pulling lists is an art by itself

[Jason Malabute]

Pulling List means generating or devising the list of properties and owners with the intention of contacting the owners to see if they are open to selling.

You can use various methods to pull lists. I use the Reonomy tool to fetch these details. Now, let me tell you that pulling list is an art in itself. You have to know the right mix and use of filters to get the perfect matches. Any extra filter might lose you an opportunity!

For example, I had been using only 4 filters at Reonomy that included City or ZIP, Building Type, Year Built and Number of Units. However, these filters wouldn’t give the preciseness I needed. I was looking for 8-30 unit buildings but would still find 100-300 unit buildings in my list. It was happening because Reonomy would be showing a 13 units apartment (on its behalf) while failing to recognize that the 13 units apartment was in fact a part of a 200 units apartment buildings community.

So, I added various size filters as well. I wanted to make sure that we don’t overlook any property that may fit our criteria. However, my pulling list would still contain properties that didn’t fit our criteria.

This is when I added more filters and started looking for properties with pools – most 8-30 unit apartment buildings don’t have pools! I also started looking for properties that were either sold for over $2M or have a mortgage of the same amount. This is because most of such properties in my area don’t cost over $3M, and thus I would be getting exactly the kind of properties we were interested in.

For me, time is the biggest issue. That’s why I don’t want to waste time on leads that have more than 30 units or in properties that we won’t buy due to our criteria. I am pulling exactly the kind of list I want, and have attained this procedure of pulling list after various improvements!

Thus, pulling list is truly an art and certainly a crucial aspect of real estate investing.