Ryan Corcoran
Ryan Corcoran has been a guest on Collecting Keys, the real estate investing podcast hosted by Mike DeHaan, Dan Austin and Dylan Koch.
Using Direct Mail to Find Multifamily Properties with Ryan Corcoran
Ryan Corcoran, a 28-year-old Rhode Island investor who left a physician assistant job, explains how he uses direct mail to buy off-market multifamily properties, growing to about 250 units in seven years. He walks through skip tracing LLC owners behind registered agents, why he mails plain white handwritten letters, how he values small multis without comping, and how he reverse-wholesales larger buildings to a short list of known buyers.
Key takeaways
- Mail sent to an LLC usually lands with a registered agent (an attorney or property manager) who won't forward it — use Open Corporates plus county assessor name searches to find the true owner's home address, and hand that research to a VA.
- Plain white envelopes with handwritten addressing and a real stamp outperform branded postcards for Ryan; callers say "you dropped a letter off at my house" instead of "you sent this to a million people."
- Anyone who calls off a letter has raised their hand for a reason, even if they say they're not interested; the job is finding the underlying problem. Ryan bought a six-unit at roughly 50% of market after spending 90 minutes talking about a seller's husband's dementia and never walking the units.
- For small multifamily, Ryan doesn't comp — he knows price per unit by town (e.g., ~$150k/unit for decent condition) and cross-checks values with agent and investor friends until he's the expert in that market.