The Hidden Value of Probate Leads

Mike Hambright (00:01.394)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today is gonna be a good one. I’ve got my buddy, Brad Woodall on here joining us. He’s a probate expert. And we’re gonna be talking about why probates are the very best lead. So Brad, always good to see you. How are you, my friend?

Brad Woodall (00:14.604)
I’m doing good man, always good to see you. We’ve known each other for a long time now and always good to chat. That’s right.

Mike Hambright (00:18.448)
Yeah, it’s been we got a lot of history. Yep. And so and I know you’re kind of a fellow marketing nerd, if you will. And so we talk we’ve talked shop a lot on marketing, different lead sources and things like that. And and I know that you’ve kind of gone heavy into probates over the last few years. And so I’m excited to talk about that topic and be able to share that with lot of folks. think we’re to have a couple little nuggets that between you and I that we kind of release here. That’s a little bit of contrarian thought to what a lot of folks think about probate. So this is to be a good one for those of you listening right now.

Brad, anybody that doesn’t know you yet, or doesn’t know you well enough yet, or they think they know you, but maybe they don’t know you as well as they thought they did, tell us your backstory a little bit.

Brad Woodall (00:57.582)
Yeah, so I just I’ve been at this 10 years now, kind of started dabbling in 2015 into trying to buy some REOs and foreclosures and stuff like that, which was a bad time to do that in Atlanta because the hedge funds were always beating you out on the offers. But got in that got me into like direct seller marketing started doing that in 2016 and was working a corporate job at the time, eventually in 2018 left a corporate job.

left a corporate grind and been doing deals ever since. Gosh, at this point, I’ve closed hundreds of deals. I’ve got a small team here. I’m located in the Atlanta Metro market. I live north of Atlanta in Canton, Georgia, but we buy all over North Georgia. And then, you know, got into the probate world, I mean, years ago, but then really like niche down onto it a few years ago, probably two or three years ago, just really decided to put a lot of focus into it.

And here I am today. So, yeah.

Mike Hambright (02:01.384)
Awesome, awesome. let’s, and Brad, you know, little, for some of you folks that are listening out there, Brad was actually at the very first Investor Fuel Mastermind meeting and has been a part of Investor Fuel over the years. And so you were, that was where we very first met, was in the, I think we had common friend that got you into the group. And so that was, by the way, that was about seven and a half years ago, if you believe that.

Brad Woodall (02:25.646)
It was November of 2017.

Mike Hambright (02:28.184)
Yeah, you know the exact date. Yeah, I know it’s before. And then when we just had our seven year investor fuel anniversary last fall, so I know we’re roughly seven and a half years ago. So cool. Awesome. Yeah, because you were at the time you were thinking about leaving your corporate job. and then I think shortly after that, you just said, Yeah, I just quit my job today.

Brad Woodall (02:29.933)
I know the date.

Brad Woodall (02:38.828)
Yeah, that’s crazy.

Brad Woodall (02:48.27)
January 2018, said adios. I think it was January 12th, 2018. I left my corporate job. put in my notice. I gave him like a 60 days notice after the investor fuel meeting and left January 18th and never looked back, left the golden handcuffs behind. So.

Mike Hambright (02:51.645)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (03:02.46)
Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, that’s awesome. So and now you’re like me on completely unemployable like they probably couldn’t afford you for one and two wouldn’t want you because you got too many bad habits from their perspective, probably. Yeah. Yeah.

Brad Woodall (03:14.67)
That’s right. That’s right. I’m glad I you know, it’s funny, my wife works a corporate job still and she works from home down the opposite end of the house and some of the stuff I see that she has to deal with. I was like, thank God I don’t have to deal with that anymore.

Mike Hambright (03:26.328)
yeah, I don’t know if that’s not at all. Yeah, not that we don’t have other drama to deal with as entrepreneurs, but it is what it is. Yeah, we tolerate it. So so let’s talk about probate. So, you know, why why are probates the best lead and the best kind of source, I guess, in your opinion, because I know you put a lot of focus on it. And not that anybody out here listening should just go all in on one source and ignore everything else. But probates are your favorites. So tell me why.

Brad Woodall (03:31.214)
Right, right, exactly.

