Transform Your Conversion Rate
& Deal Flow (Step by Step Guide)

Daniel Apke: Welcome to the real estate investing podcast, where we help you unlock your potential freedom through land investing, real estate investing, and entrepreneurship.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the real estate investing podcast. Today’s topic, we’re discussing a step by step guide to pricing your mail to get the best results.

I’m your host, Daniel Apke joined again by my brother and business partner, Ron Apke. Before we get into the show, let’s go over a question from one of our featured discord members. Today’s question is from Jeff. Jeff asked, does anyone get their property boundaries marked when you buy your property? So by this, Ron, he means the corners. I think so.

Ron Apke: Good question. There’s definitely value in that because especially when you’re selling and you have non realtors reaching out to you. Just have end buyers reaching out to you. It’s going to be much simpler for them to find your land, to be able to walk your land, uh, when no one else is walking with them.

So it’s definitely an option. The thing about it is you want to do, you don’t want to spend that much money on a survey, obviously. Do you want to have your drone person go out and mark the corners with ID land or map rate, whatever you want to call it, or some other software where you can mark the boundaries.

That’s definitely an option. I think there’s value in that. At least marking like the road frontage, Dan, that’s what I was kind of thinking. Maybe you can’t mark 300 yards back into the property cause that’s going to cost two or be too difficult for the drone or whoever it is. But marking the road frontage I think could be very valuable.

Daniel Apke: Yeah, I completely agree. I was thinking of this other day of just getting that in our processes when we order the drone, just adding that as a, you know, an item for them to do. It’s definitely a good idea. It’s going to help a lot of save a lot of time for the visitors, Ron, I think ultimately helps sell your property faster.

Other than that, let’s get into the show. Today’s topic, we’re talking about a step by step guide on pricing your mail to get the best results. And Ron, there’s multiple types of acquisitions. The one we’re talking about today is blind offers. There’s neutral letters, there’s texting, there’s cold calling.

But why do we choose pricing mail, AKA blind offers, Ron?

Ron Apke: Yeah, I think pricing, sending out offers, sending out letters with offers on them does the best job of weeding out uninterested sellers. And when I say uninterested sellers, it’s not meaning they don’t want to sell their land. It means they don’t want to sell their land for a discount or even a steep discount, which is what we’re typically looking for.

Um, so that is what these blind offers do. It weeds through a lot of the operations needed if you send neutral letters, which are letters that are just saying I’m interested in buying your land. We are saying I’m interested in buying your land for X dollars. Not everyone’s going to be happy with our offer price.

A lot of those offers, when people are aren’t happy, are going to go into the trash. Some people might not be happy with it. They call us back. We negotiate, we meet on number, but the biggest thing with blind offers is it minimizes the operations around it. It minimizes the amount of phone calls you need to take, the amount of phone time you’re going to have, or an answering service is going to have.

Um, and I, I just think right now, Dan, there’s nothing that really beats it in terms of the ROI.

Daniel Apke: Yeah, I completely agree. And ROI combination, like the money. Yes, but also the time. And that’s what we’ll get into. Like you’re not only, yes, it’s expensive to send mail in general, but it’s the blind offers save you so much time.

In my opinion, they gets right to the chase. You’re only getting 13 calls per every 2000 mailers. You’re getting a deal for every 2000. So it cuts to the, it cuts right to the point in my opinion. It’s a, it’s a great starting point. Unlike, you know, texting, yes, you can get a lot of deals, but with texting, you also have a 20% response rate.

So if you have a 20% response rate, you have a lot of back and forth going along to get a deal. That’s the opposite for blind offers. And that’s why we really, really like that. And I did want to go into, I kind of touched on a little bit around some of the pros and cons of blind offers, because obviously it takes more time, right?

You’ve got a price. We’re looking at data. We’re pricing counties, we’re splitting up pricing, zip code pricing, doing all kinds of things on the front end. But that work up front Ron helps later on. So you don’t need to, you know, if someone calls you on a property, we didn’t even offer in that area, Ron, I’ll go straight to our spreadsheet and see what we would have offered in that area for 10 acres to kind of match it up.

