Creating Your Motivated Sellers

List
Hey, everybody, this is Adam Furman with Rehab Valuator, and this is the No-BS Wholesaling 101
Masterclass. This is the fourth video in this series. In this video we're going to teach you how to create
your motivated seller list. This is going to be a step-by-step guide. I'll show you my screen as I go through
and pull a list that you then can go ahead and contact these motivated sellers through various means.
We'll talk about that in the future, but for now we're just going to focus on pulling this motivated seller
list.
Common sellers and situations, not every seller and situation is exactly the same, but here's a pretty brief
overview of the type of sellers and the situations that you will come into contact with. You have a tax
delinquent property, inherited properties, pre-foreclosure. Costly repairs. What I mean by that is
sometimes, due to neglect or procrastination, basically the lack of funds, somebody's unable to go ahead
and say maybe do a repair in their house. A lot of times I see it as a roof issue and then that roof issue
leads what would most likely cost them around eight to $10,000, well, the wood gets rotted out and then
it trickles on down and it rots out the wood around the windows and it messes up the floors and so forth
and so forth. This stuff compounds over time. Costly repairs is definitely one that I see quite often, or they
only had enough money to patch the roof, but they couldn't do anything with the drywall or any other
damage that was there, and so they need a way out.
Bad tenants, this is another one that I come across a lot. Other investors sell me their properties due to
the fact that they had a bad tenant. The tenant, hopefully it has moved out, but they caused a lot of
damage in the house and that person is just sick and tired of being a landlord. The landlord business is not
in their future anymore and they want to get rid of that property. Empty nesters is another one, out-of-
state owner.
Tired landlords, kind of goes hand in hand sometimes with bad tenants, but with the tired landlords,
although they could have bad tenets or have had bad experiences, the tired landlords are usually, they've
made their money in the real estate game and a lot of times they just tell me straight up, "Look, you're a
young person. I've made my money doing rental properties or fix and flips. I'm going to pass the torch on
over to you. You take care of this property." It really just becomes numbers and cents at that point. They're
typically, in my opinion, have been some of the easiest deals that I've come across because it's all about
numbers, the emotion's not there. They understand this business. Vacant properties, you'll see quite a
few of those.
This is to give you a sense of some of the houses that I go into. Now, maybe in your area they might not
look like this, but this is rather typical, right? We're going into houses that may be vacant, need repairs.
They have not been worked on for quite some time. They're neglected and abused in some sense. Not
every single house that you'll wholesale will look like this, but this is kind of a forewarning, to give you an
idea. I've gone into properties before where I have to wear a mask or I had to basically hurry up, get in
and get out so I don't puke because it smells so bad in there. But again, I come out kindly and I don't beat
up the house in front of the seller or tell them what a shit hole the house is, right? Have respect and
basically don't bad mouth somebody's baby, right?
I know that pink bathroom right down there in the middle, I didn't say anything about that paint color
because for all I know that could've been the homeowner's favorite color that she chose to put in there.
If I badmouth that bathroom, that probably will not look good on my part. I typically just say something
rather generic like, "Yeah, we have a paint preference that we use in all of our properties. Typically, we're
going to change out the paint no matter if I like it, you like it, or you just painted it. We have a system in
place and we tend to stick to that."
You have different sellers in different situations, as we just went over. Look, not all sellers and situations
will be similar. There might be trends over time that you see and you feel comfortable in certain
situations and with certain sellers due to the fact that you have had success in similar situations and with
similar sellers, but I can tell you from my experience, it's never exactly the same. Two things though that
have to be present in order for you to have a successful deal though, and this is always a constant in this
equation, is you have to have motivation and you have to have equity. You could have all the equity in the
world, but at the person does not have the motivation to sell their property to you at a discount, it's not
going to happen right then. Now, there's a spectrum as far as how high that motivation may or may not
be, and that's up to you to start digging at that to see level that motivation is at. But remember, you have
to add these two things in order to have a successful deal, and that's motivation equity.
Might just go on ListSource.com. Here's the page as soon as you log in. Go to Create Your Own. Oh, it
logged me out. Log back in, once you get in, go to Create Your Own. One of the things that we're going to
do, I'm going to shoot this video looking at it through the lens of me going into a new market that I'm
looking to tap into. With that, I'm kind of going into this with fresh eyes, right? Now, I've reached out to a
realtor out there to get an idea of what areas most investors buy in, and that's what you'll want to do too.
Unless you know your targeted territory and you know the zip codes, you know the area very well, then
you could skip past this part. You don't have to necessarily figure out which zip codes or which area you
want to target, but I would highly recommend you to listen to this because what we're going to do is
basically reverse engineer which areas have the most cash transactions within the past year, which most
likely means that they are cash buyers who have bought these properties and therefore are the people
you eventually want to meet and sell your deals to.