Brad Woodall (03:54.38)
Well, first of all, I want to preface this and say, if you’re looking for a high volume lead source, probates is not the answer, right? It’s sort of a lower volume thing. But from a profit margin perspective, in my experience, they have been my most profitable deals I’ve ever done. They’re a longer life cycle to get the deal closed, and there’s a lot more hurdles you got to jump through. But the profit margins, in my opinion,

Are some of the best profit margins of any? I’ve done all the marketing methods in the lists and I’ve done you name it. I’ve done it so. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (04:29.202)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And we’re gonna go over today is you really, you kind of, I’m sure there’s plenty of people that have bought houses that were in probate or had been through probate or popped up on a list because they had filed a probate and they didn’t have to deal with all of the court system or the family or anything much at all, because maybe they had gotten through all that. But I think where they become the most profitable and where you can really separate yourself, which we’re going to talk about more today.

is if you talk to them early on and you can kind of become that consultant, so really like an advisor as to like how to navigate those waters, right? And at that point, the competent, it’s real. If you know what you’re doing, and I know you do, and I know you are going to tell some of that today, you can help people. You basically the competition gets thinned out real fast because you’re clearly the become the expert. You can position yourself as the expert on it versus just somebody that wants a house, right? And so.

Yeah, so maybe you could tell us a little bit about the probate process. There’s probably some misconceptions that people have about how this even works. so I think everybody knows what a probate is. Somebody passed away and they need to file a probate so that the heirs get what they deserve or whatever, whatever. But there’s more to it than that. So maybe kind of tell us some of the misconceptions and kind of high level what it is that we’ll clarify a little bit more.

Brad Woodall (05:54.574)
Yeah, sure. And I want to kind of circle back to what you just said about competition. And probates are a very heavily marketed lead source. But they’re on each end of the process. What I have found is the blue ocean, right? So you got the red ocean. And if you’ve ever read the book, the blue ocean strategy, right, your red ocean is where all the sharks are swimming all the competition is. And getting them early on is key.

Mike Hambright (06:03.174)
Right.

Brad Woodall (06:24.746)
and winning their buy-in from the seller and helping them through the process is key. And then also catching the ones on the backside who filed for probate years ago, the marketers stopped marketing to them six months, 12 months ago, and now they’re ready to sell because they didn’t sell for one reason or another. There was a tenant in the property, brother was living there.

Mike Hambright (06:40.487)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (06:51.602)
Right.

Brad Woodall (06:54.402)
They just wanted to bury their head in the sand and not deal with it. Different things happen and the best deals are found on the blue ocean on either side of the red ocean, in my opinion. So how do you…

Mike Hambright (07:05.798)
right. Let’s come back to that because that’s gonna be a meaty, a meaty conversation, I think, because I’ve, I’ve known that for years, like, a lot of real estate investors hit them right away, right when the probates filed and maybe mailed to them two or three times, and then they stop. And I’d like to come back to that because there’s a lot of I think, new information we’re going to share with people there on that side, that’s going to be a little bit eye opening, might create a bunch of competition for guys like you and me. But that’s what we do is kind of share what’s working here. But okay, yeah. And so

Overall of the process, you want to kind of share just like, you know, the probate process and some misconceptions there maybe.

Brad Woodall (07:41.388)
Yeah, so obviously, you know, probate someone died, right? Someone dies. And in many cases, the family, the heirs of the estate, whoever that may be, generally are going to sell the property, some of them will keep it. But for the most part, most of them are going to sell it. I would say that at least probably 80 % of them are going to sell it the traditional way through a real estate agent, kind of go through that route. And that’s why we also kind of tap into the retail side too. I’m an agent.

We partner with agents because there’s, you can monetize the lead still through that source, right? But someone dies, they’re going to sell it. In order to get to sell it, they’ve got to go through the pro-weight process. And depending on what state you live in is going to dictate how in-depth that process is going to be. Like Mike, you live in Texas. You guys have affidavits of airship in Texas, which are awesome because it’s kind of like

Mike Hambright (08:16.466)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (08:33.437)
Mm-hmm.

Brad Woodall (08:39.616)
In some cases, it’s an easy way sort of around probate. You don’t have to go through that whole process versus where I live in Georgia. You kind of have to probate everything. And then some states have small estate affidavits. Some of them don’t. you know, there’s different. But for the most part, I would say the probate process around the U.S. is probably about 90 percent the same. And some states have subtle differences in the process.

