge" again and click on "City," and click "Insert." And, uh, "Please give my office a call at," we need to put a phone number in here. For the sake of this example, I was totally just going to do my cell phone number, but I don't want you all calling me, so [phone number]. Kind of a setup. Now, obviously, you would need the realtor's name and brokerage as well. Um, so we'll just, uh, pretend that this is me, and that I'm sending these out for another investor and not myself. Uh, okay, perfect.
Now, if you look at this, you know, it doesn't look right because there's like these mail merge fields, or we're not done with the actual merge. So, you want to click this button down here that says "Preview." And you'll notice that now it moves in all of the data. So, now it says "Dear Richard," has the address, has the city, and you can actually click through these little boxes to see them all and see it merge through. Now, one thing you'll notice, a couple of these are blank, which means that there wasn't a name in that first name field. So, that's something you want to look at in your data before you connect it. Chances are, this is a property that's owned by an LLC, which typically end up just in the last name column. So, that's what's going on there if you're wondering why there's some blanks.
Now, before we complete it, we do want to finish the document. So, if I'm looking at this, this to me looks a little bit plain. So, I'm going to add in a couple things just to make it look a little bit prettier. I downloaded the realtor Fair Housing logo. So, this typically goes on like anything that realtors are shooting out. So, we're going to click on this box here and make it where it'll go "in front of text." Normally, you would like pull this down and throw it in the bottom just to make it easy for you guys. When we throw this up on YouTube, I'll actually put a link to this in the comments. So, if you're watching this on Facebook or on Instagram, wherever it's convenient for you, if you want the actual document, go over to the YouTube to find it.
Now, you would also typically want to add in like the realtor logo over here, and probably the logo for their brokerage, just to make this look like letterhead, make it look a little bit more professional. I'd probably add like the URL for the brokerage's website down here at the bottom. Really want it to look like company letterhead. Now, if you're watching this and you don't have a realtor that you're working with, you could still follow the same steps to like create your own mail. Just type up whatever you want. Right now, the other thing I'm going to change is the text size. This looks a little bit small. So, I'm going to just click this button up here to bump it up a little bit. We want to be careful that we don't make it too large where we bump it down to a second page or where we end up, you know, pushing images we've added to it. So, this to me actually looks pretty decent. We've got the spot that at Ballpoint Marketing, they could actually sign with the pens, and the realtor's name. You could have the realtor do that, you could do that for them, whatever you kind of work out there. You could, in theory, always just like add the name in print, but I think that'll lower your response rate. So, it's kind of my thoughts there.
Next, we're going to click "Complete the Mail Merge," and then how I always do this, we're going to click "Edit Individual Letters." And let's say you want to do just the first 50. You could do "1 to 50." That'll open up a new window for you where you can actually scroll down and see all of the pieces that you've made.
Step two of the video, we're going to show you how to take what you've got now, how to print your letters as well as your envelopes on a printer. Um, this is a little bit of a nicer HP, but even if you've got like, kind of a, you know, cheapie from OfficeMax, whatever, it should work. You've made it this deep into the video, which tells me that you're paying attention, which is awesome. So, I'm going to reward that behavior. Now, this is a little bit more complex to get done, but I'm telling you, you will get calls from the people that you're looking for. So, this is kind of like, uh, like beast mode of direct mail, right? You're doing something that's different that a lot of other people aren't doing that should stand out. The, like, god mode above this is if you've got a small list, like let's say you're looking for land or apartments in a particular area, and you've got an in with an attorney. If you do this same thing, but from your attorney, on your attorney's letterhead, on your attorney's logoed envelope, people get a letter in the mail from an attorney with a, "Hey, my client is interested in talking to you about [blank]," their phone is going to ring, and you're going to be talking to that person about that property.
I appreciate you hanging out with us and taking the time to watch this video. I realized like learning how to do a mail merge to potentially do your own mail at home might be a little bit like involved or intense, but I've been where you're at of like on a super tight budget, not having a ton of cash. I'm personally not a huge fan of like just the full-on printed mail, which is why I use Ballpoint for all my stuff. Now, it's all actually written with pens. However, I've been where you're at of like super, super tight on money, and it's just about taking action and getting pieces out. So, I totally get that. And my first deal actually came from 2,500 full-on printed yellow letters. Ballpoint didn't exist back then. Make sure you like the video and subscribe. We're about to drop part two here just in a few days on how to take what we've done here, put it into the printer, and get out actual pieces of mail that you can then go and send to your sellers. Talk to you soon.
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