Four ways to reach a seller. Only one of them works.

Four Ways to Reach a Seller. Only One of Them Works.

From Steven Jack Butala and Jill DeWit

There are four or five ways to get in front of a potential seller. Cold calling. Email. Texting. Direct mail. Ask us how we know that only one of them actually works.

Before we got to that, we took a member question that turned out to be closely related, because both come down to the same thing: how much friction are you willing to build into your own business?

Member Question: Can You Buy Houses in a Market You Can’t Drive To?

Tracy and Dave asked the SFR mailing crowd a fair question. Are you only mailing where you can be boots on the ground? If you picked a remote market, how are you managing the asset through the sales cycle? Agent, family, friend? They live in a seller’s market in Washington and would need to mail remotely.

Jill gets versions of this constantly, usually in the form of somebody bringing her a house deal and asking her to fund it. Her process is always the same. Look at the deal first. Does it check the boxes? Great.

Then comes the question that stops most of these conversations cold: who is managing this deal on the ground?

The usual answer is “I have an agent I love, we’ve done two deals together.”

That is not your person. Not yet.

Here is what actually has to happen on a house deal, and none of it is in an agent’s job description:

• Somebody has to hold the seller’s hand through a stressful transition
• Somebody has to confirm the seller actually moved out
• Somebody probably has to drop off a cashier’s check to get utilities turned on, because the house sits vacant while you sell it
• Somebody has to deal with the tree a storm dropped on the property two months into your ownership, get it cut up, and get it hauled away

Could an agent become that person? Sure, fifty deals down the road, when you are actual friends and you are paying them a separate management fee on top of commission. Starting out, that is not the relationship you have.

What you want is the equivalent of a brother-in-law who will work like a crazy person for five grand at closing and make sure every one of those small things gets handled.

Jack’s position is blunter: in his opinion, you cannot effectively buy single family residences, or build a business doing it, across state lines without that trusted local presence.

Why Houses Need a Face and Land Doesn’t

Land is forgiving. A brush fire on a rural vacant parcel mostly just clears the brush. Flooding is a real concern these days, but there is no tenant, no plumbing, no roof, and nobody living through a hard moment inside it.

Houses are the opposite. When somebody calls back on a house mailer, the call usually starts with a life event. My husband is in the hospital. I lost my job. Something is triggering the decision to sell, and that person needs attention, not a contract.

They are not going to say “great, let’s close Thursday.” They are going to say they have to clean the place out first. And you care about the condition of the house in a way you never care about a piece of dirt.

The people who are wildly successful at this run it face to face. The seller calls, and it goes something like: can I meet you at the house at three? Four would be better. Perfect, I won’t be there myself, but my friend Jack lives right around the corner from you. He’ll come by with his wife Janet, take a look, and talk through whatever you need to make this easier. I’m sorry for what you’re going through.

That is the business. It is closer to an appointment setting business than most people expect, which is exactly how some very successful residential agents operate. Somebody calls in about selling, and the response is that Sally, the one on TV every thirty seconds, can be at your house at 8:30 tonight. That model works.

None of that exists in land, which is part of why we like land.

Cold Calling

Legality varies by municipality, so that is a real question before you start. But here is the part that does not vary: everybody hates it. Nobody likes receiving those calls, and nobody likes making them.

Look at what you are actually hoping for on a cold call. You are hoping they pick up. You are hoping they give you a minute. You are hoping they listen. And you are hoping you happened to catch them on exactly the right day of exactly the right year, which is to say a bad day.

And when all four of those line up, you still have not said anything about price. They do not know who you are, what you do, or how any of this works. You just asked a stranger whether they want to sell their house.

Ask most people that question cold and the honest answer is: sure, for forty two million dollars. Now you know your moon number and you have burned the call.

Realistically, somebody sitting on a phone eight hours a day is hoping for a warm lead every couple of weeks. Plenty of people post their real cold calling numbers on social media, so go look them up, but that is the shape of it.

It also gets worse every year. Because nobody wants to make those calls, the industry replaced people with robocalls, which means everybody on the receiving end, us included, now treats an unknown number as an attack.

Jill’s own cold calling career is instructive. She was nineteen, she loves talking to people, she was great at inbound calls, and the job was selling rubber gloves to doctor’s offices. She knew exactly who to ask for and she was selling something the buyer definitely needed. It should have been easy. She did not last two weeks. One day she just did not show up.

There is no respect in it on either side of the phone.

Email

Email is seductive if you think in data, which we do. It looks like just another data set. Get the records, clean them up, line up your ducks, blast out a few thousand messages.

That window closed. Anti-spam law shut down unsolicited commercial email as a legal strategy, and the filters finished the job. Modern spam filtering is genuinely excellent, worked on minute by minute, which is one of the reasons Jack is such an advocate for Microsoft on the infrastructure side. As a business owner it can even be frustrating, because sometimes people who want your material never get it.

Set the legal problem aside for a second, though, and there is a credibility problem underneath it. An unsolicited email from a stranger about your property is not believable. There is no established relationship and nothing to anchor trust to.

Texting

Texting is a worse version of emailing.

Nobody wants a random text asking whether they need payroll help or HR help or whether they are thinking about selling. It reads as an intrusion into the most personal channel a person has.

And the counterattack is now easy. Whatever your carrier is, there is a system for blocking and reporting. Jack held off on using it for years because he did not want to be that guy. He is not holding off anymore. Report enough of it as spam and somewhere on a server your number gets flagged as belonging to someone who will not put up with it.

That is the direction the whole channel is heading.

Direct Mail

Which leaves a letter.

Every time this comes up with people a lot younger than us, they laugh. You mail a letter? How old are you?

It works, and it has always worked. Here is why.

Everybody gets a stack of mail and almost all of it is garbage. At the bottom of the stack is one plain envelope with nothing on it. Just Mr. and Mrs. Jones, and up in the corner a name they do not recognize. Land Investment something. They have no idea what it is, so they open it.

The entire world is in the business of getting somebody to click. This is the original version of the click. Put “WE WANT TO BUY YOUR HOUSE” in big flashy type on the outside and it goes straight in the trash. Put nothing on the outside and it might be a credit card offer, it might be a notice that the neighbor is demolishing their house, it might be anything. So it gets opened.

Then the first sentence does the work. Not a pitch. A specific property and a specific number: we are interested in buying your property in Navajo County, Arizona for $3,422.82.

A material percentage of people keep reading right there. Some of them had genuinely forgotten they owned it. Almost all of them are tired of paying property taxes on something they never use.

We bank on roughly a 1% response rate on mail sent the way we send it. To be clear, that is 1% responding, not 1% closing. Inside that 1% you get all three flavors: people who tell you that you are the devil, people who say $3,822 does not work but $10,000 does, and people who say the number sounds great, it is time to sell, what are the next steps.

You do not get that first open, that first click, from any of the other three channels. And two of those three carry legal exposure that is growing, with class action case law piling up around the country.

The Takeaway

The house question and the channel question are the same question. Both are about removing friction and building trust before you ever talk about price.

On houses, that means a trusted person on the ground, because a seller in a hard moment needs a human being at the door, not an agent and a lockbox. On outreach, it means the one channel where a stranger will voluntarily open your message and read a number.

Everything else is you paying with your time for the privilege of being unwelcome.

You are not alone in your real estate ambition.