Wholesaling Real Estate: How to pull a pre-foreclosure list

Welcome back, welcome back everybody. I'm excited to have you on here. Um, today what we're going to be going over is what list would I target if I had to pick one list in the whole entire world? What list am I going to target to get a deal and that I feel confident putting my efforts, my money, all everything I got behind? We're going to go over that today. I'm going to show you exactly how to pull it with what software I use, what I recommend. And how to skip trace it. Okay, so before we get into what lists, I want to tell you guys, um, kind of my experience of wholesaling when I first got started. I thought personally, I thought like, uh, when I first started, the more people you hit, the better. I was like, oh man, let's just shotgun approach. Let's just hit all absentee owners. Let's hit all probates. Let's hit all pre-foreclosures, tired landlords, inherited, you name it, tax lien. Let's just get everybody and let's just cold call everybody. I don't know who we're going to reach. I don't know who's going to pick up the phone, but anybody that responds, great. So that's what I did. And then leads started coming in, started coming in from all over because I was not very targeted in the area. I just pulled whatever data I, I, I could get my hands on. I was like, yeah, I'm just looking for a motivated seller. So that creates a lot of problems, right? When you're not targeted on who you want, you're going to get people that are coming from all over the— you know, if your location isn't good, you're going to get neighborhoods that maybe aren't that good. And maybe you're going to talk to someone who, um, is motivated, but there's not a lot of interest in that area. So what I want to say is you, you got to be targeted, okay? You got to target— be focused on who you're going after, and not only who you're going after, but the location, okay? And next thing I want to say is instead of being a shotgun approach, I would be specifically like a sniper. Instead of just shooting everywhere, I would specifically go for a lead type, and I go for a specific location. And that brings me to my favorite list, the one where it got me when I first started, got me a couple deals from this list, and it's always, it's always producing, okay? And that is called the pre-foreclosure list, all right? For a lot of you that don't know what the pre-foreclosure list is, it's people that are behind on their mortgage payments, okay? I got a little, um, you know, definition from Google for you. I know you guys could all search that yourselves if you wanted, but I got one for you. This, it's a 90-day period between when a notice of default is issued and a sale date is issued. Okay. This is known as pre-foreclosure. I know different states, different areas have different definitions for it, but that's pretty much it. These— there's people that, you know, they're late on their payments. And I would say that most of the time, even if they catch up or reinstate or get back good with their mortgage, it's possible that they're going to go get into pre-foreclosure again. Maybe their payments are too high, there's something going on. So it's a list you want to continue to follow up with. Even if someone catches up and they're good, it's someone that you want to follow up with, in my opinion, because there's a lot of people that hit the pre-foreclosure list that they're like, no, no, I'm good. And then they try to figure out everything and try to sell like 1 month before they lose their house and they wait till the last minute. It's unfortunate, but that's what happens. So my first 2 deals I got from the pre-foreclosure, pre-foreclosure list. One was from a guy who listed the house for sale, didn't get the offers he wanted, so he just was like, I'll just let the house go. Ended up, you know, negotiating a deal with him and sold the next one. I still have the property. It's a rental I have, and we were able to work out a deal where we caught him up on, you know, where he was behind. And then I took over the payments and then paid them out later on like a subject to.

Deal.

