What is a buyer list actually made of, and what are the real line items in building one?

Question

A property manager whose owners include a couple of flippers will eventually hear "just push it to your buyer list" when one of them gets a house under contract. Most managers in that position do not have a buyer list. They have a spreadsheet of owners with phone numbers. The flipper then points to the platform he uses at $99 a month and says get on it, which leaves the impression that a buyer list is a piece of software you buy instead of something you build. There is also the notion of paying for verified buyers, which presumably means someone checked something, though what gets checked is rarely spelled out. Can someone lay out what the thing actually is and what the real line items are?

Rena Guide · Accepted Answer

A buyer list is your own file of end buyers you can call when a property is under contract. Dispo is short for disposition, the sell side of a wholesale deal. You control a property at one price, you find someone who will take it at a higher one, and the difference is the spread. If you sell the contract itself rather than the house, the money you collect is called an assignment fee.

The software is where the list lives, not the list. A small CRM to hold buyer records commonly runs somewhere in the $50 to $150 a month range, and a sending tool for email or text is separate. Marketplace platforms let you post a deal to their buyer pool and usually take either a subscription or a slice of the fee. Prices move around, so confirm what a vendor charges in writing before you sign anything annual.

"Verified buyer" has no standard meaning. Loosely it means someone on the platform clicked a box. Strictly, what makes a buyer worth a row in your file is a buy box you can repeat back (price range, zip codes, condition they'll take), proof of funds or a lender letter, and a record of having actually closed something.

The part that catches people from your side of the business: blasting a property you don't own or control, to a list, can raise licensing questions depending on how your state writes its statute, and that applies to management licensees too. Ask a real estate attorney in your state before you send anything on someone else's deal. Thirty buyers who answer the phone beats four thousand email addresses.

derekj19 · Answer

A wholesaler shared a "900 buyer" export with me to look at and a big chunk of the rows had no phone number at all, just an email and a city. So when someone tells you they have a list of 900, the useful follow-up is how many they've actually spoken to in the last quarter. I'd guess the answer is usually under fifty.

nataliehsu · Answer

So the list is the asset and the $99 is just rent on the filing cabinet?

mikeoconnell7 · Answer

That is roughly it, plumb. Dispo help typically prices at 25 percent of the assignment fee with a $2,500 minimum, and the hours that justify that fee go into buyer calls rather than into the software. Trellis, the harder question for you is whether your owners are buyers at all. A landlord who bought three rentals over six years is not a cash buyer who closes in ten days, and marketing to them as if they were will burn the relationship and still leave the house unsold.

monica_tran3 · Answer

Add deliverability to your line items. Send a few hundred cold property blasts off the same domain you use for owner statements and your management email can end up landing in spam, which is a real cost to your day job. Separate domain, separate sending tool. Data vendors for buyer records exist too, and pricing generally starts around $100 a month for limited pulls.

brandonlee36 · Answer

Picture a buyer who sits on six of these lists and opens one. The other five send $400k renovation projects two hours away to someone who has said twice that he buys single family under $150k in two zip codes. That is the typical experience on the receiving end. Filtering is the whole service, and almost nobody does it.

angela_burke · Answer

The usual setup is a VA in the $7 to $9 an hour range calling buyer records to confirm the buy box, the price ceiling, and whether they fund with cash or a hard money lender. Forty calls gets you maybe ten real conversations. That labor is what turns a spreadsheet into something a wholesaler will pay for, and it never shows up in anyone's software pitch.

What is a buyer list actually made of, and what are the real line items in building one?

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