So we’re doing all the work on the front end with blind offers.

Ron Apke: Yeah. And like, it’s not like when we get leads coming in, we’re not, we’re definitely evaluating that lead and that land in particular. But that being said, like we feel pretty confident in our offer price typically. So we know if we offer 10, 000 and they’re telling us 50, 000 and we look at the land, like there’s nothing crazy special about this land.

That’s just someone who’s calling just to kind of, um, complain essentially, um, trying to get market value, whatever the situation is. Um, but yeah, it just, it takes the ROI a hundred percent. And like you said, it’s not just ROI on. Your investment, your money investment into the mail, the ROI into the time that you’re spending into it, the time you’re spending is going to yield the most money, um, per hour with blind offers in our opinions I think.

Daniel Apke: Exactly. And instead of like texting where you’re going to have to do, you know, price when the lead comes in is how a lot of people do it, run, they get the lead, then they evaluate the land and price and then give them an offer. We’re doing that all up front. So instead of doing that work on the back end for each individual property We’re doing it as a county or whatever and bulk pricing it.

We’re not sending out, you know, 2 000 letters individually priced We bulk price it if it’s in this area in this acres We’re pricing it at this x amount per acre and then the formula kicks into excel I got asked the other day ron. They’re like when I joined the program I literally thought I was going to be sending out like two three thousand mailers individually myself They didn’t understand that when they joined and that’s One thing I want to emphasize here, if you guys are newer to the channel, we’re not individually sending out these letters ourselves.

There are services that do this. They have machines, equipment, all that stuff. Send the order straight to them and they just blast it out very efficiently. So that’s how we do it. It’s really just formula based.

Ron Apke: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, the, you’re not pricing things individually when we say this, you’re not pricing things individually.

Um, and we’ll talk more into detail in this. And you’re also not obviously printing, you’re not stamping, you’re not looking at envelopes, nothing like that.

Daniel Apke: And some of the risks, the pricing mail, cause there are risks with it, especially at first. Yes, it has the best ROI. Yes, it has the most potential in my opinion, but the risk is ultimately not.

Understanding how to price correctly and being early on and messing up your pricing, like that’s the biggest risk underpricing or significantly overpricing. Everyone always asks which one’s better to underprice or overprice. I still don’t have a clear conclusion on that. I don’t know you want to, you don’t wanna do either, ideally, but you gotta be ready when you do over price to be talk ’em down right away.

Negotiate down and when you do underprice, be willing to come up and you just gotta understand the situations. But that’s the main risk, Ron, between the price ’cause it’s expensive. And the risk of pricing wrong. Cause you can send blind offers out, you know, 5% literally we get offers on our land in Kentucky for probably five, 10% of what it’s worth from people trying to do the same things we are.

Ron Apke: Yeah. It does not work. You’re going to, um, really struggle with this business. If you don’t take the pricing aspect serious, um, and learn like you’re not, every time you price, something is going to be. Even close to being uh, accurate or something like that But that being said when that does happen like evaluating what you did evaluating what you could do better And that’s the thing about when you’re doing this every area of the country is different Like there’s non disclosure states where you don’t have uh sold comps.

There’s so many different things that go into it there’s some states that just The MLS or Zillow or Redfin is just really janky and you don’t get very many good comps and you’ve got to really weed through them. But that’s, those are some of the hurdles that don’t even seem like hurdles six months after you start when you kind of get over them and start learning about it.

Daniel Apke: Yeah, exactly. Well, let’s get into how to get the most deals run with your blind offers. Let’s talk about step by step pricing guide here. What, what, where do we start when we’re talking about blind offers? If no one even knows what they, what do they do?

Ron Apke: Yeah. So going all the way back, you’re going to be choosing an area to target.

