Mike: Hey guys, thanks for joining us today. We are live in our YouTube, we are live in Facebook and we are recording a brand new podcast for you guys. Hope you enjoy it. I'm your host Mike Slane, joined with co-host--.

David: David Dodge. Hey guys, welcome. Welcome to the show today.

Mike: Dave, what are we doing today? What are we talking about?

David: I wanted to talk about running comps, and actually pulling lists.

Mike: Perfect.

David: And talking about the software that we use to do these things.

Mike: Yeah.

David: Doesn't matter if you are an agent or not. The software that we use, that we are going to highlight today is called PropStream. It is awesome, I have MLS access and I go to PropStream first.

Mike: He does.

David: I personally do. I look at both sometimes, but PropStream just has all the information all in one place, so I really really like it. But on top of running comps I can also find my motivated seller lists on there. I used to use-- what's it called? List Source. I used to use List Source and they are good, I still do sometimes. Since I started using PropStream about I don't know, a year ago, eight months ago, I haven't been going to list source, I have been getting it straight from PropStream. It's pretty awesome. They have all types of motivated seller lists. You guys are not going to be able to see our screen because this is a podcast.

Mike: That's alright, we are going to keep it in the audio format.

David: In the audio format today.

Mike: The best we can.

David: That's right. I want to talk to you guys a little bit about PropStream, why we use it, how awesome it is. If you guys want to do a 14 day free trial we have a link for you that will give you a 14 day free trial.

Mike: Yeah, that's awesome. Let's drop that link.

David: It is DPIPodcast.com/comps.

Mike: Alright.

David: That's our new website by the way. This is the first time I have told anybody about the new website. It is not 100% done yet, but hopefully in the next two days it will be going. But, this particular site is up, DPIPodcast/comps. Go there and you guys can get a 14 day free trial. You can check it out for yourself. You can download I think it's up to 10'000 leads a month, and you get unlimited nation wide MLS comps.

Mike: That's awesome. Before we dive into that, let's talk real briefly about why it is so important to have decent comps? Or why is it important to have access--.

David: So important.

Mike: Why can't you just do the Zillow hack which I call it, which is going and finding the recently sold from Zillow, like why is this better, Dave? Why do you want good accurate comps? How does PropStream--?

David: You want good accurate comps for multiple reasons. The main reason is when you are in the wholesale business, which is the business which we are in. I like your shirt by the way.

Mike: Thank you.

David: I should have worn one. When you are in the wholesale business, all things start and end with an ARV. You have to have an ARV in order to calculate an MAO. You have to know the end number is in mind. So you have to be able to determine an ARV, which you do by running comps. It is so incredibly simple. So you want to make sure you have good comps so you have a good ARV, because if your ARV is wrong, everything else in the MAO equation is going to be wrong.

Mike: Well put, Dave. So this is basically your after repair value, your ARV, running comps. It is basically the lynch pin to all the decisions you make about a property. As a real estate investor, as a rehabber, you are going to find that ARV, you are going to work backwards, figure out your repairs, then figure out your profit, all that stuff. As a landlord you are going to figure out how much this property is worth, how much the rent-- is that going to cover mine? No. As a wholesaler you need to be able to do both of those things for your different buyers. So you have to know what your ARV is. Very important.

David: Very important. That's what we do whenever we are in the field, is we look at the ARV first, then we multiply it by 60, 70, 80%, we call it our discount rate. Then we figure out our repairs, that gives us our MAO, and we know what we do with the MAO.

Mike: We offer exactly that off the bat.

David: No.

Mike: No that's right, we offer less than the maximum allowable offer.

David: That's the maximum. So when it comes to running comps, I chose PropStream. I actually chose it over the MLS. It pulls the MLS date in, and it is just so easy to use. So Mike, we have 65 rentals, give me a rental property.

Mike: Rental property, let's do--.

David: Give me an address.

Mike: 290 Eldorado. Let's do a different one. Let's do-- one we just put under contract, 9567 Muriel.

David: That's in [00:05:50.06 - inaudible] Missouri. That is in our backyard. So the cool thing about PropStream is not only is it going to give you an estimated value of the property, it's going to tell you if it is on market or off market, it is going to give you an idea if it's distressed, it is going to tell you if it is owned by an individual or an entity. It is also going to tell you the occupancy. Go ahead.

