Why List Stacking Is Broken for Real Estate Investors and What to Do Instead

PropertyRadar (00:00)
That’s kind of a really neat score. And, you know, I’m a big believer in that you should target specific things, not just, everybody that’s in distress. Like a lot of people talk about list stacking. I think list stacking.

is one of the worst ideas ever. So sure, that person’s in a lot of distress, but if you market to them, just I buy houses. Like you’re better off list stacking in their mailbox. Like you’ve got a probate going on, you’ve got a divorce going on, you’ve got a foreclosure going on. Hit them with all those things and show them you have expertise.

Michelle Kesil (01:58)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil, and today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Sean OToole, who is from Property Radar, who created a lead generation service for investors, realtors, loan officers, helping them find the right home. So really excited to have you here today, Sean.

PropertyRadar (02:24)
thanks for having me.

Michelle Kesil (02:25)
Great, let’s dive in. So first off, for those not familiar with you and your world, can you share what your main focus is these days?

PropertyRadar (02:33)
Yeah, well, we’ve assembled a really deep set of ⁓ property ⁓ data records over the last 20 years and focused on helping small businesses take advantage of that data in the same way that big businesses have for very many years in reaching out to homeowners. whether that’s, you know, local home service companies or where we got our start, investors, you know,

tens of thousands of investors over the years buy properties. That’s our primary focus. So public records ⁓ for outbound

Michelle Kesil (03:10)
Awesome. And how do investors work with this service? They just browse the website or what does the process look like?

PropertyRadar (03:20)
Yeah, so we’re a subscription based service. We’ve built the deepest property search tool in the industry, far superior to anything from CoreLogic, Atom, any of the other kind of usual suspects with over 300 criteria. And so you come in there and put in your criteria. And these days, 300 criteria was very difficult for a while to go through all of those and understand them. But now we use AI.

to help you. So if you say, you know, I’m looking for landlords over 65 years old, it knows that landlords means non-owner occupied properties or absentee owners, and then adds in age as well. ⁓ you know, it all starts with that property search. And then once you have your audience or list defined, then you can start marketing to them via, you know, direct mail, email, online ads, ⁓ etc. Phone.

Michelle Kesil (04:13)
awesome and what differentiates this platform from other similar platforms.

PropertyRadar (04:18)
I think the big thing is, well, there’s a few things. ⁓ One is the depth of our search capabilities. Two is the timeliness and quality of our data. Three is we have data that nobody else ⁓ has direct from the court, divorce records where most people get their divorce through recorder, et cetera. So very deep data on that side. And then all the marketing channels, you know, like

the ability to do targeted online ads, nobody else has that. So very differentiated both on the data side and on the marketing side.

Michelle Kesil (04:53)
⁓ And so what have been some of the main keys that have allowed the business to be able to grow and run successfully?

PropertyRadar (05:51)
You know, think there’s a lot of things there, but…

You know, one of the keys is we were, I had a deep background both in computer science, because I started off working in Silicon Valley all through the ⁓ 90s. And then after the dot com crash ended up flipping houses, flipped 160 properties. And as part of that, I dug into title and title research.

and go to lunch weekly with a chief title officer and really understand ⁓ that data. So bringing that expertise in data science plus the expertise in real estate and title is not something you see. Usually you see like an investor starting one of these companies, they don’t know much about computer science or you see a computer science starting one of these companies and they don’t understand much about.

title. And so that’s really been kind of our unique thing. And because we started off with trustee sale investors, you know, they buy without title insurance. And so the quality of data mattered so much to them ⁓ that we really differentiated ourselves on that front. And so I would say that set marriage of deep real estate data knowledge, title knowledge and deep computer science knowledge and bringing those things together.

Michelle Kesil (07:13)
Yeah, absolutely. And how does it work for the listings? it the buyers posting their own listings or what does that look like?

PropertyRadar (07:21)
Yeah, no, it’s all public records data. So we literally have data on every single property in the United States, residential and commercial. ⁓ Who the owner is, every transaction that occurs, foreclosures, divorces, bankruptcy, probate filings, ⁓ liens, judgments, you know, it’s pretty much all there. I’m very deep.

Michelle Kesil (07:45)
awesome. And so what type of opportunities do most people benefit from or find through you guys?

