List management and list stacking are common buzzwords in data management. But what do they mean for real estate agents, brokers, and investors? And how can you use them to find motivated sellers? Let's take a look.
What Is List Management?
List management is simply the process of organizing and maintaining records. It's critical in helping professionals choose relevant target markets, prioritize their targets, and focus their marketing efforts. Real estate brokers and agents, for example, use list management to organize lists of prospects, clients, and listings.
How Are These Lists Created?
Savvy agents, brokers, and investors create lists to find homeowners who may be motivated to sell quickly. With the right data and the right filters, you can find homeowners who are in pre-foreclosure, getting divorced, or even in pre-probate. These owners are more likely to be motivated to sell in the near future than the average homeowner.
What if you find a homeowner who shows up on multiple lists? If a homeowner is on both the pre-foreclosure list and the list of divorce filings, for instance, they’re even more likely to sell. That brings us to list stacking.
How Does List Stacking Work?
List stacking is the ability to cross-reference multiple lists to identify motivated sellers. An agent will stack lists to find homeowners who are most likely to list their property, while investors stack lists to find homeowners likely to sell at a discount due to financial and situational factors such as foreclosure, excessive liens, bankruptcy, divorce, etc.
The act of list stacking comes from the time before there was easy access to data management systems. Before Big Data, real estate agents and investors looking off-market for motivated sellers had to check multiple lists from multiple data sources. They would pull lists for seller motivations including divorce filings, tax liens, and missed mortgage payments. The more lists a single home was included on, the more likely the owners were to sell.
You would literally have a stack of lists to comb through, hoping to find a handful of owners who were most likely to sell. Then you would add these homeowners to your list management system of potential leads. From there, you would pull another list from another source to find the phone numbers and mailing addresses for the owners so you could contact them.
Today, list stacking is mercifully digital. PropStream’s marketing list stacking feature allows you to pull multiple lists and see how many times a single property or owner shows up across all of them. This replicates the old-school list stacking method; the more of your targeted lists a property or owner is on, the more likely they are motivated to sell.
What is Filter Stacking?
There’s an even simpler way to list stack in PropStream, filter stacking (especially if you know what you are looking for as an investor or agent). Simply use our 120-plus filters (property characteristic, financial, and situational filters) to get a current list of properties and owners who meet your criteria. For example, you can use PropStream’s filters to search for "tired landlords in foreclosure and have liens" — a search that could return interesting results due to the eviction moratorium.
You can even combine these list-stacking principles to meet your unique needs. Use PropStream’s filters to generate custom lists, then use the list-stacking feature to check for properties that appear on multiple lists. These duplicates can act as an indicator of who is best to market to first.
With PropStream’s built-in skip tracing feature, you can get instant access to emails and telephone numbers for each property owner on your custom list.
If you want to learn more about list management, list stacking, and filter stacking, be sure to check out our free course in the Academy called Finding Motivated Sellers.
The Most Effective List Management and List Stacking Tool
For real estate agents, brokers, and investors, PropStream offers the most effective list management and list stacking tools on the market. The filter tools allow you to run quick custom reports to immediately identify potential sellers. The list stacking feature helps you understand which properties are duplicated on multiple lists so you can create a focused directory of the most likely sellers.
Sign up for a free trial to see how effective your list management and list stacking can be with PropStream. Stay tuned to our blog for more on how you can use PropStream's List Automator to take this process to the next level.
