Mail your neighborhood! Hit the phones! Call your neighborhood!

You’ll hear this over and over again when starting out. But there’s an obvious question.

Call whom?

Expireds! Your sphere! Your neighbors! FSBOs!

Okay, how?

Lists.

You don’t always have to pay for homeowner mailing lists. Some of it may be available via your MLS, or your MLS add-ons like Realist. Or you may be able to get this from your broker.

Below is a list of lists: the best real estate lists for real estate agents and investors.

The Contenders

Others

There are a number of other list sources depending on your needs, including:

• Exact Data
• Melissa
• Pipl
• ProspectNow

FSBOs and Expireds from the Dialers

If you’re looking primarily to calling expireds and FSBOs, most dialers also have their own lists you can get with their dialing software.

Dialers’ lists are not always the best. Some agents find the most dialing success by mixing and matching dialers with lists. For example, some agents will use the Mojo dialer with Cole Realty Resource.

Vulcan7 and Espresso Agent have well-reviewed FSBO and expired lists, for example.

• Espresso Agent
• Mojo
• REDX
• Ricochet360
• SalesDialers
• Vulcan7

Mail Campaigns

Is direct mail getting sexy again?

In the Internet age, the death of direct mail has been foretold over and over again. But ironically there may be additional opportunities as more advertising spending moves online. There may be less competition in your targeted homeowner’s mailbox than there is in their Facebook feed.

There are a few options for turning your list of property addresses into mail pieces. Several allow you to purchase lists in their own system as well.

• ProspectsPlus
• Quantum Digital
• RealMailers

You can create a recurring mail campaign with these services. Some even have direct integrations with CRMs or data companies, like Quantum Digital and Black Knight.

Real Estate Investors

A popular prospecting technique for real estate investing is mailing “yellow letter” postcards to an absentee homeowner list. Investors often target absentee homeowners as likely landlords.

Alternatively, investors also commonly use preforeclosure lists while they “drive for dollars”, checking in on distressed homeowners while also scouring for unkempt, vacant homes that may be the early signs of a distressed homeowner.

Most list sources allow users to generate a list of absentee owner leads, though the owner information may not always be correct. Often times public information is not updated when they have moved and turned their homes into rental properties. Expanding your list might be a way to find absentee owners that are slipping through other investors’ cracks.

Conclusion

One of the most essential features of seeing results when doing either direct mail or phone campaigns is consistency.

That means you need to plan out your budget ahead of time before investing in a real estate mailing list or phone dialer for your real estate business. Don’t invest in something you can’t maintain for at least a year before evaluating its ROI.

And as with every lead generation tool, you need an airtight funnel in your CRM to ensure no property owners are falling through the cracks. Especially with mail, the ROI can be narrower, and you can’t afford to lose anyone to bad follow-up.

For those that are ready to begin outbound marketing or supplement their current marketing with better data and automation, these are some solid real estate list companies on which to build your business!

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