An out-of-state BRRRR operation lives or dies on operations, not on the spreadsheet. Anson Young lives in Denver, owns zero rentals there, and holds 60 doors across Omaha, Columbus and Cincinnati — buying two to four more every month with a four-person remote team, outsourced property management in each market, and $20,000 to $30,000 a month in direct mail.
The model is repeatable, but only if you build it in the right order: market analysis and ground relationships first, marketing dollars second, acquisitions hires third, financing loop last. Get that order wrong and you end up with leads you cannot close or deals you cannot refinance.
Below is the full machine — how deals get sourced, who is on the ground, how short-term debt converts into DSCR financing, and the three functions still sitting on the owner’s desk that would stop the business if he disappeared for 30 days.
Key takeaways
- Direct mail produces roughly 90% of deal flow at $20,000–$30,000 per month in spend, supporting two to four acquisitions a month across three markets.
- Budget about three months of unpaid groundwork per new market — market analysis, selecting a property management company, and finding one or two agents you trust — before any marketing dollars go out.
- Hire acquisitions people for empathy, not closing aggression. Young regularly hears sellers say "you guys weren’t paying the most, but we liked you more."
- Pay your on-the-ground task people hourly, not per deal, so their reports on property condition are not colored by whether the deal closes.
- Stretching the buy box to get a deal done cost Young $30,000–$50,000 on a single flip with structural issues. The rule is older than the lesson: don’t touch what you don’t underwrite well.
From the Real Estate Pros Show
This article draws on an interview with Anson Young of Anson Property Group on the Real Estate Pros Show, hosted by Scott Bursey.
Why Investors Leave Their Home Market for BRRRR
Young started buying rentals to hold in 2022 after nearly two decades of flipping and wholesaling. When he ran the numbers on his home market, Denver didn’t work — so he didn’t force it. He bought in Omaha, Columbus and Cincinnati instead, and he still wholesales any Denver leads that come in rather than keeping them.
That second part matters more than it sounds. Running an out-of-state BRRRR business does not mean abandoning your local lead flow; it means routing it to the exit that actually pays. Denver leads become wholesale income, which helps fund marketing and payroll for the markets where the portfolio is being built.
He also chose three markets simultaneously rather than one. The logic was that the systems — mail, acquisitions scripts, PM relationships, financing — cost roughly the same to build whether they serve one market or three, so he built them once and pointed them at three places that supported the hold strategy.
His screen for a market is longer-dated than most investors use:
- Would I want to own here for 15 to 20 years?
- What does the economic picture in this area look like over that horizon, not this quarter?
- Can I find a property manager and one or two trustworthy agents on the ground?
That 15-to-20-year filter is why the next expansion he’s eyeing sits closer to the Great Lakes region. He is not chasing a cap rate that exists today; he is buying something he still wants to own when the current rate environment is a footnote.
The Lead Engine: Direct Mail as the Core Business
Ninety percent of Young’s deal flow comes from direct mail. Another 5 to 10 percent comes from cold calling — and only to high-priority names already on the mail list, never to strangers — plus the occasional agent referral. He spends $20,000 to $30,000 a month to sustain it.
He describes the business in a way most investors should steal:
We’re basically a lead generation company that happens to deal with real estate.
Cadence is the whole game. Depending on the list, mail goes out every two weeks or every month, and something related to the next drop sits on the daily task list even when nothing is being mailed that day. The failure pattern he describes is the one almost every operator has lived through: mail a batch, get leads, get buried working them, skip the next drop, close those deals, then look up two months later at an empty pipeline.
His framing is that mail is a snowball rolling downhill — it only compounds if it keeps rolling. Mail once, wait four months, mail again, and you are paying full price for cold recipients every single time.
Young rates the channel an 8 out of 10 and says he has tested nearly everything. The only levers that genuinely move it are list quality, frequency, the piece itself, and cost per acquisition. Everything else is noise. His main external risks are postage costs spiking or response rates falling industry-wide — neither of which he controls, and neither of which is a reason to pause.
