Does the type of distress you spot from the car change what you put in the first letter?

Question

I've been going back and forth on this. Found a place in Clovis six weeks ago, two-story, peeling fascia, side gate off its hinges, grass completely gone to dirt. Mailed the same letter I send to every out of state owner. No response after three touches. Pulled the deed and the owner is 40 minutes away in Madera, not across the country, which probably means they still drive by it sometimes and they know exactly what it looks like. I think the letter should have said something different to that person than it says to a guy in Ohio who hasn't seen the place in four years. The Ohio guy might not know the roof is soft. The Madera guy definitely knows. One of them needs me to describe the problem, the other one already lives with the guilt of it. Same peeling house, two completely different conversations. I've been sending one letter and it's probably costing me responses on the ones where the distress tells me something specific about the seller's situation.

cody_ahn · Answer

The Madera guy thing is real but I have never seen "acknowledge the guilt" framing actually close a deal faster than just making an offer number feel safe and easy to say yes to.

What the postmortems I've read on split-tested letters actually show is that specificity about the property beats specificity about the owner's emotional state, mentioning the gate or the fascia by name outperforms "I know this has been weighing on you" because the second one reads like a pitch and the first one proves you were actually there.

Three touches to a guy 40 minutes away with no response, what did your call-to-action look like on those?

simoneb44 · Answer

Three touches on a nearby owner is barely started, honestly.

malik_thornebury · Answer

The nearby owner already has a number in his head, even if it is wrong, so a letter that describes the property back to him reads as condescending and he stops reading. What moves that person is acknowledging that holding a property in visible decline close to home carries a particular kind of pressure, and then offering a timeline that makes the decision feel low-stakes to start, because his hesitation is usually not price, it is inertia plus embarrassment. The Ohio owner has neither of those things working on him, so the letter has to do the descriptive work and frame the condition as information he probably wants, because for him the problem is uncertainty about what he actually owns.

What does your current letter open with?

Does the type of distress you spot from the car change what you put in the first letter?

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