Mike Hambright (08:45.916)
Right.

Brad Woodall (09:09.142)
and it can take anywhere from a couple months to a year, two years, depending on what state you live in. And the person that the heirs cannot sell that real estate until they have been granted the authority to do so. And that’s where you go through the probate process to basically get the authority, the executor, the administrator, whomever gets that authority granted from the courts to say, okay, we’ve looked at the will or if there’s not a will,

All looks good. Okay, you can sell the assets of the estate now and distribute the funds to the creditors. Creditors always get paid first. So always remember that. And then distribute money to the heirs. But it’s a legal process.

Mike Hambright (09:46.44)
Right.

Mike Hambright (09:51.11)
Yeah. And that, and what you just said there is, is I want to, I want to emphasize that is that when somebody files probate, like we’re thinking of it as a real, it’s a, it’s a signal for a real estate investor that maybe where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Maybe there’s somebody that needs to sell a house because of this. Right. But I want to point out here from that you just, that you just said at a high level, but didn’t, you know, I to tie it together is that creditors are also looking at probates because

If they own debt, basically medical debt and stuff like that, now consider that a lot of people, depending on how they pass away, if they’re older and they pass away, they usually have a lot of medical. I don’t know the numbers on this, but there’s something that I’ve seen before that basically kind of end-of-life medical expenses for people are like massive, right? Like you don’t have a whole lot of medical expenses your whole life for most people. And in that last year two of your life, especially if you have

you know, any of the major ails that kill us, cancer, heart issues, all those things. If you’re in the hospital a lot, you basically have a ton of medical debt that’s tied to you. And I know because, well, just because I just happened to know, is that when somebody files for probate, that’s also, a probate is like a notice of default in some ways, right? It’s a public announcement that something has happened here, so.

That’s why that’s how we get these notifications. You go to the county or you can buy them through some different sources and stuff. But it’s also like a public announcement that something has happened here to go inform the world that if you have any interest in this property or this person or this estate, you better raise your hand now because people are lining up with their hands out to get something. And so that’s why this takes that’s why this is a process, right? Of like.

we might want to buy the house. it truly is in probate and the other spouse is deceased or whatever, then there’s a line forming to pay back the debts associated with that person. And one way to pay for those debts is possibly the sale of hard assets, including real estate, right?

Brad Woodall (11:58.658)
Yep, yeah, definitely for sure. Yeah, it’s a notice to the world that someone died and it’s a process and it was created to give creditors time. And by the way, depending on the state you live in, like where I live in Georgia, a creditor can open a probate for an estate and be the administrator. They can petition to be the administrator of an estate and open a probate. Obviously, it’s got to make sense for them to do it. They’ve got to be owed a certain amount of debt and know there’s assets to do it.

Mike Hambright (12:00.744)
Yeah.

Brad Woodall (12:26.594)
But they actually in Georgia can do that in many states they can and some states they can’t. just depends on your state. Yep.

Mike Hambright (12:31.528)
Yeah, I didn’t know that. Yeah, that’s cool. So, um, and I have a friend, somebody that you would know, uh, that I have a friend that, uh, I got a lead for a probate situation. It’s from an old friend of mine and it’s kind of a ways away. So I said, Hey, I connected them with a friend of mine to go see if they could buy the house. And sure enough, they’re buying the house, but it has to get approved by the judge. And since the person passed, then there was a fire there and they’ve got insurance, the insurance companies involved. And there’s a lot of moving parts there.

But I’m pretty sure he’s getting the deal and it’ll be it’ll be a nice juicy one but it’s because he was patient and could kind of hold their hand through the process of You know making sure that they were getting some of their questions answered. So cool. So let’s go ahead. Do you have some else other bread?

Brad Woodall (13:17.932)
I was just gonna say, yeah, in order to hold their hand, really need to educate yourself. If you’re gonna get into this niche, you need to educate yourself on and have a good team behind you, right? A good probate attorneys to consult with, real estate attorneys to consult with, divorce attorneys to consult with, know, like you need a good team of people to help you overcome the hurdles because these are hairy deals. They come with a lot of hair on them.

and you need to be either knowledgeable or know someone who is knowledgeable and then you can help steer that seller through that process because the more you help them, the more they want to do business with you. And they see that to you, it’s not just about the property. You actually genuinely want to help them and you’re helping them through the process.

