How We Find Apartment Deals Before They Hit the Market

Give a broker who's busy a reason to call you back. Oh, this guy called me 8 times. Let me just call him back.

So I have 500 going out every morning. I just got a broker in Miami that's gave me 3 deals to look at. Now one of them's for $92 million solid. I'll give that one to him.

All right, uh, first we're going to talk about, uh, building a pipeline. Uh, you cannot depend on brokers and expect results, right? Brokers are one avenue Um, if— but you got to build your relationships, but you've got to figure out two critical methods, right? One is off-market, right? You got to go direct to seller. However you do that, we're going to talk about several different ways to do it. Of course, in this room, in this week, we're talking about going, just calling sellers and getting your VA to call sellers, whatever that means. But there's several different ways to get a hold of sellers. You just got to nail down some type of system to get a hold of direct-to-seller owners. Okay, so cannot just depend on brokers. You must have multiple pipelines. Power players is also huge. You know, one thing someone mentioned was the attorneys, you know, private lenders, property management companies, right? These are all guys you need in your pocket anyway. Might as well just build that network, build that pipeline of partners. Where's Henry?

Bathroom.

Okay, okay.

Consistency in building your pipeline database is essential, okay? Life-changing results come from life-changing effort. Amen. All right, let's go. So here's your list. We talked about this yesterday. You should have off-market list of sellers for cold calling. You can have your VA doing this stuff as well. 200 leads equals 8 to 12 conversations. And then that should equal 2 offers, okay? 2 offers that you have 50% confidence in getting the deal. So if that funnel right there I just outlined, the key performance indicators, KPIs, is not true in your dials, you've gotta iterate, you've gotta refine it, you've gotta look at where is it breaking down at? Am I just not getting any pickups? Is the list bad? What is that? If I'm having those conversations, I'm not getting offers, why is that? You know, too picky, or I don't know, whatever it is, or maybe it's just not good deals. Whatever that is, you've got to diagnose that, and there's a solution for that. So we're going to talk about that in a second. But the point is, this is an iterative approach because what we're trying to build here is a business that can scale, not just some job that you continually have to do to generate more deals, right? We want to create systems that's predictable so we can find more deals on autopilot, right? Hey, Henry!

Hey!

All right. Commercial brokers. We got Masterminds, LoopNet, CREXi, Google, all these things you can find brokers. 30 dials should equal 10 good conversations, 2 good deals, that's offers. You may actually get a lot of properties. Brokers like to talk. They like to give you all the deals that they got, but actual good deals, Henry was a broker. He can tell you all about the broker game.

Oh yeah. Been a broker for 12 years, 13 years. Yeah. All commercial, all investment space. So when you're speaking to brokers, a lot of it is establishing credibility, being confident in the beginning, but also following up. How many, show me with the raise of hands, how many people have called a broker and they didn't answer the phone?

Yeah.

Very common, right? Very common. So we have to stay on top of them, but more importantly, creating systems. We all have DealFire. We can create systems in DealFire to start following up with them, right? You could buy a phone number on DealFire, have it send text messages, emails. You sync your email to DealFire. That's something we have to do.

I'll go over that in a second.

All right, so for example, uh, we had Cliff— Cliff and Preston.

Cliff and Preston did emails.

How many emails did we send out to brokers? 4,000.

4,000 emails to brokers.

All right, 4,000 emails.

That's 4,000 different brokers. All right, let's go.

That'll be 4,000 points.

Winner, right?

But a lot of it is through creating the systems, right? So when we're talking— when we're calling brokers, the information is free. It's public information. You Google the broker's name, you're gonna get their information. I've had people ask me like, how do you get the broker's number? How do you get their broker's email? You just look it up, right? Everybody puts their stuff out there. That's free. Put the list together. And then in terms of building like the system that, that fires it, how, how much, how much was Mailmeteor, Preston? How much was Mailmeteor? I think it's $4. No, I'm sorry.

It was, it was first 2 months. The first 2 months were free and then it was like $12 a month.

Mailmeteor.

Yeah. It's basically the Gmail extension, right?

So it's, it's an extension that you sync up to Gmail, right? So how many of you guys use Gmail? As a, as a, as a form to send out email.

There's something called Gmask.

Right, yeah, very similar. You just create your list on Google, on Google Sheets. It syncs up to Google Sheets, fires out using your email. It's free for the first month, and then it's what, less than $20?

What about the broker list?

We have certain cities we asked the VA to find all the commercial brokers in. She went on LoopNet and CREXi and found the commercial brokers in these 6 cities. And there's 4,000 of them. So took her several weeks to put that together, but then we—

Yeah, so a few hundred bucks maybe of VA time.

