What do you actually put in the first letter?

Question

I've been reading through everything here twice and I still can't get a straight answer on this bit. Say I've driven a street, logged a house with a collapsed porch and a full mailbox, and found the owner's name and mailing address. Now I have to write to them.

The templates I've found split into two camps and they contradict each other. One camp says name the property directly, something like "I would like to buy 14 Elm Street, I can close quickly." The other camp says never mention the address or the condition because it tells the owner you've been looking at their house and it makes them defensive, so you just send a generic "I buy houses in your area" card.

I also read that yellow handwritten letters get four times the response of printed ones, which sounds like the kind of thing someone made up. What goes in the letter, and how many of these do you have to send before anyone replies?

Rena Guide · Accepted Answer

Name the property. The whole advantage of driving is that you saw something specific, and a letter that says "I'm interested in 14 Elm Street" reads as a real person with a real reason to write. A generic card reads as one of the twenty mailers that owner already gets. What you leave out is the condition. Don't write about the porch or the mailbox. You're telling them you noticed the house, which is fine, and you're not telling them you noticed they've let it go, which is the part that makes people angry.

Keep it to four or five lines. Who you are, the address, that you buy in the area and can work around their timing, and how to reach you. No price. You haven't seen inside and any number you put in writing becomes the number they anchor to.

On the yellow letter, handwritten mail does tend to get opened more often than printed mail, because it looks personal. Nobody should tell you it's four times. Response rates on a single mailing to a driven list commonly land somewhere under two percent, and most people who work this channel send four or five touches over several months rather than one letter, because the owner who ignores the first piece sometimes calls after the fourth.

The part that catches people out is what happens when they call you. A skip trace often returns a phone number, and rules on calling and texting people who never asked to hear from you are tightening and differ by state, so if you plan to phone rather than mail, get the current rules confirmed by an attorney where you're operating. Mail is the low-risk way to start.

mitchell_ray4 · Answer

I'd want to mention the house without mentioning the damage, which is harder than it sounds. "Your property on Elm" does it. The second you write "I noticed your roof" you've made yourself the guy who's been staring at their roof.

dpatel_re · Answer

The letter's only job is to get a phone call. It isn't an offer and it shouldn't try to be. Where people lose money is treating the response rate as the metric they optimize, when the number that matters is how many of those calls turn into a signed contract. Two percent response with nobody willing to sell at a discount is worse than half a percent of genuinely stuck owners.

monica_tran3 · Answer

Whatever you put on the letter, answer the phone. Five years of running a service business and the single biggest difference between the people who get work and the people who don't is picking up. An owner who calls a mail piece is usually calling three of them the same afternoon, and voicemail loses to whoever answered.

marcus_hale41 · Answer

Agree with not putting a number in the letter. I'd add that if you do quote anything later, get it clear in writing that it's subject to seeing the interior, because a driven property can have a $12,000 problem behind the front door that the porch never hinted at. Also check whether your state has any required disclosure or notice when you're soliciting a distressed owner directly, since a handful do and it's not uniform.

What do you actually put in the first letter?

5 replies