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Handwritten Real Estate Letters with Pen & Ink: Direct Mail That Feels Personal

By October 20, 2025Real Estate Pros Show

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Show Summary

Leah Kelm shares the story of how her husband, an automation engineer, discovered a robot for sale on eBay, leading them to explore its potential applications, particularly in real estate.

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    Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

    Leah Kelm (00:00)
    You stand out. And with the postcards as well, there have been instances where people will reach out to the seller or to the potential buyer and say, you know, I’m still going through all this as a state and everything else. I’m not quite ready to sell yet, but because you sat down and wrote me a letter, I’m going to save this and call you later on for when I am ready to sell because you’re the only one that bothered to sit down and write. So there’s a lot of

    Kristen (00:22)
    Right.

    Yeah

    Leah Kelm (00:29)
    power in that personal touch that can really help drive your investment options.

    Kristen (02:07)
    Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Kristen and I’m here with Leah Kelm, who is the founder of Pen and Ink It’s a really interesting business we’re gonna talk about. It hand writes letters for you. So we’re gonna get into all of that and how direct mail can really level up your marketing. Thank you for being here, Leah.

    Leah Kelm (02:26)
    Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be on.

    Kristen (02:29)
    So how about you get into your background and talk about what made you come up with, you know, pen and ink and kind of what it does for investors and realtor.

    Leah Kelm (02:37)
    Yeah.

    Yeah. So I’ll tell you kind of how we started this business. Sorry, my camera’s caught. Okay. How we started this business. So what happened is my husband is an automation engineer and one day he’s perusing eBay and he sees this robot that is on sale. It’s this really good price. This guy lives down in Southern Appalachia and he just, he’s got it in his garage. wants it out. So we not really knowing what we wanted to do with the robot decided

    Okay, let’s go down to Appalachia. Let’s pick up this robot and let’s bring it home and figure out what we can make it do. And so we’re planning on buying this robot. We sat down with a cousin of his, ⁓ on family vacation and he’s in real estate and he’s like, you know what you could use that robot to do is we have like, they all recommend using these handwritten letters in order to improve your response rates when you’re doing real estate as a real estate investor. And you have this robot.

    let’s see if we can get it to write. And so that’s what we started doing is we started teaching this robot how to write handwritten cards. We develop, you know, tools so that it could hold a pen and it could start writing. And honestly, it wasn’t very good at it. So we had made a lot of adjustments along the way, and we’re no longer using that robot too much. We use it a little bit, ⁓ but we’ve completely adjusted the design and we have developed a new system in order to

    Kristen (03:50)
    What?

    Leah Kelm (04:07)
    produce these at scale. But it’s been a good journey, lot of learning along the way and a lot of of revisions, improvements, getting things better, worse, you know, making changes in order to move along the path. So it’s been a good time.

    Kristen (04:19)
    Yeah,

    that’s really cool. now with the business today, how do you work with people and talk about kind of what someone can expect if they go to your website?

    Leah Kelm (04:29)
    Yeah, absolutely. So our website is, you’re fully able to order anything that you want online. So we have it set up so that you can kind of do a custom thing, but we also have a couple of design options that we’ve made that we’ve seen have worked well. Some of them are just kind of, we have one that’s just kind of like a blank card that it’s just, we just write it on the front. We put the address on the front. We put the message on the back. And then we’ve got a couple of others that are more

    pretty or seasonal that kind of like stand out in the mail. So for example, I’ll just show you I got a picture of one here. We’ve got this like fall design that it’s just a ⁓ pop of color in the mail that helps you stand out a little bit more. So there’s a few different design options you can pick from. ⁓ Some investors need help figuring out how to put together lists and we can help with that. ⁓ But a lot of them come in with they have their list ready. They know what they want to do.

    And we have a way on our website that they can upload the list. We’ll double check it with the post office, make sure that the addresses are valid addresses. And then, yeah. And then they’ll get their list of non-deliverables. If there’s anything wrong with the list, they’ll be able to see all that and then go ahead and place their order. So everything’s available online. They can see the options. You can order. ⁓ And yeah, it’s a…

    Kristen (06:25)
    I am.

    Leah Kelm (06:42)
    Fairly new rollout of our website. We got it done this summer that we’ve rolled out this improvement that we can actually order online. So it’s something we’re really excited about.

    Kristen (06:50)
    Yeah, that is exciting. And how long does it take to produce the cards?

    Leah Kelm (06:55)
    Yeah, so it does depend a little bit on value. Once you pay, you’ll get put into our schedule. will. So we don’t have a automatic schedule available on our website yet. I’ll email you and let you know, okay, based on this, we’ll choose this drop date. ⁓ we also allow, depending on the user, sometimes investors would prefer that they start getting phone calls on earlier in the week as opposed to especially hitting on the weekend or something. ⁓ so.