He deliberately stays light on agent-sourced deals. Holding a Colorado license, he gets five investor texts a day; he has no interest in being the sixth text an agent ignores.
We’ll be told just straight up, hey, you guys weren’t paying the most, but we liked you more. The amount of times I’ve heard that tells me I’m doing something right.
— Anson Young, Anson Property Group
Who You Need on the Ground When You Don’t Live There
The full roster behind 60 doors and two to four acquisitions a month is smaller than most people expect:
- Two acquisitions managers — inbound calls, rapport, vetting, offers
- One project manager — construction, budgets, GCs and subs
- One part-time VA — transaction coordination, dates and deadlines
- A bookkeeper — his wife, who runs her own bookkeeping business, handling ledger and bill pay
- 1099 agents and hourly task people in each market
Every employee works remotely from home. The hourly task people are the detail worth copying: they photograph properties, check on them, and handle local errands, and they are paid by the hour specifically so they have no stake in whether the deal closes. An inspection report from someone who gets paid either way is worth more than one from someone who gets paid only if you buy.
Property management is outsourced to an established company in each market. Young has a PM in every state and no intention of bringing it in-house. For an operator adding doors across three metros simultaneously, in-house PM is a second business, not a cost saving.
Before any of this exists — and before a single mail piece goes out — a new market takes about three months of solid upfront work. Market analysis comes first, then selecting the property management company, then cultivating one or two agents he can genuinely trust. Young calls this the heaviest lifting in the whole expansion, and it is unpaid. Investors who skip it end up with leads in a market where they have no one to inspect, renovate, lease or close.
Keeping the Seller Experience Human From 1,000 Miles Away
Young’s competitive edge is not price. He hears it directly from sellers: “You guys weren’t paying the most, but we liked you more.” Hearing that repeatedly, from 1,000 miles away, is the product of three deliberate choices.
Hire for empathy, not closing instinct. He screens acquisitions candidates for whether they can genuinely care about someone in a bad situation — a death in the family, a looming loss of a house — rather than for sales aggression. He is explicit that “sales sharks” don’t work in his business. Training is ongoing, not one-time: quarterly sessions through REI Sales Academy keep the team sharp and non-complacent.
Put the human details in the CRM. Notes capture the seller’s kids, grandkids, dogs, and the fact the kitchen hasn’t been updated in 20 years. Anyone who picks up the file can continue the conversation rather than restart it. In a remote operation, the CRM is the only shared memory the team has.
Script the handoff. When a local agent or contractor is going to walk the property, the seller hears about that person first — by name, with a personal detail, framed as a teammate rather than a stranger at the door. Young’s phrase for it is white-glove: “Jenny’s going to come out, she’s on our team, you’re going to love her.”
Then there is the simplest discipline of all. If you say you’ll call at 3 o’clock Tuesday, call at 3 o’clock Tuesday. Young says sellers are blown away by it, because almost no other business keeps its word.
The gap he has identified is a part-time care manager whose only job is keeping the seller informed through escrow — so no one goes from daily attention pre-contract to silence for three weeks.
The Deal Pipeline: From Inbound Call to DSCR Refinance
Most contacts are inbound calls from mail. The sequence runs like this:
- First call. An acquisitions manager takes it, builds rapport, works out the seller’s actual situation, and gets a ballpark price. Everything — condition, motivation, personal details — goes into the CRM. Closing on this call is not the goal.
- Second call. The offer, plus a walkthrough of what happens next. Most deals close here.
- Contracts. E-signature by email, or an agent hand-delivers paperwork for sellers who aren’t technical — sometimes with the acquisitions manager on the phone while the agent sits at the kitchen table.
- Escrow. The part-time VA runs transaction coordination, with the CRM tracking dates and deadlines.
- First 10 days. Young triple-checks which bucket the lead belongs in — portfolio, wholesale, or agent listing — and confirms the deal fully pencils. Past day 10, the purchase is effectively locked.
- Financing. Short-term debt is lined up during that window.
- Two weeks before closing. The project manager is briefed on scope and budget and starts lining up GCs and subs, so work begins the day after closing on vacant properties.
