Bypass Wholesalers and Realtors: How to Get Direct Deals

TLDR

I paid a $20,000 assignment fee on my first deal and later paid a six-figure fee on an apartment deal. Going direct to sellers can keep more room in your own deal, but it requires a list, compliant outreach, follow-up, and money or labor.

Table of Contents

• Why Middleman Fees Are Killing Your Margin
• The Process in One Line
• Getting the List
• Stacking the List
• Skip Tracing and Contact Methods
• Mail Providers and What They Do
• When the Call Comes In
• You Don’t Have to Do This
• FAQ

Why Middleman Fees Are Killing Your Margin

My first deal had a $20,000 wholesale assignment fee on it. That sounds huge, but it’s not even that big compared to some I’ve paid since. I recently paid a six-figure assignment fee on an apartment complex.

Wholesalers are getting great deals. Imagine having that $20,000 back as safety margin in your deal instead of in someone else’s pocket.

The bigger the equity gap you start with, the more safety you have. The less chance you have of losing. Yes we want great deals, but the deeper point is that margin is insurance.

I ran a million-dollar-a-year wholesale company. We did over 100 deals a year. It’s taxing work at that volume, but to do a handful of deals a year for yourself, it’s very doable. And you can get some seriously good deals.

The Process in One Line

Get a list of homeowners. Skip trace to get phone numbers and mailing addresses. Mail them or call them. Wait for calls back. Go look at the house. Make an offer. Close.

That’s it. Everything else is nuance.

Direct to seller is how wholesalers eat. Doing it yourself means the same deals come to you instead.

Getting the List

A list of homeowners is the raw material. A few of the main providers:

Look into each one yourself. The source says these services can provide owner and mailing information plus estimated mortgage and equity fields. Treat estimates as screening data, not verified debt or value, and confirm each provider’s current sources and permitted uses.

Stacking the List

Stacking is how you get from a raw list of every homeowner in a zip code to a targeted list of people who are more likely to sell at a discount.

A few stacking filters I use:

• Neighborhoods. Pick specific neighborhoods. Not a whole city. Specific pockets where you want to buy.
• High equity. The list provider estimates equity. Someone with $130,000 mortgage on a $200,000 house has about $70,000 in equity. High-equity owners can actually sell at a discount.
• Years owned. People who have owned over five years. Long-term owners have more flexibility.
• Missed tax payments. That indicates financial pain. High equity plus missed taxes plus long hold time is a real seller profile.
• Out of state or absentee owners. People who don’t live in the house are often tired of it.

Combine relevant filters to narrow a broad list into a more targeted audience. The source does not prescribe a universal number of filters or promise a particular list size.

Pro Tip

Send mail to the homeowner’s own address, not the subject property. A lot of your targets are absentee owners, so mailing the subject house means the tenant gets your postcard, not the owner.

Skip Tracing and Contact Methods

After you have the list, run it through a skip tracer. PropStream and PropertyRadar have built-in skip tracing, but there are plenty of standalone services.

The skip tracer may return multiple phone numbers and email addresses, and it may be wrong. In the source, phone one was often the target while phone two could be a parent or another associated person. Verify identity, honor opt-outs, and do not expose or reuse the data outside the lawful purpose for which it was obtained.

From there you have three main ways to reach them:

• Mail. Send a postcard or letter to the owner’s mailing address. Most passive on your time. Costs more per contact.
• Cold calls. Dial the list yourself or hire callers. It takes labor, and the source warns that calling has rules and that the list must be scrubbed for do-not-call numbers.
• Cold email. The source says skip tracing may return email addresses and warns that unsolicited outreach can make people angry. It does not give a response-rate claim or a compliance workflow. The FTC’s CAN-SPAM guide explains federal requirements for commercial email; other laws and provider rules may also apply.

In the recording, I said I no longer treated high-volume texting as viable because of carrier restrictions. That was an operating observation, not a legal guide to calls, texts, or email.

The recording names Batch Dialer and Enzo Dialer as examples that existed then. It also says I had used Call Geeks in the past, but some monitored calls were poor. The alternative I named was recruiting and training your own virtual assistants through OnlineJobs.ph. Those were examples from the recording, not current endorsements.

Mail Providers and What They Do

If you’re going the mail route, use a provider that handles print and send for you. Some of the main ones:

Standard postcards run around 50 to 60 cents each. Handwritten-style letters run north of a buck. Higher cost means fewer pieces in the mail, but better open rates on each one.

Every provider lets you template with mail-merge fields. “Hey [Name], I saw your house at [Address].” They pull from your skip-traced list and personalize the mail. You pay per piece and they send.

Common Mistake

Sending one round of mail and assuming a response is guaranteed. The source describes spending several thousand dollars on a round and getting no calls, so judge the channel as a real marketing expense, not a vending machine.

Your phone number on the postcard is your home base. Local area code. A website people can find that shows you’re real. Local address. That filters you out of the “out-of-state investor” bucket and builds trust before the call.

When the Call Comes In

Phone rings. Angry person sometimes. Real seller sometimes. You set an appointment, you go walk the house.

That’s where the fliporithm calculator comes in. I built it originally so I could sit with a seller and say, “What do you think your house is worth after it’s fixed up?” They say $300,000. You run the math together. Renovation looks like $34,870. So based on what we can do, the most I can pay is $179,450.

The source stops before the sales script. It shows how I walked through the math with the seller. The inputs still have to be verified, and the resulting offer has to work for both sides.

You Don’t Have to Do This

For years I bought houses off the mls straight from real estate agents. Made it work. Grew the business. For more years I bought from wholesalers. Also made it work.

You don’t have to go direct to seller to win. You can build a real business buying retail or through wholesalers. I did.

But at some point, every hand reaching into your pocket becomes the thing you want to fix. Years of my career have been me pulling those hands out one at a time. Going direct is one of the biggest pulls.

The thing that actually matters is doing deals. If you’re stuck in a cycle of setting up mail campaigns before you’ve ever closed a house, that’s the problem. Go buy one. Do the flip. Then come back and figure out how to get better deals.

FAQ

How much money do I need to start a mail campaign?

There is no universal minimum in the source. It gives examples of roughly 50 to 60 cents for basic postcards and more than a dollar for pinned-letter mail, and it warns that a round costing several thousand dollars can produce no calls.

Is cold calling still legal?

The source says calling has rules, says to scrub against the do-not-call list, and warns that you can get in trouble for ignoring them. It is not a compliance lesson. The FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule guide explains federal telemarketing rules generally; have qualified counsel determine which federal, state, and local rules apply to your exact outreach before calling.

How do I know which list filters will work in my market?

The walkthrough shows list stacking with a buy box, equity, years owned, tax delinquency, absentee ownership, and other pain points. It does not claim one combination works in every market.

I’m brand new. Should I skip this and buy retail first?

No. The source says you can still build a business buying through the mls or wholesalers and should not let direct-to-seller marketing stop you from getting started. It does not prescribe one required first-deal channel.

What’s the cheapest way to start?

The source compares mail, calls, and hired callers but does not name one universal cheapest route. Pick a channel only after accounting for list cost, labor, tools, and its compliance burden.