    I will base my drops with the post office based on when they would like to start seeing those responses. Just because you want it to happen when you’re in the office. You want it to happen when you’re available to answer the phone. Because people may not leave a voicemail or anything else. usually we are able to get the product out within a week or two. So it.

    Just kind of depends on the scheduling and everything else, but we’ve typically been hitting, if you order on Monday, we can get it out by Friday.

    Kristen (07:58)
    Amazing. talk about kind of the people you work with in the success, my God, I can’t speak, the success that they’ve seen from ⁓ direct mail.

    Leah Kelm (08:06)
    You

    Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things with direct mail for real estate investors particularly is one, you are able to get the data list of who is at what property, which property has a address associated with it that might be different from the owner’s address and you’re able to hit the actual person. I know with Facebook and other types of marketing, they have restrictions on

    property ownership data that can’t be shared very well. So the targeting isn’t as good with the social media marketing that is available. So that’s one of the advantages of the direct mail is you can actually hit the owner specifically and make sure that they actually receive your message. So that’s one of the big advantages that a lot of real estate investors see is, and then also if you’re marketing towards an older generation,

    they’re more likely to respond to a direct mail than a text message or a social media ad as well. So it does depend on kind of who your audience is, what the best ⁓ platform for you use is, but direct mail has consistently been shown to perform well in comparison to social media and text message and other forms of marketing.

    Kristen (09:30)
    Yeah, absolutely. you know, expand a little more on the personal touch aspect and how the handwritten note really kind of drives that home, like connection home.

    Leah Kelm (09:42)
    Yeah. So with us

    specifically, because we really focus in on using the handwritten style where we use an actual pen, we actually sit down and write the cards. Well, our robots do. it does make it look very, very authentic. Like someone actually took the time to sit down and write me and you’re more likely to get the calls that you get are going to be a little more respectful one because they’re, they kind of come in with this assumption that you sat down and wrote them.

    a note you took the time to speak try to connect with them personally and also

    Yeah, it just brings a very authentic touch. makes you look much more hometown, local, which is the kind of person, trustworthy, which is the kind of person, someone, particularly if maybe this is their childhood home, they’re trying to get rid of it because their parents recently passed and they just, they need to divide it up for the inheritance purposes. makes you, it gives the first touch with the potential seller as a, Hey, I’m a person, you’re a person. I’m going to care about your property. And it can really help.

    Kristen (11:25)
    Right.

    Leah Kelm (11:27)
    You stand out. And with the postcards as well, there have been instances where people will reach out to the seller or to the potential buyer and say, you know, I’m still going through all this as a state and everything else. I’m not quite ready to sell yet, but because you sat down and wrote me a letter, I’m going to save this and call you later on for when I am ready to sell because you’re the only one that bothered to sit down and write. So there’s a lot of

    Kristen (11:48)
    Right.

    Yeah

    Leah Kelm (11:56)
    power in that personal touch that can really help drive your investment options.

    Kristen (12:02)
    Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with you. There is something about a handwritten note that just feels more personal. It feels like someone you would rather do business with. Are you able to do variations based off of, you know, one text paragraph? Or is it it’s the same uniform text on all postcards?

    Leah Kelm (12:11)
    Yeah.

    Yeah, that’s a great

    question. So the way it works is we have the Excel spreadsheet that you upload or the CSV or whatever file you have. You have different columns in there that we can take any of those columns and plug them in and uniquely create the message for every individual. So many of our real estate investors will specifically reference the specific property they’re talking about because the person may be a tired landlord who they don’t actually live at the property.

    But they do have it and maybe they’re ready to think about selling it. So we’ll say within the message, hey, I noticed your property X specifically right out the property address. Are you interested in selling that or anything else? And if you have a couple of different criteria of people within the list, we can also like fully customize the message to what the specific ⁓ people, the kind of people you have.

    Kristen (13:11)
    around.

    Leah Kelm (13:16)
    you have. If you want to try a couple of different messages, we can customize to that. There’s all sorts of options for customizing.

    Kristen (13:22)
    Yeah, that’s amazing. And I mean, you can even do like Christmas cards, stuff like that, like not even sales stuff.

    Leah Kelm (13:27)
    Yes, yeah. And that is something that we did last year was I

    did send out a handful of even just like family Christmas cards. I met a guy at an event and he’s like, my wife and I have been trying to get our Christmas cards out. just, we’re just, you know, we’re both busy people. both work. We have life stuff going on. And if I send you a list, you’re saying that you can do this for me. And I’m like, yeah, absolutely. And so he sent it. I, and I had a couple of Christmas cards designed for him that he could just pick and went ahead and send out.

    to rest of his list that they just Christmas is coming and they don’t have time to get to them. So yeah.

    Kristen (13:59)
    That’s amazing.

