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Expired Programs - do they
really work?
Article
by: Mick Orton
Marketing Director for SFResidence.com
Nov. 2006 - The answer to the question
above is... maybe. In San Francisco, we have had
such a strong market for the past several years.
Though we implemented an expired program, the
only calls we got were from sellers who insisted
on pricing their homes so high, NO Realtor could
have sold them!
No matter how good the market is,
the sellers must be reasonable. So our hopes that
an expired program would bring us riches beyone
our wildest dreams have not materialized though
we have captured several listings that we would
not have otherwise had from using this type of
program. Some sold, some didn't.
There are enough programs and people
selling them that if your market will support
an expired program, then it's probably worth the
extra 2-3 listings you might get from using one.
In spite of our low response, we
continue to farm the expired lists, mostly because
of the change we have experienced becasue of the
market slowdown. We mail weekly rather
than daily because we got more complaints
than queries from our postcards! Your results
may vary.
The system we chose was offered
by Baton Rouge, LA Realtor, Tony
Zito, because his was relatively inexpensive
compared to others and was very simple to use.
Over the years we have modified
the messages to better suit our San Francisco
market. We also developed a mail merge feature
for the address side of our postcard so that we
do not have to use labels. We import the names
from the title company (after some editing to
fit the fields in Outlook's Contacts) then print
the address side including our contact information
and expired property address right on the card
using Microsoft's mail merge feature.
If you would like to find out how
to implement this mail merge feature, contact
us by e-mail at Support@SFResidence.com.
The best part is, all of this is
done by my high school intern who edits the list,
imports the names into our database then prints,
cuts and stamps the cards weekly and drops them
into the mail on his way home. How easy is that?
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