They harvest, and separate the good from the bad.Then come the investors/rehabbers, the "processing plant" where the "wheat" is turned into "bread" (ugly houses are rehabbed).Then the processing plant ships the bread to the grocery store (rehabbers seller's agent) who them markets the bread to the consumer.Sure you could farm yourself, process yourself, and market yourself.

But you do not need a ranking website to start harvesting leads.Buid a great converting website, and then manually drive traffic to that site, either with DMM, PPC, post cards, what ever... but sending questionable mailers  and on top of that spend a fortune sending said questionable mailers is just plain stupid!