Yeah, that list was a couple hundred bucks. So we have, every day we have, I think the max it'll send out is 500. So it's sending out 500 every day. We do get a steady flow of brokers that—

Yeah, it's unbelievable what you can get. You just gotta be resourceful, think outta the box. With VAs, you can go on Upwork, you can have VA for $40, $50, like scrape an entire county tax database and give it to you in a spreadsheet. You know, it's just unbelievable what you can have done. You just have to think, what do I want?

What's the results from that?

We have sent 4 LOIs last week. We just started last, about 2 weeks ago, we sent 4 LOIs. Then actually, he told us about MailMeter. And we're having a little bit of issue with it with Mel Meter. I was gonna ask him to help, help us figure that out because it paused it for a few days. So we had a little bit of a hiccup last week.

What about finding the actual owners of the properties?

Yeah, we went through that yesterday, but we can get together and talk through that exact process.

There's hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of tracing services that we recommended, LeadSherpa, but DealFire Yeah, DealFire. Probate as well.

Yeah, we can walk you through that. Yeah, DealFire is where you can get a bunch of leads from off market.

Yeah, I'm just wondering about, you know, that kind of an email thing is kind of a shotgun everywhere, right? But we kind of need to select a market, right? And specialize in that and become kind of known in that area, right? And that's the best way to do things. Which is better, shotgun or the rifle?

Well, okay, so the question is, should I send out a bunch of emails to a large geography versus focusing on deeper conversations locally? Tennessee or Ohio. Yeah, good question. Well, here's the deal. You need to, when you're first starting out, you're not gonna have the immediate credibility to get all the deals. I mean, we'd love to just buy only deals in Columbus, Georgia, right? But, you know, there's not enough deals for one, but there's also, when you're just starting out, you don't have that brand, right? Not every single deal that comes on the market, people aren't going to you. Now, you can be, you can, hedge for that and try and be top of mind and just constantly reaching out, following up, and that's how you get your name out there. But I would make your search parameters broad, you know, encompass a state, maybe 100-mile radius of yourself. That's typically what my advice is. Now, if you're just opposed to investing in your market and you want to be somewhere else, that's fine too. But make a target broad range for searching for deals, because once you close that deal, then you have way more notoriety, way more credibility in the market, and then you're gonna attract more deals. So, I mean, 6 cities in my opinion is kinda like, I mean, it depends on what cities you're talking about, I guess. I mean, if it's Atlanta, Austin, you know, there's—

And that's very common where you are specifically, there might not be that many opportunities, but we all can drive, right? We all can drive an hour, 2 hours, Or just find the closest market if you really are in the middle of nowhere. But like we talk about here, right? Calling 200 people. What if we called 400? What if we called 600? Do we think we'd get more opportunities? What if we called 1,000 people a week? Right? How do we do that? We have— we all have that opportunity in front of us with the VAs. What if we had 2 VAs going?

You'd be the winning table.

Hi, this is for Henry. So in your experience as a broker, what do you do when you get an email like that? I mean, I feel like you'd get slammed with emails like that.

Right.

No, absolutely. And as a broker, part of my job is to get to know all the owners in the area, whatever market I'm focusing on. My job is to have that knowledge base, have them in my database, and my conversations are with them. So when I do get an email from someone I don't know, I put it on the list and depending on what I'm doing, depending on how my day is structured in the morning, maybe I'm reaching out to owners, maybe I'm doing some follow-ups on some, I'm analyzing deals, I'm providing brokers, owners, like a broker's opinion of value, right? So I'm going around meeting with the owners and saying, hey, let me tell you what your building's worth. If you sold it today, let me show you what you would get. Hey, somebody sold the building on the street, let me run some numbers and just show you what you got. You don't have to sell, no pressure. Let me just show you what you think, what we think you can get for it if you put it on the market today. So I'm having those conversations. So guess who else I know? I know who all the buyers are. I know who's buying the buildings. I know what they're offering. I know what they're looking for. So if I don't know a person, I'll put it off to the end of the day and maybe I'll get to it. Maybe I'll get to it the next morning when I come in. And if not, I get too busy, but I know who the active players are. So for us, new into this industry and breaking it, trying to build up relationships, pick up the phone and have a conversation. Leave voicemails, text messages, follow up with them. You know, give a broker who's busy a reason to call you back. Oh, this guy called me 8 times. Let me just call him back.

There you go.

I just wanted to—

There you go.

