Propstream - is it worth it?

[Nathan Shankles]

I’m a buy and hold investor with two investment properties so far and I’m looking to acquire my next. I was talking to a friend of mine who is a wholesaler in Hawaii and he said that I need to checkout propstream for finding deals. I haven’t looked into it in detail yet, but I’m curious to know if it’s worth it. For those of you who have a subscription to propstream, how do you use it and is it worth it?

[Jesse Houser]

@Nathan Shankles I've used PropStream off and on over the past year. They provide you with a ton of information about the property, property records, owner, market, etc. I've used it to send direct mail postcards to find listing as an agent and to find investment properties. You do have to pay for each lead on top of your membership, which can get expensive depending on how much marketing you're doing. But, you get access to a ton of information and marketing without doing a bunch of work yourself, which I think is where the value is. It puts a large majority of the information you want to know about a property all in one clean space without doing any of the leg work. The information isn't always up to date but I've found that it's accurate the majority of the time. 

Personally, I'm not at the point where I'm spending tens of thousands on marketing, so it's not worth it for me to pay for a subscription every month and buy the leads, particularly when you can find this information yourself with some digging as it's all public record (checking the county auditor's page, finding when the mortgage was recorded, pulling your own comps, etc.) However, you could get the membership for a month, put a list together, purchase your information, export it as an excel file, cancel after that month, and then market your list. Rinse and repeat whenever you need a new list to mail/market to. You're essentially using it just like you would ListSource but in a format that is maybe a little more user-friendly and cleaner.

It's definitely an amazing tool but you're paying a decent chunk for the convenience and getting some of the work off of your plate. With that said, if you close one deal because you've used Propstream the membership has paid or itself.