Page 66 - Trump University Commercial Real Estate 101

TRUMP UNIVERSITY COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE 101

portion of their depreciation and may be looking to sell. They may
also be close to retirement age and just want to move on.
The thing I like about list brokers is you can ask them for certain
criteria in your list and tell them that you only want to pay for those
criteria and they will get just such a list for you. It really is pretty scary
how much information is out there on all of us.
The list is priced on a per - name basis. Don ’ t go hog - wild and rent
many thousands of names. Just start with a few hundred or a few thou-
sand, and see how things go.
Note that I said rent a name. You typically cannot mail to these
people more than once. How will they know you mailed multiple
times? They seed the list with fake names and monitor what gets mailed
to those names. If you ’ re caught, you ’ ve breached the contract you
signed. Not good.
As you do more deals, you should consider asking the broker to
give you only names of owners with properties above a certain size.
My cutoff usually is properties with assessed values of $ 2 million or
more. That weeds out a lot of properties that I ’ m no longer interested
in buying. That ’ s just fine with me at this stage. You might want to

start somewhat smaller.
Here ’ s another tip: Every letter should have a headline. When
owners open your letter, there should be a big, effective headline beck-
oning them to read on. The sole purpose of that headline is to sell the
reader on reading the letter.
Because of this, your headline should state the biggest benefi t that
owners will get from selling their property to you. For instance, the
following headline has worked for me through the years:
I want to Buy Your Boston Commercial Property
Naturally I change the name of the city to the appropriate location
for whatever owners I ’ m targeting.
One thing I was surprised to discover about letters is some people
keep them for a long time. Maybe they ’ re not interested in selling at

this moment, but they file the letter away because they ’ re mulling over
in their heads the idea of selling, which I might have planted.

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