No doubt. I wanted to add to that, just to clear up anybody who may have some sense of pessimism around that. The emails definitely work, and it was a good reminder for me. When you send 4,000, you're not gonna get 4,000 responses back, okay? You're not even gonna get 2,000 responses back. You're not even gonna get 1,000 responses back. But that's not the point. It's a percentage of those brokers will get back to you. You could even refine which brokers you're sending to. When that list comes back from the VA, it's not only gonna tell you the broker, it's gonna tell you their title. What I did the first time I did it was I went for all of the second and tertiary brokers in the, office. I didn't go for the top dog. I didn't go for the one that was the senior broker. I went for the ones that were the associate broker or the assistant broker, the young hungry brokers. And I deleted all the other ones initially when I was new because I knew that they have their people that they work with. Some of those other ones that are brand new— I'm, I'm 26, I just got into the firm, I'm the guy making 100 calls, I'm the guy answering emails— they're excited to get your email. And then your email copy has to be strong. We have ChatGPT today. You can tell it everything you want to portray in an email. Your grammar can be wrong, everything can be wrong, and it's going to give you the perfect email to go along with that email to the broker. One of the things that I found in the beginning is to use your leverage. So in this room today, one thing that is very true, and I told this to my teams yesterday, I'll give the tip to the room because we're all one big team. We all in this room right now are acquisitions managers for a fund that has capital that is eager to deploy in the first quarter of 2026.

Boom.

The fund is standing right up there. You craft that nicely into an email and you attach your credibility package, which is inside of school, the one-pager with your picture. The picture of your team. You send that email with a crafted letter from ChatGPT saying that you are working for a fund. And don't send it from an email that is, uh, bettyboo@gmail.com or, you know, Jimbo's Hotcakes 21 or whatever. Send it from a credible email with a credible signature with your, your, uh, your headshot Boom, send that over. Brokers, they salivate over the words, I'm doing acquisitions for a fund with capital to deploy urgently in the first quarter. I guarantee, I guarantee they will respond back to you, and it does work.

It's good.

So I have 500 going out every morning. I just got a broker in Miami that's gave me 3 deals to look at. Now one of them's for $92 million. Sell it.

I'll give that one to you to look at. I'll give it to Jack.

But anyway, it's 500 a morning, so you're getting constantly throughout the day a broker.

Jack will take a look. All right, let's keep rolling in the training. We want to get through this. So reasons you aren't getting enough leads from calling. Alright, so if you're separating the list, if you're not using DealFire, and then your list provider is not giving you enough leads from your search, could be one issue. Okay, so you searched a broad spectrum of properties or markets and you're not able to get enough leads from the search. Okay, so common issues may be you don't have a large enough parameter. So some people, you know, are trying to go after just a couple cities and they need to broaden it, right? For a VA, you're going to need about 2,000 to 3,000 leads, phone numbers for them to call, uh, and that'll keep them busy. A part-time VA for about 2 to 3 months, okay? Uh, if it's full-time, probably a month, 2 months, right? But you want to go ahead and upload 2,000 or 3,000 because they're just going to run through these lists, and then if it's too small, it just ends up, you know, they're refreshing it every day, right? And that's not good. Or you want to have them, uh, about 2,000 to 3,000 leads.

Okay.

Um, now another issue could be you're searching areas where the market has limited or inaccurate government information. So, you know, I think— who, what, what states are kind of like that?

North Carolina, Alabama, Texas, none.

Non-disclosure. Yeah, so I mean, you have to go in there and play with the filters. Maybe you're not looking by unit count, maybe you're not, you know, filtering this, the list by unit count. Maybe you're doing it by square foot or something like that to try and figure out what the properties are. So for, you know, say you want to start with 5 or 10 units plus, you know, you may want to do 10,000 square feet or Yeah, the owner data is still good, it's just the property data's all jacked up.

So it's like 4 buildings and it's got, calling it 4 units on the tax rolls, and it's really 30 units, right?