Mike Hambright (14:04.732)
Right. Maybe share some tips on how to stand out there because obviously most real estate investors are going to come in and they’re they’re just looking at the house. They might not even know that the lead that there was a probate. Right. I mean, right. There’s people that call you to sell their house all the time and you don’t you may not know what their motivations are. And so sometimes, you know, I would say probably the average person that buys a house that went through probate.

isn’t even aware there was a probate. Like they’re just, they just are a beneficiary of that process that’s already happened and they don’t know. Right. And so obviously I know you market to probates, probate leads. And I know like with investor machine, a probate is one of many data sources that we use to identify. And we actually have a system when we generate leads for our customers, can tell them, Hey, this has a probate. It has two, you know, two years.

Back taxes like we can tell them what data is behind that that lead source, but most people don’t have that Information and so how would you know? I mean, I guess are there any tips on how to I mean you you don’t want to just say hey did Yeah, did you have a spouse that passed away or you mean you don’t really ask that but how does that come up? Naturally in your experience if you didn’t already know that hey this I used my probate phone number So I know it was a probate or whatever it might be

Brad Woodall (15:29.068)
Well, so let’s say for instance, I’ve gotten a lot of leads, you know, just from SEO for my website that, you know, that someone died and through our process, we’re asking these questions a lot of time, they volunteer it, right? They say, my dad died or whatever, this was my dad’s house or whatever. And then when we hear that my leads manager, who’s worked for me for many, many years, she knows to go down this probate path and she has those these questions asked. And to some people that might sound like a lot,

Mike Hambright (15:43.709)
Right.

Brad Woodall (15:57.826)
But then they quickly realize they’re like, wait a second, these people know what they’re doing because the average investor is not going to ask these upfront. We have some scripts that we kind of go down and ask them about this and how many brothers and sisters and when did they die and da da da da da. We’re like, this is all pertinent information because these are deal killers too. And then the REI sales training world, right? These are deal killers and you need to address them upfront. Otherwise they are going to come back to bite you in the rear end later.

So we, as we do that, we’re also winning buy-in from the seller because they’re like, these guys really know what they’re doing, right? And so we do that once they talk to us, but then on our marketing too, we’re using some things in our copy that kind of helps show us that, or show the seller that we kind of know what we’re doing. I change up my copy depending on the month, depending on the list, all that stuff, but I do kind of…

throw some subtle hints in our copy that helps set us apart from other people. And then when they do call us, they’re like, yeah, they know what they’re doing.

Mike Hambright (17:06.034)
Yeah, it’s almost like, you know, certainly during the last downturn when there were a lot, there was a lot more foreclosure activity. Whenever you would hear somebody say like, I don’t want to lose my house or anything like that. You can say, well, are you behind on any payments right now? And you kind of, it’s almost like there’s a decision tree in your call script that when they say this, I go down a different path of kind of questions or, cause you’re trying to gather information to, you know, obviously help yourself from a sales process perspective.

And to be able to be a better advisor to that seller,

Brad Woodall (17:37.378)
And also going a step deeper into the sales process, they’re going to throw out subtle hints to you by you asking questions as to what the real pain points are. Sometimes, you know, because we always ask them, well, why don’t you just list it with an agent? You know, that’s a question to get them to cue to say, well, because of X, Y and Z. And then you probe a little bit deeper. And then sometimes it’s like,

They want to sell this because their pain in the butt brother-in-law is still living in the house and he won’t move out. And they’re like threatening to sue him. And that’s where he come in and was like, well, this ain’t our first rodeo with that. Like we can help you through that. We know how to navigate that. Blah, blah, blah. And then we become their advisor to help them get their pain in the butt brother-in-law out of the property. Usually it’s just cash for keys. They just want money at the end of the day for the most part. Right. But providing the solutions and really identifying the real pain points of what

Mike Hambright (18:18.888)
Yeah.

