Quick question for the investors here — I'm testing something. If you could hand off ONE back-office task tomorrow and never touch it again, which one? 1) Building lead lists to your filters, 2) Cleaning up a messy list / CRM, 3) Prepping records for skip tracing, 4) Something else (tell me). And what would that be worth to you per month if the work came back clean, checked, and in your format every time? I'm a Minneapolis wholesaler currently based in Ethiopia (long story), surrounded by sharp, English-speaking grads looking for exactly this work — and I know what "done right" looks like on a list because I build my own. Thinking about training and managing a small bench of VAs for investors. No pitch — just want to hear what's actually painful before I build anything.
Fun question. If I could hand off just one thing tomorrow, it would be building lead lists to my filters — option one. The list is the business in this kind of investing, but doing it right takes hours of cross-checking ownership, equity, and motivation signals, and a stale or sloppy list poisons everything downstream. I would gladly pay for a list that comes back clean, de-duplicated, and actually matched to my filters. On value, for me it is less about a flat monthly number and more about cost per qualified lead that survives verification. What filters are you building your own lists to right now, and how are you verifying them before you mail or call?
Quick follow-up, Ametria — the reason I asked what 'qualified' has to survive for you: I'm opening a couple of pilot slots. Two weeks, a trained VA building lead lists to your exact filters — clean, deduped, and verified against county records before you ever see them. $250 flat for the pilot, and if week one's lists aren't right, we stop and week two is free. If that's useful, drop me your filters and your 'qualified' bar and I'll show you exactly what comes back.
Appreciate the detailed answer — list-building is the one I hear most, and for exactly your reason: a sloppy list poisons everything downstream. Right now I build to ownership length (7+ years), equity position, absentee vs owner-occupied, and property type/condition signals, then dedupe across sources. Verification before anything gets mailed or called: ownership re-checked against county records, occupancy flagged, and every phone number corroborated by two sources before it touches a dial sheet — a verified-bad number is worse than no number. Curious on your side: what does a 'qualified' lead have to survive for you to count it — and how many a month would actually move the needle for your operation?
For me, building targeted lead lists and preparing records for skip tracing are two tasks that can take a lot of time when done properly. I have experience researching public county records, probate cases, deeds, and property ownership, as well as skip tracing and cleaning, organizing, and formatting lead lists. I think having accurate, well-organized data that follows the investor’s criteria can make the acquisition process much more efficient. Consistency and data accuracy are especially important when working with multiple counties.
from the crm side, #2 is the one that comes back. a one-time cleanup is undone in a few months unless three rules change with it: match duplicates on the standardized property address, not the owner name. make lead source required. and every dead lead gets a reason and a revisit date. if you build this, selling the cleanup plus those three rules is what makes it worth paying for monthly
That's a sharp breakdown — thank you. The "cleanup plus the three rules" framing is exactly the difference between a one-time project and something an investor keeps paying for monthly, and the dedupe-on-address point alone explains half the messy CRMs I've seen. Two quick ones back: in your world, what does a package like that run per month — and which CRM are your investors breaking the most?
With probate, most of the real work happens before you even look at a list. The executor's name and the property are public record, so finding who filed isn't the hard part. The hard part is figuring out which of those filings are even worth chasing — a lot of probate cases don't involve a house at all, or the house already has so little equity it's not worth pursuing, so you have to check that before you waste time on it. Then once you know it's a real opportunity, you still don't have a phone number or email for the executor — just a name and a mailing address — so you're skip tracing to actually be able to reach them. Both of those take real time if you're doing them right, and that's before you even start working the list
Probate is exactly where it gets messy — half the work is just figuring out which filings are real and who can actually sign. How are you handling that now, and roughly how many filings a month are you working through?
Bookkeeping — that's the veteran answer. It's never the glamorous tasks that eat your week, it's the quiet ones like that. Curious how you structured it: VA, a bookkeeping firm, or someone who specializes in real estate? And are they just keeping the monthly books, or tracking per-property too?
Option one for me too, though I'd say the filters matter even more than the cleanup. In the Allegheny County data I work with, nearly 65,000 residential parcels carry a tax lien, so a lien alone barely narrows anything, but a lien plus delinquency plus an absentee owner is a much shorter and much better list.