So anyway, pre-foreclosure is the list I'd go for. The cool thing I like about the pre-foreclosure list is if you're in a big area, like a big major metro, there's still not that many leads, okay? There's still not that many. So you don't have to cold call a poll list of like 10,000 or, you know, call all day just trying to like cold call through the list or hire a giant team to do it. You can be a sniper and you can say, hey, I'm going to get a hold of all the people that are on this list. I'm going to find out if they're selling or if they're not. I'm going to just like really go after to find out if I can talk to everyone on that list. That's what I am doing. That's what people that have lower budgets should be doing, in my opinion. And you go into those situations and I'll talk more in the future about like the scripts and the best way to talk to them, to people in pre-foreclosure. But you do not want to go in and be like, hey, do you— are you selling right now? I'm looking to buy houses. Like, you have to be empathetic to the situation. They're going through. You have to be understanding. It's a tough time, so you have to do it strategically, okay? So right now, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to show you guys how to pull that list on Batch Leads and how to skip trace it. It's pretty dang simple. I know there's a ton of different ways to get the pre-foreclosure list. I actually also— some title companies, investor-friendly title companies can give it to you, but Batch Leads has it depending on the county and where you are. That depends how quick they get the list. That's just how it works. In the United States, like in different areas. Sometimes they can get really fast, the data. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer, but it just depends on where you're at. All right, so let's pull this list, everybody. Let's see how you do it. All right, so I'm in Salt Lake City, Utah. I'm in Sandy. So what am I going to do? Well, all you have to do is you— all you got to do is type in the area where you want it, or you can go here and you can say, give me the juice, give me the whole range of Salt Lake City, like below Salt Lake City and down here. I mean, if that's what you want, right? So then all— it's pretty freaking simple. All you do is you go over and you see pre-foreclosures. There's 312 there that it's pulling up at the moment. So all you got to do is you got to select all and you got to save the list. Okay, how do you save these properties? Well, you create a list. You can call the property list pre-foreclosures, pre-foreclosure, and then you can tag it as South Salt Lake. Right, or wherever the location is. Okay, pretty simple. So you save this, uh, and you can also say skip trace selected properties. Next. Bam! That's it. That's it, everybody. So you get the list, you pay, you submit, and then you go to the next tab. And this is where you'd go. You go to— you go to, uh, my list. You click my list. I got it zoomed in for you. So you just go to the top, you pick Show all properties, pre-foreclosure. You select all, and, uh, well, I already skip traced it from that main page, but if you didn't, you can skip trace it from here. Bam, and you got your list. And I'm not telling you all to just go get an auto dialer, like, uh, to go in and just like blast all these people. Um, personally, what's been working for me and for the people that I work with and I tell to do this strategy I just say, hey, call from your cell phone, call, text from your cell phone. When they see that iPhone, they see that blue check, that blue message, they're like, oh, this is a real person. Sometimes when I dial through an auto dialer or my CRM, the calls don't get delivered, they go straight to spam no matter what I do with the numbers. So when you call from your personal cell phone or like a Google Voice, it gets through better from what I've seen. It takes more time, but hey, it's all good. There's only 312 people in South Salt Lake that you've seen on the list right here. So pretty dang simple. Now, why would I specifically want to contact every single one of these people? Because when you do an auto dialer, sometimes you don't know, like, if you got the right person. It's like you're just dialing, dialing, dialing, so you're not as thorough. But when you got, you know, 312 people or 100 or 50, you can actually be like, okay, I talked to him. Yes, I did not talk to him. I'm going to keep trying. 