McKinney Holland
McKinney Holland has been a guest on Collecting Keys, the real estate investing podcast hosted by Mike DeHaan, Dan Austin and Dylan Koch.
Using Service Providers To Find Distressed Properties with McKinney Holland
McKinney Holland, a full-time accountant and one of the first Instant Investor Program members, explains how he built a side real estate business on track for $200,000 in a year. He walks through creating a proxy junk hauling business that feeds him seller leads, printing and hand-delivering his own direct mail to pre-foreclosures pulled from county records and newspapers, and buying a midterm rental in Flint, Michigan sight unseen. He also shares how he uses a trained VA to handle calls and appointments while he works his W2.
Key takeaways
- A proxy service business can generate seller leads: McKinney runs Facebook ads for junk hauling, sells the legitimate jobs to real junk haulers for $50-$100 (covering his ad spend), and asks the homeowners if they want to sell. One such lead became a hoarder house bought at $255,000 and listed around $415,000, with $32,000 in repairs.
- Doing your own direct mail cuts cost significantly: buying envelopes on Amazon, printing letters that look handwritten in Word, and paying someone a couple hundred dollars to stuff and stamp them brings the cost to about 60-65 cents per piece versus a dollar-plus from a mail house.
- Hand-delivering mail to fresh pre-foreclosure filings pulled daily from county records (and in one county, a physical newspaper) produces roughly a 3% response rate because those owners show no distress signals on data platforms and nobody else is contacting them.
- A trained VA can run intake while you work a W2. McKinney spent weekends training a VA in the Philippines on script and dialect, gave her calendar access, and now just gets told when his Saturday appointments are.