First to market on 200 probates a month in Minnesota
From zero real estate sales experience to a first to market probate system built solo: 83 records and a hot lead in month one.
About
Cecilia Sirovina left the company she worked with in California to start her own wholesaling operation as a one-person team. She wholesales to feed a rental portfolio she already runs in Minnesota, two short-term rentals bought off the MLS.
Operating market
She markets in Minnesota, the state she knows and bought in, while living in California. Her probate pulls cover three counties, all filed through one Minnesota court website.
Favorite features
The Challenge
Cecilia moved to California and spent years working with an investment group there, trying to crack one of the most competitive markets in the country. When she broke off to start her own company, she had no real estate sales experience and no pipeline. She had watched California operators overpay for marketing, burn budgets on PPC and cold callers, and feed every returned dollar into next month's overhead. She did not want that model.
Shiny object syndrome was the other fight. Foreclosures tempted her, but Minnesota is a non-judicial state where notices post six weeks before sale and pulling them from newspapers is tedious. She even paid $97 for a PropStream trial she forgot to cancel, downloaded the foreclosure and tax data, and never uploaded it. "I wanted to do it all because it didn't feel fast enough," she says. The decision that settled it: one niche, probate, worked wide across three counties until it is mastered.
What They Built
Pulling probate filings the day they hit the courthouse
Cecilia figured out how to pull probate filings from her counties daily, case number by case number, through the Minnesota court website. The filings carry the petitioner's address and sometimes a phone number, which feeds skip tracing with correct numbers.
Last week, I finally figured out how to pull the probate filings in my market daily.
Killing the copy-paste with a Google Form
The bootcamp spreadsheet needs address, city, and state split into separate columns before upload. Instead of copying and pasting every record, she built a Google Form that drops each filing into the spreadsheet already formatted for her DataSift account.
Running the sequence: call, text, voicemail, then mail
Her April pull produced 83 records, and 54 of the petitioners were absentee owners. Mail goes to the absentees first to keep costs down, while everyone gets calls, texts, and voicemails.
I'm only sending mail to these at first to be cost effective and still call, text, voicemail everyone.
Wiring the phone into the CRM
Kixie integrates with her account, so every call gets a disposition and a recording logged on the record. Her own addition: she uploads the recordings to an AI that summarizes each call into notes.
Before and After
Before DataSift
- Achieved Data Clarity
- Consistent Deal Flow
- Inconsistent Deal Flow
- Poor Marketing Flow
- Little Data Clarity
- Relied On Google Sheets
- Consistent Deal Flow
- Data Clarity / Organization
- Wholesales, Flips And Does Retail
- Strong Marketing Flow
- Didn't Understand Data Management
- Strong Real Estate Agent
- Wanted To Break Into Wholesaling But Didn't Know How
- Healthy Scale
- Data Driven Decisions
- Consistent Deals
- Strong Marketing Flow
- Inconsistent
- Little Data Insight
- Unorganized Bulk Marketing
- Strategic Focus on Niches
- Enhanced Lead Flow and Certainty
- Streamlined Marketing Process
- Efficient Use of Data
- Direct Mail & Deep Prospecting
- Broad, Unfocused Strategy
- Inconsistency in Results
- Dependency on Luck
- Marketing Clarity
- 6 Figure Months
- High Deal Volume
- Strong Marketing Flow
- Proper Data Management
- Weak Marketing Flow
- Poor Data Management
- Lack of Focus
- Manual Efforts
- Successful Scale
- Total Data Clarity
- Clear Marketing Approach
- Large Deal Spreads
- Improper Data Management
- Poor Marketing Method
- Inconsistent Deal Flow
- Strong Marketing Flow
- Clear Data Management
- Clear Data Management
- Successful Scale
- Many ways to close deals
- Large deal spreads
- Poor data management
- Unable to scale properly
- Poor marketing flow
- Smaller Deal Spreads
- Increased Deal Volume
- Platform Utilization
- Realtor Collaboration
- Funding Efforts
- Lots Of Deals
- Data Driven Decisions
- Strong Marketing Flow
- Sales And Marketing Clarity
- Poor Data Management
- Poor Marketing Flow
- Relied On Bulk Marketing
- Lack of Clarity
- Automated Acquisition
- Strong Marketing Flow
- Data Driven Decisions
- Structured Follow-ups
- Increased Lead Generation
- Achieved Sales And Marketing Clarity
- Manual Acquisition Processes
- Ineffective Marketing Flow
- Minimal Lead Insights
- Poor Follow Up Flow
- Inconsistent Lead Generation
- Lacked Sales And Marketing Clarity
After DataSift
- Tens of Thousands Spent on Masterminds That Never Fit
- Got Crushed Wholesaling Cleveland Virtually From New York
- Career-biggest payoff under agreement after a year of deep prospecting
- A 1,300-lead vacant property gold mine in two counties
- One shared database with his agent wife for three years
- Guru models demanded VAs and a big company he never wanted
- His investing and her listing business never connected
- Ten years flipping houses with no shared system
- One Call and One Text Found His Last Buyer
- A Deal About Every Three Weeks, Pushing for Two
- Eight Deals Working in the Middle of the Slowdown
- A $7,000 Mail Campaign Went Out at 56 Percent of Value