'Okay, I talked to someone, it was his wife. Let me—' You know, you can be more thorough, but it's very difficult to be thorough when you're just trying to blast people, especially when you have like 10,000 records. If you're trying to do all the absentee owners in Salt Lake and there's like, you know, 40,000 absentee owners or whatever, you want to be targeted. This will help you, I promise you guys. Like, if you do this and you stay specific on pre-foreclosure and you go probate, you go tax lien, I'm giving you like really like more highly motivated lists, but stick to pre-foreclosure. That's what I got to say to you. That's how I got my first deals when I was a brand new noob, didn't know what I was doing. They— if they want to sell, they need help. And you can also, when you go into that situation, you can also offer, hey, I might know some people that might be able to help you stay in the home. Is that something you want to do? You can offer help. So it's not always about can I get the deal? It's the the law of reciprocity. How can I give? How can I help? And sometimes it comes back, uh, and you can do a deal with them or you can help them. So, um, it's an easy way to work with people and to reach out to people that actually are in distress, in a distressed situation. Um, so we got a— I'll get to that, that question later. But what I, uh, I was talking to someone earlier on a call and he asked for my help and I wanted to help him out. He has a lead in Texas and he's like, man, I don't have buyers in that area. It's kind of an interesting situation. So I wanted to show him what I would do on Batch in order to, you know, get a buyer and see if this is an area where they would have buyers. So I'm transitioning from pulling the list on Batch and how like pre-foreclosures and how to do it. Now I want to show you guys exactly how I would go to an area on Batch and try to find a buyer. Okay, so let's go right into it right here. Um, let me share my screen. Okay, without sharing like the address of the property and everything, I'm just going to show you guys right here. It's in Honey Grove, Texas. All I did in Honey Grove, Texas is I typed it in, I got the location, and then I said, okay, what cash buyers are currently in the area? So there's 9, there's 9 cash buyers in this whole area. So I want to look at these properties and look and see if they've been flipped. So this is not like the one he has. Let's take a look at this one. So $310,000. Does it look like it's been flipped? Because if it looks like it's been flipped, I'm going to call the agent and say, hey, did you flip this or do you know who does flip? There's obviously some cash purchases going on in the area. This one looks like it's potentially been flipped. So let's call this agent. Okay, I can't share my screen on this one because like YouTube doesn't like when I share the screen, but let me, um, let me show you guys. Let me— I can't show you, but basically what I'm going to do is I'm going to click in here. It's going to give me the agent's phone number and it's going to be the buyer's phone number. I'm going to call the agent and have a conversation and find out, um, you know, if there's any action going on here for cash buyers. So let me do it right now. So I'm calling this lead. His, uh, the agent's name is James Simpson. All right, James Simpson. Let's, let me find out what's going on. Okay. So my purpose in calling this would basically to be like, hey, James, um, you know, my name's Nathan. I'm an investor. I noticed that, uh, well, I would, I would say, sorry, I'm trying to do two things at once. Let me say it again. Hey, James, my name's Nathan. I was cold calling an investor and I found a seller that has a property in your area. I've never done a business in Honeygrove. Wondering if there's a lot of flips going on. Wondering if you know any cash buyers out there that maybe we can, you know, you could help me find a buyer for this deal. Just like straight transparent honesty. Just, hey, can you help me out? Do you know how to work with wholesalers or not? And see what happens. So Let me pull this back up. I got to find out what brokerage he's from. Doesn't say. Let's see. Okay, I got the number right here. Okay, so I'm going to call and we're just going to have a conversation and see if he can help me out on this one. Again, it's really simple, guys. All I did is I went here to the location, looked up cash buyers, and that was it. Hello? Hi, Mike, my name is Nathan. I was looking to get a hold of James Simpson. Is he available?

