All Forum Posts by: Davey Wilde

The lists you purchase online have all been recycled many times, however, it's all about timing of when you hit the homeowner and with what piece of mail. You don't need a crazy response rate to get a deal done. That's the beautiful thing about wholesaling, you only need to get one deal done to make a good chunk of change. You will need to get creative in the type of mail piece you send, the time you of year you them, and how often you hit them. Many investors say you need to send to these people 4-7 times before you get the best result. I think it would be advantageous to send out a smaller amount of mail, hand written, and to hit them every month for six months. Property taxes are due on a certain date in your area, I might hit them a month before property taxes are due. Most investors send out at the beginning of the month, so maybe send out your pieces on the 15th? Research a list that works for you and then get creative in how you target them and how often you want to hit them.

It sounds like you conquered the first step in real estate which is figuring out how much time you have to offer to your new business. If you only have 15 hours per week, you will drive yourself crazy trying to cram 30 hours worth of work into that time slot. Once you figure out how many hours you have, you will now need to sit down to figure out how to allocate that amount of time. I sent out several thousand pieces of mail one month when I was working my wholesaling business "part time" and didn't have enough time to actually follow up with any of the leads. It drove me crazy! It seems like a good problem but it's not. You won't get any deals when you're overwhelmed. 

If you have under 15 hours of real estate time each week, I'd recommend sending out a micro mailing campaign (under 25 pieces per week.. maybe hand written?) or to call FSBO's. The good thing about calling FSBO's is that you have much more control over when you can make or receive a call. If you have a busy work week with your current job, call less FSBO's... if you have a light work week, maybe make more calls. You won't run into the problem of not having enough time in the week to follow up. I understand cold calling sucks and you will get rejected many times but it will also teaches you how to make offers over the phone which is a valuable asset for any investor. Treat your investing career as a long term process and working FSBO's is a great skill set to learn which can build on in the future.

Here a few good ways to get leads:

1. PropertyRadar- It's $60 per month but you can download 10k(15K?) leads per month into excel to mail. You can essentially create your own list with your own criteria and then start mailing to the tax address. This website has other features but take a look, it could help you.

2. US Leads List- Lance and Terry have an inherited (probate,estate,etc) where you can purchase a list of inherited properties broken down by county. Call them to make sure your county is available. I'll let them go over pricing with you.

3. Title/Escrow company- Get to know a title company in your area because you will need a good one when you start wholesaling properties. They can get you an absentee out of state or out of county list which many investors live by when they send out mailings. Ours doesn't break down the addresses by equity but they're super cheap so we've mailed this many times!

5. Bird Dogs- Post adds on craigslist for property finders. Target mailmen, pizza delivery guys, uber or taxi drivers, etc. Mainly your looking for people that want to make some extra money. Pay them 10% commission of a closed wholesale deal. Have them drive through neighborhoods and look for distressed and/or vacant properties and send them to your email. Then mail to the tax address and wait for call backs. 

Some of these may have legal issues in your area so do your due diligence if you decide to go forward with any of the lists above!

 I didn't read all 27 pages but it looks like BP members are discussing the merits of wholesaling real estate. It's more about wholesaling in general and less about the actual deal in 2012.

I've had a similar experience with wholesalers in the Seattle/King County market. The only number that I take from a wholesaler is the amount they are offering it to me at. The comps/rehab/ARV/etc all need to be recalculated by the investor who's buying the property. We recently decided to start wholesaling properties ourselves and we expect the buyers we work with to do their own due diligence before they purchase a house from us. I usually run the numbers that we would use if we were buying the house to rehab ourselves and then market the house at numbers "we think" would work for other people. Even with our experience rehabbing, our numbers are still different than other investors in the area.

I don't think you can get mad at a wholesaler unless they're trying to scam you. It's always up to the investor to run their own numbers and if you as the investor know your market, it won't take long to come up with your own numbers. If we took 25 investors and gave them the address and photos of a property that is going to need a rehab, you'd have 25 different numbers at which each investor would need to buy the property to make it work for them. There are so many variables that go into a rehab and everybody has different rehab costs. My advice or newer investors working with wholesalers is to find people that you believe will be honest with you and teach them how to run your numbers on the property. Most wholesalers are new and don't have expertise in rehabbing so they need help.

