40 properties in under 4 months on full-time W2s
Two construction managers stacked a $50 county tax delinquent list with Listsource absentee data and wholesaled about 40 properties before ever leaving their W2s.
About
David and Preston run Forefront Investments in Tulsa, Oklahoma while holding full-time construction management jobs. They started wholesaling in October 2019 and covered about 40 properties in four months, including a 30-house package from one cold call.
Operating market
Tulsa, OK
Favorite features
The Challenge
In August 2019 David and Preston were construction managers sharing an office at a Tulsa general contractor. Preston drove 45 minutes each way, and 12-hour days were normal. They wanted to flip a house, so they called realtors, set MLS searches, and shopped Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. Nothing penciled. They tried door knocking and driving for dollars next and were not seeing much for the effort.
A coworker connected them to a local investor named Armani, and one coaching call reset the whole approach. Until then their system was a printed spreadsheet and two cell phones in a parking lot. Armani pointed them to list stacking, Podio, and Tyler Austin's YouTube channel, all in the same day. Podio was, in their words, "a rough start." They kept the skepticism but funded the build anyway, redirecting the money they usually spent going out on weekends. "Let's do it the right way, let's build a solid foundation."
What They Built
Stacking a $50 county list before the first dial
Their first data buy was about $650: a tax delinquent list from the county for roughly $50 and high equity absentee records from Listsource. Around 15,000 records went into DataSift, and the first campaign was a two-stack of those lists. The vacancy filter surfaced their first deal, a $40,000 ask they contracted at $20,000 for a quick $5,000 assignment. Total cost to launch the business came in under $1,000. The advice they give anyone starting now:
Get a couple lists and stack them to find that, you know, maximize your motivation and just go for it.
Handing off the dials inside two weeks
David and Preston logged 10 to 15 hours of cold calling each, then hired a local caller at $10 an hour. He pulled five to six leads a day from 90 second conversations and locked up their first contracts. Six weeks later they let him go; "his willingness to learn was zero." A Philippines VA at $6 an hour replaced him, about $1,000 a month, calling weekends too. They hired and fired six people in four months and kept dialing through all of it.
Selling 29 houses through property management companies
They had never marketed a portfolio. They posted the 29-house package in the Tulsa real estate investors Facebook group, then David started cold calling property management companies for quotes.
I'm a wholesaler, I'm trying to sell twenty nine properties here, and I have some buyers that are interested.
The best quote came back at 7 percent on an $18,500 monthly rent roll. Two managers sent the package to investor clients, which produced a backup offer at $825,000. They took the $800,000 buyer instead, the one who accepted the seller's no walkthrough clause.
Texting county niche lists for about $200
From mid December they chased foreclosure, probate, eviction, and water shutoff lists at the county, hard lists to get. In January they "started hitting niche lists with Textmagic" on top of the cold calling. About $200 in texts locked up three contracts inside three weeks.
Before and After
Before 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
After 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
What changed
December 4, 2019, two months in. Their cold caller reached a Tulsa landlord on the tax delinquent and high equity two-stack, and the note was short: he would sell, he had more properties, he was ready to retire. David called back the same day. "He didn't know how many properties he had when I called him." A search of the seller's name on the county site pulled 31 records. They met in person and worked through the list one address at a time, the seller quoting every rent from memory. Two months of dialing had put a 30-house portfolio in front of two W2 construction managers.
The Results
The December 4 lead became one master contract: 30 properties at $725,000. They sold 29 as a single package for $800,000 and kept the last house. The assignment came to about $73,000 after costs, and Tyler rounds the fee to $75,000 on the call. The house they kept is 1,800 square feet, worth $170,000 to $180,000, renting at $900 with about $1,300 possible after turnover. Add it up and one cold call produced roughly $253,000 in cash and equity.
Four months in, the totals: about 12 contracts covering roughly 40 properties on about $10,000 of total spend, including a house bought for $2,500. They generated 347 leads, about 35 leads per deal, against the 60 Tyler calls typical. A $20,000 assignment from an absentee cold call was set to close the Tuesday after filming. Preston's read: "Literally the last four months have been the most extreme roller coaster I think David and I have ever been on."
It's not rocket science. All it literally is, just do it.
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