Cold Outreach

What it is

Cold outreach is marketing to homeowners directly to find deals before a wholesaler or anyone else does. Basically, you’re doing what wholesalers are doing — I ran a million-dollar a year wholesale company and did a hundred-plus deals each year doing exactly this. It’s taxing at that scale. But to do the few deals a year that you personally need? Great.

Here’s the basic route. Get a list of homeowners. Take that list and skip trace it — that’s a service that gets you the phone numbers and email addresses of those people. Then call them or mail them.

Back in the day we texted at scale. That’s not really viable anymore because the phone carriers have shut that down. That was the heyday. Okay. So now it’s calls, or you just use the mailing addresses and send physical mail. Mail is more expensive but then people are calling you instead of you having to go call them.

Main list providers: PropStream, Property Radar, List Source. They’re going to have different parameters where you can stack lists. Take a neighborhood, add high equity people who’ve owned for over five years, add missed tax payments as a distress signal. That’s list stacking.

Why it matters

Everybody has their hand in your pocket as a real estate investor. Wholesalers charging $20,000 or $40,000 assignment fees, real estate agents on both sides, lenders with points, the whole thing. It took me years of trying to get all those hands out of my pockets. Going direct to sellers is one of the biggest ones to get rid of.

You’re getting the same deal the seller was going to take anyway. You just cut out all the middlemen. And when you’re building your own deals and not depending on whoever calls you with a pocket listing, you actually have control.

That said — you do not have to do this. For a long time I bought houses off the MLS straight from real estate agents and still made it work. I also bought from wholesalers for years and still made it work. Don’t let this overwhelm you from getting started. I always get nervous I’m going to make people feel like they can’t start until they have all this in place. You don’t. Just get in the game.

How it shows up

You run the list through a skip tracer — PropStream and Property Radar both have them built in, or use a standalone service. Now you have phone numbers, probably two per person. Phone one, phone two, because the skip tracer doesn’t know for certain which is them. Phone two might be their mom. You will make some people mad. You just will.

For dialing at volume, there’s batch dialers — they dial multiple numbers at once. That’s why you sometimes get calls from marketers where there’s nobody there. You can also hire VAs to work a list on scripts. Call Geeks is one service I’ve used in the past.

For mail, you go to something like Yellow Letter or Open Letter. They have real handwritten-style pieces with higher open rates. More expensive — over a buck each. Old-school postcards were like 50 to 60 cents, lower response rate. You plug in a template that personalizes it with their name and the subject property address.

Set up your home base first: a basic website, a local phone number, not a PO box. Sellers need to know you’re a real local person, not some out-of-stater trying to lowball them.

Related

skip tracing, direct mail, list building, off market, wholesale, motivated seller, home base