I’ve had my real estate license since 2016. For the first couple of years that I was trying to find my own deals, I did what basically every new investor does: I drove around and looked for the house with the sagging gutters and the boat in the driveway that hadn’t moved since the Clinton administration, and I’d write the address in my phone as if I’d just found buried treasure.

Then I’d spend a week tracking down the owner, finally get them on the phone, and learn the house was worth $240,000 with $228,000 owed on it. The owner would have had to show up at closing with a cashier’s check just for the privilege of getting rid of their own house, so that call ended about 90 seconds after it started.

I burned a lot of Saturdays that way, and I lost $40,000 on a flip during roughly the same stretch, so I’m not writing this as a guy who had it figured out early. I’m writing it as a guy who wasted enough time to eventually change the order in which he does things.

These days, I’m mostly hunting land and RV parks in any town with a Dollar General in Texas, and the 20 minutes I’ll outline is what I run before I ever get in the truck. It works about the same in a rural East Texas county as it does in a suburb of Phoenix, because the logic underneath it doesn’t care where you are.

Nobody Checks the Math

The mistake is the order of operations, and it’s a sneaky one, because chasing distress feels productive while you’re doing it. 

Distress is visual: peeling paint, tall grass, and a code violation notice taped to the door. Your brain sees that and fills in a whole story about a motivated seller, so you spend the next three weeks deep-diving into everything you need—until learning that the owner pulled cash out in 2022 and physically can’t sell without bringing a check to the closing table.

Equity is what makes a deal possible at all, and every other signal you get excited about only tells you whether the owner wants a deal or not. Run those in the wrong order, and your list fills up with people who would love to sell you their house and legally can’t.

So gate for equity first, then layer on the reasons somebody might be tired of owning the thing. Lists built in that order come back much shorter, which is fine, because a list only has two jobs, and being long isn’t one of them.

The Target

When I’m driving neighborhoods and see a property that’s clearly been neglected, what I’m actually looking at is evidence about a person rather than an address. 

Somebody stopped showing up. Maybe they moved three states away, and the place turned into a chore they handle over the phone. Maybe they inherited it, and nobody in the family wants to be the one who deals with it. Or maybe they’re 81 years old, and the yard finally got to be too much. The house is just the part you can see from the street, and the situation underneath it is what I’m actually trying to read.

So the rundown house sends me to the data now instead of straight to a mailing list. I’ll pull up the address in PropStream on my phone right there, and within 15 seconds, I know:

• Who owns it
• What they paid
• When they bought
• What’s still owed
• Whether they live anywhere near it 

The 20 Minutes

Here’s the actual sequence. The whole thing is built to fit inside a lunch break because a process you dread is one you run exactly once.

Minutes 0 to 3: Draw a box you can service

Pick a county, or three or four ZIP codes inside one. I understand the pull, because the filters will happily hand you 90,000 properties, and a number that big feels like an accomplishment. But you can’t mail 90,000 people, and you definitely can’t follow up with them. 

Pick the area you would actually drive to on a Tuesday afternoon. If you’re not sure where that line sits, draw it tighter than feels right.

Minutes 3 to 8: Gate for equity

This is the whole ballgame, which is exactly why it goes before anything else. I set the estimated equity at 50% or higher, and I’ll usually run a second version that’s free and clear only, just to see how far apart the two numbers are. 

PropStream has more than 165 filters, and it’s genuinely easy to get lost stacking a dozen of them on your first pass, so fight that urge for a few minutes. 

Minutes 8 to 14: Layer the burden signals

Now you add the reasons, meaning the circumstances that make somebody ready instead of merely able. These are the ones I lean on:

• Absentee or out-of-state owner, because distance turns a rental into a chore, and a chore eventually turns into a decision.
• Owned for 10 years or longer, because long tenure plus high equity is the profile of somebody who already made their money and is now mostly maintaining a roof.
• Tax delinquent, because people rarely stop paying on something they still feel good about.
• Vacancy, since an empty house costs money and produces nothing, and that combination wears on an owner faster than you’d expect.
• Pre-foreclosure, probate, and inherited property, which you either handle with real human decency or stay out of entirely.

PropStream keeps about 20 pre-built lead lists covering most of those, which is a decent way to learn what the filters do before you start building your own.

Minutes 14 to 17: Sort by signal count

Don’t treat the results as one flat pile. Count how many signals each property hit and let that set your priority order, so the ones carrying three or four reasons sit above the ones carrying a single reason. 

When a house is vacant and tax delinquent and owned by somebody living in another state, though, you’re not really guessing anymore, and that’s a call you make this afternoon rather than a postcard you mail in nine days.

Minutes 17 to 20: Split the list and send it

Take the top slice, however deep your budget goes, and skip trace it so you can call and text. Everybody else gets mail, because mail is cheap and patient and doesn’t mind waiting on people.

I’d rather call 40 people than mail 400, and the entire point of the first 17 minutes is to make sure those 40 are the right 40.

Skip tracing is included on PropStream’s Pro and Elite plans, and it’s the secret weapon for getting in touch with the right decision-makers at properties.

What I Actually Say First

Keep it short, and do not open with: “I want to buy your house.”

Something closer to this: “Hey, this is Garrett. I buy property here in the county, and I came across your place on Old River Road. Are you open to an offer on it, or is that not something you’d consider?”

That last clause is doing most of the work. You’re handing them an easy way out of the conversation, and the people who don’t take it are telling you something worth knowing.

Final Thoughts

Same box, filters, and 20 minutes. What you’re hunting on the second pass is the new names, the ones that weren’t there in the last pull, because a property that just went tax delinquent or just picked up a vacancy flag is a much fresher situation than one that’s been sitting in your CRM since spring.

Most people do the opposite of all this. They run one enormous search, get buried under 4,000 addresses, feel vaguely guilty about it for a couple of weeks, and never open the software again. 

The version that works is unglamorous and a little boring. You keep the box small, you keep the list tight, and you put the same 20 minutes on your calendar every month until you’re the person already in the conversation when somebody decides they’re done with the place. That decision usually lands months before they think about calling an agent, and those months are the entire advantage.

Ready to build your first list? PropStream gives you access to data on more than 160 million properties nationwide, 165+ filters, and built-in skip tracing.