How to Respond To Poor Response Rates When Mailing in an Area

Hey, Land Geek Nation, it's Mark Podolski, the Land Geek. Your favorite digi real estate website, thelandgeek.com and on this week's podcast, the Roundtable Podcast, we have almost all the usual suspects. We've got the Zen master, Breathe in. The mailing, Breathe out, the marketing, Mike Zana. Mike, how are you?

Great, thank you.

We've got the technician, Eric Peterson. Eric, how are things with that trigger?

I am well. And the trader's doing all right, too.

Good to see you. Likewise, all the way from Sin City. I love it when you call me Big Papa Tate Litchfield Tate, how are things?

Things are good, can't complain. Good time to be a land investor.

It's a good time to be a land investor. Last but not least, the brain, the professor, your flight school Sherpa, Scott Todd. Scotttodd.net landmodo.com Learn anything about anything. Investorninjas.com Scott Todd. How are you, Mark? I'm great.

How are you?

I'm great because Eric's got an incredible topic this week for the Roundtable panel. Eric, what are we talking about?

Yeah.

So common scenario that I hear from our students is whether they're testing, mailing an area, or maybe they're revisiting an area that they haven't mailed in a while. And, you know, you send out those offers if you're testing the area. I always encourage my students to test their offer prices. Pick maybe three to four different prices. Organize your mailing data by apn, Take the first five properties at one price, the next five at another, so on down the line, and then duplicate that through your whole list and then. And mail it all at once. So they do that. They wait, say, three, four weeks, and they say, hey, I'm not getting much response. And do I stop mailing here? Is it too early? Do I do something else? What do I do next?

It's a great topic, and I'm surprised we haven't discussed this in more detail before. So I'm going to hand it off to. Because he loves going first, and I know he'd be mad at me if. If he didn't. The Zen master, Mike Zano. Wait, you're on you, Mike. There you go.

Eric, did you say they mail for like three or four weeks and then they stop? I just want to.

Yep, that's right.

So that right away, I would say, is a no, no, because we know that it usually takes about that time to even start to begin to get traction. I look at mailing like I look at Microwave popcorn. And it's very true. You know, you put the microwave popcorn in the microwave, what happens for the first few minutes? Nothing, right? Only at the very end, it starts to pop.

Right?

And so you need to maintain that state of popping. Right? But I say that it'd be like after 2 minutes and 10 seconds, taking the microwave popp out of the microwave and throw in the trash, saying, this doesn't work. And you would so close, so close to a bag full of fresh popcorn, but you threw it in the trash. So that's how I feel about that initially, is that they're not giving enough time. And I think there is danger. When you're new, you can run into some uncertainties and some doubts, and you could definitely, you know, but then you're just going to become sort of like, like, almost like hyperactive, like, add of laying about. They can be like, mail a little here, may a little there, and it's like. And it's just going to be chaos. So I think you go to the right area, which is a ton of potential deals. That's the areas we target. You're in for the long haul. Make some adjustments and have some. As dude buddy says, stick to itiveness.

Tate, is it me, or is that like the greatest analogy of all time, microwave popcorn with mailing? I think we have a title.

I never knew Mike was such a connoisseur of fresh popcorn. I mean, this is amazing. And that analogy, honestly, it speaks to me on multiple levels because it is deferred gratification, right? Like, you got to sit there, you got to be patient. You got to believe that eventually those wavelengths are going to produce something delicious for you. And so with your mailing, too, I loved it, man. That was fantastic, Mike.

Thank you. Yeah, that was like the definitive answer, Mike.

I don't know. Not Jiffy Pop, because I've never successfully cooked Jiffy Pop in my entire life.

I think I'm going to complicate the question a bit now for Scott. Todd. So, Scott, Mike's got the definitive answer. It's like microwave popcorn. You got to wait, and then at the end, it pop, pop, pops. My question is that if you know other land investors are there, but let's say you don't get the pop, pop, pop after, say, six to eight weeks, do you then remail, go to another county or stop mailing and just call Tate and go, I want to do land arb or call Zano and I want to wholesale. What do you do?

I wouldn't if I want to be in that county, I'm not going to pick up and move on. What I'm going to do is I'm going to start to go deeper in the numbers.

Right?