No, he's not here right now. Um, do you have a cell number? I don't.

Um, do you mind giving me that so I can write it down and call him?

Yeah, hold on. Okay. 903. Okay. 640. Okay. 3014.

3014, you said? Uh, yes. Well, maybe you might be able to help me out. What was your name again? Mike. Okay, Mike. So Mike, I got a question. So I work in the Dallas area mainly, and I was talking to a seller there that happens to have a property in Honeygrove that he wants to sell. And, um, you know, I usually don't— I've never done a deal out here. I've never flipped a property, but I was just curious, is there a lot of activity in Honeygrove for fix and flips and, you know, rehabbing homes? Are there a lot of cash buyers out there?

Well, um, so you're a real estate agent?

No, I'm a real estate investor. I fix and flip, I wholesale properties occasionally. Um, you know, it really just depends on the property itself.

Well, and Honeygrove is a real small town. Right. And what's it— what it has going for it right now is that it's pretty close to the dam where they dammed up, uh, the Bodark Lake. Okay. And property around there is in fairly high demand, especially the closer you get to the lake. Okay. As far as flipping properties, I mean, you can invest in land, but You know, the— it's kind of— you're kind of behind the edge of it because the property values already have already increased over the last 2 or 3 years. So you kind of be buying at the high end.

Gotcha.

As far as flipping properties and rehabbing them, I mean, we've had a lot. Bottom is where our office is, and it's about Oh, from Honey Grove, 20 miles, maybe, maybe a little bit less than that.

Yeah, I see it on the map right here.

Well, we've had a lot of investors come in and, and rehab some of these older houses, and I guess some of them have come out on them, uh, but, uh, that's been going on for at least 2 years now, so.

Okay, well, uh Have you ever—

I don't know. I think you really need to be careful right now. Yeah, yeah.

You mean like if I bought it and then flipped it and, you know, it might sell, might not?

Is that what you mean? Yeah, I think you'd be having to buy at a fairly high price, and I think you might not come out on that.

Yeah, well, I'm curious because most of the time when I come across properties that I don't want to flip, if I'm not in the area, I try to wholesale them and get them at a price that makes sense, and then I just try to, you know, assign it to a cash buyer at a price that would make sense for them. Do you work— have you ever done a wholesale deal or brought a cash buyer to a wholesale deal?

You mean like off-market properties and that type of thing?

Exactly, yeah. Because this seller I have seems pretty motivated. I think I might be able to get it low enough, but I wouldn't want to end up flipping it. I'd rather just, you know, sell it to an investor that would want to buy for cash. Off market?

I have not really participated in deals like that. I think probably, uh, I mean, you might find one seller like that. I guess there's always, you know, there's always deals out there, but right, most, uh, the common knowledge is in the area that, you know, prices are, are, uh, fairly high for— I mean, I've seen I've seen houses sold for $50,000 and $60,000 5 years ago bring 2 and 3 times that.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

And, you know, and it's pretty well general knowledge now. I mean, prices have softened a little bit, but expectations haven't. Yeah, of course. I think kind of, you know, Good luck with that. But I— yeah, I don't think there's any way I can help you.

Yeah, well, that's pretty much what I just wanted to know, is if you knew any cash buyers or any flippers that are actively looking for properties in Honeygrove or in the surrounding areas that you could connect me with, because I have one right now that I think I have it at a pretty decent price. I could send you the information, but do you even know any cash buyers off the top of your hand that are looking for flips actively right now?

Uh, not really, no.

Okay, no, I totally get it.

We got 15 agents in this office, so, you know, chances are maybe somebody does, but I personally don't.

Yeah, yeah, so it's not, it's not like, um, a really hot thing looking for like off-market properties to flip in that area, it seems like.

No, I, I personally don't deal with them.

Okay. Okay. Well, I appreciate your time. I thank you for all the information you've given me. Oh, you're welcome.

Okay, have a good one. You too. Bye.