Um, And you’re going to choose a County essentially. So you’re choosing a County. It’s not a random choose. Like we have a lot of different criteria when we’re doing this, but you’re going to end up choosing a County. Uh, and then you’re going to choose the acreage range. I think this is kind of, even though it’s not like at the pricing stage, Dan, I think choosing what acreage range you’re going to mail to is like the first step of pricing, I think, um, cause you don’t want to be mailing or at least our business model, we don’t want to be mailing to properties that are only going to sell on the backend for 5, 000.

We want our minimum back end sale to be 20, 000 and a lot of times that’s two acres. What’d you say, Dan?

Daniel Apke: Minimum.

Ron Apke: Yeah, minimum. Minimum 20, 000 on the back end, and then we go all the way up to a million dollars, two million dollars. It doesn’t really matter on the high end, but that’s where we start. And when I am deciding on an acreage range, I don’t want to go under one acre.

That’s just not our business model right now. There’s too much risk in small parcels. I’m going to be deciding like, okay, do I want to start at like 1. 25? Do I want to start at 1. 5? Or is this a cheaper county and I don’t want to start till like four acres? And go four acres up to 500 acres, something like that.

Uh, but that is the first big decision. And when you’re looking through it, if you’re going down to 1. 5 acres, you want to make sure 1. 5 acres are actually selling. There’s not a bunch sitting on the market. Don’t send to acreage ranges that are too cheap. Don’t send to acreage ranges that aren’t moving on the market.

But I would say choosing that acreage range you’re going to mail to before you pull your data. It’s probably that first big step, Dan.

Daniel Apke: Yeah. So first step choosing, and that’s the thing too, Ron, like in this, when you’re actually getting ready to price, are you using data tree to see how many records it is along with this?

Ron Apke: Yeah, that’s a good point. So data tree is where we pull our records from. Um, yeah, like absolutely. You want to know. So if you’re first starting, like you want to be sending 2000 mailers or so per county, maybe 1500, 2000 mailers per county, something around there, do that twice per month and yeah, absolutely.

So if you’re trying to send 1500 for a county. As you’re doing this. So if you look at Zillow, look at Redfin and it makes sense price wise to do 1. 5 to 50 acres. Let’s say 50 acres selling for 200, 000 or something. You do 1. 5 to 50 acres, and then you show on data tree and it’s only giving you 1200. data points, move that up, move that up and get your 1500 data points.

So move it up to 1. 5 to 500 acres, something like that. So you are getting the right amount of data points. That’s a really good point though, Dan, that I kind of forgot to mention. So data tree kind of analyzing what’s actually happening, how many data points you’re going to get.

Daniel Apke: Yeah, because what happens, some of these smaller counties, especially on the East coast, there’s a lot of them.

You’ll put in all your criteria, you’ll put in one acre to 1. 5 to 200 acres, and sometimes it’ll spit out 800 records. So you want to look at that and you want to get enough because what happens, like we’re talking about putting up all this front work, right? With pricing, you’re putting in all this work up front.

So what happens is if you don’t have enough data in your pricing and spending all that on 800 records, the chances are you still might not get a deal because it’s just not enough mail run. So we don’t, you want, do you guys want to make sure you guys are getting enough mail because you’re putting in hours and hours pricing up front.

So you want to make sure you’re putting the work to get deals and that’s kind of the gist of it, I think.

Ron Apke: Yeah, absolutely. Um, going from there guys. So we, so you’re gonna, you choose that and then you’re going to pull your data. So you’re going to get your data from data tree and now you have a long list of data.

Um, that’s when I say data, that’s going to be the owner’s name, the owner’s address, the acreage, everything like that. Mailing address. It’s going to be a full detailed information on that property who owns the property essentially. Um, so what you’re going to do next is scrub out the data, Dan. And I don’t know if this is goes that much into pricing, but we’re not scrubbing out it.

People who are up to date on taxes. We’re not scrubbing out out of state owners. The only things we really pull out of our data set is government agencies, banks, um, municipalities, cities, stuff like that of people who are not going to sell to us. We send to all the LLCs. We send to all the trusts. We don’t send to cemeteries.

