- Hello there, this is Seth, and today I want
to show you a little tutorial on how
to use a company called Melissa Data.
And this is gonna be of particular interest for anybody
who is interested in using direct mail
to find motivated sellers for real estate.
I've done a number of other similar tutorials
for other companies, and this particular one
is just another option, it's one of many potential services
out there where you can generate these kind of lists.
The nice thing about Melissa Data is that for the purpose
of generating what they call a farm list,
there is no subscription required.
In fact, they actually don't even offer subscriptions,
at least at the time of this recording they don't.
The way it works is you go in and you pay per lead.
And again, depending on when you're watching this,
the price may be different, but at the time
of this recording cost is anywhere
from 11 cents to 15 cents per lead.
It's a little bit more expensive than some others,
but the fact is you don't need a subscription,
so you don't have to commit to a long term relationship
with the company or anything like that.
You can just go in there, pull your list and be done.
But if you want to use Melissa Data,
what you would do is you would go to their home page
which is just melissadata.com,
and then you'd go up here where it says Direct Mail,
and then you're gonna scroll down to where it says Property,
and Melissa Data actually offers a ton,
ton of different data services for all kinds
of different uses and different industries.
This is just one of several different things
you can use the service for, so that's why
if you were to explore this, you would find a lot
of different potential products and services.
So anyway, you go down to Property
and then you'll go to a page that looks something like this.
First thing you're gonna do is you're gonna go here
where it says Get Free Count, and then it's gonna show you
this little filtering thing, and this is where you start
to tell the system exactly what kind of list you want
and who you want to be on that list.
So just to show you an example,
I'm gonna filter this by county,
and I'm gonna choose a county in Ohio.
And the county I'm gonna choose is Allen County,
and so we'll click that, and as you can see right now,
just as it is, without specifying any other
filtering criteria, if you look down here
we've got 32,163 records, and that's obviously
way too much for what I'm trying to do here.
My goal with any direct mail campaign is to get that list
as small and as short as possible, having only
the very specific people that I'm trying to work with.
So with that in mind, we're gonna go to the next step,
and this is where we start to get a lot more specific
about what types of properties and property owners
in this county do we want to have in our list.
And in this example I'm gonna build a vacant land list,
'cause that's the type of properties that I buy and sell.
So in this first option here we're gonna uncheck this
and then we're gonna go down here and check
on these two, vacant lot, and then agricultural.
And if I wanted to, I may or may not include agricultural,
'cause that's like farm land, and that's usually
not the exact type I end up getting, but it could be.
So anyway, for this example I'm gonna leave it there,
and then we're going to go down to this one,
Property Value, and in this one I'm gonna specify
that I only want properties on this list
that are worth anywhere from nothing to $100,000,
so in other words, based on the county's assessed value,
if there's a property out there that's worth
a million bucks, it's not gonna show up on this list.
And then Property Description, I'm going to uncheck this,
and for Sale Price I'm not gonna do anything,
and then for Sale Date I'm not gonna do anything there
either, Mortgage Amount, I'm not gonna do anything there.
If, however, I was searching for single family homes
or something like that, and I only wanted the properties
with no mortgages on them whatsoever,
in that case I could go zero to zero,
and then that would basically mean that the only people
who show up on this list are gonna be the people
who own their properties free and clear.
So there's that.
For Mortgage Date, I'm gonna uncheck that.
For Mortgage Loan Type, I'm gonna uncheck this,
'cause vacant land properties, the ones that I'm going for
typically have no mortgages on them at all,
so that's why I'm unchecking that,
and then for Owner Type, this one I actually thought
was really cool, but you can actually go in here
and check, I only want the people who are out of the county,
so their property is in Allen County, Ohio,
they live in some other county.
It could be the county next door,
it could be a county across the country.
You could also choose Out of State,
so you only want the people who don't live in the state,
and as you can see, there are several other
options to choose from here as well.
So with these things in mind,
I'm gonna go down here and click Update Counts,
and as you can see, I now have only 86 people on this list,
and that's hugely whittled down from what it was at before.
It doesn't show me anything about any of those records,
like I can't actually see the information
before I buy it, but it does tell me how many items
are gonna show up on that list.
So for me, that's kind of a small number for a direct
mail campaign, I'm usually gonna be doing a few hundred.
But just for the purpose of this little video, that's fine.
So I'm gonna move onto the next step.
And then right here, this is where I can specify
the type of file that I want it to show up in,
and pretty much all the time I'm gonna want Excel,
because that makes it easiest for me to sort through.
And then zip file, I'm just gonna say no,
I'm gonna be using this one time.
So we'll go to the next step.
And then right here I actually don't even have
a Meliss Data account yet, so I'm gonna have to go
and create one right now, so I'll just do that
and go through the motions, okay,
so I just went and checked my email and confirmed
my email address, so now we're gonna keep going,
sign in and continue where I left off.
Now we're gonna sign in.
Okay, now the first thing that I'm noticing right here
is that I've got 86 records and the price is $50,
and if I just do the math in my head,
that doesn't quite add up to 11 cents to 15 cents per lead,
and I'm guessing, I don't know this for sure,
but I'm guessing the reason that is
is 'cause they probably have a $50 minimum order price.
So I would just keep that in mind if you choose to use this.
You're probably gonna want to get at least a few hundred
records on your list, because any less than that
and you're gonna end up paying more than you
really need to, so just keep that in mind.
Call this Test List, and go to Check Out.
So when you get to the Check Out page
you can either pay with PayPal if you have a PayPal account,
or you can check out with a credit card.
So I'm just gonna choose PayPal 'cause that's easy for me.
So this is what it looks like then,
and then you just go to Check Out.
Okay, and then we're gonna Confirm Payment.
All righty, so now we've got the actual confirmation
of the order, I can go ahead and print an invoice
if I want to, but what I really want to do is download this
just to see what this list is gonna look like.
So then we see this page and we're gonna click on Get File.
Okay, so I'm back and I actually just cut out
about five minutes of this video,
and what you didn't see was I just called Melissa Data's
customer service because my file was not able to download,
and what they told me was that apparently
these files do not download correctly
if you're trying to use Safari, like on a Mac,
and that's exactly what I was doing, and it wasn't working.
So all I had to do was switch my internet browser
to either Chrome or Firefox, and then it did work.
So I was just able to download it,
now let's open it up right now and take a look
at it, see what it looks like.
Okay, so this says, Your list is located
on the last sheet in this xls file.
So I'm gonna look down here, I see these three,
four sheets, I'm gonna click on this, and then there it is.
Beautiful, so this is what the list looks like,
pretty similar to all the other data services
I know about there, it's kind of the same thing
I was expecting to see, and all I would do
is get in here and start deleting stuff.
So you can see, I can see the actual owner's mailing address
and the owner's property address,
which are gonna be two different addresses,
'cause we only did the absentee owners.
So that's pretty much it, that's about
what you can expect to see with Melissa Data.
It's a pretty straightforward and easy service to use.
Given that my list was so small, it really wasn't
that expensive, but if I wanted to do a bigger one,
it looks like that's well within range
if I wanted to do that.
So hopefully that all made sense.
Thanks for watching, and if you're looking
for another option out there for pulling lists,
feel free to give 'em a try.
I had a fine experience with them,
and I think you probably will too.
So that's all, and hopefully I'll see you again soon.