Trying to find that perfect setup

[Outdoorliving2016]

Hello everyone,

I am seeking some advice and suggestions. I am a realtor and investor. I've been at it a few years now and enjoy it. I just finished up my first spec house and I'm ready to start finding off market houses to flip.

I have hired out some marketing work and it gets expensive. I have been paying around $500.00 per 10,000 postcards shipped to my door not sorted. That is for 1 design on all 10,000.

I am wanting to mix things up and start putting different designs on postcards. Different sizes etc...I have a USPS commercial stamp that gets printed on all of my postcards. So that part is taken care of. I of course pay the post office fees every time I mail items.

I'm in the process of buying one of the auto pen writing machines to write on postcards. I will also use that machine to send personal letters to my mailing list. The auto pen can write around 150 post cards an hour. I'm not worried about that machine. I have it taken care of.

I am trying to figure out which printer and cutter I should go with in regard to postcards. I send all different sizes. I will be printing and mailing around 4-5,000 postcards/letters per month.

As far as designing postcards is there a specific program you suggest? I planned on taking pictures in the city's I'll be targeting of various areas to try and get people to actually look and read the cards. I just want to try a lot of different designs to print, and it will cost so much money having it hired out I think I should bring it in house.

I'd appreciate anything you can tell me or links you can send me to setups.

 

[jacekldn]

For software, have a look at Affinity Designer or Affinity Publisher, both will handle bitmaps and vectors. The price is good and the publisher does not want to train their AI on your images so that they can resell them you and others like Adobe does.

As for the printer, did you consider having your postcards printed and cut by a professional print shop? That's an awful lot of cards you plan to print and you may end up hating that job.

 

[NAwlins Contrarian]

I am seeking some advice and suggestions. I am a realtor and investor. I've been at it a few years now and enjoy it. I just finished up my first spec house and I'm ready to start finding off market houses to flip.

I have hired out some marketing work and it gets expensive. I have been paying around $500.00 per 10,000 postcards shipped to my door not sorted. That is for 1 design on all 10,000.

I am wanting to mix things up and start putting different designs on postcards. Different sizes etc...I have a USPS commercial stamp that gets printed on all of my postcards. So that part is taken care of. I of course pay the post office fees every time I mail items.

I'm in the process of buying one of the auto pen writing machines to write on postcards. I will also use that machine to send personal letters to my mailing list. The auto pen can write around 150 post cards an hour. I'm not worried about that machine. I have it taken care of.

I am trying to figure out which printer and cutter I should go with in regard to postcards. I send all different sizes. I will be printing and mailing around 4-5,000 postcards/letters per month.

As far as designing postcards is there a specific program you suggest? I planned on taking pictures in the city's I'll be targeting of various areas to try and get people to actually look and read the cards. I just want to try a lot of different designs to print, and it will cost so much money having it hired out I think I should bring it in house.

I'd appreciate anything you can tell me or links you can send me to setups.

I don't think any of the sort of printers we usually discuss here is likely to be a good choice for printing 4,000+ postcards per month. I don't know what the best choice is, and I suspect that few if any of the regular participants here has the expertise to guide you well.

Also, I wonder--I really don't know--whether it makes sense for you to do your own printing. How much would you spend on a suitable printer, and how much would owning your own printer save you over having a service print your postcards? Is that enough to amortize the cost of the printer?

Regarding laying out postcards, it really depends. I do all processing on the large majority of my photos in DxO PhotoLab 8 Elite, going from a raw file to a final JPEG or TIFF. But if you want to perform any substantial compositing or layout, then you'll need something else. I actually find the free / open-source GIMP the best for heavier-duty layout and compositing. Affinity Photo is a better pure image editor, but it's not nearly as good a raw converter as PhotoLab, nor as good a layout editor as GIMP.

Last but not least, you're talking about doing a lot of different things yourself, taking them on all at once or at least over a short time. Finding houses, closing the purchases, performing or at least contracting out whatever work is being done, listing / marketing them, photography, composing written materials, printing, mailer preparation, and closing the sales. Your time and money would be pulled in a bunch of directions. It might be better to start with whatever is your core expertise, and then as time permits, take on new parts of the operation one at a time.

 

[Outdoorliving2016]

Thanks everyone!

 

[Dan Berg]

As a life long business owner with multiple businesses I believe the effort and investment required to do all this yourself is not worth the time that it takes. You will be so far ahead turning this over to a professional print company. Make a phone call or email and write a check and use that valuable time to build your business. You will be so much further ahead, I know.

--
Dan Berg
http://bergsprintstudio.com/workshops/
Printmaking and Photo Mounting Workshops

 

[Red13]

I agree with everyone else that you are time and money ahead to have commercial printers handle your "thousands" marketing material. However, for the small jobs I recommend a color laser printer.

I used to use them for materials to small groups. I moved from an HP black and white laser printer to a Canon color laser printer. I like the Canon product better than any of the HP's I owned in the past. Obviously laser printers are not photo printers but they do have enough image quality for handouts.