How to Improve Mailing Response Rate Even When the Market is Changing

So thank you for joining this week's Art of Passive Income Roundtable podcast. We are going to be discussing a very important topic this week, which is your response rates. And when you're mailing offers, what do you do when your response rate is lower? What do you do if you're in a county and you feel like you're just not getting the response you should be getting? So stay tuned with us. All right, this week's round table, we've got almost all the usual suspects. You've got Dude, Buddy, the Nightcap og Scott Bossman. How are you?

Doing well, Mark, Happy New Year.

Happy New Year. We've got the technician, Eric Peterson. Eric, how are things?

Things are all right. Good to see you, Mark.

Good to see you. We've got Landon, AI Harris, the Art. The aquatic investor. I want to say artificial investor, but no, the aquatic investor. Land. How are things doing well, Mark, last but not least, I love it when you call me Big Papa Tate. Litchfield Tate, how are you?

Happy to be here, thanks.

Great. Great. Today's podcast is sponsored by Flight School. Learn how the next 16 weeks can transform your life. Just go to the landgeek.com training to learn more. Thelandgeek.com training. All right, we got a good topic, and this is one I know our coaching clients have been asking about, and I would just love to get your take on. You know, we gotta isolate two variables, right? Number one is, is the cow? Is it the county's market has changed and it's gotten more competitive, or is it our pricing? So, dude, Buddy, when you send out your offers to a county, what should your expectations be in this current market? And what do you do when they don't meet your expectation? Yeah.

So I guess the current market for us in our mailing response is pretty good. I would say maybe a year ago, there was a. There was a dip in some of the larger counties we were working in. But right now, I guess for me, it's less of a concern than. Than it was maybe a year ago, but a year ago, thinking back to then, maybe a year and a half ago, when the response rates were down, There are different ways of pivoting, right? Like, first of all, I need inventory. So if I need inventory, the nice thing about this community is I'm going to go find it somewhere. We work in really large counties, and, you know, there's hundreds of land investors in our community. And I'll venture to guess that, you know, Eric Peterson might have some land in an area where I want property. So I'M going to reach out to my connections and I'm going to, you know, do some data research that way. What are they pricing their wholesale land at?

Right.

And maybe I can do a little, little research and figure out what they bought it for and see if, see if I'm in line with the current market as far as what my, my offer was on my mailing. So I don't want to take all the answers. But, but I'm going to say one of the things I do when I'm getting low responses is I will pivot and I will look to other land investors and see do they have things for wholesale and what are they maybe buying for, Do I need to adjust and I'm gonna, I'm gonna buy land from them. You know, if just don't, I won't mail, but I'll buy land from them. So that's one of the things I would do.

I love it. How many times have you called Eric for a wholesale deal and he basically plays off and says, oh, yeah, Mark's offered me more.

Yeah, not, not very many times.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's, yeah, exactly that. Yeah, Eric's a straight shooter that way, for sure. Landon, AI Harris, what about you? How do you and Tria go about sending offers? You have your expectation, your response rate, which in this, you know, we always say 3 to 5%. I think in a more competitive counties now, it's, it's lower, it's lower, but, you know, the expectation should be maybe, what, 1 to 3%?

Yeah, I would definitely say in some of those larger counties where it's a little bit more of a investor population. Yeah, the percentage, percentage is going to change a little bit. I think one of the things, you know, Scott hit on was kind of doing a little bit of research. You might have to dig a little deeper. I think that's one of the things that we have to really make sure that we're doing. It's like we dig a little deeper and look at that meat. Maybe we're going in and we're studying some of the more seasoned land investors, people that we trust that we know have been in this business. We know that they are, they're buying tons of inventory and they're picking these properties up. Well, they're not just picking it up by accident. There, there's a reason. So we, we kind of look towards, like I said, some of those seasoned investors that have been in this for a while. One of the other things I think where we tend to do is Maybe if you're in a county that, you know, you have the deeds on file, like we'll go look up some of the APNs and go to the county, straight to the county and see was it recorded, what was, you know, what was the price that was recorded. And sometimes that gives you the answer you need to know is, is this, you know, is this our pricing that we need to adjust? But I definitely think, yeah, they your percent can go down, but it's not give up and it's not just throw more money at it. Sometimes I think, you know, we get stuck into throw more money at it, throw more mail at it. It should just work. Well, if your pricing's off, you can throw a bunch of money at it and more mail at it and it's going to be the same. You're not going to get that response. So I think like I said, doing a little bit more research really kind of pulls it home a little bit for us.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Not. Not to plug LG Pass shamelessly, but I will. Because you can adjust your, your pricing in the software. You can increase it 5%, you can lower it 5%, whatever you need to do. And you can adjust the number of mailings. So, you know, you could like the Eric Peterson method is basically what, 30 a day. And this way you can see how the market's responding. And you didn't send out a thousand mailers in one get go and realize, oh my gosh, my pricing's way off. So that's definitely a great way to look at it. For those of you driving, it's just www.LGPass.com to learn more. All right, the technician, Eric Peterson. Eric, how do you think about this?

