One deal a week to three deals a week in four months
Engagement beats conversation. His team texts sellers 10 to 15 minutes before every call and lets deals develop over text before the phone close.
About
Phil has run companies for 30 years and worked real estate for 15, with a flipping business and a separate wholesaling business. He wholesales deals from one of his entities to the other to keep cash flow moving while flips finish. January 2026 was the first time in his career he marketed direct to seller.
Operating market
Kansas City
Favorite features
The Challenge
Phil had been in business 30 years and in real estate 15 when he found DataSift. Every property he ever bought came off the MLS or through other wholesalers. His one attempt at reaching sellers directly, years earlier, was a mail campaign he still calls "$10,000 worth of nothing." So he stayed out of seller marketing entirely and let other people find his deals.
When he decided to try again, he refused to rush it. He went through the challenge, learned the process, and built his systems through the holidays instead of jumping straight in. He launched in January 2026 with a constraint most starters do not have: two closers already on the team who needed to stay busy. That meant starting with PPL and a cold calling company for volume, not the county data he actually wanted. The fruits of January and February did not show until March and April.
What They Built
Lists small enough for one person to call through
Every list starts with a minimum of 30 percent equity and a build year of 2010 or older. Then he stacks distress on top: absentee owner plus vacant at the same time, or foreclosure. Two of the deals he signed in a week and a half were already sitting on one of those pulls.
Everybody on that house pretty much is going to want to sell their house at some point time. And it was a small list that I could have one person click to call through.
A bulk calling engine that never runs dry
His calling company gets 60,000 records a quarter, sent as five lists over five days, a mix of AI-scored data and stacked niche pulls. April was his first month on AI data, one county of five, scored 90 to 100. Every Friday they review dispositions together. Leads hit Slack and a zap drops them straight into his DataSift account.
Texting before every call
The team texts 10 to 15 minutes before dialing, calls, then follows up by text. Claude writes the scripts, and a Sift Line board moves records from Claude text to clear to call and back. One March deal got its offer over text before anyone reached the seller by phone. Trestle keeps the numbers clean so nobody burns dials on dead ends.
Rehash and follow-up as the deal engine
Lists worked in January were being worked again by the middle of February. Longer term follow-up lives on mid and long boards in the Sift Line, and his dad runs the active follow-ups that turn into contracts. Whisper AI dictation took call notes from a 5 or 6 to a 9.5 out of 10. A contract signed in January came from a November PPL lead.
They're going to give you one out of every hundred, you got to turn one out of every hundred into one out of every forty, and you can. You just have to really work it.
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 pivot came in February, one month into marketing. The old playbook said get every seller on the phone, and his team kept grinding at it. Then they noticed sellers would answer a text when they would not take a call, especially after the Apple update. "We changed in February and said we need to interact with people. We don't need to get them on the phone. So, we leaned into texting with people." Conversations now run a week or two over text before the phone close, and the pipeline stays full of what Phil calls little acorns waiting to turn into deals.
The Results
The acquisitions Slack group was named one deal a week first, then two. By this April 28 mastermind it had been renamed three deals a week, a pace the team had hit two weeks running. Phil posted four contracts in 10 days, then two more possible contracts on a single Monday. His wholesales average $12,000 to $15,000 and his flips net $25,000 to $35,000. Four contracts in 10 days at his average assignment fee is $48,000 to $60,000 of pipeline in a week and a half.
Of every 20 contracts he takes down about 10 to flip himself, and at least 8 of the 10 wholesales close. The honest zero: three weeks and roughly 150 to 200 handwritten first to market mailers have produced no callbacks yet. Before January, every deal in 15 years came through the MLS or another wholesaler. Now a CRM that is only five months old carries the whole pipeline, and he is hiring another prospector to add a second AI county in June.
I don't have some real sexy like do this, do that. It's systems and work is really all we're doing.
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