It's all about the numbers. So if I gave my first best shot, it's not like, oh, well, they have all of the. They don't have the market corner, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. There's no cornering of the market. Here's the thing about that 3 to 5%. A lot of people don't even think about this 3 to 5%. You can sway 3 to 5% very easily. How do you do that? Well, if you don't scrub your list and you mail 50 offers to one dude, well, and he doesn't respond, what does that do for your percentage? So are you scrubbing your list? Are you getting rid of the people that are not buyers or sellers anyway? Like, you know, the county. I see people mail to the county all the time. So if your list is completely scrubbed and you're not getting 3 to 5%, which is the benchmark, I guess, is what we're trying to hit the milestone, then what I'm going to do is I'm going to start and one of the things that I'm going to do is I'm going to go and I'm going to find out, let's say that you're in that county mart. I'm going to go and I'm going to look up what you paid for the property. Okay? Now, I don't teach using comps because the comps is like driving with the rearview mirror, especially when it comes to land. It doesn't tell you what's happening in the market today. But I'm going to go look at what you paid for a property that's near where I want to be. And the reason I'm going to do that is because I'm going to try to recreate the wheel here to figure out what your formula is. Because success leaves clues. So if I see, man, well, man, all these properties that Mark's buying is from cheaper than what I paid. What gives? Is it me? Do they not like me? Well, then I might look at that and go, okay, well, how long ago did Mark buy? And now I'm going to start to change gears a little bit. And instead of questioning my offer price, I might start to think about the message that I'm sending. Okay, what's the offer look like? Have I complicated it by making the offer a book? Have I complicated it by Making it too many pages. Have I complicated it by putting in my own story, which nobody cares about? What have I done here or have I not done anything? Am I using the template, the standard template, which is okay, too, but if it doesn't work in a specific county, maybe you want to do something different, change it up a little bit. So now I can start to tweak my offer a little bit. So, see, there's a lot of little levers, but the thing is, is that you don't do them all at the same time. It's not like I'm going to go increase my price. And then, as we just alluded to, okay, three to four weeks later, I'm going to go make another change. I'm going to make a change. I'm going to let it run its course for six to eight weeks, and then I'm going to go back and I'm going to do it again. And so it's a process. It's a process to find the way that you want to be and make slight tweaks. But then you have to have the patience to let the popcorn pop.

Okay, let's define patience real quickly before we get to Eric Tate. When you're being patient with your mailing, how much time do you give it? Do you get? Six weeks, eight weeks, 10 weeks?

I wouldn't even really start stressing or, you know, 10 weeks doesn't even stress me out. But I'm really not even looking for a result for six to eight weeks.

Six to eight weeks. That.

That's for me.

Like.

Mike, how do you define your. What, why the popcorn's popping in actual real time. How many weeks is that?

Or to actually stop popping? Popping, yeah.

When you, like at some point, four to six weeks. Okay. The technician.

I'm going to stick with the longer time frame.

Probably six to eight weeks, Six to eight. Scott Todd.

Six to eight weeks.

Six to eight weeks. So, you know, we're all popping at around the same time. So, Eric, we're waiting for that popcorn to pop. All of a sudden starts, pop, pop, pop, pop, popping. You start receiving back those not necessarily accepted offers. What you're getting is a lot of ha back now. It's still a response, but no one likes it. How do you then pivot?

Well, you know, kind of like Scott was talking about, that might point you to dig deeper into what you're doing initially. You know, you're kind of taught to go out and look at comps in the county, divide by four or so and price your offers in Mail and see what comes back. That's like kind of dipping your toe in the water, right? And then we need to stick with it over time. If we want to work in an area, it doesn't always come automatically. And I think that, that so often that's, that's what I'm seeing our students miss is they're not getting that response rate that we talk about, and they haven't got it in, whether that's four weeks or six weeks or eight weeks. And then they're just like, well, I don't know, I don't like this county anymore. Where should I go next? And it's like, that's all fine and good that you want to go work somewhere else, but it's not going to solve your problem because now you're going to go somewhere else and you're going to have the same problem. You're going to mail, you're going to wait six to eight weeks and you're going to say, yeah, that didn't work either. I've got, you know, a low response rate. Now what? And ultimately, you just need to stick with it. You need to continue to adjust your pricing up, down, depending on what the market's telling you, and figure out what it takes to buy a property there. And once you know that, then you can begin to renegotiate those offers if you need to. You can think about your retail pricing, which may need an adjustment from what you thought it was going to be, because maybe you're having to buy for more than you thought, but. Or maybe you decide, you know, that's not the market for you now that you know the purchase price and you don't like the returns you're going to get. But the, the point, I think that, that so many of us miss is that you have to stick with it. It doesn't necessarily come from the first mailing. And that's the point I wanted to make today.