REI Blackbook

Our main focus is wholesaling single family houses and we send out several thousand mail pieces each month and use REI Blackbook to capture the leads once they contact us and turn into a lead. We haven't found a way to mail merge the addresses from our mailing list so we just use excel to send to track or mailings. It's a very basic CRM (excel 2003 vs 2015) compared to Salesforce or Zoho and there isn't much room to customize or interact with multiple users if you have a team. It's roughly $99 per month which is a bit steep for a CRM when you have others that charge $10 per month for a similar product. Maybe other investors utilize more features on this CRM (marketplace to network or to analyze deals) but we haven't found it worthwhile. We do use bird dogs and REI includes a bird dog software that allows your bird dogs to submit properties and then track where you are in process so both sides are up to date. I think it's called findmydeals.com. This is a really, really cool feature for us and I couldn't imagine having bird dogs send me properties directly to my email or through excel. It also shows you a map of all the properties they've submitted and it allows the bird dog to type in other notes on the property and also submit a photo. I'm looking elsewhere for a similar product specific to bird dogs but haven't done enough research to name any yet.

Recommendation:

If you just need a basic CRM to track leads, I'd save money and get a cheaper one like Salesforce ($180 for the year) or Zoho (free). Some investors might have tips on how to utilize this CRM better than me so I'm excited to hear everybody else's thoughts but I just don't see the value here in paying $100 per month for a basic CRM. I think we're going to get a bird dog specific software and then move on to try another CRM that possibly has mail merge functions. 

Let's get a discussion started about our experience with different CRMs specific to wholesaling. I'll start and make a post about the one we use. Please follow my format which has the name of the CRM at the top to make it easier for readers. Maybe I'll publish a blog with our findings if we can get enough responses. 

What's holding you back in your real estate investing career? What type of problems are you running into as you try to grow your business?

This question is geared towards both new and experienced investors. It could be helpful to our members (myself included) to see what type of problems other investors are running into. You could be working real estate as a 2nd job and you don't have enough time to devote to investing. Or it could be the marketing costs associated with sending out bulk mail.

Thanks for all the responses! We've been receiving too many calls to handle on our own so using a VA was the most logical and cheapest option. The big downside appears to be the lack of rapport/knowledge when screening these calls. I guess time will tell. It's now apparent I have overlooked the fact that many of these home sellers don't actually know what their house is worth. I think I'll make two separate scripts for handling this objection. One for the sellers that don't know how much their house is worth and another for the "..you called me, make me an offer" seller. I'll keep you updated if I find anything that works.

@Bryan - Good point. Sellers that don't give much information over the phone haven't actually turned into hot leads for us. Our VA won't have any idea about the price of the home but maybe it's worth looking into using a different service because I like the idea of testing the water with houses that have sold to help get them to a price. Thanks for the input.

@Alisa Q - I love the concept. Its true.. we do only have so much money available and can only help people that fit our model. I will definitely put this into our script to see what type of results we get.

@Rick - I was hoping to use this forum as a platform to bounce ideas off other investors. I can appreciate you not wanting to share any information.

@Michael - Great points. The asking price will become apparent when I get on the phone to negotiate our offer. It sure would make it easier to pick the "hottest leads" to follow up with first if I had an asking price but maybe that's a question for me to ask when I know the market for their house.

We currently use virtual assistants to screen calls from our marketing. Huge time saver for those that haven't done it yet! These leads are a combination of probate, driving for dollars, absentee, etc. The VA's seem to do a good job getting mortgage info, PITI, current rent, repairs, reason for moving, but they normally fail to get an asking price from the seller.

Does anybody have any creative ways to get an asking price from these leads? I don't remember having this problem when I used to screen the calls myself but I can't seem to put in a script a place that works for other people.

Thanks

@Iris

Most of the marketing pieces take several months before you start to get better traction. Keep hitting them for a minimum of 5-7 months and that will give you a better idea of what pieces are working. Marketing pieces differ for every city and also for what type of list you are targeting so test your results.

@Rick Jones

Either expand your target area (more cities) or drop the 40% equity down to 25%. I agree with one of the above posters about having sale date being a minimum of 5-7 years old. Landlords are much less likely to be motivated if they just purchased the house recently. Your're trying to target the investor who's had 1 rental for 15 years and wants to get rid of it.

It's different for every area so this might be a trial and error for your specific farm area. Send me a direct message if you have any other questions or want to talk marketing.