What I want to show you is how I'm looking at this new territory that I'm looking to get into. I've had
investors already reach out to me who live in this area and want me to start marketing out there so I can
get them deals. That might happen to you, or maybe it's already happening to you, where people see your
success or they heard about what you want to do and they're reaching out to you and they're saying,
"Hey, come on over into these zip codes." Either way, we're going to go into the geography of this, select
a criteria, go to the county. Now, I'm in Virginia. Whatever state you're in, go ahead, click on that.
All right, right in here is all the available counties. If you know the counties, you're going to go on down,
and once you find it, you're going to click on it and then just hit Add. Right over here you're going to see
without anything else on here, except for they already did this and I like this, that they automatically
populated this, the Mailing Address Complete. Well, we definitely want that complete mailing, right, and
we want to exclude corporate-owned. Although, I might change that, because we're looking for cash
buyers or investors who have bought these properties and sometimes they might own that property as
corporation. But for right now, looking at it from the high view, our account is close to 40,000.
The next thing that we want to do, to get a little bit more granular on this data, is go to the last market
sale date. Right in here, you'll go to Property, look for last market sale date and it automatically populates
it for a year. That's cool, that's what we want, go within the year. Look at that, that count went from like
40,000 all the way down to basically 1,800, but that's fine.
Now, you might live in Atlanta or a much larger area, or you might have a larger territory that you're
looking to dominate. Again, that count's probably going to be considerably larger than this. The more
information we feed into ListSource, the more we can refine and really hyperfocus on that count, but for
right now though, just go back a year. Do everything as I'm showing you, because right now we just want
to see where the cash transactions occurred in which zip code. As we create our lists, we will obviously
change this.
So we're good on that. Let's go back to Property. Another thing that we want to do is, depending on your
area, you might not have condos or townhouses, that might be something that you don't have so this next
part might not be for you, but what we want to do is go in here, click on the Property Type. I'm going to
click on ... Again, you have townhouses, multifamily, mobile home, all these different types that you can
click on. Again, the more you click on, obviously the higher the count number will most likely be. I'm going
to look at residential SFR, which stands for single family residential. I'm going to look at condos and I'll
also look for townhouses right up here. I'll just add that to the equation. I went down, looks like maybe
300 on the total count over here.
All right, we'll go to Options. The Owner-occupied Status, what we want on here is we want Absentee-
Owned. If it's owner-occupied, then that most likely means that there was somebody who had the cash,
bought the house and they're living in it. We want to find the people who are not living in these properties.
It's cool because it already clicked on these. We want them in-state and also out-of-state owners. All right?
So make sure you click on Absentee-Owned. Trustee-owned properties, with that you're going to click on
No Preference, and then corporate-owned properties, go down and click on No Preference. All right, our
count right here is 264. Pretty small, right? Again, it is going to be completely dependent upon wherever
your territory is.
We have Mailing Address Complete. I'm going to click on Both Mailing and Property Address Complete. It
obviously didn't change the count, so we're fine, but I just want to make sure that I have the mailing and
property address complete. Then you'll go down here where it says Purchase List. You're not going to
actually purchase this list, but you're going click on it. Now, there's a count of 264. If we wanted to buy
that list, it would only cost us $7.92. It's ridiculous, in a good way, okay?
Now, one tip here. For basically eight bucks, we can get the cash transactions within the past year, which
fits all of the criteria that we put in. Say there's 264, we could click down here, Remove Duplicate Property
Addresses, if we wanted to. That would probably bring the count down. But either way, the good thing
about having this of the 264 count is we could buy this list for $8 and then go ahead and send an actual
letter to the people on that list and say, "Look, it looks like you might be a cash buyer. I'm an investor in
the area. I often come across great deals at a discount. If you're interested, here's my email and phone
number, reach out to me." Super easy to do. If you wanted to get even more aggressive, you could always
find their phone numbers from that list of $8 and then reach out to them with a phone call. Fuel for
thought.
Click on the Purchase Partial List. Go down to Custom Selection, select the criteria of zip codes so we can
break this down. Now you have it like this. We want to export this into a CSV or an Excel sheet and then
we can run it through and filter that out to see which zip codes have the highest cash transactions. I'm
just going to put in my email address and then submit it to myself.
All right. I went into my Gmail account. I sent myself this email, I exported this list that we got from
ListSource, and I'm just going to take a look at this. I'll delete this crap just so it's out of my way. We're
going to look at which area has the highest. We're just going to filter this all out, so go through here. You'll
go down here in the records. This shows you how many transactions occurred in that area. All right, you'll
just come right here, click on this, and we're going to go from the highest to the lowest numbers. 98 cash
transactions occurred within the past year in this zip code and then all the way down as follows.