I think there's two big lessons from this discussion. The first lesson is be impatient with your actions, but patient with your results. I think the second big lesson is don't have shiny object syndrome with counties. Stick to that county. If you know definitively and you've done your county research. Other land investors are doing deals there. You, too can do deals there. We have a massive market. No one's going to saturate a county. It's just too big. There's too much land. And again, there's not that much money out there chasing these deals.

Right.

It's not like Warren Buffett's coming in and wants to be a land investor deploying a billion dollars. He couldn't even do it if he wanted to. So, I mean, he could have a farmland, but not in Armitage.

Right.

So I thought it was a really great topic. Eric, is there anything we should have discussed? We didn't.

I don't think so.

Here's the thing, too. One of the things that I think makes people a little, gives people a little bit of anxiety, too, is when it comes back to the yield, right? So, you know, when you, when you're making the price, we follow this simple formula. You know, look at what the market, the market's offering and come up with your offer price. Right? But see, the thing is, is that people try to, they try to back into this number based on those percentages that, that get talked about all the time. Oh, make 300 to 1000% return. So let's just say that you're seeing a property out there that's selling for $7,000 and you break out your calculator and go, $7,000. I'm going to sell this thing on terms divide by, you know, you know, by, by 10. That's a thousand percent. Divide by 10. And that's going to give me, oh, my offer price should be 700. That's wrong. That's the wrong thing. So forget, forget when you hear Mark or somebody else talk about, oh, the yield for a minute, forget the yield for a minute. Just follow, just follow what's out there. What are other land investors selling for, and what do you think is a fair price to buy it for? Now, we always talk about divide by four. We talk about that as a role model, as a goal. But in certain markets, you can't divide by four. It's more competitive. So you got to find out what that divide by is. But don't try to force your offer price into the yield or the return. It doesn't work. And that will cause you to get frustrated. It will cause you to chase counties. And I see it happen frequently is, oh, well, it's been four weeks. I didn't get an offer. And so now I'm going to pack up and I'm going to move to another county. But as Eric said, you didn't solve the problem. You're going to move to another county and you don't have a core understanding of the simplest thing, which is what the market is bearing and what you can buy it for. And until you get the math right, you can move to every county in America and you still won't get it.

That's a great point, Tate.

Yeah.

I mean, at some point, this is a game of numbers, right? You got to pay your dues, and it takes a long time. Well, it doesn't take necessarily a long time, but it can take time to zero in on the right price for certain properties, and that's okay. Don't get discouraged by it. Stay focused. This is truly how we acquire land. I want to drive that home, is that we buy land from direct mailers all the time. This is part of the business. It's part of the game. And you can build land businesses using other methods. But I buy a lot of land from direct mailers, and my first 3, 400 offers that I mail, I don't necessarily expect to hit home runs on those ones. I'm feeling out the area. I'm trying to figure out which ones are going to work best, what price range I should be going with, and then I zero in on it. So it is a. I throw a wide net, and then I zero in on the right price range to be in, and then I go and buy everything that I can get my hands on. So have patience.

Absolutely. And you know, to Scott's point, like, this isn't math. Right. It's not just I can say 3 to 300 to 1000%. It is a market. It's always changing. It's better to have some metric than none. But the market's constantly changing. You have to find out for you what is the appropriate yield. And I mean, if you're listening to this, no one's going to be angry making 100% or 200% on their money. No one's going to be angry making 72% on their money, probably 50%. But you want to start somewhere. As far as a gauge, 3% to 5% as a response rate is a good metric, but in some competitive markets, it might be way lower. But you have to start somewhere. Zen master.

Yeah. I think this is the first true part of the business. We have to develop grit. We talk about grit all the time. We wear shirts that say grit. But I think people forget this is where it starts, right at the beginning. And this is going to make or break you. Do you. Are you going to. Are you going to have grit? Because we know it works. We know it works consistently. Like Tate just said, we all. This is how we all acquire property. You know, we're not. This is our method. It works. And the 3 to 5% divided by 4, there's guidelines you have to adjust as Scott said. So I don't want to say is that you just. This is where the grit starts and dig your heels in and decide if you're going to do this and then do it.