PropertyRadar (07:55)
Yeah, usually, you know, most of our our customers are the ones that, you know, a little analytical dive in a little deeper, you know, realize that everybody’s mailing to an absentee owner list. And with the same message, you know, like an an absentee owner list, what is an absentee owner list? Is that, you know, a retired or an older landlord? Is that a Burbrough? Is that a short term rental? Is it a vacation home? Right?

And you kind of need, an absentee owner list can include all of those things. And so most people go to them with a message that’s just about that. With all of our criteria, you can start to separate those out and focus in with a very targeted, more specific message. So for those investors that kind of graduate beyond just I buy houses with an absentee owner list and want to do more specific targeted, targeting better messaging and the rest, ⁓ and want to do it themselves, right?

Investor Fuel does it for you and that’s an awesome option for folks that want to go that direction, but for the folks who want to do it themselves, that’s where we fit in.

Michelle Kesil (08:59)
Awesome. And what so what are you most focused on solving or scaling to next?

PropertyRadar (09:06)
Yeah, so you know, the big thing for everybody right now is AI, we’ve we had a good head start in that, ⁓ you know, my background is in data science, machine learning, and those kinds of things that grew into the large language models. And so you know, we kind of had a pretty good understanding of those from from the beginning, and we’ve started deploying those throughout our platform. So now instead of, you know, you want out of states,

you know, landlords that are over a certain age, that have so much equity and all the rest. You can just describe that in your own words and we’ll build all the industry specific criteria. You don’t need to know all the terminology anymore as an example. Or you want to write that email message, right? AI will now write that for you. And so we’re building all of that into the system, which just makes it all easier to

Michelle Kesil (09:55)
Yeah, absolutely. And are there any opportunities or changes that you are planning to make with this platform?

PropertyRadar (10:41)
You know the big one we just launched our version 5.0 and it has Court sourced probate divorce and eviction and a lot of people will claim that but just for example in in divorce We looked at two of our primary competitors for January we looked on February 15th and in that county there was 850 divorce records

⁓ We had 550 and the reason we didn’t have them all is because we only have the ones on property owners, right? Because that’s what we specialize in is property owners. And so the other 300 were not property owners. And our most recent filing was the day before. ⁓ Our best strongest competitor had 13 filings for that month compared to 550. And that’s because they’re relying on the county recorder.

And even then, the county recorder stuff gets filed after the court filing. So most of those actual divorce cases were filed a year or more earlier. So big, big differences there. It’s simply data that’s not been available on any platform to date. So we’re pretty excited about that. And then launch new marketing tools. So definitely very strong on that front too.

Michelle Kesil (12:04)
Yeah, and what do the marketing tools look like?

PropertyRadar (12:07)
Yeah, so we have a ⁓ really strong direct mail tool. A lot of the direct mail tools out there just use ⁓ SVG, which is just web-based graphics. And ⁓ I actually hired the team from Shutterfly, which everybody uses for Christmas cards and that kind of stuff to build our solution.

and or the team that originally built Shutterfly, they’re no longer there, to build our solution and it uses Adobe InDesign server in the background. So very high quality ⁓ rendering. If you have overflow on a box or variable text, it does a much better job of rendering that. So super high quality print engine on direct mail. We have an email feature that will send email.

⁓ Out and we also have the email addresses to go along with the owner so you can do that ⁓ a dialer third-party dialer from a company called wave ⁓ Door knocking we recommend text messaging also from wave. That’s really better. You know with the laws. That’s better to only use for opted-in customers ⁓ What else online ads which is

really amazing. So you build a list in Property Radar and only those people see those ads as they surf around the web on Yahoo, People, and all kinds of other sites. Much different than Google Ads, which is typically keyword based. This is based on your specific audience. So it’s a really neat feature.

Michelle Kesil (13:42)
Awesome. And what percentage of your users would you say are investors versus realtors or other providers?

PropertyRadar (13:50)
Yeah,

it’s pretty evenly mixed between ⁓ investors, realtors, ⁓ mortgage, ⁓ commercial realtors, and ⁓ home services companies like HVAC, etc. ⁓ But we started off with investors and I started the service because I was an investor. So that’s still, you know, very near and dear to my heart. It’s probably our largest by percentage, but only by a little because we’ve definitely grown so much in the other.

other areas. yeah, I would say investors still where we’re by far the strongest. We still do trustee sale tracking for the folks that go to the auctions in, I think, 10 states and a few hundred counties. ⁓ That’s not nationwide, but certainly on the Western US at all the trustee sales were pretty strong presence. So yeah.