Brad Woodall (18:34.678)
they’re really going through or it’s we had one recently that she’s the she’s the executor of her mom’s estate, but she’s the little sister and her older brothers that are like 10 years older than her still view her as a little sister, even though they’re like in their 60s and 50s and 60s. And they like don’t trust the sister, but she’s technically the one in charge. Right. She’s the executor and she signs on the dotted line. But we we.

Mike Hambright (18:58.568)
Yeah.

Brad Woodall (19:01.71)
have had to consult with the whole family through this process. still haven’t. We’re still going through this, but we have to communicate with her and the brothers and play that line so that we’re stroking her ego and making sure that we’re not overstepping our bounds and telling the brothers too much because we know she’s in charge. And then the same token, we’re playing that game with the brothers. you know, so it’s a balance game and you just have to navigate that.

Mike Hambright (19:28.966)
Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit more about the, the marketing and really from the standpoint of you said the kind of blue ocean stuff. So, I have lots of thoughts and opinions on the backside, like as the probate kind of ages, if you will, the opportunity that’s still there. But you talked about getting to it really early, which would indicate some sort of kind of pre-probate strategy or, cause a lot of folks that certainly if they, if they buy probate lists, in theory, they’re getting them.

soon after the probates filed. But how do you get to probates? Well, I know on the investor machine side, we actually, it’s gonna sound a little morbid, but we analyze the obituaries in every, every county where we operate. also anything other than that about kind of get to like a pre probate or how to get in front of it before everybody else sees it.

Brad Woodall (20:21.006)
So the way I’ve done that is through my probateresource.com brand and my probate resource YouTube channel. When someone dies, enter into a information seeking journey. So they are now, because most people don’t have the slightest clue how to go through probate until they have to do it. And they may only do it once in their life. And then so they get on, nowadays they get on the internet to…

Mike Hambright (20:41.704)
Bye.

Brad Woodall (20:49.24)
How long does Probate take? How long does this? They start asking all these questions to Google. And that’s where we capture them early on. And what I do in a lot of my marketing is a lot of my video content and my probateresource.com brand, which is a of a seller facing brand, is there to capture them into my funnel early on while they’re in their information seeking journey. We also have some other lead magnets where we…

have created some pages on our website that just basically link to the probate forms for that state. So if you Google Texas probate forms, we actually have a page on our site with a link to the Texas probate forms. But as soon as I get them on my site, I pixel them and I can retarget them with my content. And then I hopefully as they’re further down, because they’re not ready to sell yet. Right. These people, when you catch them early, you have to carry them through their life cycle.

of when they finally are ready to sell, they’ll call you instead of someone else. And that’s how we capture them on the front side with, I mean, I’ve been doing this for years now, probably two, three years now, creating all these YouTube videos and blog articles and online content to capture them in. I’ve partnered with, I’ve done podcast episodes with attorneys and we’ve done state specific legal topics and all the questions that they might ask Google.

Mike Hambright (21:50.12)
Mm-hmm.

Brad Woodall (22:13.162)
we’re answering them for them to catch them on the front side. So

Mike Hambright (22:17.16)
Yeah, okay. a quick question for you. So I’m sure this is all over the board, but how soon after somebody dies is a probate usually filed?

Brad Woodall (22:27.054)
I mean, they can file it the next day if they wanted to. I would say typically, so I actually did some analysis on this this year. I built a whole model and you can go on my site and actually did a video on how to build the model for your own data. You can go buy that course if you want to, but I did a huge analysis on it. I went back and did literally five years worth of probate data. I’ve spent half a million dollars in probate marketing to all this stuff over the years.

Mike Hambright (22:29.36)
Right, but what’s common?

Brad Woodall (22:55.156)
What I found is that on average, most people are filing within, God, what are the numbers? Within the first 60 days, thereabouts. The zero to 30 day window is a lot less. And then it’s actually, I’m sorry, 90 days. So the 60 to 90 day window is the most common time of when they file after their death. Because when someone dies,

Mike Hambright (23:20.68)
Yeah.

Brad Woodall (23:22.51)
You know, when I lost my son last year for two months, I was an emotional roller coaster for like, just, you don’t know which way is up. You got so many things to think about and you just don’t, you don’t know what’s going on and you don’t even want to worry about, you don’t even worry about probate until you get your head back on your shoulders, you know? So, you know, I found that like, and I analyzed what

Mike Hambright (23:27.089)
Yeah.

