A $1M+ business run on a daily first to market routine
15 years in real estate. Success is a daily routine, not a marketing hack. 3 VAs run the data pipeline.
About
Kevin Davis has wholesaled and flipped houses around Baltimore for 15 years, through big teams, small teams, and solo stretches. Today he runs lean: himself, three virtual assistants, and a short sale team on referral. His daily first to market routine keeps a seven-figure business moving.
Operating market
Baltimore, MD
Favorite features
The Challenge
Kevin Davis has spent 15 years wholesaling and flipping around Baltimore, on a footprint he describes as running from Baltimore to Tennessee. The years were not a straight line. He built a large team, shrank to a small one, and at points ran everything himself. Marketing followed the same pattern: broad campaigns across every niche at once, with easy downloadable lists thrown in to pad the data.
Two problems kept surfacing. First, unfiltered lists buried his team in junk records: $2,000 shells in neighborhoods he no longer wanted to work. Second, monster companies in his market were throwing far more marketing money at the same sellers. On top of that, this is his second or third team build, and the earlier ones ran on loose onboarding. He gave underperformers the benefit of the doubt for too long and paid for it. The business needed to get narrower and more disciplined at the same time.
What They Built
Narrowing 15 years of range down to three niche filters
Kevin calls himself a transaction engineer who can do most deals. He niched his lead generation anyway. Three first to market filters now feed the funnel: pre-foreclosures and foreclosures, probates, and tax records. Every record also passes a value filter, so low-value shells never reach a caller. Vacant properties get pulled into their own bucket. Anything that hits one of the niche lists jumps straight into his record process, first.
Putting three VAs on the pipeline so records never wait
One VA pulls the data. Two more run outbound and inbound outreach. Records missing numbers get skip traced, and anything still showing no numbers after two passes is routed to mail. Kevin admits the immediate mail step has been lagging, and he calls that out himself. VAs purge and clean everything before it lands in the ready to market bucket, and only then does the dialer run.
So my first job is to make certain everybody else can do their job.
Being first in the door before the lists get crowded
Kevin is not trying to close on the first call, although he will when the seller is ready. The goal is contact and rapport before anyone else has the record.
But I'd rather be the first in the door to make contact at minimum. Because once the data gets out there, we have so many people contacting them that people get very turned off very quickly from calls that they don't know.
Recycling every no on a two-year cycle
Nothing gets thrown away. Not interested records enter a quarterly rehash of ringless voicemail and hand-picked texts, offset by quarters, out to a two-year cycle. Cold leads get 45, 90, or 180 day follow-up tasks depending on temperature. Warm leads run a staggered 3, 5, 7, 10, and 14 day sequence. Fully exhausted records get a deep dive for relatives, then a wiped attempt count and a trip back through the funnel.
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
The clicking point for Kevin was treating the size of his team as an edge instead of a handicap. Big-budget competitors in his market outspend him on marketing every month. He stopped trying to match them and got narrow and fast instead.
I have a small team, so I know I have, you know, in our market, there are monster, you know, companies that have a lot of money they're throwing at marketing, but they're not able to get as nimble as I can.
Three filters, three VAs, first in the door. The daily routine is the strategy, repeated without exception.
The Results
The routine now carries a seven-figure business on a three-VA payroll. One first to market flip shows the math. An out-of-state seller in Southern Maryland, contacted first, with the contract handled before they ever came to town. Purchase at about $250,000, resale at $403,000, and about a $50,000 profit split after the renovation and a flaked first buyer. About eight flips this year are sold or in the process of selling, with the wholesale pipeline running underneath as it always has.
The before and after is simple. Before: broad marketing to every niche and crowded lists worked late. After: three niche filters, cleaned data, and first contact, repeated every single day. Same 15 years of skill, pointed at fewer records.
If you can't train them to do the job, and most of the jobs are trainable, I've done all of them and continue to do some, if you're not the right person, you just won't pick it up. It just is what it is.
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