- [Seth Williams] Hey guys, what's up?
This is Seth Williams from the REtipster Blog.
In this video, I wanna show you a really cool trick
I learned about, not long ago, from a couple people
in the Retipster Club: Daniel Bear and Nathan Springer.
And I'm actually really surprised that I didn't know
about this before because I've been using
AgentPro247 for a long time, and there's this feature
built into it that makes it really easy to pull
up very specific type of list.
And somehow I've just missed this all along.
But, as soon as it was pointed out to me,
I knew I had to share it with you guys.
And what I'm about to show you actually works
on AgentPro247 and on
SiteXPro, which is just a separate site that
offers a lot of the same stuff with some different pricing.
But, both sites are owned by the same parent company
which is Black Knight Financial Services.
What I'm gonna do here is log in to both sites.
And just to keep this less confusing, Imma do
this whole thing in AgentPro247.
So once you're in AgentPro you would go up here
and click on the "FARM" button, and what we're gonna
do here is we're going to generate a mailing list
based on a very specific geographic region.
So, let's go 'head and just kinda pick a random spot
on the map here.
Let's zoom in to this property here.
Let's say that I own this property and what I wanna do
is I wanna contact the neighbors so that I can
let them know that the property is for sale
and they can buy it from me at a discount if they want to.
What I used to do is, using AgentPro, I would click on
this property here, I'd click on this one too,
this one too, this one too, this one across the street,
probably this one here, and this one here.
And I would just pull all of their mailing addresses
and send all of them what I call a Neighbor Letter
just saying, "Hey, I got this property that's right here."
"Here's all the basic information, I'm about to list"
"it for sale soon, but before I do it I wanted to contact"
"you guys and see if you would have any interest"
"in purchasing it from me at a discount?"
And sometimes this can be a super effective way
at getting a property sold really quickly because a lot
of times these neighboring property owners are highly
interested in purchasing the property right next door
or across the street from them.
However, there's a couple problems with this approach.
First of all, it's kind of a slow, time consuming way
to click on each one of these individually and
copy all the information down on each one.
And its also leaving out a bunch of other potential
buyers who might live, say, over here
or they maybe they own the property over here,
or they've invested in a number of properties in
this neighborhood but they don't live anywhere in the area
and it's still worth our while to contact them as well.
Well in that case, we've got a couple tools, over here,
that we can use to draw a polygon or a circle around
whatever specified area we want and we can pull
all the mailing addresses for all of these properties.
So, I'm gonna go ahead and zoom out here.
And one way to do this is to click
on this circle right here,
and once we do one left click it's gonna create this
circle and we can just drag it out
and capture the mailing addresses of every
property that falls inside this circle.
So, say if I wanted to go like this far out,
all I'd have to do, I don't wanna stop, is right click.
Now, it's captured all these properties in here
and we can go ahead and click on "Count Only"
and its got 98 mailing addresses there.
So, there's not really a magic number you need
to use for this, but really however many letters
or postcards you wanna send out, you would just
want to keep that in mind and factor that
into the equation when you see this.
And then once you find the number that you want,
all you gotta do is click on "View Records" here
and it will show you all the names and addresses
of these properties and essentially you can get
the mailing address of each property owner whether or not
they live in these houses.
So, say there's like a rental property owner where they
own one of these properties but they don't actually
live there, you can get their mailing address so you can
contact them through the mail.
But, before we go to the next step, I wanna go ahead
and clear this out because there's another method
I wanna show 'ya where you can draw a polygon
rather than using a circle.
And the reason this might be helpful is,
say if you want to target a more specific area than
just a general circle, you can do that with this.
So, we go ahead and click on this right here
and again, we just start by doing a left click.
And let's say we want to get this whole area here.
So, like this block here, this block here,
and this section right here.
We can go over here and do another left click,
and then do another left click here,
another left click here, and then draw it over here.
And again, every time I'm doing a left click it's
just creating a new point on this map.
Another left click.
And then when we get all the way back here,
once we want to close the loop, we have to do
a right click on our mouse and then that's going to
capture this specific area.
And then we go to this same process of doing "Count Only"
and that shows us how many addresses are going
to be showing up in that area.
Now, another cool thing about this is you don't necessarily
just have to use this for the purpose of
sending out a Neighbor Letter.
You could also this, say if you were looking to buy
properties in a very specific area and you wanted
to contact these people about potentially purchasing
their property, not selling them your property.
Let's say, in a hypothetical example, we wanted to contact
all the property owners that own land along this
131 Highway that goes over here.
And the reason why we're contacting these people
is because we want to buy land so that we can
potentially put an outdoor advertising billboard on it.
And when land is zoned commercially, and it's along
a highway, and the local township will allow it,
that's typically some pretty ideal conditions
for that type of use for vacant land.
So, say using that example if we were trying to reach
those specific types of property owners then we
could go ahead and click on this again and just start
drawing this polygon so that it captures all the properties
along this highway, like this.
Kinda goes up here, and there,
and of course you can go as far as you want,
but I'm just gonna stop there for this example.
And then we would come all the way back,
make sure we capture all these properties here,
over there, and then we will close that loop right there.
And now we've got all these properties here,
we can go ahead and click on "Count Only".
And this is giving us, again, right around
100 properties, that seems to be the magic number today.
But, anyway, you get the idea.