Right.

Mike Hambright (23:37.617)
Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Brad Woodall (23:47.05)
Like, okay, how many deals did we do? Okay, so zero to 30 days. If someone filed within 30 days after the date of the death, what is our lead rate? What is our deal rate? All that stuff. We never did any deals for anybody within the first 30 days. Like none in five years of marketing to this and all the stuff. And then you dive into, I also found some pockets within there where surprisingly,

Mike Hambright (24:00.552)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brad Woodall (24:14.494)
our deal rate was really low in certain pockets. So in my market, I eliminate those pockets where I actually don’t market to people if they’ve filed probate within a certain number of days after the date of the death. I found in my analysis, and I’ve got a huge data set to analyze it, 60 some odd thousand rows of data, which is a pretty decent sized data set that says, no, the likelihood of a deal is very low for that. So we’re not going to spend money on that. And then like you mentioned over time later,

Mike Hambright (24:39.783)
Mm-hmm.

Brad Woodall (24:42.538)
there are diminishing returns as you go into the future.

Mike Hambright (24:48.28)
Sure. Yeah, I bet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because just because somebody dies, I mean, if I were to pass away, my wife’s not going to sell our house. I mean, she’s comfortable there. And it doesn’t mean that somebody is going to die. It just means there’s some legal issues that kind of have to happen. yeah. So let’s talk about on the the backside. So in my experience, and probably yours, too, there’s a lot of folks that hit them hard after the probates filed. And but like you said, there’s always cases like

You know, there’s three adult siblings and there’s the shit head brother that’s just like, well, I’m gonna, I’m going to move into the house or was maybe already living there before mom passed away or something. And, basically like, I’ll, I’ll take care of the house and I’ll pay the taxes and stuff. And then like a year later, the other two siblings realized he hasn’t paid the taxes and he doesn’t, doesn’t have any money. It’s not going to happen. Right. And by the way, he was going to fix that leak and do all this and that he hasn’t done anything. So we need to get this guy out of here. Right. And so.

there’s a lot of that kind of backside or there’s like negotiating medical debt. Like there’s a bunch of stuff that just takes, you know, months and months and months to kind of work itself out. Right. And so maybe share your thoughts on marketing to probates in terms of like the backend of like, after most of the other investors have kind of given up because they have ADD and moved on really fast. You know, what are the windows or kind of some, some things you see on the backend?

Brad Woodall (26:11.896)
So I would say that most investors and real estate agents too are marketing to these probates in the first six months, but really the biggest meat of it is in the first three months, heavily, heavily marketing, and then they start to taper off over time. And your competition goes down after a certain amount of time. So when I analyzed my data, what I found is that our closed

Mike Hambright (26:31.772)
Yeah, right.

Brad Woodall (26:41.742)
deal rate after six months went up like a very high percentage because now all of a sudden we have less competition. So we’re going on these appointments and we’re closing a higher percentage of these appointments than we were on the like earlier pre like six month leads because then you got a lot more competition, a lot more offers out there. I tell you one like we went on an appointment like two weeks ago.

And this guy was the nicest guy ever. And he was like, you know, I’m a nice guy. So I feel like, you know, I got all these letters and I feel like I need to, you know, give all these people the opportunity to come make an offer on the house. He had 25 investors that he called 25 people out of the house. He ultimately ended up selling it to the next door neighbor, which I don’t think that deal is going to work out. So he’s still on our follow up our follow up process there. But 25 people.

Mike Hambright (27:35.612)
Yeah.

Brad Woodall (27:39.0)
came out to the house. And, you know, so you get that piece and but over time you get as time goes on, obviously it costs money to continue to market to these people. Right. But with any marketing channel, the consistency of hitting them over and over. So when you do catch them in that moment, when they’re like they check their mail and they’re like, yeah, I do need to sell mom’s house now. Now is probably the time to call these people. Let me call them.

Mike Hambright (27:40.668)
Wow.

Brad Woodall (28:09.162)
We just got a call two days ago from a guy. He’s like, I got this card from you guys like two and a half years ago and it’s put in my drawer and I’m calling you now. I’m ready to sell that house. So. So.

