How to Choose a Good House Zip Code to Send Mail (HA 014)
How to Choose a Good House Zip Code to Send Mail (HA 014)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here!
Jill DeWit: Good day.
Steven Butala: Welcome to the House Academy Show, entertaining real estate investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit: And I’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny Southern California.
Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about how to choose a good house zip code area to send mail.
Jill DeWit: I would like to point out, although these shows are meant to be informative and serious, and really help people, you know, we’re also here to have some fun and let you know that we are fun. I don’t know if that’s … But, and we would love your feedback.
Jill DeWit: So, this is a new show for us. We’re very excited to be here. And, you know what’s interesting about this? We’re doing this because we want to. We actually love doing the podcast.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: This has been [inaudible 00:00:54] for a long time.
Steven Butala: Heck, yeah.
Jill DeWit: We’re not new, and if you don’t know us, we’re, gosh, four years in on another show that has a thousand and 10 or 20, I don’t remember how many it is now. You know, once you hit that first 1,000 it’s all just like, grave. Just kidding, but episodes. And, it’s funny too. I can still remember when our friends said, “What the heck do you guys have to talk about?”
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: You remember that? It was good, here we are.
Steven Butala: Maybe he was right.
Jill DeWit: I know. I’m sorry. Well, let me back up and say I’m sorry. Maybe we have nothing left to talk about, and that’s what this show is. And, I apologize. Kidding.
Steven Butala: I look at our numbers with a microscope every day, and we’re getting lots of new listeners, and it’s good.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, well, we want your feedback. If you don’t know us, this is who we are. If you want to dial it up, dial it down. You want to get a question in there, Steven’s going to say, “Bring it.”
Steven Butala: Yeah. So, before we get into the topic, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on thehouseacademy.com online community. It’s free.
Jill DeWit: Stanley asks, “How do you choose the best zip code in a market?”
Steven Butala: So, I have to say this is a … This question on the House Academy environment forum is what prompted this topic, because it’s a very basic, good question. And, I’ve spent a ton and ton of time devising a system that yields perfect, very consistent and predictable results. Let’s just say that.
Steven Butala: Today’s topic, I’m going to just go right into the show, instead of just answering. It’s the same thing, yeah.
Jill DeWit: Okay, just going to cover the question on the topic.
Steven Butala: Today’s topic, how to choose a good house zip code to send mail. This is why you’re listening. So, you’re sitting in a house environment, probably where you live. And you’re saying, “Well, how do I know which houses deserve to get a letter from me, or an offer?”
Steven Butala: And so, this is my answer to that. And, this is what we teach in the program. And, our members are, experience a tremendous amount of success with it. And, every relatively urban market, there’s multiple zip codes. And, if you just Google zip code map, let’s say, you’ll find out all kinds of sources to look at a map of which zip codes cover which, and what the boundaries are.
Steven Butala: Lucky for us, this day and age, places like realtor.com and redfin.com have this huge back end available data that’s free. So, what we do is, I’ll take Mesa, Arizona as an example. Mesa’s exactly 10 zip codes. So, I pull all the data from realtor.com and/or redfin.com, line up all 10 of those zip codes, and I see which one has the best days on the market. You know, how long does it take to sell a house? How many days on market does a house have to be, before it gets sold? So, that, we want to be low, preferably less than 30.
Steven Butala: We look at things like new lists to sold, like, how many new listings come into the market, versus get sold that month. Hopefully, that number’s less than one or a hundred percent, depending on how you look at it. More houses get sold than get listed. And, there’s lots of other statistics like that, that you can pit these zip codes against each other. And, two of them, one or two, or maybe four or five, are really going to shine. So, what’s the result of that? Like, why does this matter?
Steven Butala: Well, it matters because whoever’s selling this property or managing the sales side of it, I manage the buy side. Jill manages the sell side, doesn’t need her life to be difficult.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. I’m sorry, are we talking about houses here? Or, just life in general?
Steven Butala: Yeah, all of that.
Jill DeWit: We really don’t want our life to be difficult, ever.
