What is working? Looking to spur some lead generation ideas!

Question

Hey Friends - at my 9-5 (institutional fixed income sales) we have a Tuesday morning round table where we share what is working, new ideas, and new strategies.   I am looking to do the same with this forum post.  Up until this point I have exclusively been driving for dollars, as the sun now sets here in Memphis around 5 pm, I need to learn to utilize other tools.

So - I have signed up with PropStream.  I have spent several hours punching around, and really haven't come up with anything I feel is a compelling "warm leads" list.  I am hoping someone out there is willing to share their "secret sauce" in terms of what filters to use.

I guess I should also mention my goal.  I am trying to buy 5 SFR rentals in the next 12 months, utilizing the infamous BRRR method.

Cornelius Garland · Answer

@Ben Parrish Great question, Ben. I'm a big proponent of leveraging tools and my team to generate leads for me. As a wholesaler, I need to market every day to meet my monthly deal goals. While PPC, Facebook, and SEO work, it does take a while to get leads from these sources to come in. I like knowing that I can market today and start getting leads in today. The primary way I do this is through cold calling. This may change depending on my KPIs in the coming months and years, but I'm holding steady right now with a cost per deal around $2k - $3k. In some markets, my Joint Venture partners and I have spent around $6k in marketing expenses and closed up $80k in assignments on 4 deals, which is a $1500 cost per deal and over 50% ROI once we deducted our other expenses. This was the case for my JV partner's Jacksonville OCT 2021 campaign. Pretty solid numbers.

While starting with Propstream is better than I've seen others start with, we need to ensure we're conducting market research to determine which zip codes to market to. Instead of going off of a hunch, you can do this research beforehand to determine if your market is viable for generating motivated seller leads and if you're targeting the right demographic.

Early on in my career, I would choose a market and zips based on what I heard at my REIA or was in proximity to my home. This was the wrong direction to go as I didn't look to see how many homes were sold in the last 30 days. Additionally, I was targeting some zips that were affluent, so whenever I reached out to sellers, they wouldn't be interested in my message because they had homes on golf courses, lakes, etc.

The first step that many new investors make is that they want to target niche lists like code violations, tax delinquents, preforeclosures, etc. While these lists perform well, they're typically small and finite. I'll go into more detail on this point. Essentially, if you have a code violations list, you may be able to pull 20k code violations from the last 12 months. After you finish this list, you won't have another set of unique 20k records to pull. At most, you'll have 500 - 1,000 new properties that pop up on the code violations list. At this point, most investors get stuck so they just continue dialing, texting, or mailing this same list over and over. This list needs to be retired as soon as it stops generating leads.

The approach I take is actually marketing to specific zips and focusing on putting the following primary filters on my list: year built 1999 and prior, purchase date 1999 and prior, purchase price/total outstanding loans/first loan amount $80,000 or less. Below, I'll place an image of what this looks like in Investors Title Toolbox aka Rebogateway. This is the list pulling tool I use. I think most of these filters are in Propstream minus total outstanding loans.

Notice, I don't have equity filters on here neither do I have any typical "motivating criteria" like absentee, tax delinquency, or code violations. The purchase price filter is actually a really solid filter. When I do my analysis, I know that if the sales prices are around $200k that I can contract any house that was last bought for $80k or less and it will have equity. You can end up eliminating a ton of houses by adding that equity filter because a significant number of homes may have unknown equity. Additionally, what happens after we go through all of the high equity records? We're back at square one with not having any unique records to target.

To boil my process down to a few steps, I do the following:

1) Market analysis on the whole MSA to determine which zips are worth marketing to.

2) Pull the list in my list pulling tool using the criteria above and only pull records in the zips I determined are desirable.

3) Skip tracing to add phone numbers to my list

4) Cold call the list

5) Vet the cold leads from the hot ones

6) Lock up the hot leads and put the cold ones on follow-up to see if their situation changes over the next few months.

Let me know if you have any questions on anything I stated.

Brian Nally · Answer

I'd start with a website geared towards convincing motivated sellers that you are the most credible, trustworthy home buyer in your market. Then use SEO and PPC to get that site in front of sellers when they're truly motivated, ie when they search for very specific terms related to your business. Good luck. I'm rooting for you to get out of the rat race soon!!

Matthew Crivelli · Answer

Mail out flyers advertising your home buyer business. We have Val-Pack in the north east. Do you have a website? If not get one going. You can advertise on Facebook. Yard signs in high traffic areas. Also, make friends with local realtors and let them know you're looking for off market deals and motivated sellers!

What is working? Looking to spur some lead generation ideas!

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