How to Find Real Estate Deals Using Your Existing Data

Real estate deals can sometimes feel elusive. 

But the good news (and bad news) is, it probably only feels that way because A) you don’t understand your data and B) you’re missing out on a lot of leads and deals because you don’t understand your data. 

What you need is a marketing plan that pulls more deals from your existing data.

And in this guide, we’re going to show you how to do that. 

The Treasure Trove of Deals You’re Probably Ignoring

More prospects, more motivated sellers, more data…

That’s the obsession of most real estate investors. In fact, every month, 250 investors flock to Google in search of motivated seller leads…

Look — we’re all for generating more leads and building a bigger business… that’s why we are putting this article together. 

The problem is, most investors collect more data in order to generate leads and find new deals without having properly marketed to their existing data. 

(We’ve met more than one investor who tosses out old data altogether — which is a huge mistake)

This is sort of like trying to build a fire with wet wood. You can keep putting logs on the fire, but you’re going to get a lot of smoke and very little flame. 

But what if we told you that you’re missing out on tons of real estate deals by not making good use of your existing data? 

This isn’t just a problem you have… it’s a problem lots of investors have. 

At REISift, we specialize in helping real estate investors organize, clean, and market to their data.

Here are just a few things investors have said after they’ve started properly marketing to their data…

Understanding the data you have and creating a system to capture as many leads as possible from that data can have a huge impact on your business. 

And below, we’re going to show you our 3-step process for pulling more deals from your existing data. 

Step 1. Understand & Organize The Data You Already Have

The first step is to understand your data. 

Because if you don’t understand your data, then you’re not going to be able to create clear-cut and effective systems for marketing to your prospects. 

So you’ve got to understand it. And you’ve got to organize it. 

At REISift, we like to think of data as belonging to four different high-level buckets. 

• Equity — These are prospects with high equity, between 30% and 99%. We specify 99% because we like to create a “Free & Clear” bucket for the 100%-equity owners.

• Stacked — These are prospects that belong to multiple lists. A prospect being stacked can indicate someone who’s highly motivated, if, for example, that prospect belongs to your high equity list and your bankruptcy or divorce list. 

• Vacant — These are properties that are vacant. This often means that the homeowner isn’t doing anything with the home and they might be more motivated to sell. 

• Ouchies — This includes prospects that fall into all of the problem-based data buckets, such as tax delinquency, code violations, probate, divorce, bankruptcy, etc. 

From there, you can create more specific data categories within those buckets.

Here’s what we want you to understand: if you look at your data and you can’t easily filter based on equity, vacancy, or other critical information… then your business has a serious weakness. 

Your data should be clean, updated, and easy to filter. 

That’ll make your marketing campaigns much more targeted and thus much more effective. That’s why we take data marketing, organization, and cleanliness so seriously at REISift. 

Just take a look at all these different filters you can use...

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Step 2. Take Your Data Through 3 “Cycles”

So let’s assume that you finished the first step and your data is now organized and updated. 

You can filter by different marketing buckets to identify high equity homeowners, vacant properties, stacked records, and prospects going through difficult situations (like preforeclosure or divorce). 

Now what? 

Well, now you can start sending targeted marketing campaigns to those prospects, whether by cold calling, direct mail, or SMS.

We recommend marketing to your stacked and vacant lists — those buckets are almost always going to contain 80% to 90% of all the motivated sellers in your database. 

(We also recommend skip tracing clean data to find phone numbers for those prospects — check out our full skip tracing guide over here)

Now, once you’ve sent your marketing campaign, you’re going to get some results back. Some people are going to become leads. Obviously, you want to take those leads through your follow-up and deal-closing process (if you don’t have a good process for this, we recommend checking out our 14-Day Auto Lead Gen Challenge). 

But for the people who don’t become leads… they’re going to fall into a few different categories…

• Not Interested (NI)
• Wrong Number (WN)
• Do Not Call (DNC)

And the final bucket is made up of prospects who simply didn’t respond to your marketing campaign. 

At this point, a lot of investors make the mistake of throwing out all of their NI, WN, and DNC data.

But don’t — we’re going to use it later. 

After this marketing campaign has been sent out and you’ve collected results, remove all of the NI, WN, and DNC records and take the rest of the data through a second “marketing cycle.” 

(In other words, you’ll be remarketing to all of the people who haven’t responded yet)

You’re going to repeat this process for the third cycle — pull out leads, remove NI, WN, and DNC records, and then send one final campaign to the rest of the data using the same marketing medium (SMS, cold calling, or direct mail). 

After taking a set of data through three marketing cycles, we recommend changing your medium (from SMS to direct mail, for instance) and repeating the process.

This ensures that you’re marketing to people consistently, at different times, and in different ways so that you’ll generate as many leads and get as many responses as possible. 

By the way, you can easily set the status of phone number as NI or DNC inside of your REISift account, which makes the remarketing process much smoother. 

Now, remember how we said we were going to use those NI, DNC, and WN prospects? 

Here’s what we recommend…

• Not Interested — When you tag these prospects, make sure to include the month and year that they said they weren’t interested in selling. Then, three months down the road, follow up with these people and see if anything has changed. 

• Wrong Number — Finding out that you have the wrong number for a prospect is a common occurrence when you’re skip tracing data. Make sure that you tag the phone number as being wrong and not the prospect themself… otherwise, you’ll not know which phone numbers you’ve tried. Then, during the next marketing cycle, try a different phone number if you have it. We also recommend re-skipping data every 90 days because databases are consistently being updated with new information.

• Do Not Call — If someone tells you not to call them, ask if there’s another way that they prefer to be contacted. If they are adamant that they don’t want you to contact them at all, then it’s best to save face and take them off your list. 

If you followed this process, how much more effective do you think your marketing campaigns would be? 

The advantages of this process are that you’re marketing to people consistently in different ways (which generates more leads), and more importantly, you’re making the most of every single record. 

Step 3. Keep Your Data Clean & Updated

The final step is to keep your data clean, organized, and updated. 

This means creating an ongoing process (or better yet, automations) for things like removing duplicates, updating records with relevant tags, checking vacancy, and re-skipping data every 90 days.

While that probably seems like a lot of work, we created REISift to make these processes as simple and easy as possible. 

REISift can easily remove duplicates and skip trace your records. It’ll even automatically check and update USPS vacancy on your property data every 30 days.

REISift users can also create tags and filter data by using a plethora of different details, which allows for more targeted and effective marketing campaigns. 

If you want to try us out for yourself, you can get a 7-day free trial by clicking here. 

Better Data Means More Real Estate Deals

It probably seems like the best way to grow your business and do more real estate deals is by adding wood to the fire… collecting more data and marketing to more people. 

We support that…

...IF you’ve already properly marketed to your existing data. 

Otherwise, you’re just putting cold, sad logs in a wet, whimpering firepit and hoping for flames to burst forth. 

You’ve got to take care of your foundation first. You’ve got to let the wood dry. And then, once you’ve got a clear-cut system for making the most of every single shred of data… well, burn baby burn. 

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