All Forum Posts by: Cornelius Garland

I've found that agencies are so-so at closing. Contracting properties isn't the issue; however, getting the closer to communicate with the dispositions manager and transactions coordinator is the most difficult part. I'll provide real-world example: I had a duplex my closer got under contract in Cleveland. However, one tenant was very difficult and wouldn't allow us in the unit whenever our home inspectors or buyers went to the property. I was training up a new closer at the time, so I walked him through the entire process of stalling the seller to buy us more time. During the same deal, our buyer's wife was having a baby, so my acquisitions manager had to coordinate with the title company to get the buyer to submit EMD. If my closer kept pestering my buyer, I felt like he would ghost us.

Essentially, dealing with delicate situations post-contract is what I really need a closer for. The acquisitions folks that do not want to do this aren't allowed on my team. It's awkward if myself or another team member started communicating with the seller after the closer built rapport over weeks or months.

This is something to consider. Usually, most agencies who hire "closers" are doing nothing more than promoting lead managers and cold callers to this position and training them on your dime. 

Since this is a classified ad, I think I'm allowed to self-promote here. I do offer trained acquisitions managers along with training business owners to manage their team. I do complete team build outs from cold callers, lead managers, texting specialists, ops managers, and acquisitions managers. Feel free to reach out via DM if you're interested.

@Tim Tafel I'd still use Zillow. In Texas and Kansas, I run across this issue all the time. To get comps, I go to the recently solds, click on an ARV property, then go down to the "pricing history". Once there, you can see the pending price. Most of the time, this is the price it closed for. Maybe, it closed for 5% higher or lower than the pending price, but it's usually close to the closed price. I use these as my comps. Easy solution!

I used to get marked as spam all the time when I first started in 2024, but thankfully we were able to fix these issues. Some best practices we use are avoiding "spam" words in the initial message. We avoid saying "buy", "sell", "offer", or "cash".

Instead, we'll say "we're interested in acquiring your property". Also, we only send off texts to each seller number once. I know it's tempting to text the unresponded people multiple times, but this can flag your account as spam. You'll also want to purchase multiple outbound phone numbers (DIDs). Send no more than 100 texts from one DID in a 24-hour period.

The biggest difference, though, is how we have our accounts set up. We don't drip our messages. Instead, we send them out through the workflows section, so it bypasses the carriers' spam filters. This is the custom coding we did. It wasn't overnight we figured this out. It took a lot of work and was a very frustrating process. However, we're able to operate in any market with autonomy. We rarely get sellers saying they've been contacted multiple times, since no one else is mass texting like us.

You're welcome! Glad to help. Yes, it does allow you to import your lists. You'll just need to skip trace them first. Then you'll be good to go.

@Evan Lago Texting is my primary marketing channel. Both Launch Control and Smarter Contact are pricey and they have their issues. I'll explain in detail below:

I JV with a lot of investors across the country, and I am able to compare their systems with mine. All of my partners who use Smarter Contact get a .5% lower lead rate than I do with REI Reply. I can send out 1000 texts and get 10 leads, which is a 1% lead rate. In Smarter Contact, it's consistently at or below .5%. Also, Smarter Contact is trying to push their skip tracing feature, so if you upload a list of homeowners, it'll tell you that 70% of the phone numbers are invalid. ALL LIES. I get the game, but that's very deceptive.

Additionally, it's very difficult to get 10 DLC compliant without any assistance from an expert. If you sign up for the tool, you could be paying a hefty fee monthly and not even be able to send off texts for 3+ months. Also, all of the tools I mentioned only drip off the texts instead of blast them in one drop. I custom coded REI Reply to allow me to send them in one drop and you cannot do this in all the previous tools. You're basically stuck with the tool they give you. In REI Reply, it's built on Go High Level, so you can add in your own coding if you're savvy at that.

I love texting but it's difficult to configure, which is why it works so well right now. The learning curve is high and I like it like this. The experienced investors and the ones who are tech savvy have a competitive advantage. Let me know if you have any other questions!

@Isaiah Hall I agree with you - waiting for the deals to come to you is not a viable business model. This is the reason why I'm a big proponent of off-market push marketing / direct outreach: I can consistently predict how many leads I generate based on how much marketing I do.

You're going to want to get a large prospect list that has motivation on it to start. You can pull a list in PropStream using the criteria delineated below.

SFR, Duplex, Triplex, Quads
Owned for 10+ Years
No LLC Owners
Purchased for $100k or less
Total Outstanding Loans less than $100k
Half Acre or Less Lot Size
Absentee AND Owner Occupants
Tax Delinquent - Yes (Finite Dataset, though)

In markets where there's over 1 million in population, you'll easily get 30,000 - 60,000+ homeowners who fit this criteria, minus the tax delinquent filter. With the tax delinquent filter on, there will likely be around 8k - 10k homeowners.

This is a very balanced list that has enough volume to target unique homeowners daily, and it's not just a broad list of people that purchased homes this year.

You want to target unique prospects every day. You shouldn't reuse your lists as this is what contributes to decreased lead flow. You want a new list of homeowners to target every month. I usually pull my lists on the first Monday of every month.

The criteria I provided will get you a deal out of every 100 or so leads with cold calling and texting. I am a big proponent of texting right now because most people do not know how to get approved to send out texts since the regulations went into effect in October 2023. This gives us a significant competitive advantage because texting reaches a completely different demographic that will not pick up for a cold call.

Cold calling generates about 1 - 2 leads per day per cold caller. You would need 5 full-time callers in order to generate one deal in a month. Most investors largely underestimate the amount of volume of cold prospecting that's needed to "just close one deal a month". I put that part in quotations because new investors who are trying to get their first deal play it small in hopes to keep their costs low. It will take about $3,000 to get your first deal. This is how much it cost for me to land my first deal 10 years ago. Today, my cost per deal is averaging $2,500. I include my data costs, marketing team costs, and software costs in this price. Not too bad considering my average assignment is $20,000!

I hope this helps. Feel free to ask any other questions you have, Isaiah.

@Mathew Swingle The MLS and Facebook are my top-two dispo strategies. Another I would highly suggest is pulling a list of cash buyers from PropStream and text blast them. I would focus on the buyers who purchased a property in the last 12 months and also own more than 3 properties. I suggest only targeting LLC owners. If your market is small then you can remove the LLC filter, but the serious cash buyers would have their properties in an LLC.

Once you pull the list, skip trace it, then then text blast it with the deal information. I'd include the ARV, repairs needed, and zip code of the property. I wouldn't include the exact address unless you have already vetted the buyers. You just want to make sure the deal doesn't get snaked behind you. Best of luck!

I've only seen it from the outside, and it looks amazing. Easily, the best-looking house on the street.

Sounds like you're gatekeeping. I highly doubt the influx of new investors is the primary factor why you're unable to acquire deals at reasonable prices. At some point, we all had to enter the real estate market, and I'm certain when you were new there was an experienced flipper saying the same thing you're saying now. 

What's the alternative? Do we not want people to follow their dreams and change their lives for the better?

The camaraderie in the Biggerpockets' community has gone downhill significantly since I joined in 2015. Everyone seems so bitter and jaded these days.