So, once we've captured the area we're looking for
and we know what the count is, we would just have to go
ahead and view records in order to see those.
However, something else I wanna show you is
in this example, like I mentioned, we're looking
specifically for land that is zoned Commercial
because we need to be able to place a billboard
on the property and we can't do that with
residential properties.
So, if there are any residentially zoned properties
on this list, we don't want 'em because that's
not gonna serve our purpose.
What we'd have to do, at that point, is go over here
and click on this and then we're gonna click on here
where it says "Property Type" and we're gonna start
by selecting everything but we are going to
specifically exclude properties that we know
we're not gonna be able to work with.
So, Government Public Use, we're most likely not
gonna be buying properties from the government,
so we'll uncheck that.
We're also gonna uncheck SFR, that's
Single Family Residential, and Residential Vacant Land
because, again, those are residential and residential
is generally not gonna serve our purpose.
Some of these other types may or may not apply
but I'm just gonna leave the rest of those
checked for now.
But once that's done, we can go ahead and click
"Count Only" again and then that brings us way down to 13.
So, based on this area we selected and
the other specifications we made up here,
there's only 13 properties that potentially fit
what we're looking for.
And say if we had drawn this area around the highway
in a much larger stretch, then obviously we'd have a
much larger number there.
But, either way, hopefully this just helps
illustrate what these tools can be used for in terms
of sending out Neighbor Letters or sending out
Direct Mailer Campaigns for the purpose of
purchasing properties in a very specific geographic
area with some of these filters applied to them
potentially based on what types of properties
you're looking for.
So, there's really a lot of power here if you understand
how to target the specific areas you're looking for
and how to use these filtering criteria that apply to
you based on what kinds of property owner
you're looking for.
And once you're satisfied with the count,
just go ahead and click on "View Records"
and assuming these are all the people you want to send
mail to, you just click "Select Records"
and then name your list.
We'll call it Example List and then click on "Okay".
And then we'll click on "Export" right here.
It doesn't cost anything extra to include all
the information, so we'll just go ahead and
click on that, click "Okay" again, and then
export file has been created.
We can download this, comes as an Excel file.
Go ahead and open this up, and now here we've got our list,
which we can then filter further and manipulate
as we need to.
As I mentioned, you can do all this same stuff
on SiteXPro, all you gotta do, once you're logged in,
is go up here to the Lists section of the site,
and then you'll see a very familiar looking screen
where you can do all the exact same things
with these tools.
And it works pretty much the exact same way
I just showed you over on AgentPro.
One other thing I will mention is that that the
Black Knight Financial Services' database
does not necessarily have current up-to-date
information on every property owner in every
single county and all over the country,
and before you use any of this information
you're gonna want to verify the data you're using
is actually fairly recent and updated.
And you can check that on both websites.
If you're using SiteXPro, all you gotta do is go
down here to the footer area and click on "Coverage",
and then you would just go ahead and click on the
state that you're pulling your list in, and
then you can find wherever that county is
and it will show you when that database was last updated.
So, for example I'm looking here in Kent County,
I'm recording this as of October 17, 2017,
and this information was last updated on
September 22, 2017 so that is less than a month old
and in my book, that's good enough.
If I was trying to work in a different county like
Isabella County or Huron County where the information
hasn't been updated since 2013,
that is definitely a problem.
That's way too old and I would never wanna rely
on information that is that far out-of-date.
So, that's definitely something you'll wanna
check before you start using either one of these services.
And over on AgentPro, if you wanna check this same thing,
all you gotta do is click up here on "Tools",
and then click on "Geographic Coverage"
and you'll see a very similar thing where you
can click the state and then find the county
your working in and see when it was last updated.
Anyway, that's just one other thing you'll wanna
double check before you start pulling these lists
and using the information.
Personally, when I see lists that are more than like
60 days old, that's when I start to really question
whether or not I wanna use it.
But, most of the time in most states I think you'll
find that the information is reasonably up-to-date.
If you do wanna use AgentPro, you can go ahead
and click on "Subscribe Now" and they've actually
changed up the pricing quite a bit over the past year.
But, whatever this checkout page looks like when you
get to it there is a Partner ID, and I do not get
paid for this.
It's just a discount you can get if you wanna use it.
All you gotta do is type in CFGRSH, like that
and you'll click "Update" and it will automatically
take 10 percent off each one of these prices.
Depending on how much mail you send out,
usually one of these three is a good fit for most people.
The plan I'm currently using actually isn't even
available anymore but it's very similar to
this one right here that provides 1,000 records for
72 bucks a month.
So, that's basically the one I use, but if you don't need
1,000 records a month then obviously do 500 records
or whatever it is you need.
But once you got all that set, just go ahead and
click "Next" down here and click "Next" again,
and then "Next" again and then just fill out all this stuff.
One thing I will note, when it comes down here to
Real Estate License Number, if you're not
a Real Estate Agent, that's okay, you can still
get through this screen.
All you gotta do is put the word "investor" in here
and it then it will let you go to the next page.
If you leave it blank you won't be able to proceed,
but once you put investor in there it should
let you through.
Hopefully, that makes sense.
Thanks again for watching and thanks again
to Daniel and Nathan for showing me this,
I really appreciate that guys.
If you're watching this, I wish y'all the best
with your next Direct Mail project.