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What to Do While Driving for Dollars
As you drive your pre-plotted route, look for vacant or run-down homes. Even if the property isn’t vacant, neglected repairs and upkeep often mean that the owner can’t afford to keep the property and would be open to a buyout offer.
Here are a few signs to look out for as you drive for dollars:
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- violation notices posted on the door
- newspapers piled up
- overflowing mailboxes
- overgrown lawns and/or landscaping
- boarded up or broken windows
- deferred maintenance
- utility shutoff notices
- old door hangers on the doorknob
As you find these properties, go through a quick checklist. First, write down the property address, notes, and other details on your driving for dollars spreadsheet.
Next, photograph the property from several angles, being sure to clearly capture the street number. Then log which camera shot numbers were for which property. The last thing you want is to get home and wonder which photos were of which properties!
Consider a driving for dollars app like Deal Machine. You just snap a photo with it and it will automatically log it and pull up all the information for you. More on driving for dollars apps shortly.
Try to get at least one photo that really paints the property in a bad light, figuratively speaking. The more dilapidated looking the better, as you can use this photo later when you contact the owner.
As you’re out of the car taking photos, tape your “handwritten” note on the front door. Tape both the top and the bottom of it to keep it secured in place — you never know how long it will be before the owner comes back to check on the property.
Finally, keep an eye out for postal workers delivering mail in these neighborhoods. When you see one, stop and strike up a conversation. Introduce yourself as someone who buys and renovates run-down homes, and tell them that you pay a $500 referral fee for information about vacant homes that lead to closings. Postal workers tend to perk up when they hear that, because they know which homes are vacant at any given time on their routes.
Get their name and number as well, and check in with these “bird dogs” every 60 days or so.
Tech to Drive for Dollars More Efficiently
If all the steps above sound like a lot of work, well, no one says you have to do it yourself.
There are several ways you can automate with a driving for dollars app. First, you can automate the photography and spreadsheet tracking with Deal Machine or HomeSnap. When you take a photo of a property, these apps use your phone’s GPS location and the visual AI to automatically pull up the property address.
Deal Machine then pulls up the property owner’s contact information (often including phone and email), along with information about the property’s equity, transaction history, neighborhood data, and more. In other words, they handle all the research for you.
For an extra fee, they’ll even mail your postcards for you. You save a template to the app, and they mail your cards per your personal design and text.
Literally all you have to do is drive around and snap photos of vacant homes.
Don’t even feel like driving? That’s cool too. Use a tool like Propstream to pull up all the vacant properties in your target neighborhood, then just click a button to send postcards to the owners.
You can literally automate the entire process with these driving for dollars apps. If you spend 15 minutes once a week scouting vacant homes and mailing owners from the comfort of your couch, you’ll start seeing calls roll in almost instantly.
Researching Equity & Owner Information
You’ve found a few dozen vacant properties after driving for dollars. Now what?
In a word, research. The first thing you want to do is research the equity (or lack thereof) in each property. If you’re using a tool like Propstream or Deal Machine, they’ll give you an estimate of the property’s equity based on the address.
Without such a tool, you’re at the mercy of your state’s or municipality’s online records of liens. Some of these websites are easy to use, others not so much.
If the property has little or no equity, scratch it off your spreadsheet. If it looks like it does have equity, proceed to look up the owner’s information.
Again, tools like Propstream make this easy, as do driving for dollars apps like Deal Machine. But every state lists owner names and mailing addresses in their online public records. For example, here’s the real estate public record search in Maryland.
Don’t stop there though. Try to find the owner’s phone number by searching their name with the local area code in Google. Search for personal websites as well, and for their employment information.
Then try to track them down on social media as well, particularly Facebook and LinkedIn. Sending a letter works, but contacting by phone, email, or social media can lead to better response rates.
This is the hard part: creating marketing campaigns to reach property owners at scale.
Outreach: Direct Mail & More
After trying to reach out by phone, email, and social media, it’s time to send a letter or postcard.
If you use a driving for dollars app like Deal Machine, you can automate your direct mail campaigns. Otherwise, here are a few tips to improve your open rates and callback rates.
First things first: handwrite the mailing address on the envelope, if you send a letter. If you send a postcard, either hand write it or print in a handwriting font.
Image courtesy of Feltus Family Homes
But take it a step further and print a thumbnail of the property on the upper left-hand side of the envelope. Remember the especially ugly-looking photo you took of each property? Yeah – use that.
It piques the owner’s curiosity; they can’t help but open a letter with their own house printed on it.
The letter itself should be short and sweet and to the point. We include a template in our FIRE from Real Estate program (if you’re not familiar with it, check out our free course on retiring early with real estate).
In fact, you should ideally have two different letter templates: one for vacant properties and one for owner-occupied properties that are just run-down. But as you learn how to find motivated sellers, few tactics work better than reaching out to these two types of sellers.
Be sure to jot down the dates when you send mailings on your driving for dollars spreadsheet. Every three months, follow up with another letter, for homes that remain vacant or shabby. Often it’s your third, fourth, or fifth letter that finally catches the seller’s attention!
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