Um, we send to churches, we’ve bought land and made good money on. Land that we have bought from churches just out parcels by a church that they might’ve had plans 20 years ago and nothing happened. Uh, so the only thing that we really teach scrubbing out is government agencies, municipalities, cities, banks, uh, cemeteries, stuff like that.

Daniel Apke: Yeah, what we do guys, it’s a shotgun approach and you know, we’re not only getting tax lien properties. We’re not only going after out of state owners, we’re going after everyone. And that’s, I know that’s not really what the topic either, but. It’s a shotgun approach because this method and the return is so good.

And everyone always asks, do we go after out of state owners, Ron? The answer is no, because we, we do, but not only because 50% of our properties are more are in state, probably more than that, probably closer to 60, 70% are in state. And then another like 30%, 20, 30, 40% are actually like live within very, very close to the property or neighboring.

So you don’t want to exclude the returns on mail on blind offers guys from what we’re talking about. Are so good. You don’t, you don’t need a rifle approach to make this work. Like you do not need a rifle approach.

Ron Apke: Absolutely. And then you get into, which is kind of the first step of pricing, Dan. I know we talked about that previous stuff.

Um, but now you want to choose how you’re going to price. So are you going to choose the price by the whole county? And when I say this, trying to explain this, that makes sense, Dan, to someone who’s completely new. So are we going to have the same pricing? points for the entire county. Are we going to split it up into zip code pricing or something like that?

Um, so what I’m saying is let’s say there’s one area of the county that is double the amount of, uh, double the amount per acre than the other side of the county, because it’s closer to a city. It’s closer to X. I don’t know the reason. You want to cut that down the middle or you want to split that out. So you are pricing that more expensive area, uh, in a more expensive way.

So that is your next step. And you’re going to do this by looking at Zillow, looking at Redfin, looking at the map on there and kind of seeing. One thing I do every time before I even look at any prices is look at a county and just see what makes sense in terms of, okay, here is a pretty Decent sized city that might be pulling people that might increase the price over here.

And then what I’m going to do after, I think that I’m going to use the data to kind of conform, confirm or deny that that area of the County is more expensive or cheaper, whatever the situation is. And then you kind of make the decision there then.

Daniel Apke: Yeah. It’s like, you know, if you’re looking at a city just for people who understand houses and house value, if you’re pricing a city houses, A thousand square feet, any two, two bedrooms, two baths, a thousand square feet.

And you’re looking at a city like Cincinnati or wherever you guys are. The pricing defers based on where you are in the city. Land is not nearly that extreme because it’s more rural and there’s not as much going on in those counties from how we do it, our business model. But that’s the gist. Sometimes, you know, the Southwest is going to be closer to a city of the County.

So the Southwest is going to be more expensive and then it gets cheaper as you go. So we can slice that up with latitude, longitude and do different things. And that’s more advanced pricing. We go over that a lot in the program, but it’s more advanced pricing. You don’t always need to do that. If you get more rural, the pricing, like the more row you go in general, Pricing in a County stays pretty, um, consistent the more rural you are away from those cities and things like that.

Ron Apke: Yeah. A lot of times, I mean, we probably priced by County 40%, 50% of the time. And like Daniel said, like, it’s definitely a more advanced thing when you start splitting it up into three different regions for different regions. Absolutely. It’s going to take three or four times the amount. Um, going from there though, guys, now you’re getting into the pricing aspect.

So let’s say for this situation that we’re just pricing by County. Um, now you’re going to start pulling comps. Like you want to start really getting a feel for this market. And what I do, I look into like, how much is five acres selling for? How much is 20 acres selling for? And I try to get a feel for like the different price points, what’s changing the pricing and you want to get.

And this isn’t even pooling or exporting data. I’m going into individual comps on there, and I’m trying to find out what five acres is selling for it. Let’s just start with that. What is five acres selling for, uh, what is on the market in terms of for sale for five acres? And this is going to give me a good starting point.