Michelle Kesil (14:43)
And how does that work on the backend to get all of that data from all of these sources?

PropertyRadar (14:50)
A lot of people, a lot of money, a lot of time. ⁓ Yeah. So I was

fortunate in that I had some very good contacts at some of the big companies. We’re unique. ⁓ Most of our competitors just resell data from First American. If you want to get into this business, you just go buy the data from First American or you buy shitty data from Adam.

⁓ And the first American data is decent. It’s not the best in the industry. The other two big players are Black Knight and CoreLogic. ⁓ And we’re unique in that we kind of, regularly bake these off and we take the best ⁓ from multiple vendors. And so I think we’re the only multi-sourced ⁓ vendor in the industry. So that’s another place where we’re…

We’re a little unique, we do buy a lot of the data. We also go and abstract data ourselves. So we have a whole team of folks that, you know, pull stuff from the counties, you know, and then we do some online scraping. A lot less than you think. There’s a lot less data online. know, so for example, the assessor’s office in California,

Most assessor’s offices, one per county, you can go and you get basics like beds and baths, but you can’t get the owner name. And of course you need the owner name. you you can’t scrape ⁓ in most of the nation. You can’t scrape the data you need. So ⁓ a lot of it you have to go buy directly from the counties or through ⁓ somebody who does.

Michelle Kesil (17:09)
Yeah, that makes sense. And are there any plans for scaling or growing the platform?

PropertyRadar (17:17)
yeah, no, we’ve been growing and scaling every year for a long time. yeah, definitely a lot of growth there. Really great team. so lots of growth, lots of scale, lots of new features on ⁓ the roadmap. We’ve got a very large development team working every day on new stuff. So lots of exciting stuff on the roadmap for sure.

Michelle Kesil (17:43)
Yeah, any exciting new features you want to share?

PropertyRadar (17:46)
Well, you know, the ones we just released are that probate divorce and eviction data. and a distress score. So we score every property in the United States based on a level of distress. And that’s

kind of a really neat score. And, you know, I’m a big believer in that you should target specific things, not just, everybody that’s in distress. Like a lot of people talk about list stacking. I think list stacking.

is one of the worst ideas ever. So sure, that person’s in a lot of distress, but if you market to them, just I buy houses. Like you’re better off list stacking in their mailbox. Like you’ve got a probate going on, you’ve got a divorce going on, you’ve got a foreclosure going on. Hit them with all those things and show them you have

in all of them and can help them with any of them. And then you’re list stacking in their mailbox, which means you’re spending more money on marketing to the people that are more distressed, which makes sense because you’re more likely to get a deal. But still the distress score

is great because let’s say you’ve identified 200 opportunities in your market. Go sort by that distress score. And when you personally go work on them, start making calls, knocking on doors, work on the one with the most distress first and then work down the list. Right. So that’s a really neat, a really neat feature. And then, you know, you could also use it, say, I only want to market to people with a distress score above 70 or whatever. Right. And

So you can do that, but I think it’s better to market to somebody in foreclosure, somebody in probate, and have those messages match the distress issue.

Michelle Kesil (19:15)
Yeah, absolutely, and that makes sense. Thank you for sharing.

PropertyRadar (19:18)
You

Michelle Kesil (19:18)
Well, before we begin to wrap up here, someone wants to reach out, connect, learn more, where can people find you?

PropertyRadar (19:24)
Yeah, well certainly our website, PropertyRadar.com. ⁓ I’m on LinkedIn. I think it’s Sean OToole, maybe just Sean OToole at LinkedIn. So easy to find there, especially associated with Property Radar. And that’s probably the best place for me personally. And then, you know, our support team and the rest is here too, for sure. ⁓ But yeah, PropertyRadar.com.

Michelle Kesil (19:51)
We’ll appreciate your time and your story. Thank you for being here.

PropertyRadar (19:54)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Michelle Kesil (19:55)
And for those tuning in to the show, you got value, make sure you’ve subscribed. We’ve got more conversations with operators like Sean who are building real businesses and we’ll see you on the next episode.