What to ask a cash buyer so the list is worth searching.
Most buyer lists are a name, a phone number and the word investor. That list has one use: blasting all eighty people every time, which trains them to ignore you and tells you nothing about who the house is for. Seven fields is the difference between a contact list and something you can ask a question of at 9pm with a deal on the clock.
Each one has a question that gets a real answer instead of a marketing answer. Ask about the last house they bought, not about what they are looking for. People describe their appetite generously and their history accurately.
Where, exactly
Ask: “Which zip codes did you buy in this year?”
Not the metro. Nobody buys a metro. A buyer who says “anywhere in Atlanta” has bought in four zips and will pass on the other ninety. Ask what they actually closed on, and you get a list of three to six areas you can match against instead of a word that matches everything.
Price band, top and bottom
Ask: “What is the cheapest house worth your time, and the most you have paid?”
The bottom end matters more than the top and almost nobody records it. A buyer with a $95,000 floor is a wasted phone call on your $60,000 assignment, and you only find that out after you have sent it to eleven people.
Property type, including the ones they refuse
Ask: “Single family only, or do you take duplexes, mobiles, land?”
Record the no as carefully as the yes. “No mobiles, no condos with an HOA” is more useful at 9pm than a checkbox that says single-family, because it tells you who to skip without re-reading a thread from March.
What they do with it
Ask: “Flip, rent, or both — and which one for this kind of house?”
This is the field that changes your number. A flipper is buying the resale, a landlord is buying the rent, and the same house is worth two different amounts to them. Most buyers do both and lean one way per area, so write the lean down.
How ugly they will go
Ask: “What is the worst condition you have taken on — and did you regret it?”
Condition tolerance is where a match quietly fails. “Any condition” in their marketing usually means cosmetic and a roof. Ask about foundation movement, fire damage, a tenant who will not leave, and an open permit, and you learn which of your hard deals they are actually for.
How fast, honestly
Ask: “Last house you bought — contract to close, how many days?”
Everyone says seven to ten. Ask about the last one and you get fourteen, or twenty-one because their lender needed a walkthrough. If your seller needs to be out by the 30th, that difference is the whole deal.
Whether they are real
Ask: “Are you buying with your own funds, and what did you close last?”
Half of a typical list is other wholesalers hoping to daisy-chain your contract. That is not a crime, but it is not a buyer, and you should know which is which before you hand somebody an assignment. Proof of funds, a hard money relationship or one address they can name.
Every extra column is a reason to stop updating the list. These four get collected constantly and have never once decided which buyer gets the call.
A star rating you gave them
You will not remember what three stars meant in April. Record a fact instead: what they bought, what they paid, and what they said when they passed.
Free-text notes and nothing else
A paragraph is fine as a supplement and useless as a filter. If the price band lives in a sentence, you cannot ask your own list who takes $80k to $120k in that zip.
Mailing address, company registration, website
Nice for a contract, irrelevant to whether this buyer wants this house. Collect it when you are under contract with them, not when you are building the list.
How they found you
Interesting for your marketing, never used in a match. Keep it out of the fields you have to fill in for every single buyer, or you will stop filling them in.
Nobody sits still for a seven-question form. You do not need them to. Fill in what you already know from the last time you dealt with them, and get the rest in the two conversations you are having anyway.
When a buyer passes on a deal, that is the moment. They have just told you a reason, and the reason is one of the seven fields. “Too far out” is market. “Numbers do not work” is price band or strategy. “Not taking on another foundation job” is condition. Write the reason down against the buyer, not against the deal, and after a dozen passes the list fills itself in.
When a buyer closes, get the closing speed and the price from the deal you just did rather than from what they claimed. That single number is worth more than everything on their website.
And when you are adding somebody new, four fields are enough to be useful: area, price band, type, flip or rent. A list of eighty buyers with four fields each beats a list of eighty with a perfect profile for six of them.
Sending every deal to every buyer looks free and is not. The buyers who take rurals learn that four out of five of your emails are city duplexes, and they stop opening. By the time you have a deal they genuinely want, you are in a folder they never look at.
The other cost is speed. If eighty people get the same email, the one who replies is the one who happened to be at a desk, not the one who pays most. A ranked list of six lets you call the best fit first and hold the rest as backup, which is how a fee goes up instead of down.
Sorting is also the difference between recording the seven fields and using them. Fields you never filter on are just typing.
Import the spreadsheet, then ask it who this house is for.
Bring your buyers in from Google Sheets or Excel as a CSV, or add them one at a time. Then on a deal under contract, Find Buyers ranks your own list against the house and says in plain words why each one fits and where one does not. Your buyers stay yours, and nobody else ever sees them.