Direct mail is a beautiful thing. People hold on to those letters for years, and sometimes we have done deals after one, two, even three years from the time we ran a campaign.
This is a story of a vacant lot in Hope Mills, North Carolina, where we met the seller originally from direct mail in July of 2022. This was a basic white letter campaign in direct mail. The Acquisitions Department and our team revived this lead in July of 2025, three years later, and then we made them an offer on August 13th which they accepted on the 14th of August, and they wanted a 45-day close.
We were able to close this deal 37 in days, which was ahead of the deadline, and includes the hurdles of getting a price reduction and some minor delays with the closing attorney.
This was a 0.68 acre wooded corner lot. It does have water and sewer, and the tax value is $27.5k. We originally got it under contract for $28k, and then when we did our marketing for dispositions, we got a bunch of lower offers. We were marking it at $35k and the highest offer we had was $28k, which was basically what we were paying for it.
We went back to the seller and got a price reduction Down to $20,000. Part of the basis for that was that even though it had water and sewer, the sewer line needed to come from the other side of the street, which was going to cost extra. And I think they knew that this was an issue, and also they were just motivated to sell and get cash out of the property.
Our primary marketing strategy to find a cash buyer for this was to do a text blast and we used a list of buyers that we searched in InvestorBase and also scraped from our buyer list in our CRM, which is Podio.
After we got the price reduction from the seller, we were able to go under contract with a buyer who had offered us $28k.
- The buyer used his attorney, and they didn’t like our contract (which is hilarious because we’ve closed dozens and dozens of deals with that contract). We edited it for them to make them happy.
- The buyer had some issues with his wire which delayed the closing a day or two.
We then closed it and made $7,600 on a deal that we thought we might have to cancel because our contract price was too high. The moral of the story here is: it never hurts to ask for a price reduction. You can’t always get the analysis right even if you think you have good comps. A lot of the time, the seller knows there’s an issue with their property and they will be willing to do a price reduction. So, it never hurts to ask.