- Three to Five Active Listings in Every Subdivision He Underwrites
- Colorado Prices Down 9 to 11 Percent by May
- Callers Hunt Correct Numbers, Closers Take Over
- Returned Mail Tagged And Worked As Its Own Bucket
- 6 Deals In One Month From Year-Old Data
- Eight Months In Before Working The Data Right
- Bulk Dials On Call Tools Produced Nothing
- 100K Records Added, Team Spinning Its Wheels
- Mail, three call attempts, then the rehash pool
- 150 records a month, skip traced twice before dialing
- Full authority probates only, five Southern California counties
- 15 to 20 grand across seven months of last year
- Calling agents and MLS, never direct to seller
- No CRM, just a phone, a computer, and email
- $56K Largest Single Assignment
- A VA Pulls County Probate Data Daily
- $5,300 Total Expenses, About $441 A Month
- $210K In Fees From 7 Deals In A Year
- Every Conversation Started Cold
- No Pipeline, No Aged Database, No Team
- Random Calling On Whatever Records He Found
- Started September 2023 With No Probate Experience
- $95K Spread Closed In 21 Days
- All Four Questions Answered On Every Lead
- 120 Qualified Sellers In The Pipeline
- $1M+ Company With SMS As The Core Channel
- Tracking It All In Podio, Then Another CRM
- Doing What Everybody Else Was Doing
- Downloading Every Record Providers Would Give Him
- Churn And Burn Message Blasts
- One Contract For Every 10 Leads
- 100% Of Deals Sourced Inside The System
- $1M+ In Assignment Fees In 2023
- Almost All Deal Flow From Driving For Dollars
- Bouncing Between Tools Looking For One That Stuck
- Leads Tracked In Excel Sheets, Antiquated And Scattered
- First Flip Finished And Live On Market
- Partner Funding Instead Of 18-22% Hard Money
- Probate Cleared In A Week And A Half
- About One Deal Per 15 To 20 Doors
- Door Knocks The Foreclosure List Top To Bottom
- Severely In Debt, Couldn't Keep Up
- A Couple Of Years To Get In Gear
- Worked Hard For Two Weeks, Then Stopped
- 12 Years In Oil And Gas, Then Nothing Left
- $10K Deal From A Q3 Not Interested Lead
- Follow Up Brought The Seller Down $40,000
- Two First To Market Contracts In One Week
- Dedicated Caller Works The First To Market Flow
- Eviction Records Pulled Straight From Two Counties
- Outbound Marketing Completely Phased Out
- Credit Card Debt From Bad Marketing Advice
- Two Years Of Shiny Object Crash And Burn
- Absurd Data Subscription Costs Draining The Business
- $61,644 Net From A Lien List Rehash
- Tracks Wrong Numbers, Cuts Skip Trace Spend
- Emails The Township For Exact Lien Payoffs
- Rehash Filters: Mobile Numbers, No Response, Liens
- Next Day Follow Up Text Gets The Reply
- Lien Lead Silent Since February 2024
- No Follow Up Text After A Silent First Message
- Unknowingly Recycling The Same Data
- Pulling 10,000 Record Lists The Old Way
- 15 Heirs Signed, $37,500 In One Month
- Skip Trace, Upload To Sift, Call Fast
- Small Problem Lists Over Huge Data Sets
- Targets Deeds Of Trust 12 Years Or Older
- Checks County Foreclosure Postings Every Morning
- Bulk Absentee And Owner Marketing Dried Up
- 150 Mile Days Driving Project To Project
- Six Renovations Running At One Time
- Full Time Rehabbing Since 2015
- Sellers Now Calling In From Her Mail
- One Hot Lead Plus Tons Of Correct Numbers
- Mails Only The 54 Absentee Petitioners First
- Google Form Auto Formats Data For Upload
- Pulls Probate Filings Daily Across Three Counties
- Left A Company, Unsure She Could Pull It Off
- Tedious Copy And Paste List Formatting
- Struggled To Pull Data From Her County
- Years In California Trying To Figure It Out
- 135,000 Records Organized Into Buckets
- A Lead Every 10-15 Calls
- Pre-probate Inherited Niche, 60% Sell Within Two Years
- New Process Closed Its First Deal In 30 Days
- Thursday Deep Research, Offer Accepted By Monday
- PropStream Lists And Bought Probate Data
- Return Mail Dead-ended, Records Sat Dormant For Years
What changed
Cecilia figured out how to pull probate filings from her counties daily, case numbers included, straight from the Minnesota court website. A Google Form she built formats each record for upload into DataSift, so she skips the copy and paste. She calls, texts, and leaves voicemail for every petitioner, and mails the absentee ones first to stay cost effective.
Of her first 83 April records, 54 petitioners were absentee. The full month came to about 200 probate filings across the state. Day one of calling produced one hot lead and tons of correct numbers, with call-ins now coming off the mail.
A lot of people track their leads in their CRM, but they're not tracking the data side of things and how to really squeeze the deals out of the records that you've already purchased.
The Results
The April numbers: 83 probate records pulled, 54 of them absentee petitioners, so roughly two of every three records got a cost-effective mail piece on top of the calls. Her first day of calling produced a hot lead and a stack of correct numbers. Direct mail is now generating inbound calls, and the statewide April probate count came to about 200 records.
The contrast is the before and after. A year ago she was inside someone else's operation in California with nothing of her own. Now a one-person company runs a daily pull, mail, and call flow with a rehash backlog compounding behind it. No deal had closed on camera yet, and she says so. Her plan for the first assignment fee is already set: reinvest it into her first hire for data pulling or outreach.
If they can do it, I can do it.
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