Case Study - Data-Driven Domination: Josh’s Strategy to Scale Wholesaling

Data-Driven Domination: Josh’s Strategy to Scale Wholesaling

Josh Wagner is a real estate agent based in North Carolina with nearly a decade of experience representing buyers and sellers. He’s also an experienced wholesaler and flipper, having completed nearly a hundred real estate transactions over the past few years. In the early days, it was just him and his wife handling the entire lifecycle from sourcing deals and getting them under contract to assigning contracts to end buyers. Slowly but surely, as his operations grew he brought on additional teammates. Today Josh has a team of cold callers and VAs that help find opportunities, qualify sellers, and coordinate transactions.

Early innings — flipping and wholesaling homes

When Josh and his wife were just getting started in the world of real estate investing, they decided to focus on wholesaling and flipping distressed properties. Wholesaling came with a much smaller payout, but also much less risk. They could also be completed quickly (under 30 days) and with minimal investment (just the escrow deposit). But flips, if done correctly, came with larger payouts, often 5-6x as much as wholesaled properties, making them attractive.

As time wore on, Josh figured out how to double and eventually triple the assignment fees he garnered for wholesaled properties. Going from $5-8k to $12-15k and eventually $40k+. At the same time, he built out a robust network of investors and cash buyers for the properties he secured under contract—making the other side of the market. That’s when he officially shifted focus to exclusively wholesaling properties. But there was a problem, it was extremely time-consuming to find properties and get in contact with the owners.

Hitting his stride — scaling the team

In the beginning, Josh found the properties he wholesaled through a combination of his connections and sheer willpower. But eventually, the wells dried up, and he needed to source properties from elsewhere. That’s when he started to buy lists and create tools and systems to find more properties. The lists were helpful because they gave him a list of numbers to call, but they were incredibly ineffective and inaccurate. Often the owners had already sold their homes weeks before he called them, despite the lists being advertised as “up-to-date”. That’s when Josh started exploring bots to scrape the data from local municipalities' websites.

The bots gathered lots of information, but they were missing key details, frequently broke and the outputs needed further work. So he brought in a VA to double-check the accuracy, fix the errors, and find the additional information. The VA worked around the clock parsing and enriching the information. They would take the addresses mentioned in the public notice and enter them one by one into the assessor’s database to find the parcel ID and then enter the parcel ID into the treasurer's database to find the owner’s information and mailing info. Then twice a month he would skiptrace the list to find the property owner’s contact information.

All that took place before he picked up the phone and dialed even a single phone number. It required 12-15 hours/week of his own time on top of the full-time VA to make the list usable. But once he had the list he immediately saw the fruits of his labor. Jumping from one deal every other month, to consistently hitting at one deal (or more) per month. That’s when he started outsourcing the cold-calling of leads that had not yet been qualified. After onboarding two callers he started to see a nice ramp-up in productivity, consistently hitting two deals per month.

That’s when he ran into the next issue, the list couldn’t be aggregated or cleaned fast enough to keep up with the demand from the callers, who churned through hundreds of leads each day. So he hired another VA and dedicated more of his own time to finding opportunities. But soon he was burning the candle on both ends.

That’s when Goliath Data stepped in.

Getting his operations back on track

When we initially connected with Josh, we knew we could help eliminate some of the operational burdens that plagued his day-to-day. Identifying and aggregating all of the information from the public notices was the first step to eliminating the bottlenecks. The next was parsing and enriching the raw data with information from the other public sources he tied together manually. The final step was automatically skiptracing the owners to find their contact information and surfacing those leads in the tools his callers used daily. From end to end, the entire process took less than 15 minutes for leads from public notices to become opportunities in their system, and our systems ran all day, every day, without fail.

The result?

Josh’s operations skyrocketed from a few transactions per month to 3-6 per month. He was also able to eliminate the need for VAs to gather or enrich data, increasing his bottom line. More importantly, he got the 12-15 hours per week back. Time that he could spend with family or chasing strategic deals.

The future of off-market properties—Goliath Data

Josh’s experience isn’t uncommon, we’ve heard similar stories from operators who are just starting, and from those who are facilitating hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property transactions each month. They scale through sheer will, making tens of thousands of phone calls each month only to hit a wall. And no matter what they try, they can’t seem to scale further. That’s where speed of information is key—getting information before anyone else and acting on it, by being the first caller an owner or agent receives. We provide access to custom intent signals like pre-foreclosures, code violations, and eviction notices in real-time, so real estate professionals can find and close more off-market properties.

To get started with the future of off-market properties, get in touch.

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