For Wholesaling which gives Good results? Need Pro's advice
Zeeshan S.Business Member
Specialist · Member since 2024 · 73 posts · 31 votesWholesaling real estate starts with one crucial step: finding motivated sellers. Two popular ways investors do this are through cold calling and SMS outreach. Texting allows you to quickly connect with large numbers of homeowners, often getting high open and response rates. Cold calling, meanwhile, creates space for real conversations and building trust. Both methods have pros and cons—it really depends on your style and market. Some investors combine both for maximum reach. Whichever route you choose, consistent follow-up is key to converting leads into deals.
Curious to hear from the community: Have you had better results with cold calling or SMS outreach?
I agree withe @James McGovern neither.
I do 25-50 deals a year and I have never done a deal via a cold call or a text.
Neither. The most successful in my area use the foreclosure list and work it face to face
I agree withe @James McGovern neither.
I do 25-50 deals a year and I have never done a deal via a cold call or a text.
Wholesaling real estate starts with one crucial step: finding motivated sellers. Two popular ways investors do this are through cold calling and SMS outreach. Texting allows you to quickly connect with large numbers of homeowners, often getting high open and response rates. Cold calling, meanwhile, creates space for real conversations and building trust. Both methods have pros and cons—it really depends on your style and market. Some investors combine both for maximum reach. Whichever route you choose, consistent follow-up is key to converting leads into deals.
Curious to hear from the community: Have you had better results with cold calling or SMS outreach?
Cold calling definitely still works — but it's become so saturated that only doing it the old-fashioned way won't get you far anymore. The more successful wholesalers take a few extra steps to stand out and actually close deals.
First, it's all about the quality of your list. Rather than pulling from DealMachine or other generic platforms, they focus on niche lists like probates, pre-foreclosures, code violations, or tax delinquents. These types of leads tend to have more motivation baked in.
Next, skip tracing quality is critical. You can have the best list in the world, but if you're dialing bad numbers, it’s useless. You want at least 70%–80% accuracy on your skip trace data to have a solid connection rate and real conversations with sellers.
Then there's your cold call game (or your VA's) — the ability to break the ice and not get hung up on immediately. That first few seconds matters. Without building quick rapport, you’ll miss the opportunity to even find out if the person is a motivated seller.
The catch with niche lists is they’re time-consuming to get and hard to scale. Unless you’re going remote and hitting multiple markets, you’re usually working with a list that might only produce a few dozen new leads a week. Some, like tax delinquent lists, can be refreshed only once or twice a year, to get decent number of new prospects.
So, that leaves you one option to scale: utilize mass dialing. In which case game becomes finding reliable data sources and high-quality skip tracing that won’t keep your wheels spinning. Also, don’t overlook your dialer setup. If it's not configured right or your numbers aren't whitelisted, you’ll show up as “Spam Likely,” which kills your contact rate — even if your dialer burns through 1200 numbers every few hours.
In short: cold calling still gets results, but you’ve got to be strategic with list quality, skip tracing, conversation skills, and tech setup if you want to really make it work.
As for SMS outreach — it definitely has potential, but there are some serious compliance issues to be aware of. Cold texting is a lot more restricted than it used to be, and doing it the wrong way can get you into legal trouble fast.
For one, to even start texting at scale, you need to go through the A2P 10DLC registration process (basically getting approved to send business texts through U.S. carriers). It’s a bit of a process with paperwork, brand and campaign registration, and approval wait times. Not something you can just spin up overnight.
Because of those hurdles — and the risk of fines if you don’t stay compliant — I personally haven’t gone deep into SMS, so I can’t speak on its performance firsthand. But hopefully others in the community who are using it actively can chime in with their experience.
Wholesaling real estate starts with one crucial step: finding motivated sellers. Two popular ways investors do this are through cold calling and SMS outreach. Texting allows you to quickly connect with large numbers of homeowners, often getting high open and response rates. Cold calling, meanwhile, creates space for real conversations and building trust. Both methods have pros and cons—it really depends on your style and market. Some investors combine both for maximum reach. Whichever route you choose, consistent follow-up is key to converting leads into deals.
Curious to hear from the community: Have you had better results with cold calling or SMS outreach?
Cold calling and SMS are both getting pretty saturated because the gurus are teaching it now. PPL and PPC are going to get you better leads. It costs more, but you are getting warm leads who want to sell. So the deal pays for the cost.
Wholesaling real estate starts with one crucial step: finding motivated sellers. Two popular ways investors do this are through cold calling and SMS outreach. Texting allows you to quickly connect with large numbers of homeowners, often getting high open and response rates. Cold calling, meanwhile, creates space for real conversations and building trust. Both methods have pros and cons—it really depends on your style and market. Some investors combine both for maximum reach. Whichever route you choose, consistent follow-up is key to converting leads into deals.
Curious to hear from the community: Have you had better results with cold calling or SMS outreach?
Cold calling and SMS are both getting pretty saturated because the gurus are teaching it now. PPL and PPC are going to get you better leads. It costs more, but you are getting warm leads who want to sell. So the deal pays for the cost.