Yeah, and this is just to give you something, I mean, we're gonna give this out. This is just something to reference as you're going, you're on your computer and you're actually looking at your list. But another software out there, you didn't uncheck exclude corporate owned. So everything's corporate owned. So if it's automatically checked, exclude corporate owned, you're not gonna get many leads. You're adding too many parameters. So unit count, year built, et cetera, right? Typically you wanna make it broad. You're gonna have a VA and you're gonna be networking anyway. That's the point of it. All right, you're using the wrong list provider. Use DealFire. But your skip tracing software is not getting enough hits. So one next step in the funnel may be the constraint of you're— you've uploaded all these leads, you have enough leads, but you're not getting enough hits. And a hit is simply a phone number and an owner attached to that property, right, or attached to that LLC that owns the property. Okay, so if you're not getting enough hits, it should be at least 70% hit rate on the leads you have. Then it's typically an issue with the actual provider. So with LeadSherpa, if you're using that you want to make sure you go in there and, and it matches exactly how you're supposed to upload it into LeadSherpa. So when you upload the leads into there to be skip traced, it's got to match exactly how it does. And so there's a, there's a, uh, template of instructions that show you exactly how to do that. All right, and so then you would just call that list provider. Uh, typically that's going to be the, the number one thing to do. All right, use a skip tracing software like PropStream Um, so that's another opportunity right there. If you're not using, obviously, like I said yesterday, the, the best one's CoStar. Um, but if you're not trying to pay that kind of money, you don't have to, especially as a newer investor. It's not needed. Uh, your dialer isn't accepting the list or part of the list. Okay, so this could mean that, uh, if you go into ready mode and it's just not accepting a lot of it, you have a lot of duplicates and it's canceling those out. So that's one thing to keep in mind. If you upload 1,000 leads and only 500 actually get accepted, That may mean you have duplicates or the dialer could not be set up correctly, meaning it's taking out the DNC calls, the DNC numbers. So your do not call registry numbers, which is typically— and again, I'm not an attorney, but it's DNC is typically meaning that they've put themselves on there and you cannot call them to try and sell them something. Cool thing about what we're doing is we're trying to buy something from them, right? It's not necessarily we're trying to sell something. So, you know, I'm not an attorney, but that's how we get around it. So anyway, yeah, so match the correct field to your list, to the dialer. Example: phone number to phone number, email to email, address to address. Okay, now next to you're getting bad, wrong numbers or no answers. If you're not getting any answers or all your numbers are bad, there could be several reasons. Okay, first off, the first time you run through a list is the worst time, all right, because the list has to mature, right? As you get the list, go through it, the bad numbers get erased, and then you have a more efficient use of your time the second, third, and fourth time you go through that list. All right, so that's one thing I hear a lot is I go through the list and you know, most of them were wrong or whatever. Well, that's just part of the deal, right? You go through it, your dialer deciphers all the bad numbers, and you disposition it, and it basically sends all the bad numbers away, right? So then you go back through it, and it's way more potent, right? You get way more deals. All right, and then also it may be a market issue. You may need to factor in more calls, okay? Adjust timing, the way, the time you call or your VA is calling. We've tried several different ways. I've heard some people get a lot of success when they call like 8 to 9 or 7 to 9 in the morning, you know, or 4 to 6, right? Because it's like the assistant's out and the owner's still there, you know, or the owner just came in early, you know. So there's many ways you can look at it. But, you know, we just have them call all day. What time do our VAs work till? Dan, you know? Okay, we don't know. Yeah, as long as they're producing results. But that is something, if you're not— we get a lot of results. We've had like 100 in the past month. Yeah, more than that.

Yeah, so I mean, if you do have to split them, lead studies do show like 4 to 6 evening and 8 to 9 morning. Yeah, and it's usually Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Yep. But like you said, the people that won't answer at 8 to 9 may answer at 2 in the afternoon, so call often and call a lot.

Yeah, so you can adjust the timing that you or your VA's calling. You need to try a different list provider and skip tracing software if you're just not getting any answers or the numbers are not doing good. You are discounting property management companies and underutilizing associated parties. I hear sometimes I've got a lot of property management companies answering, like at the end of the day, those are still connections. And a lot of times, well, there's two things. One, they may know the owner and can connect you with the owner. Two, they may manage other properties, right? And the, and a lot of times they know the distressed owners, right? They know the owners that are getting ready to, you know, they're taking their eyes off the property and the property's underperforming. So network with those property management companies. They're not a wasted lead, all right?

The email trick works not only with brokers as well. You can have a VA scrape all the property management companies, all the plumbing companies, all the landscaping companies.

That's good. All right, cool. Last thing, you aren't getting anyone wanting to sell. So this is probably the biggest one. And here's 9 times out of 10 the solution or the issue. You are in KPI, so you're actually doing the amount of dials that you're supposed to be doing. You're connecting with the amount of people you're supposed to be connecting with. You just haven't put in the amount of numbers that you need to to get an interested party, right? So you're in KPI and you just need to keep dialing. For some people, it's a longer-term game. Make sure to make relationships. So that would be the other thing. Is again, like I said yesterday, and I can't stress enough, is these VA opportunities or the leads that are coming from the list for direct-to-seller is a relationship game. If you approach it that way, first off, you're going to have more opportunity with the properties that you are calling about that the seller does have. Instead of approaching these conversations as a transactional conversation versus a relationship, as something where you're actually trying to add value, you're trying to just get to know them. Right? If you have that mentality of either you want to sell or don't, and end the call if they don't, right? You're not going to get very far. All right. So approach this as a relational game. All right. And the last thing is you need to do call reviews so you can have us check out your calls. If you go on DealFire, there's a place where you can actually record those calls. So that's something you can utilize and then we can check out the calls and help you get better. The best sales organizations in the world spend more time training than they do on the field, right? So like, spend time focused on training, right? Getting better, getting good at building your brand, building the clout you have in the marketplace, all right? Edit your script and get better on the call. Like Dan said, add value. All right, ask about other properties the owner, property management company owns. Uh, ask when do you think you might want to sell in the future, right? Add to your notes and calendar, use the CRM. Okay, and then obviously the last issue is just not following up, and that's probably one of the biggest.