A five minute filter turned 700 dispo blast emails into one closing

Step 5 is the one most people skip and it's the one that wastes actual money. I ask for the executed purchase and sale agreement plus whatever the title company has so far, and I ask early, before I've paid for anything.

Two I passed on last year had unreleased liens and one had an heir who hadn't signed. All three were being marketed as though they were ready to close in 14 days. Whether a given cloud is fixable in that window depends on your state's process and on the specific instrument, so that's a title company and attorney conversation rather than a guess from the email.

The 40 percent pad in step 4 is doing something worth naming precisely. You are not correcting for dishonesty. You are correcting for the fact that a wholesaler's repair estimate is built from photos and a walkthrough with no destructive investigation, so it systematically misses anything behind a wall or under the slab. Sewer laterals, failed subfloor under vinyl, undersized electrical service, aluminum branch wiring. Those items cluster in older stock, which is most of what gets wholesaled.

That suggests the pad should not be flat. On a 1990s build with a visible kitchen and bath scope, 15 to 20 percent above their number may be enough. On pre-1960 stock with occupancy history you can't verify, 40 percent may be light. If you have 40 or 50 files with both an estimate and a final cost, calculate the ratio by decade of construction and use those instead of one number.

The other thing your funnel tells you is where your sender quality sits. 400 of 700 failed on ARV support. If that 400 is concentrated in two of your six senders, unsubscribing from those two removes most of the work without removing any of the 11 that passed. Track pass rate per sender and the filter gets faster every month.

One assumption to watch. Step 2 asks for three sold comps within a mile in the last six months. In thin rural markets that test fails on properties that are fine, and roughly a dozen states do not make sale prices public at all, so a member on this forum in one of those states will need agent or MLS access to run your step 2 the way you wrote it.

Went through this a couple of times to be sure. So the ARV in the email is the wholesaler's estimate of what the house is worth fixed up, and step 2 is you checking that estimate against houses that actually sold. Have I got that right?

And 700 emails to 1 closing is a 0.14 percent rate. Is that normal or is your filter unusually strict?

My rate is similar and I'm a few deals in. The number that stings isn't the ratio, it's step 3. I have twice offered on something where the photos hid a missing kitchen and I'd already spent time on comps.

sextant, do you check the photo timestamps or metadata? I've had a packet with photos from a prior listing 18 months earlier and a wholesaler who claimed not to know.