Handwritten mail is having a moment, so the instinct is to run it across every list you own and watch the response rate climb. The company selling the results says the proof is on one side of the list only, and using it everywhere is how you spend three dollars a letter to learn that.
The piece comes out of a webinar where the host opened with the reason volume prospecting is not the answer: national home turnover sat at just 2.77 percent as of May 2026, the lowest in more than 40 years, even with 75 million more homeowners than back then. There are not more sellers to find, so the work is converting the ones already trying to move.
The mail math is the practical part. Generic postcards are cheap by design and should stay that way for volume — their own run about 88 cents each. Handwritten letters, machine-written with an actual pen and mailed with a stamp like a personal letter, run about $2 to $3 each.
On expired listings, the guest says that handwritten touch produced four times the response rate of his company's prior generic mail, and the meetings it generated held up 25 percent more often. Those are his own company's numbers.
Then comes the caveat that most write-ups leave out: "Guertin said his company doesn’t yet have strong results running the same handwritten approach on FSBOs, so treat it as a tool for the expired side of your list for now."
Two more things from the same conversation worth keeping. He says the highest responses come about a week after the data hits the system, and their research finds homeowners feel embarrassed first after an expired listing, not angry — they spent months telling neighbors they were moving and then had to explain the sign coming down. And plan on 30 to 50 touches across call, text, email and mail, not the 7 to 12 older sales advice promised.
“Guertin said his company doesn’t yet have strong results running the same handwritten approach on FSBOs, so treat it as a tool for the expired side of your list for now.”
The expensive mistake is not the letter, it is the assumption that a channel that works on one audience works on all of them. An expired seller and a for-sale-by-owner are in opposite emotional positions — one just failed publicly, the other is proving a point — and mail that lands as kindness on the first can land as a sales pitch on the second.
Put the cheap mail on volume and the expensive mail on the moments that decide something: a first touch on your best prospects, or a triggered letter the day someone responds. And give the expired a week before you arrive, since that is when the answering starts.