Dion Wright spent 14 years as a steelworker before deciding to build a property business in South Wales. When he discovered that generic Rightmove searches and landlord letters were not producing results, he turned to motivated seller data to change his approach. His first targeted letter campaign - 10 letters sent to precisely filtered sellers - produced 6 phone calls and his first deal within 2 months.

Dion Wright's challenge before Property Filter

Dion Wright had the ambition and the work ethic - he had spent 14 years in the steel industry and had redundancy behind him. What he did not have was a reliable process for finding deals. The advice he was getting pointed him to Rightmove and standard landlord letters. Neither was working.

The problem with Rightmove was time. Dion was still working during this period and had limited hours to spend on property. Hours of scrolling produced a huge amount of noise and very little signal. He was struggling to identify which sellers were genuinely motivated and which were simply listing at a hopeful price with no urgency to sell.

The letters he was sending had the same problem. Generic landlord mail goes to every property owner in a postcode regardless of whether they want to sell. Without data to back the targeting, the response rate was low and the conversations that did happen rarely led anywhere productive. As a young investor, he was also finding that estate agents were dismissing him rather than taking him seriously.

"I've done a couple of courses and they were saying just use Rightmove. I spent hours just scrolling. At that time I was working so I didn't have much time, and it just felt like I was wasting lots of time."

How Dion Wright uses Property Filter to target motivated sellers in South Wales

Dion's approach changed when he started using property sourcing software to filter for genuine seller motivation before sending a single letter. Instead of blasting generic mail to every landlord on a street, he used Property Filter to identify only properties showing clear distress signals - long time on market, previous fall-throughs, repeated price reductions.

The first campaign under this new approach illustrates the difference data makes. Dion sent just 10 letters - not to random landlords, but to owners whose properties had been on the market a long time and had already fallen through with other buyers. He received 6 phone calls. That is a 60% response rate from a letter campaign that most investors would be delighted to get a 2% return on.

One of those calls led to his first deal within 2 months - a refurbishment financed with a bridging loan. The contact list that produced that call had been built entirely through Property Filter's motivated seller filters, not through hours of manual Rightmove research.

"I used Property Filter to really niche down on motivated sellers. I'd look at properties which had been on the market for a long time and had fallen through. I'd filter right down - my first batch of letters, I sent 10 letters and I had six phone calls."

Beyond letter targeting, Property Filter also gave Dion the comparable sales data he needed to evaluate deals confidently. When he identified his key assisted sale opportunity - a seller facing repossession who had fallen through multiple times with prospective buyers - he used Property Filter to find a comparable property sold 2 to 3 doors away. That comparable, at £167,000, gave him the confidence to know the deal was worth structuring and what the end value would be when sold on to a first-time buyer.

Dion has also evolved how he uses Property Filter as his business has matured. Rather than searching for any deal available, he now focuses on demand first. He identifies areas in South Wales with genuine contractor or worker demand for service accommodation, then uses Property Filter to find motivated sellers in those same areas. This demand-first approach means every deal he pursues has a clear exit strategy before negotiations even begin.