Cause that five acres spot is a really good. Point to start pricing. So let’s say you see consistently, okay. Five acres just sold for 45, 000. I see a five acres on the market for 55, 000. That’s got some interest, but it’s not selling like you can, you can really take a lot of data just from those two data points.

45 sell or five for 45 selling for 45 and then five for 55 not selling F 55. Like you can assume that your deal a five acre property and your county’s gonna sell $45,000 or so. So that gives you a really good offer price of around $20,000 for that five acre property. Um, That, that’s my first step Dan, like that really helps me conceptualize what’s going on in the county because I, you have the most data points for four to six acre properties, typically in a county.

So if I can kind of get a feel for that, I can work with everything around it.

Daniel Apke: Exactly. And that’s what it’s all about. Like sandwiching the data. Yes, you have a lot of four to six. So, you know, the price breaker, anything lower than that one to two is going to be more and anything above that, you know, once you start getting six to 10, plus, it’s going to be less.

So you kind of, that gives you a starting point to understand kind of what’s going on. If five acres is worth 45, 000, that means that, you know, 10 acres is going to be a little bit less price per acre, just cause you’re buying in bulk. And that’s just how land works.

Ron Apke: Yeah. So let’s say we pulled like two to 10 acres, like, which is not a very big range, but let’s say we pulled two to 10 acres.

I almost always price four to six acres, the same price per acre. So let’s say like we just did that. We just found out five acres selling for 45, 000. We want to offer 4, 000 an acre. I’m going to offer 4, 000 acre for everything, four to six acres. And then I would price and pool comps and do the same exact thing for two to four acres, for six to eight acres and eight to 10.

All those are going to be in the same pricing range. And that is how we’re going to price in terms of the price per acre in each of those ranges. One thing I don’t like two to four acres. I know I just said that I would actually do two to three and three to four guys. And the reason being, Dan, what I see so many people pricing is they’re pricing like 1.

5 acres, the same price per acre as like four acres. Those are completely different types of land. Those are completely different types of buyers. 1. 5 acres might sell for 20, 000. 4 acres might sell for 30, 000. And you guys can see if you sandwich those into the same thing, your price per acre is going to be really jacked up and just going to throw off your entire pricing.

So really think about it. I don’t like doing 2 to 4. I know I said that originally. So if you’re 2 to 10 acres total, do 2 to 3. Three to four, four to six, six to eight, eight to 10. And Dan, you want to talk about like, when we don’t have data points a little bit, like, cause that’s a thing. Like what if we don’t have a nine acre parcel or eight acre, whatever it is.

Cause we’re breaking that up pretty, pretty detailed. Is that’s just kinda what I do is kind of just play off the numbers around it.

Daniel Apke: Yeah, that’s exactly what you have to do. We know five acres is, you know, a little under 10 grand an acre, nine grand an acre. Right. So it’s 9, 000 acre, you know, as you go up, it’s going to ultimately be less.

So if you don’t have any six to eight acres, and then all of a sudden you have eight to 10 comps Ron from eight to 10, and that’s, you know, 6, 000 acre, you know, it’s going to be sandwiched somewhere between nine and six and that’s what, how you have to kind of play off of it. And then you also look for sale, see if anything, you know, nine to six, say that’s 7, 000 an acre, and you have seven acres for 7, 000.

See if there’s anything listed for that price, see what the traction is going and you kind of bounce it by that. But you got to work with what you have. Like it’s normal to not have comps in certain acreage ranges. You just got to sandwich them in between and kind of trust the data around it.

Ron Apke: Yeah, I think we’re probably making it sound easier than what it is, guys.

But it really is the biggest hurdle people struggle with is getting, using good comps. Just like Dan was talking about, using good comps is what people really struggle with. They’re, or that price per acre thing where there’s sandwiching 1. 5 in with four, that doesn’t make sense. Um, but if you, Put bad comps in there and you’re finding an average, you’re doing an average of all the five acre comps.

