by Leon McKenzie, Founder and CEO
Getting Started
When my son and I worked in IT, idea came to us for US Probate Leads. We always wanted to be in business for ourselves. So, we attend our first REI group in Dallas, TX. While there, we listed to a guru who told us all about the wonderful deals and opportunities hidden in probates. He said that we too could begin doing deals month in and month out like clockwork. It sounded like a dream come true. Little to no competition, motivated sellers, and a couple of hundred probates being filed every month – what more could we need? We just had to get the information from the county clerk.
Visiting the Courthouse
This sounded great to us! A secret source of deals that no one else knows about or just doesn’t understand….So, we walked into the county clerk’s office. Then, we asked politely for the list of executors that filed for probate. Much to our surprise, she laughed and said, “This must be your first time here.” She then explained that the files were in the back and that we needed to go through each file individually. In addition, we could not take any recording devices in with us. Furthermore, we could only take 10 files at a time. This floored us. The court held over 250 files, and with just a pen and paper, it would take us weeks to collect the information we needed.
Month after month, we went to the courthouse and developed a relationship with the clerk’s office. My son and I spent a lot of time at the courthouse which didn’t leave us much time for investing. We needed to recoup our time and costs. We decided to start going to the local REI groups and selling the leads to the local investors.
Selling Probate Leads
After a few months, several investors told us that because they had been so successful, they wanted more counties. We knew we had come up with a truly profitable niche for investors. As such, we continued to expand from one county to the next. This occurred 15 years ago. Although we learned quickly that no two courthouses are alike, today we can deliver probate leads in virtually every county in the United State. We continue to develop and refine our methods to provide our customers with the best leads in today’s real estate market.
Together, we built this business one client at a time. We maintain those relationships with continuous feedback on what challenges they have, what works, and what doesn’t work. In order to help our customers succeed at a high level, Mike and I learned everything we needed to know. Some of our customers do a few deals a year, while others do a few deals per week. We learned that you can scale to as few or as many deals as you have the desire and resources to work.
A Growing Source of Leads
Today, we help our customers reach their desired outcome by compressing 15 years of knowledge into a simple process that enables our customers to be successful. In addition, we offer tools to help our customers such as done-for-you mailings and an inside sales agent to make phone calls. With the real estate becoming more competitive, investors need to look for the next flood of inventory to hit the market. With over $20-40 trillion in assets passing through probate in the next 10-20 years, primarily in the form of real estate, now is the time to make this a consistent source of business. Learn more about: www.usprobateleads.com