- [Seth] Well hey there, welcome back. This is Seth, again,
this is video number two in the three part series of
how I find motivated sellers and get them contacting me. So we just went through
and generated a list with a service called DataTree, and we downloaded that
list as an Excel file, and that's what you're seeing right here. What I'm gonna show
you, I mean, the process is very, very similar whether
you're using DataTree, or RealQuest, or AgentPro247, or ListSource, or Melissa Data,
or any of those out there. They all kinda follow
a very similar process that I'm about to show you, when you're cleaning
up your list like this and getting it ready to send out the mail. So, you're gonna notice on this list, there is a ton of information, and a lot of this stuff
we really don't need. It's all kinda nice to have, if you wanna reference anything. Like, we've got property coordinates for every single property, we've got assessed values,
all kinds of stuff. But again, for the purpose
of just sending out the mail, we don't need 90% of this. So, first thing I'd suggest you do is take this raw list that you've
got and save a copy of it, 'cause you wanna have the original copy that you can refer back to when you start doing property
research in the future, when people start responding to you. It's nice to have all
this data in one place. But once you've got that
saved, we're gonna go through and start deleting a lot of this stuff that doesn't really matter. So first thing I always do is, I like to expand all of these
fields just so I can see what they all say very clearly. That's pretty easy to do, you
just click on that top row, go up here to format, column,
and then auto fit selection. What it does is it
stretches all of them out so I can actually read what every
single one of them is saying. Essentially, what we wanna do is, we want to create five columns here. First one is gonna be the
owner's first and last name, then their address, then their
city, state, and zip code. And that's all we need. So we just have to find those
five pieces of information here throughout this list
and delete everything else. So what this list does, is it gives you all kinds of different
renditions of the owner name, but the only one that I'm gonna
use is this one right here in column K, which is
called owner mailing name. And as you can see, if you
just look through this, it basically just shows
the owner's first name, and last name, all in the same cell. All this other stuff, I'm just
gonna go ahead and delete. And then we're gonna call this name. Pretty straight forward. Now, if we move over here, we're gonna see two different types of addresses. First we see like, the
actual site property address, and then we also will see
the mail property address. And the one that we wanna
keep is this second one here, the actual mailing address. This over here is the
address of the property that the person owns, so I mean,
that's certainly important, but the way to actually
contact them and send mail to their mailbox, is to send
it to this address right here. So we're just gonna go ahead
and delete all of the stuff that refers to the site address. In terms of filling out
that street address one, that's gonna be this one right here. And you'll actually
notice right over here, there's another one that
says mailing full address, and this lists like
everything in one cell. The street address, city,
state, and zip code all in one, and I think there's probably
some mailing services where you can get away with using that, but with the mailing services
that I've always used, and also for that matter, if
you're ever doing a mail merge, it's a lot cleaner if you can keep those things separated in different cells. Just kinda gives you a
little bit more flexibility than having everything
stuck in a single cell. So, all the information
is here, but I'm not gonna be using that for this particular example. So go ahead and delete all of these. And we're gonna call this one address. We're gonna get rid of this, we're gonna delete all this
'cause this information is already baked into this address field, so we don't need any of this
stuff, it's kinda redundant. And then mail state, that's right there. And then the mail zip
is right there as well, so we'll go ahead and rename
this city, state, and zip, and that's pretty much all we have to do. All this other stuff here
really is not necessary. Again, I think some of it can
be helpful when it comes time to like, identify properties
based on calls you get. It's just helpful to have
everything in one place. But for the purpose of
uploading this list so we can send out the mail, we really
don't need any of this stuff. I will say, if you ever
were trying to send out mail only to properties with
certain market values, again, you probably
would've already specified that in the previous step
when you were generating and downloading your list,
but also keep in mind, that data is included
here on this list, too. So you could sort the
list based on this stuff. Like for example, if I
knew I would never buy a five million dollar property, I could just go ahead and delete
this one right off the bat. So, just keep that in mind. There's a lot of helpful
information that is here. I mean, you could really
take any one of these things and if something about
it looked out of whack, and you knew you were not interested in buying that kind of property. There's a lot of data here you can use to further whittle down your list, so that you're not sending mail to people that you're never gonna do
business with anyway, but... So when everything looks okay, you can go ahead and delete all the stuff that you don't need. That's pretty much all there is to it. If, for some reason,
you wanted to go through and further delete things,
it's actually really easy to sort this entire
list, and put it in order based on any one of these columns. I'll show you how to do that
and why it might be helpful. So let's say we wanted to sort this whole list based on column B here. If you go up here to data, go up here, highlight that column,
do the A-Z function, we're gonna expand the selection. And what we're able to do
here, I actually should've changed this so that
those weren't included, but the reason this is
useful, is it lines up all of these items numerically, so that if there are
still duplicates in here even after you already
checked that you didn't want duplicates in the DataTree system, which is really nice that
it allows you to do that, but you'll see that there's
still some duplicates that made it through, and the
reason they made it through, is because these names are
basically the same thing, but they're not like letter
for letter exactly the same. DataTree deletes duplicates
based on the owner name, not the address itself. So in this case, it looks
like we've got five here that are all the exact same address. I don't wanna send five
mailers to the same place, so I'm basically just going to highlight and delete four of these five, so that only one mailer makes it through. And then if we kinda look
through here further, not seeing, oh, looks like
this one might be a duplicate, I'm not sure, 'cause
there's two different units. I'm just gonna go ahead
and leave that on there. I'm actually thinking
that might even be a typo, 'cause that's not even a word. I'm just gonna go out on a
limb and add that in there, and then if we keep going down... Looks like there might be one more here. Go ahead and delete that. And again, if you came
across something that's like, obviously a large
financial institution, like Bank of America,
or J.P. Morgan Chase, anything like that, it's highly unlikely you're gonna end up buying land
from one of those entities. Not impossible, but also not likely, so I typically don't waste money sending mail to those places. Or if you go through here and you see that one of these things
simply doesn't have an address at all, then
obviously, you're not gonna be sending mail there either,
so you could delete those. Just kinda go through it and use your head and decide which ones you do or don't wanna keep on that list. I'm gonna grab this down here,
which moved to the bottom. Go ahead and insert
this back up at the top. But once you've got this
all sorted to your liking, you can go ahead and
move onto the next step, which is uploading this
list to the mail service that you're using, and we'll
cover that in the next video. See you there.
