Realtor Buying Printer

[Realtor]

Hello everyone. I need some advise. I am a realtor in Naples, FL. I am highly considering leasing a Versant 180. The reason I am buying it is to get my cost of mailer down by bringing the print in house. Right now I only mail about 3,000 pieces a month, but for the same price I could be mailing 5,000. This is a big investment and I have zero knowledge of these printers. Are these difficult to use? Am I crazy for considering this? I hope by mailing more and if this work I figured I will be easily able to scale my business.

Also is this a good deal or fair deal?
I have found a used 180 Versant machine which I can lease $1,380 for 5 years. They want .04 for the service contract for color.

 

[pippip]

For 3k or 5k a month forget it.

If you have an image running to the edge of the sheet you'll also need a guillotine.

Others on here are being told the v180 will be not be supported by Xerox in 3 years so that is also a red flag, especially for a non print company.

 

[Ynot_UK]

Hello everyone. I need some advise. I am a realtor in Naples, FL. I am highly considering leasing a Versant 180. The reason I am buying it is to get my cost of mailer down by bringing the print in house. Right now I only mail about 3,000 pieces a month, but for the same price I could be mailing 5,000. This is a big investment and I have zero knowledge of these printers.

Isn't this about concentrating on your core business? At those small quantities, everything considered, it would cost you far more to produce the same amount of mailers in house than it would to buy them from a local print business with whom you've built a good relationship. Perhaps you need to shop around and try out a few print shops, in your business it's no bad thing to have a couple of print suppliers chomping at the bit for your regular workstream.

There would be a level (think hundreds of thousands of pieces per month) when a multi site business in your sector may consider running an inplant, staffed with print & design and mailing & fulfilment specialists who won't know much, if anything, about selling houses.

Turning this on its head, as a printer, why do I need a realtor? Couldn't I save thousands of bucks by doing the marketing myself? Drone photography is a hobby and we already make pretty good websites and YouTube videos. And we design & print great brochures. So why should I waste 5% or whatever crazy figure you guys charge? (IIRC it's loads more than here in the UK)... see where I'm coming from? Core business.

 

[gregbatch]

Also is this a good deal or fair deal?
I have found a used 180 Versant machine which I can lease $1,380 for 5 years. They want .04 for the service contract for color.

It's a bad deal. Way too much for the machine. That machine used, with a Fiery, should be no more than $20,000 in excellent condition, or about $420 a month.

You will need electrical work to accommodate the machine. $$$
You will need a paper cutter (guillotine). $$$
You need to consider the square footage cost of the machine if you are leasing space.

I always recommend the $0 down, $0 a month plan. Let the pros do it for you.

Who is doing the mailing? Are you getting maximum postage discounts?

 

[gazfocus]

As others have said, it's a bad idea. You can only rely on the support guys so much but there will still be things they'll expect you to pick up and sort yourself, so having zero knowledge about printers is probably not a good place to start.

Then there's the cost... Even if you were doing 5,000 mailers per month, that would be an extra 28 cents per mailer just to cover the lease cost you've been quoted. Surely you can get more than 5,000 copies of your mailer per month for far less than $1200.

 

[narseman]

I am a realtor in Naples, FL.

Do you want to become a printer?
You will be looking for print work, to cover the cost of printing.. Take good advise.. As in everyone above. The volumes you suggest.. (5k) are very little, to a print shop. But require more expensive equipment to "finish". Get quotes from 4 local printers, and look at samples from all of them.

 

[MailGuru]

Right now I only mail about 3,000 pieces a month, but for the same price I could be mailing 5,000.

You don't really give the members here a lot to go on. What's a "piece"?
A 6 x 9 Post Card being printed 4-up on a sheet? If so, even at 5,000 pieces, you're only printing 1,250 sheets per month - not enough volume to consider buying your own printing equipment.

At any event, regardless of what your piece looks like, or, how many you are mailing, you need to understand that over 50% of your out the door cost is probably USPS Postage. That won't change whether or not you are printing and mailing yourself or someone else is doing it for you.

 

[Craig]

Hmmm, I was thinking about becoming a realtor to get my commission costs down.

 

[TJPrinter]

I don’t think your Xerox rep took you seriously because that is an outrageous lease price for this used Versant 180.

Lots of excellent advice you’ve been given by everyone here. If you choose to ignore it, know that Xerox or the leasing company doesn’t want the machine back if you can’t make the payments down the road. They want the cash and will do everything to get it all from you.

 

[Shawnd]

Right now I only mail about 3,000 pieces a month, but for the same price I could be mailing 5,000.

What are you basing this statement on?

 

[narseman]

Get a little walk up rental office printer and print up 50 - 100, 500, as needed. Assuming you don't need to do more advanced finishing. Save yourself money and headaches.
What you're suggesting to do, is gonna put you into a different business. No matter what your dealer says about costs, it ALWAYS comes out far more than you thought it was going to.

 

[PricelineNegotiator]

Guy hasn't even logged on since he posted. Let's not waste our breath guys.

 

[Shawnd]

Typical realtor, ask for something crazy and then never reply.

 

[YourCastle]

I googled OP. His website says he's a BROKERAGE, not a real estate agent. Meaning he's way more invested in real estate than your typical agent. I didn't bother doing much searching on OP, but running a brokerage is only cost-effective if you have several agents working for you and/or you're making a decent number of transactions per month. (i'm a printer, not an agent, so i could be wrong about how invested you must be to run a brokerage)

I work for Your Castle Real Estate in Colorado. We have 700+ agents under our umbrella. So, it was cost-effective for my company to have a dedicated marketing department which includes me, my two printers (xerox v180 and v280), my duplo and a poster printer. My print "shop" is not-for-profit, so we offer our agents pricing that's about half of retail, turn-times no one can beat (I mean, I'm in-house) and higher quality since I see these people daily and want to give them the best.

So, is this a good idea for OP? yes, IF you have enough agents in your brokerage and/or want to attract more agents. One of the selling points for my company in recruiting agents is that we're in-house.

OP, if you want more insights, I'd be happy to help.

I am curious tho why you joined this forum in 2019... is it because you have experience in printing? If not, you'll need to find someone like me to help you set up your print shop because it's easy to make expensive mistakes. ... and you simply don't have the time to run a print shop, brokerage, and do your own real estate selling.