LossMarketing / PPC Agency (Real Estate)

$9,300 chasing note holders through paid search that nobody was doing

Five months, $9,300 total, 31 form fills, 4 conversations, zero notes bought. Writing it out because the failure was visible before I spent a dollar and I didn't look.

The idea was to buy seller financed first position notes direct from the people holding them, rather than through the brokers where everything is picked over. Everyone in the note world says the direct approach is where the margin is. So I hired a small agency, $1,100 a month plus $760 a month media, to run search ads against terms like sell my mortgage note and seller financed note buyer.

Step where it went wrong: the keyword research. The agency gave me a planner export showing decent volume on a phrase set, and I read the number as monthly searches in my target states. It was national, it was a broad match aggregate, and the genuinely commercial phrases were doing something like 40 to 90 searches a month across the whole country. The big note buying shops have been sitting on those terms for fifteen years with real budgets and real domain authority. My $760 a month was buying position 4 on a term nobody searches.

What that produced: mostly people who wanted to sell a structured settlement or an annuity, which is a different business, plus two people confused about their own mortgage. The four real conversations were all holders of notes on properties in rough condition with payment histories I wouldn't touch.

I don't blame the agency for the outcome, though I do blame them for handing me an export without saying out loud that the addressable search pool was tiny. That's the thing they know and I didn't.

What I'd do differently: pull the planner myself, filter to the exact states, look at exact match only, and if the monthly commercial volume can't support the deal count I need, don't run paid search at all. Note holders don't search. They get found through the county recorder and the servicers, which is where the money should have gone.

Answer

1tylerbrooks9PassivePRO5

The step you're calling the failure isn't the planner export. It's that you bought a channel before you knew how the seller finds you.

A note holder isn't looking for anything. They have a payment arriving every month and no problem to solve. Search ads catch people who have already decided they have a problem and typed it in. That's why they work for a distressed homeowner and don't work here. No amount of keyword hygiene fixes an audience that isn't searching. You could have had the exact match filter right and the correct states and you'd have found the same 40 to 90 people a month, most of them shopping the same offer to four buyers.

What does reach a passive holder is something that arrives without being asked for. Mail to names pulled off recorded instruments, calls, or a servicer relationship where somebody already has the phone number. That's slower and less measurable and it's the work.

On the agency: I'd have expected them to say the pool was small, and a good one would have. But you hired a paid search shop and asked them whether paid search would work. They answered the question you asked. Before the next retainer, pay someone two hours to tell you which channel, with no fee riding on the answer.

Your $9,300 bought you the knowledge that this audience is outbound only. That's an expensive way to learn it and it's not nothing.

3 replies

0marcus_hale41CG4A

The export thing gets a lot of people. Broad match aggregates in a planner are a marketing number, and reading them as demand is like reading a zip code's median income as your tenant's paycheck.

Where I'd push back slightly on your diagnosis: 31 fills on $9,300 is bad, and part of that is thin volume, part is that you were bidding into a category with fifteen years of entrenched spend where your cost per click was probably four or five times what a land buyer pays. Even if volume tripled, the auction economics might still not work for a small buyer. So the lesson may be broader than volume.

Recording practice for finding seller financed paper varies quite a bit by state, and roughly a dozen states don't publish sale prices at all, so the recorder route you're describing works better in some places than others. Worth knowing which yours is before you rebuild around it.

1aliyah_bAU2APRO6

Verity's point about the seller having no problem to solve is going in my notes.

vellum, out of curiosity, did the $1,100 management cover anything beyond the ads? I'm pricing my own first campaign and I keep seeing that number quoted with wildly different things included underneath it.