Mike: Before you tell them what number it pulled up, I want to tell the guys what I did.

David: Let's hear it.

Mike: I looked at this property, analyzed it. It was sent to me by another wholesaler who knew that I liked to buy in and around this area. I ran comps on it. I ran comps on it, I said jeez, it's only a two bed one bath, but it has a decent amount of square footage, it looks like it had an addition on the back at some point. I said, I can probably convert that to three bed. I got up there and I was a little disappointed, it was a slab. I said, oh shoot that's going to kill my ARV. I came back and really dug into comps.

David: You didn't even use-- you looked at the MLS. Mike is a broker if you are unaware. He is all MLS. I am not an agent or a broker. But I am convincing him to get over to PropStream.

Mike: A good point to make is that I am in that system more often which is why I use it more probably.

David: Of course, absolutely. That is understandable.

Mike: I have to be in that system more. Long story short, I ran comps, I tried to find similar slabs, three ones, all this stuff. I came up with the ARV, Dave, you can probably pull up a text message, or something we sent-- I said, it's probably worth about $70'000 when it is all said and done. Actually, that is actually what I typed up and sent to our closing coordinator this morning. I said, this property is worth $70'000, that is a rather conservative ARV after it's fixed up. Dave, spoiler, let's see what PropStream says this property is worth.

David: Okay PropStream says it is worth $73'164. What did you have as an ARV?

Mike: I said 70'000.

David: Boom.

Mike: Right in the ball park number, that's beautiful, man.

David: I love that we just pulled a random property out the hat too.

Mike: What's amazing too-- is this allows you-- if you are talking on the phone with a seller, pull up a property really quickly and have a 70-80% confidence that you have got a decent ball park number in mind right off the bat.

David: I love it.

Mike: Really cool. This is super powerful when you are negotiating with sellers.

David: Again, it is going to tell you an estimated value, it is going to give you a status if it is on market or off market. It is going to tell you if it's distressed, it is going to tell you if it is individually owned or entity owned. It will tell you the occupancy of the property, and of course it has comps. You can't see my screen, so I am going to do my best to describe some of these features. One of the things I really like is the cost per foot. It does the cost per foot and it averages that for your neighborhood. Now if you click under the details tab, this is my favorite part, because what it does is give you the property details; who owns the property, building information. It even gives you tax data.

Mike: I was going to say, this reminds me a lot of the tax data.

David: It does.

Mike: It looks very similar to if you went in and pulled--.

David: -- with the St Louis version of it, everyone's is probably going to be a little bit different. Comparables and nearby listings. So we saw on the first screen that it had it, but this really breaks it down even more. You can sort by bed, bath, square footage, property type, sub division, distance and so on and so forth. What I really like about PropStream, Mike, one of my favorite features is the mortgage and transaction history. What it does is allow me to see when the last owner had a mortgage on it. It estimates what their mortgage should be assuming they just made regular payments like people typically do.

Mike: I didn't know it had that.

David: In this scenario, on this particular property, it looks like the last mortgage date was 2009, it was for $17'500. So it's awesome. It looks to me like the MLS made a value of 73. It went up because last year it was 73 so it is on the up and up. This neighborhood is on the up and up, and that's the truth.

Mike: It seems to be the case everywhere around St Louis. Everything is going up. It just feels that way. Prices are going up, which is not a bad thing. Again, it is very good for your portfolios. If you are a seller, prices seem to be going up.

David: Another cool tool it has is the analysis tool. You can actually put in your purchase amount. You can put in an estimate mortgage. You can put in income or expenses on the property that you may have, your rehab or whatnot. Then you can actually put in what you expect to sell it for, then it will actually gives you an analysis. It will do a rental analysis, a complete analysis, it will do an expense analysis, it will do a tax analysis, it will do a property analysis. I mean it is truly the one stop shop to analyze your property. That's why I love it, that's why I use it all day everyday. I'm in here at least an hour maybe two hours everyday running my comps.

