Episode 203: Propstream + Mobile App

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David: We are live.

Mike: All right, all right. Dave, how we doing?

David: We are doing good, welcome to the discount property investor podcast. Today guys, we are going to be talking about Propstream. Propstream is one of our favorite tools. In fact it is taken more power in my mind than the MLS cuz it pulls it in, and it’s funny because I have MLS access yet I haven’t even logged into my MLS portal in three to four months probably.

Mike: So real quick, Propstream really really neat, allows you to pull comps. Like that’s just one piece of it. Dave, lets talk about failure real quick.

David: Okay.

Mike: Let’s talk about our investing journey, and what we tried to start. We invested some of our own money into some friends of ours’ software. It does just this, it accesses-

David: Well, we tried to do just this.

Mike: We tried- well, it worked in one market, we tried. So, we were a couple years ago, were trying to do this.

David: That’s right.

Mike: But guess what? We cut our losses, we said we failed. Moving forward, we focused on what we’re good at which is wholesale and buying rentals, flipping properties, and that’s what we do. So again, guys you’re going to fail in the wholesale business. You’re going to fail at a lot of things, but it doesn’t matter. You only fail when you quit or when you give up.

David: That’s a great point, yup.

Mike: So we just keep on plowing forward. We found this Propstream tool, works better than ours ever did and again, we wouldn’t look back, it’s a game-changer. When we started wholesaling, or at least when I did, you couldn’t- you couldn’t find comps. I mean you could use Zillow and you can kind of back door and find the solds on Zillow, but that wasn’t everything. You could- you’d have to get an MLS or an agent with MLS access and ask them to run comps for you, or become an assistant to them.

David: Or get your license.

Mike: Or- exactly.

David: Just to get the access.

Mike: So again, there was this huge hurdle, Propstream has taken that away. Very very cool, so how do you get Propstream Dave? You can check out DPIpodcast.com, check out our tool kit.

David: Yeah, the toolkit’s got a link for the free- for actually to get a free trial which is great.

Mike: Exactly, so you go down there and then just click on running MLS comps and motivated sellers list.

David: And if you’re watching this video versus listening, there’s a link in the description actually as well too.

Mike: Perfect. So, that to me, just that one piece of the Propstream alone makes it worthwhile so much so that I mean Dave even- anyone who asks for coaching from us, we basically require it, like you have to get access to this.

David: Yeah.

Mike: You cannot do this business without knowing what properties are going to sell for.

David: But it’s not just for that, but you’re right.

Mike: I know that’s what I’m saying though, just that one piece.

David: See, that’s the thing though, that’s the thing. That is so important, so I tell, you know, we say hey listen, this is a requirement if you want to work with us and be in our coaching program, and the reason is because you have to be able to analyze properties first and foremost, but even if you have MLS access, you still are going to want to buy lists most likely if you’re not creating your own. So the only way that somebody could join our program and not have access to this is if they were an agent or a broker and they had MLS access already and they drove for dollars every single day to create a big list.

Mike: Or they bought their list elsewhere, but why?

David: Right, and that’s the point, so buying your list elsewhere. Let’s just back up for a second Mike.

Mike: Let’s do it.

David: When we first started, right? I’m talking six years ago, seven years ago, doing real estate wholesaling full-time. We were buying lists from ListSource and Listability, and before we got the yellow letter HQ hook up, I was paying like between 12 and 15 cents a lead. I can’t remember exactly but it wasn’t cheap.

Mike: Yeah, I think the best I ever got- I mean yeah, it was usually 11.

David: So then once we got the deal from the direct mail house that we were working with, you know, and we still do occasionally from time to time. They got us leads at 3 cents and I thought wow, this is crazy. This is like a fourth of what I’m- of what I had been paying for the previous year. So, let’s just say it was you know 15 cents, so I went from 15 cents to 3 cents, or with Propstream it’s 1 cent literally because you get 10,000 exports, it’s about a hundred bucks a month and you get- so that’s leads for 1 cent. Now, the cool thing is it’s not just motivated seller leads, it’s any export, so you can get cash buyers, you could get motivated sellers by any category: vacants, absentee owned, high equity, unknown sale date, you name it, not only in your own market, but anywhere in the United States which is amazing because if you aren’t doing local wholesaling, you’re maybe doing it virtually, you don’t have to go get access to multiple MLS’s across the country. It’s literally a one-stop-shop.

Mike: Yeah, very cool.

