This is a transcript excerpt from a YouTube video/panel (How To Make A Mailing List For Land Investing) where attendees ask how to source mailing lists for land investing. Panelists (Mark J. Podolsky, Scott Todd, Taria Harris and others) recommend using paid data vendors (Datatree / The Land Geek / Geek Promotion) instead of county offices because county data is inconsistent and slow. They discuss pricing (~$0.07–$0.10 per record), using assessor websites for familiar counties, applying filters and geographic draws, and mailing services (LOB, LGPass) to send mail quickly.
Chapters
David Brighton has a question. David.
All right, David.
I'm starting to work a new area and for the first time I'm not able to find a good list through the county. Where would you suggest I go to get that list? Buy it or build it manually? Who wants to take that?
Not Foxy Proxy.
Not Foxy. Not unless you want to talk to the mail people without them knowing who you are. I don't know. Terea, what would you say?
So we. I just. I threw out trying to go through the county. Just some. There was not a lot of consistency there. So we use Datatree or Datatree to get our information.
Yeah.
There's no consistency. Nor is there cooperation.
Yeah.
It doesn't give you. Yeah, the county has the two Cs. Lack of. Lack of cooperation and lack of consistency and lack of everything else. So I agree with Taria.
When's the last time. How many months ago has it been for all three of you since you got a list from the county? Years.
How many months ago? Yeah.
24, 36, 72. How old were your oldest kid?
60, 48.
Yeah. I haven't gotten a list from the county in forever just because it takes so long to get the list and then go scrub it. And I always thought, hey, I'm saving all this money because I love Excel and I'm an Excel guru and I can go do all this and you know what? Just buy the damn list. It's 10 cents a record and go and be done and get the mail in the mail.
I would say geek promotion. I think it's now 7 cents.
I was gonna say that to you, but I didn't want to bust his bubble if he's paying 10.
So.
Crap.
Go to datatree.com the land geek for your discounted rate. But David here, I love the stuff. Sometimes you go to the assessor website and you can pull that data yourself. That data yourself. And I. There's still one county where I do that because I know exactly. I've done it for. I've done it for four years. I'm going to go to that county, I'm going to pull the list for that subdivision. Here we go. We're good. I don't need to pay for it.
I actually haven't updated my list in like 18 months.
So.
What about your filters?
Just keep remailing.
What about your filters? Like on Datatree? Like, I can weed out a whole lot of stuff that I don't want to pull. Does the county also. Or you just have to scrub the list yourself for that?
No. On this particular county, yeah. But there's not much I need to remove. Not much we need to remove. Yeah.
If it's a bunch of squares, right? Then it's fine. If it's, I don't want a male over here, but I definitely want a mail over there, then the county's useless. Unless you're gonna pull that data into zome and start looking at it from a geography perspective. But to go draw a circle, my mind was blown. John Burnett, I love you. When Burnett was like, shut up and watch this loom of me draw a circle of where I want to be. Here are the reasons I draw the circle. I download the list, and I'm just like, oh, my God. Yes. And that cost me $100.
Done.
I'll take those thousand records. You mean I can have those in the mail tomorrow through LOB and LGPass? Done. Next, I will officially point my energy towards something that will make me more money.
