Quarter 1, 2018 Update by Justin Bone

Quarter 1 2018 Update

As the first quarter of 2018 comes to a close I thought it would be good to take a look at the numbers once again.  We pulled a report this morning and here are the most updated numbers for our direct mail campaign:

Our Q1 goal was to have a few more under contract at this point.  We have fallen a bit short of expectation, so we’ve dived into the number and here is our take away from the above chart:

Tax Delinquent – This list has tracked the way we had expected it to.  We consistently purchase around 1 house per 100 responses as well as 1 house per 10,000 mailers.  We are pleased with our results and will expand this list to Jacksonville next quarter.

Custom Equity List – This list has worked well for us in the past, but does not seem to be working well for us at all during Q1.  We pulled this list in 4 geographical areas around California.  Every week we mail to a different area, and after 4 weeks, we begin each city again. We had expected this list to yield at least 1 purchased house by now but we have not put any under contract yet.  After diving into the numbers, we found that the Sacramento mailers were not yielding the same responses as the rest of the cities were.  Sacramento’s Custom Equity list fell short by quite a bit.  Going forward, we will no longer mail to Sacramento under this list, so we expect to see our response rate climb a bit.

Jacksonville Equity List –    This list was never expected to do very well from the beginning.  We knew we wanted to expand to the Florida market so we mailed to this list in the absence of a better list.  Now that we have a team in place in Florida, a driving for dollars list and we are putting together a tax delinquent list, we will drop this list and expect to see our marketing efforts in Jacksonville improve by Q2.

As we step back and look at the list as a unit, we’ve sent 67,000 pieces of mail, talked to 444 people and we expect to purchase no less than 3 houses.  In reality, if we were to completely stop marketing right now and continue our “follow up” process, we will likely purchase 1 or 2 more homes.  So, after we readjust for next quarter, we suspect that our numbers will align a bit closer to our initial expectation of 1 purchased house per 100 responses.