David: I love it. So, Propstream is basically required for you know, our students and they just launched a mobile app literally I don’t know three weeks ago, four weeks ago and then mobile app is awesome. So, the cool thing about Propstream is it’s about 100 bucks a month, I think it’s 97 bucks a month. Again, use the link in the description to get a free trial for 7 days and check it out or go to DPIpodcast.com and click on the toolkit and you can get a link to that free trial as well, but the cool thing is there’s unlimited searches, right? So whenever- the only thing that they limit you and you can obviously buy more is exports, right? So you basically can get 10,000 exports a month for a hundred bucks, that’s a penny apiece, right? If you need 15,000 or 20,000, you can upgrade your service, but you typically don’t need more than that a month, especially if you’re getting started, you know, you’re not doing a ton of business, but when it comes to running comps, there’s no limit on that and you can go in and you can see both on market and off-market, which is awesome.

Mike: Yeah, it’s really slick.

David: So you can see the comps for both. One of my favorite things about it is it’s not just giving you data on the property like Zillow would, like bed, bath, square footage, but it’s also giving you those comps which is basically what you would need the MLS for and you know, like you said earlier you can kind of run comps with Zillow but it’s not designed to do that and it’s not something I would really trust either, right? But beyond that, it tells you information about the taxes and the entity or name of the owners. It also shows you the mortgage information and when they got out of the mortgage and what bank they used and what the original mortgage was for and then estimate what it might be today.

Mike: Well, and what’s so cool is that it’s right there all in one on the first screen when you pull it up. Like, so you can get all that through the MLS like, I mean we’ve talked about but you have to go into different pages and different things cuz it’s not- that’s not typically what someone’s looking for.

David: Right.

Mike: But again when you’re an investor, those are all the things that you want to see is oh, who owns it? What’s their mortgage about? you know cuz if they got a mortgage 5 years ago, you can kind of figure out about how much they owe. So, all that stuff is just right there in your face once you pull up that property. Very very cool. Dave, you had mentioned the app, so what’s cool about the app and what is it.

David: It’s very basic but that’s what I like about it.

Mike: Yeah, well you don’t need a lot.

David: You don’t need a lot, so when you log into the app and you have to have a subscription but if you get the free trial, it’s the same login on a computer as it is on the app, so it makes it really easy. So, if you want to- if you already have it, you can get the app. If you get the trial, you can use the app in the meantime to play around with it, but when you login, it takes you to like a search page, right? And the search page allows you to search by address, APN, which is like a county parcel number essentially, or you can go to geo-locate which essentially just pulls up a map and it puts you in a, you know, it shows your location so you can find nearby property. So, it allows you to search in multiple different ways to find the particular property that you want and this is really just for analyzing, it’s for determining you know, what the estimated value might be, what other houses in the area are going for. It’s very very user-friendly and easy-to-use. Now, once you do pull up a particular property, it gives you a lot of other options so basically it starts with the details of the property, right? From there, you can go and you can look at tax information or transaction history, even open loans, but then it has different tabs. So the tabs are comps, which is awesome because you can then pull the comps and it shows you on the map those particular comps, so you can filter out the ones that may not be good comps for you. It also has an opportunity tab which basically gives you an estimated value. It shows the last sale date and then of course any mortgages that are on the property. Now Mike, why would it be helpful to know if somebody has a mortgage and what that number might be?

Mike: Because you’re going to figure out what they owe on the property. So, to me the mortgage was kind of just a way to figure out if someone’s being truthful or not too. Knowing if they have a mortgage and they’re like, oh yeah I’ve got a mortgage, I owe 200,000 and you look at the info on there and it says mortgage taken out three years ago, 150 thousand was the mortgage. Well then you know they may not be 100% honest with you at that point and that’s okay, you just need to build more rapport and figure out what’s going on.

David: Absolutely.

Mike: But it just kind of gives you a little bit of insight about the property. Another reason it’s helpful is you know what they owe. Again, you don’t know exactly cuz again, it’s going to show you when the mortgage was taken out and what that number was, so you going to have to kind of figure out if it was 5 years ago, maybe they paid off 10 grand or if it was 25 years ago, well then it’s probably pretty close to free and clear.

David: Right.

Mike: Or if they just refinanced it, shoot they probably owe a lot of money on it still, or whatever that amount is. So again, it’s just very very helpful to know if they have equity in that property or not. So, when you get them on the phone, you can see okay this property- the Propstream map shows you this. It shows you hey we think that it’s worth about this, it pulls- it provides you the comps and it says they owe about this. So again, you can see all that info in about 5 seconds, figure out if there’s equity in the property, is this even a deal worth pursuing? Should I continue talking to this person, following up etcetera etcetera.

