Do you feel getting off-market deals is like playing a lottery?

Hey fellow wholesalers,

As a wholesaler who has a team of two VA's, runs SMS campaign and has a licensed realtor on top of VA's (who apprentices as helper/acquisition guy) , getting a steady flow of off market leads, I am curious: how many of you feel like you are playing a scratch off lottery with all the lists you pull and sellers you target?

We get 2 to 5 leads daily. Our top performing lead manager/cold caller VA gets an average of two leads for us from cold call campaign. Second VA is not doing so great, but also delivers 1 lead every other day. Both of them work part time.

The reality is almost all of these so called leads are unmotivated or somewhat motivated and have all the time on their hand to list it with agent or do FSBO. Realistically, we are lucky to close 1 deal a month (by closing I mean delivering it to a finish line, where it's assigned to end buyer and paid for).

All the tweaks and attempts to pull so called "motivated" lists deliver near identical results. It seems like anyone you can get on the phone, who you think might be motivated to sell, has already received hundreds of calls from other cold callers and couldn't care less what seller techniques you use on them. As Rick says, they are simply not motivated. Some of them are awesome people and it's easy to establish a rapport with them (many are being jerks, yell, scream and curse at my cold callers without provocation and the moment they are asked about the property they own). But even nicest ones are there to "help you" make them a retail offer or buy at retail price. Occasionally they will agree to sell at 80% of market value, but when we run numbers it's obvious that we would have to lock it at 40%-50% of Zillow/Redfin value to make it a viable deal. Anything above that erodes any profits potential buyer would make, let alone squeezing our assignment fee, which would be on top of it.

So, what is your take on it? Are there truly seasoned wholesalers that do 5-10 deals a month off market with relatively limited resources?

Zach told the story about prison inmate who smuggled a cell phone and closed a deal from his jail cell, but I keep a tab on numbers/statistics and I think what that inmate experienced is a sheer luck rather than solid and consistent probability. Our VA's use dialers and dialer calls 2000 numbers a day (per VA) to have a connection with 150-180 individual recipients. Of those connections, about 40% are answering machines, which dialer for some reason can't distinguish from the human. The other 60% are typical "go kick the rocks!", "I am not interested", "FU, don't call me again!!!!" folks. But every day 2-4 of them will say "Yes! I want to sell!". And we will get occasional "Yes" on SMS campaign (1 yes for every 357 SMS sent). The end result, though, is always the same. They are not serious/motivated sellers, or they are somewhat motivated (retiring next year, moving in 6 months , tired of being a landlord and etc.), but not nearly as motivated as someone who would take 50% of Zillow/Redfin estimate on their property. They would rather put it on market as FSBO, hire a realtor and pay 9%-10% selling costs or pay a flat fee to a local broker to list on MLS and try their luck.

Yes, we still end up locking deals and closing may be one deal a month, but it seems like we are doing a lot of wheel spinning and spend tremendous amount of effort to achieve this result, and it doesn't even feel like it's solid and fully predictable.

What is your take on it? Please, no guruism and fluff, no marketing of the services you provide. I know all the ways you can lock and dispo a deal (including creative financing, net listings and etc.). Just straight talk. This is not meant to whine and cry all day, this is meant to brainstorm and explore the truth, to find out how those of you who close 5-10 deals a month do it. Newbies who have not close a deal or closed may be one deal here and there are welcome to chime in, but I really want to dig deep and hear from those who do some good volume in wholesaling while relying on limited resources (20,000 paid lists pulled and skipped per month, 2 VA's on the phones, 10,000 SMSs sent per month, a licensed realtor/apprentice on the team with no foreign accent and great skills talking to sellers and etc.).

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