All Forum Posts by: Cornelius Garland

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.

@Catie Fihn I have ample experience with all of the outbound marketing channels, as I've been wholesaling full time since 2015. An important metric to track is how many leads it will take to get one property under contract from cold calling. Based on my company's metrics, we're averaging 100 leads to 1 contract with cold calling. In new virtual markets or cities where the median sales prices of homes are over $400k, it takes 200 leads to get a deal. In 2024, our cold callers averaged 1.5 leads per day, and I had 40 callers on my team.

Let's answer an even more pertinent question: How long will it take to get a contract from cold calling? On average, it took us 60 - 90 days for the hot leads to convert into a contract in 2024. 

If the agency you're using will generate 6 leads per week then you'll realistically get your first contract in 4 months.

Because of these abysmal contract timelines, I'm not suggesting my JV partners or clients utilize cold calling as their primary marketing channel. It was my main marketing channel from 2019 - 2023, but cold texting has since replaced it.

You can get the same lead volume from one day of texting 5,000 sellers as you would with 5 cold callers dialing for a month. At $5 per hour per cold caller, on the low end, your labor expenses will be at $4,000 per month. Texting 5,000 sellers at .0075 cents per text will cost $37.50, and this will generate roughly 50 leads per day. Additionally, the leads from texting are more motivated.

If you're considering cold calling, I would treat it like direct mail - you must go all in on it or else it doesn't make sense as a marketing channel. A part time caller, even on a very targeted and motivated list, will not generate enough leads to get a property under contract in the next 30 days.

I really do not like being the bearer of bad news, but I've seen so many investors go down the marketing route you're taking, and they end up spending all their hard-earned money on methods that do not work well. However, I do think it's the natural progression for many investors, and some lessons are better learned through experience.

At the end of the day, you'll need to choose the marketing channel that best fits your lifestyle, budget, and goals. For some investors, it's direct mail because they're in a rural market with many elder homeowners. For others, voice broadcast is crushing it. At the moment, my research indicates that cold texting is working extremely well in any market and demographic.

Lastly, I do not suggest to cold calling yourself unless you're dialing a very motivated list like an inherited or auction list. It's very difficult to keep up with cold calling daily especially when you're making offers, building a buyers list, and maintaining your family life outside of real estate. When you stop dialing, the leads stop. And when the leads stop, your business stops. As with any marketing channel, you see the best results by consistently reaching out to sellers daily.

I hope this helps and best of luck! You're on the right track and asking all the right questions.

You're welcome. There are certain words we need to avoid so the carriers won't flag us as spam. My message looks something like this: Hi, I'm interested in acquiring your property at 123 Main St. Are you considering parting ways with it?

It's important to avoid these words: sell, cash offer, buy, purchase, interested, etc. Any word that can be considered transactional should be avoided.

10 DLC registration can be a pain, but it's necessary so you can enable the texting feature in any software. I read all the regulations in 2023, and there was an update last month, which required me to update my SOPs. I taught myself how to submit the accounts for approval. It took me several tries the first time, but I've gotten several accounts approved since then. I mainly use REI Reply, and I can send off 5,000 texts per day in each account. I have 10 accounts, and I'm texting major volume daily. We get 50 - 100 leads per day and these sellers aren't in communication with other investors since they do not pick up for cold calls.

I would suggest using a lead gen service like Lead Mining Pros now to gain momentum. However, I would start working on getting a texting platform 10 DLC approved. The hassle is worth it, and cold texting is a blue ocean right now. There are very few marketing channels where there is literally no competition.

Based on the KPIs I'm tracking, yes texting is more effective, and it's not even close. In 2015, I started using direct mail and landed my first several deals this way. Once skip tracing became accessible and reliable, I switched to cold calling primarily as my marketing channel in 2019. Around this time is when I started cold texting. It was effective back then, but it quickly became saturated. During the pandemic, hundreds of new investors were entering the wholesaling business, and it caused immense marketing oversaturation. Some homeowners were getting 50 - 100 texts a week on one house. Consequently, the government introduced legislation in October 2023, which requires every business to register their companies with a federally regulated organization in order to text.

This brings us to today. Now that the laws were introduced, it essentially removed 99% of the investors who were texting. Many investors simply think it's illegal or ineffective. The truth is, the process to get your account 10DLC / A2P verified is not straightforward and the government prefers it like this. If you can overcome the obstacles with getting your account compliant, then it's worth it.

In the last 12 months, the majority of my deals came from cold texting and long term follow up from leads I had in my CRM. Very few came from cold calling and direct mail. I can get 5 - 20 leads per day texting, depending on how many texts I send. Currently, I'm averaging a 1% lead rate - 500 texts sent and 5 leads generated; 1000 texts sent and 10 leads generated, etc.

For cold calling it will take 1 full-time cold caller dialing over a month to get the same amount of leads I can get in a day with texting. It just doesn't make sense to cold call anymore. Until something changes, texting will be my number one marketing channel. I'm glad the regulations were put in place because I can go into any market and dominate it without competition, while keeping my cost per deal low.