$37,500 in a month from a 15-heir foreclosure
$37.5K wholesale fee on a single complex multi-heir deal. Built $100K business from leads others skipped.
About
John has worked real estate full time in San Antonio since 2015, rehabbing and flipping before narrowing to foreclosures with title problems. He targets the properties other investors drop: multiple heirs, liens, delinquent taxes, and vacant houses.
Operating market
San Antonio, Texas, a non-judicial state where a 21-day notice can put a house on the courthouse steps the next month. High Texas property taxes make vacant houses expensive to sit on, which is exactly what he targets.
Favorite features
The Challenge
John has been in real estate full time since 2015 in San Antonio. He has flipped houses, torn them down, rebuilt them, and run $120K renovations, six projects at once at the peak. Some days he drove 150 miles chasing contractors without ever leaving the city. Then the market shifted. Sellers locked into 2020-2022 interest rates stopped moving, and generic absentee and homeowner marketing stopped producing.
The standard data playbook had the same problem. Waiting on a list provider meant arriving late: by the time a foreclosure list gets sold, John and several competitors have already hit the house. One seller told him her phone rang 20 to 30 times a day until she bought a new number. Even his own network pushed back on the alternative. A friend looked at a 3,000-property niche list and said it was nowhere near big enough of a data set. John's answer was to want smaller lists with more problems on them.
What They Built
Running every list against a 234,000-record equity pool
John downloaded a target price range of properties into DataSift and checks everything against it. When a record stacks high equity, delinquent taxes, and a vacancy flag, it moves to the front of the line. Texas property taxes make a vacant house expensive fast, which is exactly the pressure he looks for.
I don't want huge data sets. I want smaller data sets with a lot of problems.
Beating the list providers to the county postings
Every morning his team pulls the county's fresh foreclosure postings, keeps only deeds of trust 12 years or older, skip traces every name into a spreadsheet, and uploads to the CRM. Then they dial as fast as the system allows. Some owners tell him they did not know they were in foreclosure until he called.
Digging for the owners nobody could reach
Dead phone numbers are a buy signal, not a dead end. VAs power dial through the vacancy lists, and tools like TLO trace the heirs behind tax-delinquent probates.
You just keep digging until you find somebody. Cause like the harder you have to dig, the more likelihood somebody completely forgot about this thing.
Consolidating 15 heirs before the auction
On the featured deal, a high equity record already in his system surfaced in foreclosure with 15 heirs holding fractional interest. His team traced every heir, got deeds signed over to the one brother, and filed an affidavit of heirship with two independent witnesses. Texas allows that document to bypass probate entirely, and the title company accepted it for clear title.
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
John does not wait for a list provider. Every morning his team pulls the county's new foreclosure postings. They keep only deeds of trust 12 years or older, where the equity usually is. Each record gets skip traced, uploaded to DataSift, and dialed as fast as the team can get through them. Inside DataSift he runs a 234,000-record equity pool and stacks the pain points: delinquent taxes, vacancy, deceased owners.
The featured deal: 15 heirs on one house, a mom who died in 2004, and a foreclosure weeks away. John tracked down every heir, got the affidavit of heirship signed, and bought the house for $55,000 cash. He contracted it at $92,500 without touching it: $37,500 in proceeds, within a month of first contact.
What I really enjoy doing is the type of deals where somebody comes across as like, ah, it's too many problems. They're not answering my phone. I'm just going to move on, move on to somebody else, find something else. Like I see that. I'm like, all right, there's gold there.
The Results
The numbers on the 15-heir deal: bought for $55K cash, resold under contract at $92.5K with zero renovation work, $37.5K in proceeds. From first contact to a funded closing took about a month, with the bank's auction set for the following Tuesday. The title company ran all 15 heirs for judgments and liens and found none.
The before and after sits inside the same deal. Another wholesaler had the family at $75K and dragged their feet until the contract died. John quoted $55K, told them exactly how he would clear the title, and closed on the Friday before foreclosure. That approach, worked deal after deal across tax delinquent and vacant properties, is what built the $100K+ business from leads other investors intentionally skipped.
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