Cold email, will it work for wholesaling?

Will Cold Email Work for Wholesaling Real Estate?

As I’ve been looking for low-budget ways to generate more leads, cold email came across my radar, and I decided to dive in and give it a test whirl.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far. I’ll break it down into projected metrics, costs, and logistics.

Projected Metrics

This is based on email addresses that you have warmed up and following protocols recommended by bulk email companies. I’ll touch on what “warming up” emails means in a minute.

Deliverability: 75%. This is, of course, affected by your list quality and your email content.
Open Rate: 20%. This is conservative because I’m looking at it from the standpoint of real estate marketing. In some other fields, people estimate as high as 30 to 35 percent.
Reply Rate: 2%. Again, conservative. People report up to six percent in different business sectors.

The Funnel Math

If we were sending 100,000 cold emails per month, here is what we would roughly expect:

75,000 would reach the inbox
15,000 would get opened
300 Replies

Here’s where I’m injecting the math from SMS data that we already have in our system to project what those 300 replies will get us:

Leads: In our SMS system, 4% of replies turn into pushed leads. Extrapolating that math would give us 12 leads from 100,000 cold emails.
Offers: We offer on ~70% of pushed leads. That would give us 8.4 offers.
Contracts: We currently contract on 7.5% of our offers. That would turn into 0.63 contracts per 100K emails.
Closed Deals: Historically, we have closed 45% of our contracts. So that would lead us to 0.28 closed deals per 100,000 cold emails.

Not super sexy, but this is a conservative estimate. If we could increase that to half a closed deal (I used conservative projections at the top of the funnel), then we’d be doing one deal every two months from cold email, and it doesn’t cost very much. I’ll dive into the costs next.

Cold Email Costs

There is some upfront cost because you have to buy domains and hosting if you don’t already have a hosting package for a website. The ongoing monthly cost is very small.

Email Platform: We’re using a company called Smartlead, and the package we have is $94/month. This will accommodate the volume that we want to send initially. We saved some money by starting out on the free plan to warm up our emails for the first few weeks.
Hosting: We use Namecheap. The package that enables us to have up to 50 domains costs $78 a year. If you have to set up a hosting package, this will be an upfront cost.
Domains: Domains cost about $12 to purchase. We’re starting with five domains ($60).

Total Setup Cost: ~$138

Ongoing Costs:

Annual renewal for the domains: ~$60/year.
Hosting: $78/year.
Smartlead (or similar platform): $94/month. (If you scale up in a big way, the next tiers are roughly $179 and $379).

Total Average Ongoing Cost: ~$113/month. (More if you increase volume).

The Takeaway

For our trial that we will run for six months to a year, cold email is going to cost us about $110 a month. If we can get one closed deal a month out of it, or even half of a closed deal, that’s a victory. And then we ramp up.

Half of a closed deal per month would result in a $220 cost per closed deal. One closed deal would be $110.

What does it take to set up cold email? (Logistics)

Set up: We’ve set up five domains with five emails each. 25 emails total. I used AI to walk me through the setup. Once you have all of your emails, you upload them to your cold email platform (Smartlead).
Warm Up: Once they’re uploaded, you set them to warm up. The platform will send test emails from your addresses for a period of time until they have built trust among email servers so you can gradually increase volume without getting flagged as spam.
Launch: Once you have notification from your platform that your emails are warmed up, you can start composing messages and sending them to lists of sellers. We will send 40 emails from each address per day—1,000 per day. (This is the recommended max per email address to avoid getting flagged). We will ramp up to 100k per month once we have proof of concept and a solid SOP established.

And away we go, launch time!

That’s what I know so far. If you have any questions, feel free to ask! I’ll keep posting updates on it as we go through the process. We will be launching our first campaign on March 16th, 2026.

Make better offers, faster. Use my free Multi-Offer Calculator to run your numbers and make data-driven, profitable offers:

Mark Cool