DataSift

Deal Flow Ladder · Phase 1 of 4

The Operator

One county, one list, one flow. Get sequential marketing live before you build anything else.

Phase 1 Solo + Claude Graduate on overflow

You are every seat. Good.

You are every seat: data, dials, follow-up, closing. That is fine. Phase 1 is one live flow on your market's most efficient list.

Off your plate this phase: nothing.

That is the design, not a gap. You cannot delegate a process you have never run, and every later phase is delegation.

The first hire is a data manager at $500-$700 a month. Hire only after closed deals fund the seat, with 3-6 months of costs banked.

The Deal Flow Ladder

Four phases. One discipline. Doors per deal decides everything.

Doors per deal: how many doors you market to for one closed deal. Lower is better. The number picks your list, your hires, your phase.

Climb on overflow only. Never skip a rung.

Doors per deal, by band
Eliteunder 10
Strong10-35
Volumeover 35

Doors marketed per closed deal. Elite lists lead. Volume lists are coverage, not the lead.

Pick the list by the number, not the story.

The Phase 1 decision: the lowest doors-per-deal list that still captures the most market share. Start at the top of this table.

ListDoors per deal
Judgments6.2
Pre-foreclosure Final Judgement9.4
Negative Equity10.9
Estate Sales12.4
Pre-Probate / Deceased14.8
Investor AI Score 90+about 22

Lower is better: Judgments at 6.2 means about six doors marketed for every closed deal. Run the Investor AI Score 90+ as a parallel precision pull, not stacked on top of the niche list.

Sensitive lists have contact rules. Deceased and pre-probate: mail the family immediately, no calls until 3 months after filing, never a cold text. Only about 30% of deceased owners ever file probate, so this list rewards the patient.
Buy box, the teaching example
Price band$100-700K
PropertySingle-family, off MLS
Equity30%+ or unknown

Set yours before you pull a record. Every record outside it is money spent on a door you will not buy.

One market. Doors per deal picks it, the Market Finder confirms it, and you widen only after this flow is maxed.

Stand it up in six moves.

Category level, in order. The tools change every year. The order has not.

  1. Pick one market. Use the doors-per-deal data to choose it, then commit. No second market.
  2. Pull the most efficient niche list your plan allows. Apply your buy box before a single skip trace.
  3. Stand up the sequential flow. Skip trace, phone scoring, click-to-dial, and a call-attempt counter on every record.
  4. Turn on the safety nets. Sold suppression, auto-add for new matching records, and number reputation monitoring.
  5. Choose how you run it. Three modes below. Decide by hours and cash, then start.
  6. Seed First-to-Market with Claude. County data has a long sales cycle. Start it day one so it pays later.

Phase 1 dials one line at a time, from the record, with the counter in view. Click-to-dial keeps a caller at the 150-dials-a-day benchmark.

smrtPhone click-to-dial interface showing one-click calling from a lead record

smrtPhone click-to-dial interface. One click from any lead record to start a call.

Three ways to run the same flow.

No mode is wrong. Match the mode to your hours and your cash.

You dial

$0.03-0.06 per call

Leanest start. Run 4 full attempts per record: call every number, leave the voicemail, send the text, bump the counter by hand. Work the not-interested queue daily.

A caller dials

$750-$1,000 a month

Hand the list to one caller from day one. Benchmark: 150 dials a day. You keep follow-up, appointments, and offers.

Mail only (lifestyle)

$0.50-0.75 per touch

No callers to manage. Mail the best list on a steady cadence and the best leads call you. Slower and calmer, same precision.

The rule

The math that keeps you going: every 75-100 correct-number not-interesteds turns into about 1 deal inside 12 months. Log the disposition, work the queue daily, keep dialing.

5-DAY DEAL FLOW CHALLENGE

Next live cohort: Monday, August 24 to August 28

5 days live with Ty. 34 interactive modules. A community of 1,047+ investors. Save your seat in the next cohort. Already enrolled? Use this guide as your between-session refresher.

Not two strategies. One engine at two speeds.

The niche list pays this quarter. The county pipeline pays after a long sales cycle. Run both from day one.

Fast cycle

The SiftMap niche list

Conversations this week, contracts this quarter. This is the flow you stood up above, and it earns your dials from day one.

Slow cycle

First-to-Market county data

Pulled by Claude from day one. The sales cycle is long, so records seeded now become the deals that close in later quarters.

Skip the slow cycle now and Phase 2 opens with nothing maturing behind the dials.

Proof from two solo starts.

Same constraints as you: one person, one market, every seat. Different modes, same discipline.

Cecilia Moreno case study
Watch Cecilia's Story

Cecilia Moreno

Solo probate operator across three Minnesota counties. Pulls, calls, texts, and mails herself: 180+ probates a month on a Google Form workflow.

Probate You dial + mail
"I decided that my main strategy is first to market. I'm not doing any bulk marketing. I'm a one-person team right now."
Torin Murphin case study
Watch Torin's Story

Torin Murphin

Part-time behind a W-2, foreclosure niche in two Washington counties. Recycled dead-number leads into a $42K assignment by knocking the doors other investors abandoned.

Foreclosure Door knock
"Dead numbers and wrong numbers. We call that pure gold. Everyone else is going to give up on these."

Graduate on overflow, not on a date.

Phase 1 ends when leads exceed what one person can hold. Four gates, all open, then move.

  • The flow is live: skip trace, phone scoring, click-to-dial, counters, and safety nets all on.
  • Dials happen daily and every record gets its 4 full attempts before it leaves the queue.
  • First-to-Market is seeded: Claude pulls the county data on schedule.
  • Leads now exceed what you can hold and follow-ups start slipping. That is the trigger, not a failure.

Overflow funds the first hire. Phase 2 shows which seat, in which order, at what cost.

Next: Phase 2, The Delegator

Multiply touches. The first hires take the overflow.