I love it. I love it. Well, we are now at that point in the podcast where I'm going to ask myself for the tip of the week, a website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the autopaths and making listeners to go improve their business, improve their lives. But Mark, before you give that tip, we have to give a shout out to our sponsor, which is flight school. Learn how the next 16 weeks can transform your life. Because you want to start building passive income. Because you want to work when you want, where you want, with whom you want. Once your passive income exceeds your monthly expenses, you're totally free. And the way to do that is without any headaches. No renters, rehabs, renovations or rodents. Learn more. Go to landgeek.com training Mike and Scott Bossman will walk you through how Scott Todd takes you up that mountain quickly, safely and efficiently. That tuition investment ain't going to cost nothing. Guaranteed you're going to make back your investment 180 days or less. Just show us that you did it. Belaygeek.com training okay, Mark, what is your tip of the week? Well, thanks, Mark, for asking. So this, this week I discovered. I shouldn't say I discovered Garrett Spong, who's a software engineer, gave Tate and I an incredible tip in Jamaica. There's an app called Signal and Garrett works in the security industry. It turns out that those messaging apps, they're not so secure. This is end to end encryption. You can do lots of different things to verify that the person that you're actually chatting with is whom they say they are. Is it who or whom Eric Peterson Ask me sometimes I forget. I feel like whom sounds very pretentious. Who they are, Right. And I don't know.

It's cool.

It's a cool app. It's really fun to use. It does everything imessage does, but it's got phenomenal security encryption. And for people like Eric Peterson that are in the crypto world, they need a crypto app signal. Check it out. Eric, have you heard about this?

Yeah, I'm familiar with it.

See, there you go. Scott Todd, do you know Bot Signal?

Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, fantastic. So I'm late to the party, Mike.

Yeah, no idea. I don't understand. I text my family. So this is for business. So if you don't know something, this is like higher end Texting?

No, it's for anybody you can text. Your family, your friends.

It's not that you don't know who they are, but somebody else may access it. Is that what you're saying?

Correct. You know definitively that this. There's not a man in the middle attack going on and the person you're texting is who they say they are. They've been verified.

Okay. I like it.

All right.

Yeah. Eric and I have been back and forth on Signal for years.

What, you guys communicate on signal?

No, he's joking. Who?

I mean, why would you use Voxer when you have signal? Right, Eric? I mean, that's how I'm getting the Traeger recipes.

I mean, this could go back to the last podcast when Kishan was saying that you didn't respond to Voxer. Maybe she needs to be on Signal.

Signal for Scott Todd, because he's all about that security.

Well, he wasn't sure it was Kishan that was contacting him.

The problem is, is that she doesn't contact me correctly. The problem is she uses the wrong email address. Unboxer. And I don't get it. That's the problem. So it's not a me problem.

You like this? Stung deep.

It's probably her boss's problem for giving her the wrong contact information.

Listen, 95%. Everybody write this down. 95% of all outcomes are management related. Seriously, 95% of all outcomes are management related.

Take a look in the mirror is what you're telling us. When we have a problem.

That's it.

I don't want to take that much responsibility in a day. I think 95% of problems are, you know, someone else's problem.

That's a large number.

Wow, that's true. That's tremendous. Scott Todd. What makes you say that?

What makes me say that? Yeah.

Is it like a Peter Drucker quote?

Yeah, it is. Yeah, that's it. Peter Drucker.

There you go. Who is the management guru of our time.

We share the same birthday, him and I.

So Scott Todd just brought a quote onto the net, onto the roundtable. Wow.

Okay, whatever's that measure, whatever that measures managed.

Not as a tip of the week.

But that would have been a great tip of the week, though.

It could have been. Yeah.

Well, I want to thank the listeners. Remind them the only way that Scott Todd is going to keep giving out these quotes for free and not as tips of the week is if you do us three favors. Follow rate, Review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of that review. Supportlandgeek.com I'm going to send you for free a signed copy of Dirt Rich, which in crypto dollars is now worth 2.2 million Cardano Shinu Edu.

I feel like I need to bring my book to the next boot camp and have you sign it because I don't even have a signed copy of Dirt Rich. I think I need to bring my book there.

Mike, I will sign it for you.

Thank you.

And I'll spritz cologne on it for you. No problem. No problem, man. Yeah. All right, well, thanks everybody.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, wait, we can't say thanks everybody. We didn't do our our ending. 1, 2, 3. Let's freedom bring ring now. Thanks, everybody.

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 forward slash training. Let Freedom Ring.