Why Your Strike Price Matters More Than Your Lead List
A bigger list of names rarely produces more deals. The investors who close consistently are the ones who define exactly what they will buy — and filter everything else out before it eats their week.
Greg Harris — The Wholesale Knockout King
Most flippers I talk to think they have a lead problem. They almost never do. They have a filtering problem.
A spreadsheet with 800 property records is not a pipeline. It is a pile of work you have not done yet. If half of those records are in areas you will not touch, at price points that do not work, or in conditions you do not have the stomach or the budget for, then the list is not helping you. It is quietly costing you deals — because every hour you spend sorting bad-fit records is an hour you are not spending on the three properties that could actually work.
Define the strike price first
Before anyone builds a list, you need to be honest about what you actually buy. Not what you would buy in a perfect market. What you buy in this market, with your funding, your team, and your rehab tolerance.
That means writing down your target areas, your ARV range, your maximum acquisition price, your rehab ceiling, and the profit margin that makes a project worth your time. It also means writing down what you will not touch — the neighborhoods, the property types, and the conditions that have burned you before.
Filter hard, early
Once the strike price is defined, the job of deal flow is to filter against it relentlessly. A property that does not fit the area, the numbers, or the condition should never make it to your desk as something to "take a look at." It should be filtered out before it wastes your time.
The goal is not more names. The goal is more real opportunities — properties worth actually evaluating, underwriting, and pursuing.
That is the whole point of organizing deal flow around a strike price instead of around raw data volume.
