Even though agents have been focusing their marketing efforts on digital spaces like Facebook and Google in recent years, there’s still great value in sending real estate postcards to prospects. In an age flooded with emails, direct mail stands out as a novelty. But ask anyone who sends large quantities of mail about the cost and they’ll tell you that it’s not cheap.
If you blanket your entire farm area with real estate postcards, then you’re spending a lot of money on too broad of an audience for a low ROI.
The key to spending wisely on real estate postcards—just like with digital ads—is whittling down the candidates and selecting the right audience. But how do you do that when you don’t know every single homeowner in your farm?.
Fortunately, Homesnap Pro can help.
Get More Responses with Your Real Estate Postcards
Zero in on the right audience
At around $0.75 per postcard (including printing and mailing costs), it’s expensive to send mail to people who will ignore your marketing, like local renters and recent buyers. And if you’re mailing hundreds of postcards at a time, you could potentially be wasting $100s that could have been used for a number of other marketing tactics.
The audience you send real estate postcards to deserves the same scrutiny as the audience you target on sites like Facebook and Google.
Homesnap Pro’s Likelihood to List tool allows real estate agents to examine each property in their farm to determine which are fit for their marketing efforts. By filtering out those that don’t meet specific criteria, you’re left with homeowners who are most likely to engage with and be responsive to your marketing.
Find seller leads with Likelihood to List
Let’s take a look at how you can use Homesnap Pro’s Likelihood to List tool to find the right audience for your next set of real estate postcards.
Activating the Likelihood to List tool
If you’re a Homesnap Pro member, start your prospecting on Homesnap Pro’s main map and search for your farm area. Then tap the “All Homes” button to see the marketplace of unlisted homes. Once you do, Homesnap Pro’s Heatmaps list will appear. These are all valuable prospecting tools, though we’re going to focus on just the first one for now: Likelihood to List.
Using the Likelihood to List filter
Once you tap on Likelihood to List, it will expand with a selection of filter options:
● Most Likely (orange)
● Likely (yellow)
● Least Likely (blue)
Start by viewing only homes that are most likely to be listed in the next 12 months by deselecting the Likely and Least Likely options. Then, tap a blue cluster on the map to zoom into specific areas so you can click on individual properties for more information.
Understanding the Likelihood to List factors
The Likelihood to List score (Most Likely, Likely or Least Likely) is generated by Homesnap’s proprietary algorithm that uses local trends in combination with a multitude of data points to predict how likely an off-market property is to be listed in the next 12 months.
When you tap into an unlisted property on the map, you’ll see that we list out the key factors that led to the algorithm’s conclusion of Most Likely, Likely or Least Likely. Included are explanations of each factor and how they influenced the final Likelihood to List score for that specific property.
Further narrowing your audience
You could stop your prospecting at this first step and send a broad message to all the homes that are labeled as Most Likely and Likely to list. However, you’d be better off going one step further and separating your audience into cohorts that receive a hyper-targeted marketing message.
For example, one set could be homeowners with high net equity and another could be those who recently retracted their property from the market without selling. A relevant, targeted message that resonates with the audience will make your marketing more effective, and therefore you’re more likely to increase your ROI.
To do this, you’ll use Homesnap Pro’s other Heatmaps, which appear in the Heatmaps panel below Likelihood to List. We recommend clicking into each category to see which criteria you can filter on. Here are the top-level Heatmap categories:
● Last List Date
● Ownership Time
● Ownership Type
● Home Equity
● Mortgage Age
● Mortgage Rate
● Distressed
● Cash Buyers
● Loan Balance
● MLS Status
If you apply one of the above filters and click into a home on the map, you’ll still see that property’s unique Likelihood to List score. You can tap into the associated key factors to read whether our algorithm thinks that the Heatmap filter you selected has an impact on the property’s potential to be listed soon.
Obtaining contact information
Homesnap Pro provides available homeowner contact information for off-market properties, whether you want to personalize each postcard with the recipient’s name or keep contact details on standby for a one-to-one follow-up. On each Homeowner Profile, you’ll see email address(es) and phone number(s), including a flag for those on the National Do Not Call Registry. Homesnap Pro+ members are able to unlock demographic information and social media profile details, too.
Additional Heatmaps
With Homesnap Pro+, the premium version of Homesnap Pro, you can access additional filters—such as, Distressed, Ownership Type, and Equity—to further narrow down your message. Perhaps you send one set of postcards to homeowners with lots of equity to encourage them to take profits on their home, while another set of postcards go to older owners, who might now be empty nesters and are looking to downsize.
The Likelihood to List tool is the most effective way to find seller leads for your next real estate postcard mailing. And Homesnap Pro agents have free access, courtesy of their MLS. Download Homesnap today—available on iOS and Android—or try out the desktop version of Homesnap