Mike: We are talking about a software program that runs comps for you guys. Go to DPIPodcast.com/comps. You will be able to get access to this. What I was doing earlier today too, the person who sold me the Muriel property was actually-- Dave you may remember the name Casey Adams, I am going to do a little shout out here, Casey I don't know if you listen to our podcast or not. She signed up-- she spoke to us about learning to wholesale a while back.

David: And she wholesaled us a deal? How awesome is that.

Mike: We kind of talked a little bit.

David: Did she take our free course?

Mike: She did.

David: Cool, maybe she learned.

Mike: I think she did.

David: That would be awesome.

Mike: What's funny is I was looking at her contact card in my phone. I spoke to her back in 2015. She was one of my seller leads.

David: So she went from motivated seller to wholesaler?

Mike: She has come a long way.

David: Shout out to Casey. Very cool.

Mike: They are double closing, so I am sure they are making eight grand on it.

David: I hope they do.

Mike: Exactly.

David: We're getting a great price, we are going to rehab it. We will either keep it as a rental or we will sell it turn key and make 25 or 30 grand.

Mike: Exactly.

David: It's going to be a good deal either way.

Mike: Win win all around. The reason I bring that up is-- if I was doing this all over, talking about 2014 or so when I started, if I had access to the software, I don't even know if I would have been a licensed agent, or gone the broker path. Just because--.

David: You know what? Now that you say that, you hate listing properties.

Mike: I never do retail stuff. I'm a broker and I love clients, but--.

David: That's right.

Mike: I don't necessarily care for the retail side of it, I really don't. I do it because it's part of the business, it is part of what we've done. But it is, it's one of those things where I don't know if I would have gone down this path had this been available five or six years ago when we were really getting started. That's how powerful I think this software is.

David: It is. It's cool.

Mike: Yeah.

David: So that's comps, alright. I want to talk now about pulling lists, it's the cool thing, it does both. So you can see the top here. You can't see, Mike can, I will explain what I'm looking at. You can pull MLS data, you can pull pre foreclosures. You can search by drawing on the map which I actually like to do the most, just draw on the areas of the neighborhoods that I want, or I can type in zip codes and cities, counties, whatever I want. Pre foreclosures, I can pull auctions, I can pull foreclosures, I can even pull cash buyers, which is super cool if you are new and you want to build your buyers list. I can pull leads, my personal favorite is vacants. We do a ton of deals from our vacants, then high equity. Those are actually all just quick lists that you can generate after you type in an address, a city or a county, or a zip code or whatnot. Very cool. They also have a features option where you can then go in and filter that list down even more. You can do owner occupied, you can do the occupancy status of occupancy vacant or any, which is different from the owner occupied status, because that would mean that they live there or they don't live there. Of course you can break down the characteristics of the property if you are only looking for two bedrooms and above. You can sort out all those one bedrooms. If you don't like houses that are under 650 square feet you can sort those all out. You can take properties off that list that are listed on the MLS. Again, you can go in and sort pre foreclosures by recording dates, or even auction date or bids. I really like the ownership information, because what I can do there is I can specify that I want to search for property owners that have owned the property for seven, ten, maybe even 15 years a minimum. We do that when we are dealing with the high equity properties, or the absentee owned. I will also add that in there, I want properties that have been owned for a very long time, because the chances of them being landlords is going to be increased.

Next we have lead and bankruptcy as well as divorce information. If I wanted to just pull a list of divorces I could go and type in one zip code and find anybody that has had a divorce in that area recently, and get that list. Very cool.

Evaluation of equity also very powerful. Whenever I am doing my equities, I usually shoot for a minimum of 30% equity, sometimes I will go as high as 35 or 40%. It depends on how big my list is and if I'm trying to narrow it down. So not only can you do the equity percent, but you can do the equity amount, which is also very cool because if you have a property that doesn't have a ton of equity, but it may still have 40 grand, let's say it only has 5% equity, but that is still 40 grand. Let's say you are dealing with bigger and nicer homes, you can search that way. It is very cool.

Last but not least is mortgages. If you want to search for properties that have multiple open mortgages, you can search [00:16:16.07 - inaudible], you can search loan to value. So really what I'm trying to get at is that any and every way that you could search for motivated sellers, you can do it in PropStream. That's why I love it so much.