Mike Hambright (28:20.968)
Yeah, that’s all. You know what I’ve seen? I think people say too is in the kind of a key for consistency here is I’ve seen people that they get, like you said, the first six months they get a bunch of mailers and they get. But there’s very few. If you kind of look at it over like a 12 or 18 month period, they’ll they’ll almost everybody’s a little bit different how they look at this. But sometimes they’re like, you know, I got a whole bunch of people. I got one postcard from a whole bunch of others. I got two or maybe three.

But you sent me nine like they just kept coming right and they’re just like they almost in their mind. They’re like hey you you stuck with me the longest right there’s something to be I think people obviously sometimes people are annoyed when we market to them and we all deal with the people that are mad that they’re marketed to you and then of course it is probate specifically are a sensitive topic but there’s also some people that are just like, know.

Brad Woodall (28:59.778)
Yeah. Yep.

Mike Hambright (29:15.684)
I appreciate that you, that I need help and I appreciate that somehow you knew that and you just kind of stuck with me. And they’re like, I’m only, the only person that’s been sending me anything for the last six months. And so I’m going to award my opportunity to you. Basically it’s a weird thing. It’s this, it’s this reciprocation like thing where people are like, you stayed with me. I know that sounds weird, but people just, they think.

Brad Woodall (29:34.926)
Mm-hmm.

Brad Woodall (29:39.426)
No, it’s Yeah, we’ve had people say that to us so many times that you are the only people that were continuing to mail me. No one else had mailed me anymore. And we went on the appointment and we had no competition. We made an offer. We got the deal. It was like a lay down, you And you just got to stay with it. But it costs money to do that, right? I mean, think of the mailers you’re going to continue to send and all that stuff. We do taper our cadence off over time.

Mike Hambright (29:57.66)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (30:02.392)
for sure.

Brad Woodall (30:07.627)
After a certain amount of time, we slow it down and we will move to maybe a 60-day cadence. Once they get out to a certain point, we’re only hitting them maybe twice a year because it really doesn’t matter. Nobody else is hitting them anyways.

Mike Hambright (30:19.846)
Right. Yeah. Brad, so you have a wealth of information on your site. So folks wanted to kind of learn more about you, what you’ve got going on. I know you work with other investors too, to help them generate leads and become probate experts as well, right? So where do they go to learn more about that?

Brad Woodall (30:36.61)
Yeah, so I’ve got my probatehouseguy.com website, and I have a YouTube channel for that. So I put out sort of investor and agent focused content on that channel. It’s the Probate House Guy channel. You can go to probatehouseguy.com as well. And we offer sort of a partnership program where we will partner with investors and agents. We actually would prefer them to be an investor and an agent, like a hybrid, in the individual markets because

Like I mentioned earlier, know, probate’s about 90 % the same across the country. So our content, we’re kind of capturing all the leads over on probateresource.com. And then they end up over here where we, you know, maybe get a lead in, you know, near you in Texas. And I would rather just work with someone in Texas because having that boots on the ground and going to that belly to belly appointment, especially on probates is so critical to get the deal because

that personal relationship matters with those people. So we’d rather partner with people in the markets. We kind of handle the marketing. We help, set up a page for you on our site. We run Google ads, we do direct mail. There’s different levels of packages we offer. And that kind of helps you get the leads and then you run with the ball once you get it in your market, right? And you get from there, so.

Mike Hambright (31:54.15)
Yeah, Yeah, awesome. Well, we’ll add those links down below in the show notes as well. So thanks for sharing your probate knowledge with us today, Brad. Always great to see you, buddy.

Brad Woodall (32:03.266)
For sure, man. Good chatting with you,

Mike Hambright (32:05.222)
Yeah, you too, of course. Everybody hope you got some good insights on probates today. And there’s a lot of lead sources out there. And honestly, the best lead source is probably all of them. You just you just have to work them all individually. And I think probably one of the best pieces of advice that I can give, I’m sure Brad would agree, is don’t work all your leads the same way. Like, be aware, listen, if there is a probate situation or a payment situation or any other indicator that you can really specialize that because most real estate investors out there.

all sound the same and they’re very clear that they just want the house and not really trying to help the person. I mean, they might say that they want to help the person and maybe they do, but you can position yourself as an expert and truly help people if you just become a better listener ultimately. So, but appreciate all you guys. We’ll see you on the next show.