Does anyone have any experience filtering lists to exclude all properties that have been purchased within the last 5 years? I’m wondering if that is effective, or If I am potentially missing out on opportunity by doing so.
My only thought in doing this is there has been quite a few properties sold in my county within the last few years, I almost feel like it would be a waste to re-market to those people again.
@dyer22adam I’ve never run this kind of filter before (so this is purely theoretical, and it will only work if the county’s database actually provides this information), but if I wanted to exclude all the properties that have been sold in the past 5 years, I would scroll down to the “Sale Information” section in DataTree and I would set up my filters like this:
I would set the “Transaction Type” to arm’s length (i.e. - only the transfers that happened between two independent parties acting in their own self interest).
If I’m thinking through this right… this means it would exclude the past 5 years of transfers between unrelated (arm’s length) parties, but it wouldn’t exclude transfers between related (non-arm’s length) parties.
In many cases, the whole reason motivated sellers exist is because they recevied a property from a family member that they didn’t necessarily want. If you exclude these transactions from the past 5 years, you could be throwing out a TON of prime opportunities.
As for the “Last Sale Date” section, I would only include the sale dates that range from the beginning of DataTree’s recorded history all the way up until exactly 5 years ago (since I’m posting this on May 19, 2021, I would set the timeline to stop at May 19, 2016).
I heard different theories on this. For my third campaign (working on it now) I’m filtering properties sold before 7-8 years (if I remind well, I read somewhere here that this is also what @karljames does) but my understanding is that Jack and Jill from the Land Academy have a different view and they tend to exclude less potential sellers as possible (nice, I wonder if it’s sustainable when you have a limited budget though). I don’t know what works better but, for example, today I was considering a specific County when I noticed that 70% of the properties had been sold in the last 2-3 years…not sure if I was right but I felt like it was a good idea to look somewhere else…
@arturo I wonder if it would make a big impact (the right kind of impact) by specifying whether you wanted to exclude the arm’s length transactions instead of the non-arm’s length ones?
@retipsterseth I think that all depends on how all these filters work together actually. I explain: what you say makes sense, but I wonder if, instead, that setting would provide as a result only the sales that happened before 2016 and were Arms Length, cutting out all the sales after 2016. If this is the case (I don’t know), then I believe that the only way to identify owners who recently received a property from a Family member would be to select “Transaction type”= non Arms length and “Last Sale Date”= after 05/19/2016…but, then, you would lose a lot of other mailers, as you would cut all that happened before 05/19/2016 
Always talking about how to use the “Transaction Type” filter, I was considering the possibility to implement it along with the “Sale Price” filter when the “Market Value” filter is not working in the area but, still, I want to pull a list within a desired Market Value interval. More precisely, I think that, maybe, it could be possible to replicate the function of the “Market Value” filter by
selecting “Transaction Type”= Arms length and filling the “Sales Prices” field with the desired market value interval…
But truth is that so far I didn’t play too much with these filters…
@arturo that’s a great point. You’re probably right. It sounds like a similar situation we have to deal with when filtering lists to include BOTH out-of-state owners AND owners that live in-state, but don’t live within the same county.
If you only select one of the two, you’ll be cutting out a lot of people that you do want to send mail to. That’s why you’d want to take special care to select both. For example, if I was working Dodge County, Minnesota, I could select the one filter, add it to the list and then select the next one, to make sure both are included.
However, the problem I’m seeing with the “Sale Information” section is that it doesn’t give you the option of adding one filter and then adding another… it’s either one or the other - so I think the only way to get around this would be to filter it one way (including only the arms-length transactions for the past 5 years), export the list, and then filter it the other way (including all transactions from the beginning of time until 5 years ago, but nothing after that) and then export the list again and then combine them.
Again, this is all theoretical right now. I’ve never actually executed a campaign like this myself, so don’t look at this as “the right way to do it”, but I can see how it could be helpful to some extent, assuming the county’s database is able to get this granular.
Actually I never considered the possibility to use the owner filters as you showed up here, even if it’s pretty intuitive actually. Sure I learned something (else) today. Thank you for the highlight @retipsterseth 
!
About the rest yes, probably the “double filter solution” could be the way to work around the “Sale Information” issue…I may decide to give a try in one of the next campaigns.
Arturo.
