Outside of direct mail, what have you found to be the most effective way to find deals?

  • LIM Mod

    I'm looking heavily into buying from county auctions as an alternative to direct mail, but I'm just curious what else you guys are finding effective.

  • problem with county auctions, beside the fact that everyone is there trying to buy them.... is that at least in states like FL is that a tax deed is not marketable title.  You have to do a quiet title suite to clean it or wait 4 years or most title companies will not insure...

    I actually did some playing around with posting "I buy land" or "I buy houses" on fb and Craiglist etc and push people to my buying site.  I got a few leads from this.  I have bougth several properties through a land network where another guy basically pays hundreds of dollars in google adwords and fb ads to push people to his site, and he sends the leads to other investors, when you buy you pay a 5 percent comission or 500 dollars.  I have found a few off of here, but generally speaking they aren't as motivated and you can waste time back and forth.

    I am sending mail but also thinking about doing what de does and paying for fb ads for my buying site but really specific in markets... not sure how that would work with out of state buyers though

  • LIM Mod

    Jason Wollbrink Yea I hear you - so far a lot of the margins for these lots via the county don't have a lot of meat on them. I've only tried buying over-the-counter though. Will be giving an actual deed auction a shot soon. 

    Facebook has worked a bit in my experience with houses but still needs some testing and tweaking for land. 

    The best thing I've seen outside of direct mail is buying from wholesalers (in the world of houses) and hypothetically, that could look like buying from other land investors... but I don't know if it would work. 

    Some wholesalers in the house world are happy to make $1,000-$2,500 per deal... but land investors probably want more if the spread still makes sense for another land flipper to purchase it.

  • We've been tampering with local tv ads recently. Also, we've found Google PPC to be a great way to source deals. Our return on money invested is round 292%, tough to beat that.

    Also, we stumbled across a cold caller that we are trying out starting next week. I'll have to report back!

  • Counties in my state have what is called the repository list.  If properties don't sell at the tax auctions they get placed on the repository list where I believe they sit for an indefinite amount of time until someone buys them.  Usually there is a minimum bid of around $600 or so depending on the county.  Properties sold from the repository list are sold free and clear of all liens, back taxes, mortgages etc.  Many of the properties on the list are difficult to make use of for one reason or another.  I have found one county with a semi abandoned subdivision.  Long story short it is a subdivision full of 0.2 acre lots and the county started requiring a 1 acre minimum for septic at some point in the past.  On top of that, nearby fracking activity recently ruined everyone's well water.  Many vacant lots there have gone delinquent and most of them have ended up on the repository list.  I have found that these lots are still good to market as camping lots and there are plenty of people who will buy them for such uses.  I've bought and sold several of them and plan to continue doing so.  They don't bring in a ton of profit but there are quite a few of them and they're fairly easy to buy and sell.

  • Nick Bond

    Is your google ppc for lmvacant land or houses?  Also how area specific is this campaign?  I was thinking about it, but wsnting to focus on an area

  • Hey Jason Wollbrink ,

    I have only done this for single family homes. In my opinion, the you should be as targeted as possible when it comes to location. I setup a separate city landing page for each city I want to run ads in. It's very important for the ad copy to match what the content the user is searching and the location the user is searching in.

  • just curious as to your keyword serachs for sfr?  I mean "we buy junk houses" or simply "sell your house xyz city"

    I would be doing with land but think this idea is inyeresting with the different landing pages

  • Jason Wollbrink Hey! I'm 'that guy.' 

    Cool topic. I've been doing blind offer mailers and PPC (no Facebook) for 3 years. I look at mailers to drive the consistent "singles" and the PPC to land the every-once-in-a-while "homeruns." It costs me $2k+ to get a deal of direct mail. Whereas, PPC is coming in at around $1,500 a deal. The monthly PPC budget is 4-digits.

    Yeah, I agree Jason. Running a PPC campaign is like sending a 'neutral' letter. It can be a big time suck researching properties, sending an offer only to have the seller disappear on you. 

    But....man...every once in a while one of those PPC leads hit. I've done a couple deals that net $30k+. I know one member in our lead sharing group just sold a property (that he got off a PPC lead) and netted $48k. 

  • ryan dick


    Obviously I am in your group. 

    But I wonder how selective you can be with PPC?  I know properties come on from all over..  I am focuaing more on a couple lf markets and mailing, like you said is expensive to produce singles.

    I was thinking of doing a focused campaign but before i build the site etc was wondering if you can be selective with the campaign?

  • Jason Wollbrink Well...two thoughts here...

    1.) Target search terms with some sort of geographic keyword in the phrase - like 'sell my land in Florida' or 'who buys land in Florida.' You could drill that down to specific cities as well - example "sell my land in Melbourne, Florida.' I did a quick look at the numbers (from the site) and see that 'land buyers in texas' was our most common 'geo-specific' search term. However, that term has only generated 10 leads over the last 3 years. The next most common, geo-specific term is 'sell land in Florida' which has generated 3 leads over the last 3 years. That's not a lot of volume. However, for your PPC campaign, you would probably bid very aggressively for a limited amount of keyword phrases which should, hopefully, generate a few more conversions. 

    2.) Limit where your PPC ads run. You can target more common search terms like 'sell my land' and limit who can are served these ads based on their geography. This isn't a 100% surefire tactic to only generate leads for properties in certain markets. But, I think it'd be worth a shot. 

    Lastly...consider investing in some SEO. Work to get your site ranked within the top 10 ranking for a search term like: 'we buy land in Florida' and similar phrases. I think this might be your best bet. 

    Hope this helps! - Ryan 

  • ryan dick

    Great advice, thanks for sharing.

    I may be working on this for a house buying project in the future.... I will pick your brain more if I go that route..

  • I usually find some good deals with the help of online ads. I just search for what I need and look for the one that suits me better. I know it might not be the best option for this, but it's what I do. I think it actually is something that most of us do lol. I heard about a lot of marketing strategies. Some of them are so sneaky, I would never know they're actual ads, but there are a lot that are just obvious promotion, like this ppc liverpool campaign I saw the other day. I mean I know ads are ads, but it is just interesting to me how some of them are only based on psychology, not just a link on a website.

  • Joe what county is this?

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