I think as a seasoned land investor, someone that's been doing this for a while, you do have a slight advantage, right? Because every now and then in your mailbox shows up offers from other land investors, right? So we can see what others are offering in an area that we might frequently work in, Right? So as a new investor, you're not going to have that luxury. But what I often talk about with students that are struggling with mailing, they, they're struggling to purchase, they're struggling to get accepted offers or any response from their mailing. Mailing is certainly a learning process, right? Just because we buy a list or download a list and price it and send it out doesn't mean that we're going to see results, right? Like there's, there's more to it than that. So as the others have been talking about, you know, further research is always important, but I like to encourage students to test their pricing. Okay. Don't just, you know, maybe you're mailing 5 acre properties in a given area. Don't just pick one price, especially when you're new, and just go with that for all of your mailing because if that's not working, you're not going to see any results. So instead, what I encourage people to do is take three to 500 rows of data, okay, pick three to four price points, and those should be fairly widely varied. You know, on the, on the low end, maybe it's about a quarter of what you think retail value is. And on the higher end, maybe it's approaching the wholesale value for that particular county. Right. And pick those price points and then duplicate them through the whole list. Okay. Now we got three to five hundred pieces of mail that are going to go out that all have, you know, three or four different prices on them. And when we mail that, we do it all at once. And the reason we want to do that is it's going to ensure that we get response the fastest possible. If we only let Those go at 30 a day, it's going to take us longer to see the result of that mailing. Now, once we have the pricing figured out, 30 a day is perfect, right? Because then we have some consistency. But while we're trying to learn, we want to get to those answers as quickly as possible. So then assuming we get some, some accepted offers back, then we can learn from that. If they're all at the highest price, well, that's going to tell us, you know, it's probably somewhere around that number that we can buy in this county. If we see a variety, well, maybe we need to renegotiate the highest ones down to a more, you know, reasonable price based on what else we see coming back. And we just learned from that and now we know, okay, this seems to be our buy price for this area. Let's price the rest of our list and mail and go from there. So, you know, it's not always possible in every county that we can go look up the sales history and see what was actually paid. Some counties we can, some counties we can't. So this is another method that we can utilize to help us arrive at the purchase price in a given area.

I love it. I love it, Tate. I love it when you call me Big Papa. Between Dude Buddy the Technician and Landon AI, you don't have much left on the bone here to chew on to. To add your two cents. I Think, you know, there's some definitive answers there, but this is why you get paid the big bucks.

You know, it's a fair question to ask, like, what do I do when my mailing's not hitting and going back to the basics.

Right.

Are you working in a county where there's sufficient supply?

Right.

And that's. That's often what it comes back to. And if you're working in a county that's well known and established. Yeah. You might not see the results from your mailers that you want, but it doesn't mean it's a failed, you know, mailing. Right. Not every mailing has to produce this crazy number of acquisitions for it to be worth its time. Right. For example, if you can buy a property in an area that you have demand for and sell it very, very quickly, that's okay if you get a lower response rate. The other thing that I'd like to just reiterate across the board is, remember, the counties that we typically do business in are bigger than a lot of, you know, the areas that one would typically target. There's a county that I work in, and there are a quarter million. It's actually 248,000 targetable lots in it. Think about that number. I mean, if you're mailing 30 a day or 100 a day, that's a lot of land to try to buy or acquire. So sometimes you can work in the areas that you'd like to be working in, but it might have a different subdivision or might be a different area or a different region. And if the business model works in one area, the chances are it will probably work in another area as well. Don't get yourself down on the fact that your mailers aren't hitting. That's part of the process. That's part of the learning. Just like mailing offers at the wrong price, that's part of a game we all play. It's okay. Don't quit or don't get discouraged and don't lose faith. This is a good method for you to build your passive income, because it's not. All of us have mailers that don't work. Welcome to the family.

