Drake Johnson
Drake Johnson has been a guest on Collecting Keys, the real estate investing podcast hosted by Mike DeHaan, Dan Austin and Dylan Koch, 2 times.
How to Improve Your Lead Flow & Get Quality Leads w/ Drake Johnson
SCALE member Drake Johnson breaks down the lead intake system he and his partner run in the Austin–San Antonio corridor, including a round-robin call routing setup, a disqualification-first intake script, and live transfers from lead manager to acquisitions manager. He also covers why Facebook ads outperformed texting for them, their $12,000/month marketing budget, and the strain of running flips alongside a wholesale pipeline while working a full-time firefighter schedule.
Key takeaways
- Route inbound calls round robin (lead manager → acquisition manager → owner) instead of paying an answering service; if a seller waits through the rings, that itself signals motivation.
- Treat intake as a disqualification process against four pillars — motivation, condition, timeline, price. If a lead hits at least two and scores above a five out of ten, the lead manager live transfers to the acquisitions manager, which more than doubled their appointment conversion.
- Set expectations on the call: tell the seller the call takes seven to eight minutes, explain the lead manager is just intake, and have the AM open by admitting they may repeat a question.
- Facebook ads produced some of their biggest deals because leads must see the ad and fill out a form, then get Zapier-driven email and text drips plus a five-minute callback; texting produced hundreds of tire-kicker leads and one deal in nearly a year.
Deal Case Study - Off Market Lake Cabin
Mike DeHaan walks through a deal case study with Drake Johnson, a San Antonio investor and agent who bought an inherited, seven-year vacant cabin near Canyon Lake off a direct mail offer card. Drake explains how he built rapport with the out-of-town seller, used unexpected roof and septic issues to renegotiate $20,000 off the price, and partnered with a JV team that handled labor and financing, ending with a roughly two-and-a-half-month wholetail that sold for $269,000 and grossed about $96,000 split 50/50.
Key takeaways
- Offer postcards with a reasonable (not lowball) number invite conversation, and simply answering the phone or calling back sets you apart — Drake's seller drove three hours from Houston twice to meet him.
- Set expectations early and say out loud that you're an investor who needs to make money on the deal; sellers who run businesses tend to understand that.
- Due diligence findings (roof, HVAC, septic that hadn't been serviced since 1984) justified a dollar-for-dollar $20,000 price reduction the seller accepted.
- Recomping before listing mattered: similar homes were selling for $240k–$250k, so instead of wholesaling for a $10k–$15k fee they did a light wholetail, got 7–8 showings in the first days, and went under contract $15k over ask.