- Immediately after closing. Young starts the refinance conversation with the DSCR lender to move the asset onto permanent debt as fast as the lender’s seasoning allows.
Start to close runs two to six weeks. Two weeks is realistic only on a vacant property with a highly motivated seller; anything requiring the seller to find a new place pushes toward a traditional 30-to-45-day timeline.
The three-bucket structure is what makes the marketing spend sustainable. Portfolio is the goal, but wholesale and agent-listing exits convert leads that don’t fit into cash, and that cash pays for the next mail drop and payroll.
Where the Model Breaks: Buy Box Discipline and Owner Bottlenecks
Two mistakes have cost Young real money, and both are available to any investor scaling remotely.
The first was stretching the buy box. He doesn’t touch fire damage or major structural work. He broke his own rule once “because I needed a deal,” took on a structural flip, and lost $30,000 to $50,000. Needing a deal is the single most expensive reason to buy one.
The second was staying involved in bookkeeping he didn’t understand. Early on he did everything himself, including the accounting, which eventually contributed to cash-flow problems. His wife — whose background is bookkeeping and accounting — now handles the ledger and bill pay.
The sharper test is what he admits would break if he vanished for 30 days with no contact: final deal analysis, marketing, and financing. One month of mail is queued in advance; after that it stops. No deals would be placed into short-term financing, and nothing would move into DSCR refi. Three functions, all on one desk.
Run that exercise on your own operation before you add a fourth market. If the answer is the same, you are not scaling a business — you are adding volume to a bottleneck.
On rates, Young’s position is blunt. Investors made money at 18% and investors are making money at 8%. When he froze in 2020 and delayed a new market launch during COVID uncertainty, it cost him roughly nine months and he launched into the 2021–2022 run anyway. The adjustment for a harder market is conservative underwriting and longer timelines in your model — not pulling back on marketing.
Frequently asked questions
How much marketing spend does it take to buy two to four out-of-state rentals a month?
Anson Young spends $20,000 to $30,000 a month on marketing — overwhelmingly direct mail — to acquire two to four properties a month across three markets. That figure covers mail to multiple lists at a cadence of every two weeks to monthly, plus a small amount of cold calling to high-priority names already on those lists.
Your cost per acquisition will vary by market, list quality and piece, but the relevant point is that the spend is continuous. Pausing it to work leads is the failure mode, not the savings.
Should I hire in-house property management or outsource it in each market?
Outsource it, at least until a single market justifies its own operation. Young has a property manager in each of his three states and uses existing third-party companies rather than building in-house capacity.
Selecting that PM is part of the three months of upfront work he does before spending a dollar on marketing in a new market. Bringing management in-house across three metros means running a second business with its own hiring, licensing and compliance burden.
How long does it take to stand up a new out-of-state market before you start mailing?
Budget roughly three months. Young’s sequence is market analysis first, then selecting a property management company, then finding one or two agents he can genuinely trust on the ground — all before marketing dollars go in.
Skipping this creates leads you cannot service. Once it is in place, he expects to be closing deals within the first 60 days of marketing in that market.
How do you finance a BRRRR deal from short-term debt into a DSCR loan?
Young lines up short-term financing during the first 10 days of the contract, once he has confirmed the deal pencils and belongs in the portfolio bucket. The property closes on that short-term debt, renovation begins immediately on vacant properties, and he starts the DSCR refinance conversation with his permanent lender right after closing.
Terms, seasoning requirements and qualifying criteria vary by lender and change over time — confirm them with your lender before you commit to a purchase, not after.
What should an out-of-state investor’s buy box exclude?
Young excludes fire-damaged properties and anything with major structural issues. He learned it the expensive way: one structural flip taken on outside his normal criteria cost him $30,000 to $50,000.
The broader rule is that your buy box should exclude whatever you cannot accurately underwrite or supervise from a distance. The most dangerous moment is when pipeline is thin and a marginal deal starts looking acceptable.
The bottom line
Before adding a market, run Young’s 30-day test on your own business: write down what would stop if you were unreachable for a month. Whatever is on that list is what you build out next — not another mail drop in another city.