Welcome to the club.

Yeah, I love it.

And.

And to what you're saying. Eric said it. It's a test. Right. And the market is going to teach you and, and tell you, and then you. You can adjust from there. But to Scott's point and Glenn's point, like, don't wait. Buy land. Go get it wholesale while you're figuring out your market. Especially while you're new and, you know, use all the strategies, do land, arm, buy wholesale, and then also get your. Your best deals are going to be through the mailing, but don't be reliant on it. And there's. There's certainly an expense to it in the learning process that you have to go through. So I thought this was a really good topic. And. And now it's time to go to Landon and ask him for his tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the art of passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. Landon, what do you got?

So I started pick. I picked up this book and literally just came out. Have you guys read the book all in yet by Mike McAllow? Oh, no, no, no. It's actually really good. It's actually, to me, it's probably one of his better books. I think it's basically talking about how to be a good leader and how that you can. I mean, we work with a lot of the VAs, and sometimes we come up with they're just not good VAs, but sometimes it's the fact that we just didn't train them properly or we put them in the wrong spot where it didn't fit the abilities of what they can do. And so this book kind of digs into that a little bit, really talks about the way that we can be just better and how we can kind of lead our team to really create this. This amazing team. I mean, you know, I. I hate to bring. I don't hate to bring it up, but, you know, we all want a Rossi on our team, so. So this kind of walks us through kind of. How do we get these A plus team members for our. Our business? So now, like I said, I haven't finished it all the way. I'm kind of halfway through it, but so far, really good book.

I love it. I love it. I'm going to get Mike back on the podcast now to talk about All In. He's been on twice, so there's no reason he won't go on a third time for sure.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, I really, you know, profit first, the pumpkin plan. What else did he write? He's written a bunch.

Work.

They've all been really solid books, and I love his audiobooks. He's funny.

Yeah, he does a great job with it. I like this one, though. You'll like this one. This one's really good.

All right. Done and done. I'm definitely getting it. Great.

Great.

Tip of the week. So my tip of the week is. Learn more. Go tolandgeek.com schedule a free consultation. See if land investing is right for you. Landgeek.com forward/training. All right. Are we good? All right. I want to thank the listeners. Remind them the only way land is going to keep coming up with these amazing tips of the week. If you do three favors, Follow rate, review the podcast, send us a Screenshot of. @supportlantic.com we're going to send you for free a signed copy of Dirt Rich, but just. Just do it anyways. Not even for the book. You probably read the book. It just helps us get better guests like Mike McAllen, because he'll look at those reviews and be like, oh, yeah, look at these. All these reviews must be a good podcast. So please do it. All right, one, two, three, let's.

Freedom.

Yeah, it's. We're. We're really off sync, so this. Look, I. I don't want to offend anybody, okay? But I have. I have a topic I want to talk about. Oh, and, you know, I was talking to Tate about this, and he's like, mark, it's a little risque, but you got to watch this movie on Amazon prime called Saltburn. And that movie, if you have not.

Seen.

Will stick to your ribs.

Be prepared. Be prepared.

I don't even want to go on.

The record talking about it because it's like a. Yeah, yeah.

So all.

So all T told me was risque. He didn't say, you know, you're. You're gonna. It's gonna stick with you. That's all I knew. Like, oh, okay. And then there's, like, memes of people, like, what their face looks like while they're watching Saltburn.

All those people that tried to sit down and watch a nice, you know, holiday movie with their parents over. Over the break, and they chose that.

One, which, by the way, I can't.

Imagine watching that with my parents.

Yeah. And. And my mom walked out, and I was. But she didn't walk out soon enough. Let's just say that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for those of you that like disturbing movies, check out softburn. But for. On a more positive note, I found a new podcast I'm really enjoying in the same vein as, like, a Tim Ferriss. I don't know the guy's name, but Diao is CEO for the. For our coaching clients. I've. I've already recommended, you know, some. Some podcasts to start the year. I don't have you guys check that out. It's a British guy, but he's like. He's really a big podcaster. He's got, like, 4 million subscribers. He's 1. He's one of the biggest. It's great. It's great. And he gets great guests, so check out Dyer's CEO. All right, enough babbling. See you guys later.

See ya.

Bye.

Thanks for listening to the Art of Passive Income podcast. Are you ready to learn how you can start building a passive income without renters, rehabs, renovations, or rodents? Schedule a free consultation@thelandgeek.com training. Let freedom ring.