Steven Butala: You know, as a husband, do you want to leave a bunch of dishes in the sink and make her life difficult? Or, do you just want to clean them up and have a nice time? I can come up with fifty of those.
Jill DeWit: I bet you can.
Steven Butala: So, all kidding aside, you want to make sure that where you’re sending this mail out … because a very consistent number regardless of where you send this mail out, they’re going to sign this and send it back. We’re getting reports as low as 800. Yesterday, you listened to a show with member, Andrew Peacock, who’s getting every 800 units, he gets, buys, purchase a property.
Steven Butala: For us, it’s a little closer to 800. For new people, it’s a little closer to 3,000. But, the fact is, it works. And, the longer you get into this, the more practice you got, the more specific you get in an environment, the better those numbers get. So that, from an information standpoint, is exactly how we insure our success of a mailer, and we know where to send mail.
Jill DeWit: I want to point out, just to explain a little bit what that number means. What it means is, his 800 number, or if you’re brand new, it’s 2,000, 3,000, however, what it takes, that’s all the way to the end. That means, you have enough interest that comes back at your offer price. You research those houses. They meet your criteria. You narrow it down, and you pick a house and you pull the trigger, and you buy it. There’s no negotiating, you know. They’re interested, and they’re interested at your offer price.
Jill DeWit: For me, that’s what’s huge. That’s the real value. And, that’s why you make it easy. You know, I’ve always said, “Hey, just make my phone ring.” And now, not only do you make my phone, my team’s phone ring, but you have it ringing with the right people holding the right offer, where it’s just kind of like, we just have to decide do we really want it? Now, do we still want the house? And let’s just get it going.
Steven Butala: Those statistics also indicate too, and you know, exactly what Jill said. But, to take it a step further, those statistics indicate that people want to buy houses in that environment for some reason. Or, they want to live there. Let’s just say that. So now, not only as real estate investors on the front end, which is what we really are, does it make our life easy. But the people that we’re selling our house to, which is not the end user. It’s another investor who’s either going to renovate it or going to rent it out. We just made their life a lot easier too, because we’re in an active market.
Jill DeWit: Yep, yep.
Steven Butala: So, what takes a half hour to an hour up front, this research really knocks out a lot of problems for people down the line and keeps them coming back.
Jill DeWit: It’s wonderful. It’s amazing. What we have our hands on now …
Steven Butala: Yep.
Jill DeWit: … do you believe it? Gosh.
Steven Butala: Oh, my gosh.
Jill DeWit: What we could have done. Can you think, like, if we would have had this in our hands 20 years ago, wow.
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: And, what’s it going to be like 20 years from now?
Steven Butala: Yeah, I think about that a lot. Like, you know, I can’t wait. I dream up my dream data set sometimes. And, it gets closer and closer every time I look into it.
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Steven Butala: There’s other sources that you can pull in. And the data is easier to pull in, you know. We started all this stuff before API’s were available, so it’s going to get … The further we get into this, the more automated it is.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, even just in the few years we’ve been doing it. I say few, but it’s been several. It’s changed a lot, and it’s awesome.
Steven Butala: Hey, we know your time’s valuable. Thanks for spending some of it with us today. Join us next time for the episode called Wholesaling Houses Versus Mobile Homes.
Jill DeWit: And, we’ll answer your questions, post in our online community at houseacademy.com. It is free.
Steven Butala: You are not alone in your real estate ambition. I think that we made a dry topic bearable.
Jill DeWit: I hope so. It really is. We really are, when we say information … When we say information and inspiration, which we … information and … I don’t know.
Steven Butala: Well, I tell you.
Jill DeWit: Entertainment …
Steven Butala: You know, if you’ve never … You and I’ve been talking about this for decades together.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: But, if you’ve never sent out … If you just tuned into this show, and you’re wondering about how do people make money in real estate, flipping houses and stuff, this is actually should be pretty earth-shattering.
Jill DeWit: I agree. Wherever you’re watching, wherever you’re listening, please subscribe and rate us there. We are Steve and Jill.
Steven Butala: We are Steve and Jill. Information.
Jill DeWit: And information.
Steven Butala: To buy undervalued property.
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