So the difficult thing about working— everybody, if anybody heard that— like, the difficult thing in areas that are this small is there's just not a lot of demand, right? So I called the office and it gave me the number of the guy that has the listing. He might be BetterHelp. I'd have that exact same conversation. I was kind of throwing a little word vomit, like throwing a little too much questions at him. I needed to just ask him one question instead of multiple ones. It's my bad. I can do better. But he— I would still call these ones because they're saying these are cash buyers. I'd call the agents on these. So to my buddy that I'm doing this for, that's exactly what I would do. Have that conversation. He doesn't know anybody. That doesn't mean it's not happening. But this, this activity of finding a buyer might take you a day if you, you know, a couple hours to go through all the listings in here and kind of get the scoop. But because he, he just didn't know anybody, he, you know, but if you find someone's like, yeah, maybe depends, like obviously we got it at a great deal at a low price and it would make sense. But anyway, that's the process that I go through in small, small towns like this. You just got to call some agents that have the hookup and know the area like the back of their hand. They're the masters of the area. Okay. All right. So let me answer some of the questions that have come through here and then we'll wrap it up. Let's see. Hopefully that was helpful. You guys can ask any questions you'd like. What percentage of sellers signed contracts do you find buyers for? Um, that's a really good question. I don't like to just, uh, sign a contract and then find a buyer. That's not really my style. I like to know if it's a good deal and then, um, I sign it, and then it's usually like 100% because I know it's a good deal, or I have a buyer already before. So my, my close rate's a lot higher than the it used to be when I was just locking up stuff when I was newer. I don't do that anymore. So does the state being a non-disclosure state have anything to do with pre-foreclosure availability? No, a non-disclosure just means that they don't disclose what the house sold for. As far as I'm concerned, as far as I know. How do you help people stay in their house when in pre-foreclosure? So if you want to help someone stay in their house, you can negotiate some of the Well, hold on, that's if they have like debt from other stuff. Okay, so how you can help people stay in their home is you can catch up their payments and then you can rent it back to them, which I don't really recommend. You can buy it and buy it. And yeah, it's mainly for me, from what I would do is help them stay in it, catch up their payments and then buy it and then let them stay in it a little bit after enough time to move. What other ways? Like, you could give them advice on how to catch it up, or they could call their mortgage company and you could kind of give them advice like, hey, maybe you can negotiate, uh, or put like, uh, the how much you're behind and what, um, and getting that caught up or putting it on the— I can't remember what they call it when they put the, the debt on the back end. They did a lot that a lot during the pandemic. But, um, yeah, that's, that's what I would suggest. A lot of the time when I suggest that, um, that like we can help you stay, it's more of like, hey, we'd buy it on terms and let you— and we'd work out a structure where we would take over the payments and we'd let you stay in it for just a little bit or something like that. So, um, yeah, I hope that answers your question. I know there's a lot of other tricks, like a lot of more in-depth things you can do, um, that I have never done. But, um, that— yeah, that's my answer. Uh, Philip Alu, yeah, of course. Amazing Mr. Payne, Will— Willie Will Maleon. And I think that's how you say it, Maleon. I appreciate you. Thank you so much. Yeah, guys. So like the pre-foreclosure game, it's a good— it's a good thing to go into. You can help a lot of people that feel like they're going to lose their houses. They have options. They have a lot of options. And you can help them. You can stop the sale from happening if you present, you know, contract before the auction or you— yeah, you can stop a sale from happening, which helps a lot of people out. You can navigate the situation. A lot of them don't know what to do. So like I said, that's— I was able to do— I've done a lot of pre-foreclosure deals, deals that have been in pre-foreclosure, and I did them when I first started. So it's not that difficult when you're new to get into that kind of— I don't want to say game, but into that strategy or that lead source. So, but if we are looking to assign, will the buyer allow that? It depends on the buyer. I have a buyer that buys pre-foreclosure deals. Well, I don't know if this is a strategy I'd recommend everybody doing, but what he does is he'll buy it and then he'll say, hey, I'll let you buy it back from me in a year if you want. And he'll give that like an option for a lot of people in pre-foreclosure. He'll actually even let them live in the property and then saying, hey, if I'll let you live in it for a year and you don't have to make any payments, and then at the end of that year you can buy it back, and if not, then you got to move. So it depends on your buyer. There's a lot of buyers that are willing to do, you know, some stuff that other buyers aren't willing to do that are maybe trickier or like more difficult to navigate because they have a lot of money and they don't mind, you know, getting a house at a discount and letting it sit. To get it at that price. So Phillips, uh, it really depends on the buyer you have. That's all I got to say. So hopefully that was helpful, everybody. I didn't want to go too crazy in depth. I just want to show you guys really how to pull the pre-foreclosure list on Batch, how to skip trace it. And you know, I'm going to do some more calls that are going to go more in depth on what to say, um, to answer your questions a little further on how you can help people stay, how you can stop the auctions. Um, from happening. So all good stuff. Hope that's helpful. Have a great day, everybody. Peace out.