What I would look at, again, depending on your budget, your bandwidth and everything of the sort, is I
would probably just look at these four right here. Maybe if my budget allowed, I would say, "Okay, 16
transactions occurred in this zip code. Maybe I could get one of those and I would have 12 deals total out
of those 16." Who knows, but either way it depends on what you're comfortable with. Now again, if you're
in a much larger city, you might see these numbers in the hundreds, if not in the thousands. Go
after, especially at the beginning, the lowest hanging fruit. You might look at this and say, "16 doesn't fit
my criteria, but anything over 30 does, so I'll go with these four. These are the four areas that I am going
to start targeting in the new territory that I go into because I look at it and say these four zip codes have
the highest cash transaction activity within the past year."
Okay. We just went through, we picked out the zip codes that we want to target and now we're going to
go back into Create Your Own and we'll start in the Geography area. In this area, this is where you could
click on the zip codes and input those zip codes that you just found out were the hottest ones within the
past year for cash transactions. Okay, so once you get those zip codes, you're now just going to look for
them. You could skip this part, that might take some time, but all you're going to do is right here, write
down those top zip codes that you're looking to go into, put a comma and just write them all out.
Remember, I only picked the top four based upon my budget. I'll add those. All right, so here's our count.
Basically 47,000 in those zip codes, you can see which one is going to be the highest count.
The next thing that we're going to do to really target this list, let's go to the mortgage. All Mortgages, go
to Loan to Value. Keep it at Combined Loan to Value, this way it gives you all mortgages on a property.
Click on Unknown. There's some data that's just unknown, right? Somehow it got transferred, the system
doesn't know what the loan to value is on the property. You don't want to miss out on those, so make
sure you click on Unknown. Then we're going to go from basically 1% to 50% loan to value on here.
Again, if you have a bigger budget or if you know you could do a loan to value up to say 60%, then by all
means go ahead and click on that. If by the end you're looking at this and you're saying, "Oh, my budget
doesn't allow me to purchase a list this size and that costs this much money," what you can do is you can
always come back in here and maybe get rid of a zip code or maybe you get rid of one of these loan to
values, get rid of one of those. Again, you have the flexibility to create this list as broad or as targeted as
you want. For the sake of this video in this course, we want to get as targeted as we can, especially right
off the bat so we can try and get the highest ROI for our money and time spent. Now, as you scale, you
obviously can broaden your horizons on this.
Let's go to Property Type. Go down to Property Type right here. For me, in this area, all that I'm going to
look at right now is SFR. If you want, you can go up here and click on the townhouses, you can go down
here and click on the condos, quads, whatever makes you happy. You can change them. Demographics,
here's something that you can do to as far as age. In my experience, the age range, based upon my data
that we've collected as we buy properties from people, is typically the age ranges in that 45 to 65 plus
years so I'm going to click on that. That's not to say that every once in a while I get somebody who's in
their thirties or forties. I cannot say that I've had anybody under the age of probably 25 that has sold me
a property. Again, you can change these. My preference is 45 to 65 plus. Again, we're getting more and
more targeted, right, in our selection, in our criteria of building this motivated seller list.
After you've done that, we're going to go to our options, Owner-Occupied Status. Now, for me and my
budget in this area, I'm going with no preference. I want the owner-occupied and the absentee-owned
properties as well. Lower hanging fruit for you might be the absentee-owned, right? If you want to get
even more granular, you could click on you only want to go after properties where it's an out-of-state
owner that fits all your other criteria over here. Now, if I do that in this very small town, that's only 12.
That is very limited, so I'm going to go ahead and click on Include Properties with In-State Owners. I'm
also going to click on Owner-Occupied, I'm sorry, click on No Preference.
Absentee and owner-occupied, I get deals from both sources. Trustee-owned properties, exclude.
Corporate-owned properties, I'll exclude that as well. Then I'm going to click on Both Mailing and Property
Address. Click on the Both Mailing and Property Address Complete. My count is 13,260. You can see over
here the criteria, everything that I've broken down. Okay? Go down here, purchase the list.
For 13,260 leads, make sure you always click on Remove Duplicate Property Mailing Addresses, that'll
bring your total down. To pull these leads, it'll cost me 464 bucks. Pretty gosh darn cheap to pull a list that
size and also that's that targeted. Then you can always save the criteria.
All right, everybody. Thanks for watching that one. I hope it wasn't too long for you. I wanted to give you
plenty of detail into the reason why I was doing certain things that I was doing and how I come to creating
my targeted marketing list. The takeaways from this video, number one, you know common sellers and
you know their situations. Number two, you know how to find top zip codes where cash transactions have
occurred, target those zip codes. Number three, you know how to pull a targeted marketing list and you
also have a recommended mail house to use to start marketing to those leads. You're getting closer and
closer, day by day, video by video. Keep on moving forward. Don't stop now. Stay up a little bit later, drink
another cup of coffee, and keep on moving forward. Let's go.