📈 Market Snapshot

📰 Headlines

• 🛠️ U.S. apartment market sees biggest delivery of new units in history 

• 🔥 Columbus is listed as an emerging life sciences market 

• 💰 Gen Z to pay $145k in rent by age 30

• 📊 US cities with the highest increase in single-family rents

• 📋 All 2024 multifamily conferences and events in one list

🏚️ Deep dive

Finding amazing off-market deals with mailers

I’ve always been a paid ads guy for scaling businesses, but I have a new obsession: cold outreach.

I started experimenting with it in January (I knew nothing) and it’s helped me take a side business from 0 → $25,000/month in 90 days.

What is cold outreach?

• Direct mail

• Phone calls

• Cold email

I (probably like you) thought this was an “old man” method.

I was 100% wrong… and it’s fantastic for real estate.

This week I found a guy, Nate, who is killing it in real estate using direct mail.

It’s allowed him to get $150,000 in ‘instant equity’ by buying homes below market value from motivated sellers in Youngstown, Ohio.

Here’s what he’s learned sending 3,000+ mailers to homeowners.

Getting Started

Cold outreach is not hard.

You just need to get 3 things right:

• Contact information for a lot of people

• Automated outreach

• The patience to hop on calls with interested folks and close business

Using the method below will yield significantly better results than Propstream or other contact aggregators.

Finding contact information

I shared how to find seller contact info in last week’s newsletter.

Here’s a short recap:

1. Pull property data directly from the county auditor’s website into a Google sheet using a virtual assistant (VA)

2. Have your VA tag them by property type (duplex, triplex, single-family home, etc.) to help customize the mailer

3. Have the VA pull the owner’s first name to help personalize mail

Structuring the postcards

Like cold email, direct mail campaigns are about

1) Appearing as personalized as possible

2) Standing out from the big firms associated with direct mail

Nate’s go-to letter is clever - it signals he’s not investing from out of state and that he knows the neighborhood through family.

Here are a few additional tips to personalize your mailers:

1. Include a Google Street View photo of the home in the mailer

2. Make the mailers look hand-written (mailing companies can do this)

3. Use the first name of the seller

4. Mention the type of property (Duplex, single-family home, etc.)

I use personalization like this all the time in cold outreach and it can boost replies by 30-40%.

Sending postcards

Companies like Stannp do everything from print production to mailing.

Prices typically range from $0.75-$1.00 per mailer and Nate sends anywhere between 600-1000 per campaign.

You should expect 10-40 calls for every 1,000 mailers you send.

Pretty good! At that level of scale, you can still close deals without being inundated with calls.

(That’s me looking out for you folks not investing in real estate full-time)

Let’s have a quick look at the opportunity.

Nate’s most recent deal using direct mail was a steal:

• Purchase Price: $120k

• Type: Duplex

• LTR Rent: $1,600

• Financing: Seller Financing

That property is easily worth $160k as-is and has a great yield.

My guess is he spent somewhere between $500-$2000 to find it via a direct mail campaign.

A wholesaler would charge anywhere between $5,000-$10,000 to source the same deal.

Significant savings, with just a little extra work!

📊 Chart of the Week

Zillow just released its housing price predictions for the next year.

As expected, interest continues to move away from Texas/SF and toward Florida and the Midwest.

🐤 Real Estate Rizz

#1

Before you take advice from people who got started in RE in 2009-2019, remember you didn’t have to do much to be ‘good’. Today’s real estate market separates the great investors from the lucky ones.

#2

Residential real estate investors - pour one out for your friends in commercial.

🔥 Want everything you need to buy 1-5 units this year?

Check out the Duplexx Blueprint and get all of these goodies:

Note: If you’ve joined in the past 2 weeks, you’ll automatically be taken to a special page to receive 80% off. 

• Cash-on-cash returns calculator

• Guide with 75+ items for your next rehab

• PM/Contractor interview guide

• 30-minute mini-course on finding deals