Five missing heirs found to close one Houston probate deal
Went beyond the transaction to advocate for her client, proving relationships drive repeat business.
About
Leslie Luna is a Houston wholesaler and flipper who spent 10 years as an ICU nurse. She and her husband started with a house hacked duplex in 2017, and she began wholesaling in 2019. A DataSift user since 2021, she specializes in probate deals that demand deep heir research.
Operating market
Houston, TX
Favorite features
The Challenge
Leslie Luna spent 10 years as an ICU nurse before real estate. She and her husband house hacked a duplex in 2017, and she started wholesaling in 2019. By 2020 he had quit his W-2 so they could flip houses together. She had been a DataSift user since 2021, but admits she was not using it for what it could be. That changed when she watched a user interview with Josh Wagner and copied his list stack: deceased plus tax delinquent.
One property stood out near a flip they were running. The house sat untouched, matching its Google Maps image from two years earlier, and the county appraisal record signaled the owner had died. Then the trail collapsed. The owner's only son had died back in 1997. Her birth certificate listed a father by initials only, the way records worked back then. Obituaries hid women behind married names. None of it was digitized, and no living heir appeared anywhere on paper.
What They Built
Turning a death record into a family tree
Texas birth certificates go public after 50 years, so Leslie pulled the owner's from the county. The father's initials sent her to a courthouse two hours away, flipping through paper records for hours until she found the parents' marriage certificate and his real name.
I was literally like Erin Brockovich in there taking pictures.
Bringing in a specialist instead of guessing
In over her head on her first deep heir search, she called Stephanie and they split the digging. They combed old newspapers where women appeared only by married names and initials. The mother's obituary finally cracked it: two half siblings, leading to a living nephew in his seventies and four great nephews.
Contacting heirs nobody could find
One great nephew in Austin ignored every channel. She found his house from a Facebook photo with a Google image search, then tried the pizza method. He refused the pizza, so she sent Crumbl cookies with a note listing his brothers' names. He called right away.
I added him on cash app, I try to send him a message, I was trying to email him, I literally did everything.
The adopted-out heir signed over through her title company. For the heir jailed before sentencing, she used a visitation app to get a notary onto his visitor list.
Advocating past the closing table
Inside the house everything sat untouched, down to the pillow and phone by the owner's chair. Nobody knew where the woman was. Leslie's nursing instincts read the broken door as first responders. She called the county examiner's office, then the funeral home, and found the owner cremated and unclaimed on a shelf for two years.
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 moment was not at closing. It was at the cemetery, standing with a worker over a $350 opening beside the son's grave, holding ashes no relative had claimed in two years. Her husband got caught at work, so she went alone. The worker asked if she wanted to say a few words. She told the woman she had tried to respect her things, then watched her buried with her son at last.
Even if I only made five dollars on that deal, as long as I was able to put her where she was, like, that's all that mattered.
The Results
The deal closed with five heirs signed: a nephew in his seventies and four great nephews spread across Texas, one of them adopted out at 16. The heirship research took Leslie and Stephanie two to three months. The jailed heir stretched closing out to many months more. She never names her fee on this deal, and that is deliberate. Her own line is that five dollars would have been enough.
What the deal actually paid was capability. It was the most in-depth investigative work she has done on a deal, and it trained her to run heir research on her own. She has not needed outside help on a deal since. And the seller came home. Leslie claimed the ashes, paid $350 for the opening and closing, and buried her with her son, under the double headstone that already carried her name.
I would not be able to even be here without REI SIFT. I mean truly like it been so life changing.
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