$200K in 6 weeks from 250 prospects on a $500 budget
250 stacked prospects beat months of shotgun lists: 13 contracts and about $200K in six weeks on a $500 monthly budget.
About
Josh Newman wholesales houses in Birmingham, Alabama. He lost his remodeling business in 2016, spent 2018 in trucking, and learned wholesaling in June 2019 with no savings. Six months of grinding later, a data reset turned 250 stacked prospects into 13 contracts and about $200,000 in six weeks.
Operating market
Birmingham, AL
Favorite features
The Challenge
Josh learned what wholesaling was in June 2019 and started with almost nothing. He wrote down addresses while driving for dollars, looked up numbers on free people-search sites, and dialed from his cell phone. He tried Mojo as his first dialer and did not like it. His first paid deal came four weeks in: $13,000 from two contracts, found on the first call through a 15-name cash buyers list.
Then the grind set in. From July to December he closed around $40,000, spread so thin he stayed behind on bills. Five contracts in a row fell through. Some were priced too high, one seller sold behind his back, and one sat in a zip code where the buyers had already left. He was loading every list he could find and calling all of it. "It literally comes down to I can buy groceries or I can pay for my REI budget," he says of those months. The budget was $500. It still is.
What They Built
Breaking liens into their own lists
At the end of 2019 Josh rebuilt his whole data approach. Instead of one blanket liens list from PropStream, he pulled HOA liens, mechanics liens, judgments, and income tax judgments separately, plus failed MLS listings. Jefferson County splits its records across municipalities, so he went town by town for code violation lists most investors never touch. On some of those lists, in his words, "I'm the only one that's going out and getting them."
I would pull HOA liens, mechanics liens, judgments, I'll break everything down so to where my data is really like individualized.
Stacking down to 250 prospects
With everything loaded into DataSift, he cut the bad zip codes and built two campaigns. Two-stack matches in the top three turnover zip codes made one list of 200. Three-stack matches everywhere else made a second list of 50. His question was simple: "How can I get so much great data and lay it all out here so I can just laser focus on stacks only?" Equity and absentee lists stayed in rotation for daily volume, but the stacks got the real attention.
Mastering one channel: cold calling
Josh runs a 400-dial day on a triple-line dialer. Prospecting fills the first half of the morning, lead follow-up the second, and he drives to appointments only when needed.
I never have even tried to do any RVMs, texts, direct mail. I haven't done anything except learn how to master cold calling. Learn how to systematize it. Learn how to do it properly.
Marketing to bigger houses on purpose
Most wholesalers cap their list values low. Josh set his filters at $50,000 to $650,000 because his remodeling background taught him rapport with affluent owners. "I'm going to set a goal. I want to do the biggest wholesale deal ever in Birmingham," he says. The rest was rapport: "It starts with genuinely caring about the people."
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
The reset came at the end of December 2019. His trucking partner had gone back on the road because the deals were too thin to live on. Josh stayed, spent nights going through his records, and asked himself why he was failing. "It was plain and simple because I was way too shotgun. I was way too all over the place," he says. So he redid the whole way he approached data and campaigns: separate lien types, filtered zip codes, stacked lists only. The first call through the new 200-name list produced a contract the same day.
The Results
The 50-name list produced two deals worth about $105,000. The big one came off a municipal code violation list. A retired couple in Destin owned a $650,000 Birmingham house their tenant had wrecked, with $500,000 still owed on it. Josh contracted it at $225,000, sold it to a buyer at $310,000, and the sellers brought over $277,000 to closing to be done with it. That was an $85,000 deal. Their second house added a projected spread of about $20,000.
The 200-name list opened with a bankruptcy contract locked the same day as the first call, a projected $17,000 spread. Then came the week of this recording: 11 contracts, including a 10-property rental portfolio locked at $520,000 against a $1.1 million ARV.
Add it up: 13 contracts from 250 prospects, about one for every 19 people on the lists. Roughly $200,000 closed and projected in six weeks, against $40,000 across his whole first six months. About $25,000 had hit his pocket by the recording, with the budget still $500 a month. His KPIs stay rough, tracked by hand in free Podio, and he says so.
You can't give up. Cuz you only fail if you quit.
Get results like this. Start your free trial.
Related Stories
.avif)
What our users have to say
Get results like this. Start your free trial.
Common questions before you start
Is there a free trial?
Yes DataSift offers a 7 day free trial. In those 7 days you’ll receive all necessary materials to learn exactly how to leverage Sift in your company.
How much does DataSift cost?
Our lowest plan starts at $149 a month and our highest plan is $1250 a month.
How long does setup take?
Your account ships with the lead management default build already wired. Boards, statuses, tasks, automations — ready on day one. Add your team, import your data, and your lead manager can start working leads the same afternoon.
I'm coming from Podio, REsimpli, or Go High Level. Why switch?
Every CRM needs someone to move leads where they belong. The difference is what catches the misses. Most CRMs hand you an empty box and tell you to build it. DataSift ships with the workflow assembled — boards, statuses, tasks, and 26+ automations already wired. You're not paying for a database. You're paying for the system that already runs your lead management.
How do I migrate over my data from another CRM?
Contact our support team through our support chat and they will give you all necessary materials and information to make sure you get all of your data uploaded exactly how you want it.
Does DataSift work with my dialer?
Yes. Ready Mode, Smart Dialer, Call Tools, Smarter Contact, Aircall and Kixie connect directly. A wrong-number disposition in the dialer flips the phone status in DataSift in real time. A new-lead disposition fires the full Call New Lead sequence. Other dialers connect through CSV upload or Zapier.