Before I was introduced to PropStream, I was using the MLS via somebody else's login, or I would get an assistant's license where I could access it. But I am still going elsewhere to pull my list. I was using ListSource, Listability. I have eliminated all that, and I am just in PropStream now. They also just released skip tracing, which is really really cool. Now we have a couple of other skip tracing providers that we use, so I personally have not tried their skip tracing, but that is a new feature as well. If you don't have another provider, you can do in in there. I would be willing to bet that their skip tracing is top notch, just like everything else they have in there.

Mike: It's very powerful. Very cool. So that is basically PropStream in a nutshell. Yeah I think you went over the list that we like to pull .

David: There are so many different lists. I was training a guy this morning on doing some cold calling. Got a cold caller that came in this morning, got him all set up with a dialer. I threw in some of my numbers that I had already skip traced recently into the dialer. He was asking me, he was like, man I'm new, I want to get my first deal. I said, you're lucky because you are in my city, and I will be your best buyer. Every deal you get, bring it to me. If I don't buy it I will help you sell it and we will split it 50 50. He was like, oh this is fantastic. He is-- I don't want to call him an intern, but he is an unpaid cold caller making commission. But he is a super nice guy, looking forward to working with him. What I'm getting at though is he is like, man what lists do you go for? I'm like, it doesn't matter. Get the vacants, get the high equities, get the absentee owned. Get the code violations. It doesn't matter. Just more. The answer is more. Always, more more more.

Mike: I love it, man.

David: If you are not doing marketing, do it. If you are already doing marketing, do more of it, period.

Mike: One of my-- I love that attitude. That is one of my biggest things when I started. I started kind of dipping my toes in, then I was like, this doesn't make sense. If you are going to do it, you have to take a lot of action, you have to do a lot at once. I was like okay, I ordered bandit signs and I ordered literally a pallet. A pallet delivered to my house. I didn't know any better. I was like, I want a lot of them.

David: If you're ordering bandit signs, order a pallet.

Mike: I didn't know any better.

David: The reason why, you are married and you have a spouse, they are going to say get this crap out of my house, and it is going to force you to get off your ass and get out there and hang bandit signs.

Mike: Yeah.

David: Totally love it.

Mike: Get out there, take massive action guys. Buy all the lists. Again, as many as you can afford.

David: Here's the cool thing about PropStream. You get ten thousand downloads, leads a month.

Mike: Unbelievable.

David: If you want to do 2000 vacants, 2000 absentees, 3000 high equities. You still have a couple of thousand left to do whatever. It is actually quite rare that I will even pull ten thousand a month. Some months I will.

Mike: We are a pretty big operation, we probably have-- I haven't even looked recently. We have a couple hundred thousand seller leads in our database.

David: 5600.

Mike: That's actual leads that came in.

David: No, that's in the follow up system.

Mike: No, that's what I'm saying. That's how many people we're talking to, 5600. What I'm talking about is total number in there. I think we stopped importing lists, didn't we?

David: We did, it was over 100'000. Multiple hundreds of thousands.

Mike: Point being, we are a pretty big operation, we have been going for years. It's a couple of hundred thousand. Ten thousand a month if you are just starting out is a huge number of leads.

David: A massive amount.

Mike: That is a huge number.

David: I remember the first mailing I did when I started this five years ago was-- 1300. That-- not that -- that was massive. It is still pretty big.

Mike: You are going to get leads from those sorts of numbers. Yeah, that's awesome.

David: Very cool. Guys, check it out. This is a podcast. So if you are watching me on Instagram, if you are on Facebook, if you are on YouTube, you can't see our screens and we did this on purpose, because we are not doing a demo here today, we are just talking about some of the software and systems that we use. Today we are focusing on PropStream for two reasons; one you can run comps nationwide, MLS data, we explained why it is so important to have good comps. Number two, find your motivated seller lists. Download those lists, and you can even skip trace them in here as well. If you are not using it, we highly encourage you guys to use it. Go to DPIPodcast. That is our brand new website. DPIPodcast.com/comps. That is C.O.M.P.S. You can get a 14 day free trial, we use it daily, you should be using it daily too. Mike, anything you want to end with on that note?

Mike: No, I love it, guys. We will put links in the show notes as well.

David: That's right. Links to come. Thanks for listening, we are signing off.