Joe McCall has been investing since 2006 and has an excellent podcast called the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast that he does with Alex Joungblood.  He’s doing deals in multiple markets across the us while traveling for months at a  time in Europe and traveling the us in an RV.  He’s been teaching and coaching investing since 2011. In this episode, Joe goes into incredible detail on how he set up and runs his direct mail marketing for motivated sellers leads.  We talk about the lists that he targets and how to get them. He even shares when he sends postcards and when he sends letters. A funny story during the interview was when Joe realized that he had been sending a postcard for years that he got from FlippingJunkie.com and didn’t put two and two together until that moment. Bonus: get that postcard here http://flippingjunkie.com/41 Joe focuses on absentee owner mailings using postcards.  When there is a lot of competition, he focuses on high equity owner occupied houses. He gets his list from Listsource.com using the following criteria: Bought at least 10 years ago At least 40% equity At least 3 bedroom house Owner at least 55 years old Specific zip codes with lots of rehab activity One way Joe finds the most sought after areas is Trulia heat maps.  He targets a county and the heat map shows cheap, median and expensive houses.  There is even a table of data that can be sorted to show the most popular areas. During the conversation we shared some numbers for the typical marketing spend per deal for investors.  The numbers vary between $1,000 and $3,000 per deal and go as high as $5,000 per deal for some very competitive areas.  Mailing intervals for probates should be about once per week for the first 6 weeks or so.  Mailing intervals for other lists usually are spread out from 30 to 90 days in between mailings. One recurring theme throughout the episode was the discussion of how most investors fail to answer their phones.  If there is one thing you can do to eliminate 75% or more of your competition, it’s answering your phone or calling back a seller IMMEDIATELY.  Take that to the bank.