Tarah Fernandes
Tarah Fernandes has been a guest on Collecting Keys, the real estate investing podcast hosted by Mike DeHaan, Dan Austin and Dylan Koch.
Marketing Secrets to Go From W2 to 7 Figures in 15 Months with Tarah Fernandes
Tarah Fernandes explains how she and her husband Billy built a multi-seven-figure wholesaling business in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in about 15 months with a two-person team, splitting roles between his sales and her marketing and data work. She walks through her weekly direct mail process, the lists and tools she uses, how she tracks which lists actually produce closings, and how they set concrete criteria before quitting their W2 jobs. She also covers buyer relationships in a shifting market and the owner-financed storage facility that now produces roughly $8,000 a month.
Key takeaways
- Tarah and Billy set four specific conditions before quitting their W2s: six to nine months of reserves, three consecutive months of consistent deals, matching their roughly $12,000/month combined take-home pay, and full agreement between both partners on the timing. They left nine months after starting.
- Their marketing is simple and repetitive: every Monday Tarah pulls lists and drops direct mail. She uses Deal Machine, PropStream and List Source for data and ReiSift to tag records so she knows what was mailed, when, and whether it was a letter or postcard.
- High equity lists (absentee and owner-occupied) are the bread and butter, filtered to homes built before 2015 and under 2,200 square feet. Niche lists are underperforming because cash-strapped marketers all pile onto the same small lists.
- Look backward at your own results: pull the last 30 days of closings, find which list the records came from, and mail that list again or hit it with a different channel. Lists that work now may stop working in three or four months.