I’ve been sending them out weekly for 9 and a half years! Now it looks like they won’t make it to 10 years.
Home Sale News is an email newsletter of homes sold in the Phoenix area by zip code that I started in June 2001 before I was real estate agent.
Last week the email server (the computer) I use to send out the newsletters crashed and it took me the better part of 5 days to get it up and going again. The email server is a 5 year old computer with 5 year old email server software.
There were a lot of times over those 5 days that I had to think through what I would do if I never got the email server back up again. It’s held together now with bailing wire and gray tape, so to speak, but at least I got it running yesterday.
Although Home Sale News is my baby, the reality sank in that to upgrade the email server didn’t make sense, it would cost me about $6,000 and weeks — and I mean weeks — of work.
After nearly 10 years, the current email lists are so full of old email addresses that ISPs often wouldn’t deliver my emails. My deliverability stank. To clean up the lists I really needed to have every active reader resubscribe anew but that’s a huge job when you have to create 124 new mailing lists to replace the 124 old mailing lists.
And honestly, today with Zillow and Trulia, the number of subscribers hadn’t increased in many months or maybe years. (BTW, there was a period of a few months in the early days when I would commonly get 60+ new subscriptions a day. I had a few days with over 90 new subscriptions!)
So, I’m going to make an orderly retreat from Home Sale News… if the email server cooperates.
All That Real Estate Information is Here, Anyway
Actually, for a few years now I’ve published all the information in Home Sale News (and a lot more) here on Arizona Real Estate Notebook. The readers of Home Sale News just need to bop on over here to find the real estate information they used to see in Home Sale News.
About the only downside is that here we only show one week’s home sales in detail so readers will have to come by every week to stay current. I know a lot of subscribers to Home Sale News liked having a complete long-term, detailed history of homes sold in their inbox.
One advantage to dropping Home Sale News it that it will let me better manage the real estate websites I just recently finished creating for 20 Scottsdale area communities.