Who is Young?

[bobobb.livejournal.com]

I got a strange letter in the mail today from someone named "Young" (not sure if this is the first or last name - it was just "Young") wanting me to sell my house in Davis Square. It looked like it was meant to look hand written on legal paper, but actually seems to have been printed in 'handwritten style'. The return address is 1085 Comm. Ave #311 in Boston, but googling shows this as a "Florida foreign profit corporation". Has anyone received these? Is it fair to ask, WTF?

Edit: Stranger still, the phone number given is for a roofing company in Lynn.

Comments

[somerfriend.livejournal.com]

Question is, why do you care? Just toss it in the recycling. I get unsolicited offers to sell my place about once a month. They send out tons of letters and will be happy with a .01% response rate. Yeah, sometimes they use the cheesy trick of making it look like it was handwritten when it is really printed. Yours sounds more inept than most of them are.

[nightsurfing.livejournal.com]

why do you care that they care?

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

I get unsolicited offers to buy about once a month. At this point I can almost recognize them from the look of the envelope.

The first one was surprising though. Now I realize they are just sending them to pretty much everyone who has owned for more than a couple of years, assuming we don't know the value of our property.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Yeah - about once a month seems right. Bulk mail is cheap enough that a very small hit rate is enough to pay for a whole lot of failed attempts.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

They are generally sent by geographic area, not length of ownership, because you never know when somebody might sell. It's not that they think you don't know the value -- they assume you do, and that with enough reminders, you may decide to sell. Or if you were vaguely thinking about selling and you see their letter, that means you'll contact them to list it.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Real estate agents make their money by getting listings -- once they have a listing, they'll likely get their 6% or whatever. Deduct from that what they spend on showing the property, so they don't have a strong incentive to spend a lot of effort showing the property, it pays better to put that effort into getting more listings. Mass mailing to bring in the people who were thinking of selling is just a particularly efficient way of getting more listings.