I've spent the last few years testing just about every motivated-seller channel out there. Here's the honest scorecard, in case it saves someone the tuition I paid.

What worked:

Consistency over channel. The investors crushing it aren't using a secret source — they run ONE channel every single day for 6+ months. My first year I jumped between direct mail, PPC, and cold calling every 30 days and wondered why nothing hit.

Outbound (calling/texting) for speed. Need deals in the next 60 days? Outbound is the fastest feedback loop. But the metric that matters isn't dials — it's conversations. On decent data, budget ~1 qualified appointment per 150–200 dials, and expect a lot of "no" before a "maybe."

Follow-up is the whole game. ~60–70% of our deals came from the 3rd–8th touch, not the first. Most people quit at touch 2. A simple CRM + a 12-month cadence beat every shiny new channel.

Data quality > list size. A tight 2,000-owner list (absentee / high-equity / pre-foreclosure) beat a 20,000 "everyone in the county" pull every time.

What burned cash:

Aggregator "motivated seller leads." Recycled, over-contacted, low intent. Rarely worth the per-lead price.

Funnels before a follow-up system. Leads mean nothing if they leak out the bottom.

Chasing cheapest cost-per-LEAD instead of cost-per-CONTRACT. Cheap leads that don't close are the most expensive leads there are.

The framework that finally worked: pick ONE channel → commit 90 days minimum → track conversations and contracts, not vanity metrics → put every lead in a long follow-up cadence → only then add a second channel.

Curious what everyone's seeing in 2026 — for those actively pulling deals: which channel is giving you the best cost-per-contract, and how many touches is it taking you to close? Would love to compare notes.