Off-Market Listings Are Still Out There — Here’s How to Build the List and Mail Your Way to Them

Watch the full replay: https://youtu.be/M9S2Effvos8

Direct mail gets written off as outdated more often than it should. The truth is it still works — it’s just that most agents never stick with it long enough to see it pay off, because building the right list and staying consistent takes more effort than firing off a Facebook ad. In a recent Labcoat Agents session, Burton from PropStream walked through exactly how to build a targeted, off-market prospecting list and turn it into postcards and letters that actually reach the right homeowners.

Three Ways to Build Your List

However you’re starting, PropStream gives you three paths in:

1. Search an individual address. Look up a specific property, pull owner info, and save it to your favorites.
2. Build a list from their nationwide data. Search any county, city, or zip code (or hand-draw a custom area on the map), then filter down to the exact type of owner you want to reach.
3. Import a list you already have. Got an old spreadsheet of addresses sitting on your desktop? Import it and PropStream will enrich it with ownership data, mortgage info, and how many other properties the owner holds — even if all you started with was an address.

The Filters That Actually Matter

This is where the real targeting happens. Among the most useful filters:

• Tired landlords — non-owner-occupied properties held 15+ years
• Cash buyers with multiple properties — a strong relationship to build if you want a steady source of listings and buyers
• Vacant, pre-foreclosure, lien, bankruptcy, and divorce filters
• Equity and mortgage filters — including the ability to target VA loan holders if you specialize in working with military families
• AI-powered condition filters — surface properties that look like they’re in disrepair based on MLS photo analysis
• Off-market only — most agents filter out anything already listed, since the goal is to reach owners directly, before an agent is involved

In a live demo, a broad search of “tired landlords” in Reseda, CA went from 301 results down to 82 highly targeted ones once ownership and property-count filters were applied.

Skip Tracing: Getting the Owner’s Actual Contact Info

Once you’ve built and saved a list, you can skip trace it — pulling cell phone numbers, landlines, emails, and flags for do-not-call status or litigator history (this works for LLC-owned properties too). Skip tracing runs about $0.12 per address on its own, or comes free (up to 25,000 addresses/month) with the $30/month PropStream Connect add-on — which pays for itself quickly if you’re skip tracing more than a couple hundred properties a month.

Turning the List Into Mail

Once your list is built, saved, and skip traced, it moves into PropStream’s campaign section, where each list gets its own dedicated landing page and mail campaign. Options include:

• Postcards (about $0.57 each), including newly launched designs
• Hybrid letters — printed letters mailed inside an actual envelope
• Custom designs — upload your own postcard or letter design, including one with a dynamic QR code if you want to track scans

You can run a single send, a multi-touch drip over time, or even an A/B split test between two postcard designs to see which performs better.

The Real Key: Consistency

The biggest factor in whether this works isn’t the tool — it’s sticking with it. A steady mix of postcards, letters, and even handwritten notes to your farm area or past client sphere builds the kind of familiarity that eventually turns into a phone call. This isn’t a one-and-done campaign; it’s a long game that rewards agents who stay in front of the same list over months, not weeks.

Try It

PropStream offers a 7-day free trial, and Burton’s team is available directly for questions.

👉 Start your free trial: https://trial.propstreampro.com/lca/
📺 Watch the full session replay: https://youtu.be/M9S2Effvos8