Let’s say we had a bunch 45 to $55,000, and then you had one at $14,000 for five acres like that is gonna throw off everything. Then you’re gonna end up pricing your five acres at $15,000, selling for $35,000 when it’s really gonna sell for 45, and you could have offered 20, $21,000, something like that.

It is significant changes in that it is significant results, differences when you are not pricing correctly. And it’s, like I said, it’s easier said than done, but really learn if there’s one thing you guys can learn is how to get rid of bad comps. How do you find out the good comps in the county? And like Daniel always says, use a couple great comps over.

A lot of good or decent comps. A couple great comps are going to tell you way more, tell you way more of a story than a lot of good or decent comps or, and you probably have some bad comps in there.

Daniel Apke: Yeah. If we have two comps guys at both five and six acres and they’re both 9, 000 an acre. So it’s sold for 45 grand and you go into that sold comp and that’s a sold comp and it was three months old, right?

So fairly recent, that’s a good comp. You look at it, it was listed for sale. It went pending after three weeks of being on the market and then it sold and the see consistency there. That’s what you want. Those two comps are worth more than any of the bulk stuff. And they’re in the similar area to any of the bulk stuff that you guys can pull because you’ll get some public record stuff Some garbage listings some you know, you just never know the story You got to dive into individual comps like ron said to understand that story of what actually is going on

Ron Apke: Yeah, I don’t have much more to add, Dan.

Like what you’re going to do for each of those acreage ranges. We have everything in Excel. Obviously, if you guys remember, you can see this, um, but this is more honestly for non members, people who are trying to conceptualize what we teach with that. Um, but yeah, everything’s done in Excel. We’re not pricing each individual property.

We’re pricing acreage ranges, guys. We’re finding averages. We’re finding good comps. We’re pulling good comps and then we’re pricing based on that. Okay. If I have five acre or let’s say 10 acres, I think 10 acres is going to sell for 90, 000. We’re going to be offering 40 to 43, 000. Around 50, a little less than 50% of market value.

So once we have closing costs in there, Dan, it puts us right at 50%. And then we can sell for 90, 000.

Daniel Apke: Exactly. That was the last thing I was going to add, like staying aggressive, getting those pricing. You don’t want to price at 20%. I always say, guys, you can get one deal at 20% or you can get four deals at 45%.

Do the math. You’ll make a lot more getting multiple deals, even though you’re pricing higher use deal funding If you don’t have 200 grand like 99% of the people out there do don’t have get deal funding get more deals price aggressively And that’s the most sustainable way to doing because at the end of the day we’re on land is not the most liquid asset out There especially in rural america.

There’s not a lot of realtors. There’s not always a lot of buyers around They don’t know how to sell their property. Whatever the situation is. That’s our job, right? We buy it. We liquidate it for them They need the money 50% And we put it up and then we take the risk and we get the realtors and we get the drone and we wait, you know, a couple of months to turn it.

Ron Apke: Absolutely. Yeah, there’s definitely a risk. I mean, there is like we are turning their illiquid acid liquid. I say that a lot. Um, but it’s just the truth. Like that’s the value we bring. But yeah, just pricing and pricing. Pricing is a long term thing in terms of getting that correct. Um, we obviously have our done for you pricing where we price for people as well.

Um, but that being said, uh, just stay on top of it. I think you can definitely learn it. And if you guys are overwhelmed, just start with County pricing. Like I was talking to Mike the other day on one of our calls, Ron, and he said that he, part of his way, he chooses his County County selection Ron is by looking to find consistent pricing.

So he doesn’t need to take five hours splitting it all up. So if you guys are overwhelmed, just go more rural, get areas where there’s more consistent pricing. It’s. You know, it’s, uh, it would take time to get used to, but with consistency, you guys will look back and it’s, um, definitely pays off and has a great ROI.

Daniel Apke: As always, thank you for joining. Please do us a huge favor and like, and subscribe our YouTube channel and share this with a friend. It really means the world to Ron and I, but more importantly, it could help change the life of someone else. Thanks for joining and we’ll see you next episode.