    Yeah, I can see how people can really use this to their advantage to really promote their businesses. So the company is fairly new, correct?

    Leah Kelm (14:08)
    Mm-hmm.

    Yeah,

    so we’ve been around for two years now.

    Kristen (14:14)
    Okay, cool. And what are the plans to scale? What’s next?

    Leah Kelm (14:15)
    Yep.

    Yeah. So we’re doing a lot of spending a lot of time kind of spreading the word because the more people know about it, the more people can benefit from it. And as we spread the word, we can start to scale and grow the business. So right now we are where we are. ⁓ we’re able to produce at a high volume at a fast rate. And we’re able to, we have our system designed and dialed in such that as we grow, we’ll be able to scale pretty easily and effectively and quickly.

    so that we are able to meet the needs of all of our clients.

    Kristen (15:35)
    I love that. And what are some things that you’ve learned from starting your business that maybe you can share with people, like budding entrepreneurs?

    Leah Kelm (15:45)
    Yeah,

    absolutely. It’s been, there’s been good times and hard times. So it’s a lot more overall stressful than working for someone else because, and I spent years working as an engineer and they were stressful times doing whatever I was working on designing or creating. ⁓ But it’s a lot higher stakes when everything’s kind of on your shoulders. Like I got a,

    figure out how to manage the accountant, I gotta figure out what to do for marketing, I gotta figure out. Also, if something goes wrong, I can’t enlist the help of all the other ⁓ engineers in the field. It’s me, I gotta figure it out, you know? So a lot more decisions become my decisions to make, which is good, but also sometimes it’s just a little overwhelming. So kind of…

    Kristen (16:28)
    Come.

    Right.

    Leah Kelm (16:41)
    Take it a day at a time is what I do and some days it’s good. Most days it’s good. But some days it’s like, okay, we just, we just gotta get through this. We just gotta get through this day. Just gotta get through this week. And shoot, I just got this huge order and my printer broke. That sucks. So you gotta be ready to be flexible and like, okay, what are my other options? Have kind of other options set up in place so that when you have those emergencies, they’re not so…

    burdensome as far as emergency goes. You got to have a backup plan. It’s just, yeah.

    Kristen (17:13)
    Yeah, absolutely. Everything

    falls on you. I feel like building is one thing and scaling is another. And scaling is very challenging to do by yourself. Building, I mean, it is challenging to do by yourself, but it can be a little bit more fun. ⁓

    Leah Kelm (17:21)
    Yep.

    Yeah.

    Kristen (17:29)
    Yeah,

    I can totally see how the scaling process is just challenging, working on your own. And people glamorize it a lot and think that everyone can be an entrepreneur, but you really have to have special skill set. And what would be your skill set that really makes you shine in this role?

    Leah Kelm (17:42)
    Mm-hmm.

    Yeah, so my skill set specifically. So I have an engineering background, which helps with all the issues that we might deal with when it comes to manufacturing. ⁓ I’m also, as far as engineers go, a lot more people-oriented than most of them are, a lot more relationship-driven, which helps when it’s time to go do outreach and talk to people. It’s just important to be able to do all that and not just be like, I’m in my little engineering shell, leave me alone.

    Kristen (17:55)
    Yeah.

    Leah Kelm (18:19)
    and actually connect with people. So, and then the thing that’s been challenging for us is figuring out what’s the best way to do marketing. Because it’s kind of a little outside of our experience, outside of our wheelhouse. So, and so we bring our strengths and our limitations to our business, right? And so working with different groups, working with people to kind of bounce ideas off of them and being willing to talk to other people to figure out what’s the best strategy, being open to

    Kristen (18:43)
    and

    Leah Kelm (18:48)
    ⁓ Advice is an important thing to continue to do as well.

    Kristen (18:53)
    Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. I mean, I think this is really interesting for people. I’m sure a lot of people don’t know this is even an option, don’t know it exists. So tell everyone where to find you in Pen and Ink.

    Leah Kelm (19:01)
    Yeah.

    Yeah,

    so our website is penandinkads.com. I’ll spell it for you, but it is spelled just like it sounds, P-E-N-A-N-D-I-N-K-A-D-S.com. So penandinkads.com. You can go there, check out our options. If you have any questions or anything, feel free to reach out. My email is leah @ penandinkads.com. Leah is L-E-A-H. So I’m always available to…

    shoot me an email and I’d love to help you out with anything that you need.

    Kristen (19:40)
    Amazing. Well, thank you so much for being here.

    Leah Kelm (19:43)
    Yeah, thanks for having me again. It’s been good talking to you, Kristen.

    Kristen (19:46)
    Yeah, and thank you everybody for tuning in. Hope you learned a little bit about something that could really help your business and consider using pen and ink. So thank you everyone for listening and we will see you back next time.

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