David: Love it, so much data.

Mike: Yeah.

David: So that’s the opportunity tab, then you have a skip trace, and you can run an instant skip trace on any property owner to get phone numbers and email addresses. From here, they just added this too Mike this is really cool.

Mike: I haven’t seen it yet.

David: But you can also send postcards now.

Mike: Nice.

David: From Propstream.

Mike: That’s very cool, I didn’t-

David: Not only can you skip trace, you can also do direct mail directly from the app or the login online, it all works together.

Mike: Sweet.

David: Very very cool. You can also pull up docs so you can see like property comps, you can see the accessor’s map, you can actually pull a CMA which is a comparative market analysis to help you determine you know, what that property might be worth. It has directions and then it has the ability to share. Now that’s all just in the search, which is awesome. Next, you have like favorited properties and you can filter by those. They’ve also added driving for dollars, which is so cool, so you can turn on and off your drives, you can set filters for your drive or you can just click just drive and it’ll start tracking your drive and it’ll show you all the properties that you plot while you’re driving and it also trace your route. So, that’s built into this app, I mean, they’re trying to become the all-in-one resource for running comps, pulling lists and driving for dollars and they’re crushing it. They’re doing really well. Also, I had mentioned skip tracing and the direct mail, very very cool. Then there’s a history of course, you can kind of see where you’re at and then there’s help videos on here, account information, updates and of course customer support. So, the app I think is a game changer Mike because if you’re in the field and you come across a property, you know, you can add it to the driving for dollars, you can do an instant skip trace or you can just go ahead and start sending mail to those people all from your phone in the field. Very very very very helpful. I love it, it’s awesome.

Mike: Yeah, the game is just so different than before with technology. I mean it’s a few years and just things change so much. I’m sure every industry can say that but it’s just- yeah, it’s really, it’s fun to be a part of it here in the real estate industry where again, there’s big profits to be made wholesaling guys.

David: There really is.

Mike: So, yeah. I mean if you’re interested in it, you’ve got to again, this would be a great first step to start taking action is to check out this trial at least like we said, there’s a link out there on our DPIpodcast.com or in the show notes below. You can click on that and check out Propstream.

David: And you know what else they do that I didn’t even mention is they do kind of like a list stacking which is really cool. So, if you go pull a criteria on a particular ZIP code or county that let’s say is vacant properties with high equity, the last sale date was 10 plus years, like let’s just say that’s the criteria, kind of random doesn’t matter, but let’s say I go back in 3 weeks and I want to pull that same list, I can only see the ones that were added to that criteria versus the entire one and vice-versa, so they definitely help with some list stacking as well. I mean really Propstream is kind of a no-brainer guys. Unless you’re an agent, a broker, or assistant to an agent or broker, and you already have MLS access and you aren’t buying comps, that’s the only reason that you wouldn’t, I’m sorry, you’re not buying lists. That’s the only reason that you wouldn’t want and/or need this software. I mean essentially it’s the first thing we point our students to because what’s important about wholesaling? Well, there’s three pillars: marketing, making offers, and following up. The marketing doesn’t necessarily require it but making offers does. You need to know how to make an offer and there’s a simple formula, but you have to start with the ARV in mind and that’s where knowing the comps of a property is so important, right? So, if you are starting with the ARV to figure out your offer, that’s where you start, not knowing what that number is devastating to your business. How are you going to make a good offer if you don’t know how to work the equation, and the first part of it is knowing the values.

Mike: Yup.

David: So it’s so simple. So guys, Propstream is one of our favorite software’s. Again, go check it out DPIpodcast.com and then click on the tool kit to get a free trial or click the link in the description of this video if you’re watching. Go check it out, you get 7 days for free that includes access to the app and it’s about a hundred bucks a month. So we get it, it’s not the cheapest software out there, but it’s worth ten times that in my own opinion because it has so much value. It’s not just analyzing, it’s also pulling these lists of motivated sellers, pulling list of cash buyers. Derrick sells his deals, one of our students, from that method. I love that method right? Driving for dollars, mobile app, unlimited searches, you got to check it out guys, DPIpodcast.com toolkit, check that out.

Mike: Check the toolkit out.

David: Or again, click the link in this video. Signing off guys, go get Propstream, it is required.

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