Folks, I want to tell you about the day I finally quit mailing to strangers.
For years I did what most new investors do. I'd pull one list — absentee owners, say — and I'd mail the whole thing. A few thousand letters going out to people whose only crime was owning a rental they lived two towns away from. Most of them were doing just fine. They didn't need me. I was paying good money to interrupt happy people, and I was getting the response rate to prove it.
Then an old-timer at a meeting asked me a question I've never forgotten. He said, "Chris, out of everybody on that list, which ones are actually in a bind?" And I didn't have an answer. I was mailing the whole county and hoping the right person opened the envelope.
That question is the whole idea behind list stacking. So let me walk you through how I do it, in plain English, because it's the closest thing I've found to knowing who's hurting before I ever knock.
What "stacking" actually means
Here's the thing nobody tells you when they throw the word around: a stacked list is just the same house showing up on more than one trouble list. That's it. There's no software wizardry to be scared of.
Think about it the way you'd think about a neighbor. If I told you a fella owned a house he doesn't live in, you'd shrug. Landlords are everywhere. But if I told you he owns a house he doesn't live in, and he's behind on the property taxes, and the place has been sitting empty since last winter — now you're leaning in. Now you're thinking, that man has a challenge, and somebody ought to help him solve it.
Nothing changed except the number of lists that house landed on. One list is a maybe. Two lists is a "worth a stamp." Three lists, and I'm reaching for the phone. The house didn't get more distressed. I just got smarter about which door I knock on.
That's why I stopped thinking about this as marketing and started thinking about it the way I think about everything in real estate investing — we don't buy houses, we solve challenges. Stacking is how I find the folks whose challenge is real enough that they'll actually pick up.
The lists I pull, and how they stack
Let me name the ones I use most, and what each one is really telling me about the person, not the property.
Tax delinquent. Somebody stopped paying the county. Now, life happens — people forget, people travel. But a man who's a year behind on his taxes is usually a man who's behind on more than his taxes. This is my favorite starting point.
Absentee owner. They own it, they don't live in it. On its own, that's half the county. But an absentee owner who's also tired — a landlord who's done fixing toilets at midnight — is exactly the kind of seller who'll take a fair deal to be done.
High equity. This one's the quiet hero. A seller can only say yes to my offer if there's room in the house for them to walk away with something. If they owe more than it's worth, there's no deal to make, no matter how motivated they are. High equity means a yes is even possible.
Pre-foreclosure. Now we're getting into the folks who genuinely need a hand. If somebody's behind on the mortgage and the clock is running, they've got a real decision in front of them. I treat these people gently — I've written before about how I talk to an Illinois homeowner facing a sheriff's sale, and the short version is: you decide with them against their challenge, not at them.
Vacant. An empty house costs the owner money every single month and gives them nothing back. Vacancy on top of any of the above is usually the tipping point.
Now here's the stacking part. I don't mail any one of those lists. I lay them on top of each other and I look for the houses that appear on two, three, four of them at once. The combination I chase hardest is tax delinquent, plus absentee, plus high equity. That's an out-of-town owner who's behind with the county and has room to sell. That is a person with a challenge and the means to solve it — which is the only kind of seller worth a real conversation.
You don't need every list to line up. Chasing houses that show up on five lists sounds smart, but you'll end up with eleven addresses in a whole county and nobody to call. Two lists is a stamp. Three is a phone call. That's the ladder I climb.
What I do once I've got the short list
Here's where I get to talk about my favorite subject, because the numbers are sacred, and stacking is really a numbers argument.
A plain black-and-white letter runs me about 63 cents to send, all in. So a thousand mailers is around 630 bucks. When I was mailing a raw absentee list, I'd send that whole thousand to make three or four decent conversations happen. The math worked, barely, but I was spending 630 dollars to talk to a handful of people who mostly weren't ready.
When I stack, I mail the right two hundred instead of a thousand. That's about 126 bucks, and my phone rings more, not less, because every one of those letters landed on somebody with a real reason to talk. Or I take that same 630 dollars and mail those two hundred folks three or four times over, since the follow-up is where the deals actually come from. Either way I stopped paying to interrupt happy people. That's the whole win: fewer letters, better sellers, and a budget that finally works as hard as I do.
A couple of things I've learned the hard way once the short list is in hand:
- A stacked list goes stale. The list I pull in January is old news by March. New tax delinquencies show up, foreclosure notices get filed, houses go empty. I re-pull and re-stack every month or so, or I'm mailing yesterday's news.
- The list gets you the door, not the deal. Stacking tells me who to call. It does not close anything. The conversation still has to happen, and it still has to be about them. If you want a place to start on that, I put down how I talk to motivated sellers without feeling pushy a while back.
- No for now is not no forever. Plenty of these folks aren't ready the first time. That's fine. A stacked list is also a great follow-up list, because the same person who says "not yet" in spring is often the person whose vacancy and taxes have gotten worse by fall.
If you're brand new and you don't own any list software yet, don't let that stop you. You can drive for dollars and build the same picture with your own two eyes — a beat-up house you've watched sit empty, cross-checked against public tax records at the county, is a two-list stack you built for free.
And yes, before you mail anybody, know the rules where you operate. I've written about whether wholesaling is even legal in Illinois because the law is different state to state, and knowing it is part of doing this the right way. On the follow-up and phone side, my friend Tim Wilkinson down in Texas has a good piece on using AI to help you follow up with seller leads without losing the human touch — worth a read if your problem is that you keep dropping the ball after the first call.
Why I keep coming back to this
I'm just an old grumpy grandpa-looking guy who taught high-school English for ten years before he ever bought a house. I am not a data scientist. If I can lay a few lists on top of each other and find the folks who actually need help, so can you.
Stacking didn't make me a better negotiator. It didn't teach me a single script. What it did was stop me from wasting stamps on strangers and start pointing me at neighbors with a real challenge — the ones who are relieved when a straight-shooting person calls and offers to solve it with them.
When it's all said and done, that's the job. We don't buy houses. We solve challenges. Stacking just helps me find the right challenge to solve, one letter at a time.
This post is for informational and educational purposes only. Chris Albin and CRARE Instruction do not guarantee any level of money, success, or lifestyle from learning any of the strategies discussed here. The information in this post is of a general nature and is not intended to replace specific advice you may receive from a licensed professional for legal, financial, or business decisions. Individual results will vary depending on several factors, including your starting point, your effort, and your resources. All information is believed to be true and accurate, and is subject to change without notice.
