Apollo Advanced Filters Masterclass

Why filter combinations beat single filters

A single Apollo title filter (Managing Partner) returns 412,000 contacts. Useful for almost nothing. The same Managing Partner filter stacked with company-keyword (multifamily), headcount (2-200), revenue (under $50M), email status (verified), and technology (Juniper Square) returns 487 contacts. Every one of them is a real RE syndicator with a working email and active investor-management software. That stack is what makes Apollo the highest-yield single tool for RE capital outbound. The 16 screenshots below walk through each filter in order, then close with the 5 copy-paste recipes.

From the Apollo dashboard to a 391-contact verified send list

Each screenshot is a faithful re-render of Apollo's filter panel and results table with real public data overlaid. Contact names are from confirmed LinkedIn profiles of US RE syndication operators.

1

Apollo dashboard + People search entry

Sign into Apollo and the dashboard opens with four large entry tiles: People (270M contacts), Companies (73M firms), Saved searches (your recipes), CSV enrichment (upload a list to enrich). The People tile is where every cold-outbound workflow starts. The saved-searches block on the homepage doubles as a daily standup. New contacts added by each alert overnight are surfaced as a count.

What to copy. Always start in People, not Companies. Companies is useful for firmographic research, but the goal of an outbound workflow is to email people, so the database that returns people is where the workflow begins.

https://app.apollo.io/#/people

2

Job titles · Boolean OR

The single most important filter. RE capital decision-makers use roughly 5 titles across the industry: Managing Partner, Principal, Director of Acquisitions, Head of Capital Markets, VP Investor Relations. Apollo accepts Boolean grammar inside the title field, so the right input is ("Managing Partner" OR "Principal" OR "Director of Acquisitions" OR "Head of Capital Markets" OR "VP Investor Relations"). Match type set to Current title only to exclude people who held the role at a previous company.

What to copy. Use quotes around multi-word titles or Apollo treats each word as an independent token. Managing Partner without quotes matches any Manager or any Partner, blowing the cohort up to 4M contacts.

3

Company keywords · Boolean OR

After title, the second filter that actually narrows the cohort. Company keywords search both the company description and the website content. The right Boolean for RE capital: ("real estate" OR "multifamily" OR "syndication" OR "private equity real estate"). This combo pulls every sponsor, syndicator, or PE-RE firm that mentions any of those four phrases on their site. Excludes adjacent verticals like proptech, construction tech, and REIT software, which is intentional.

What to copy. If you sell into PropTech instead of RE syndication, swap the keywords to ("proptech" OR "real estate tech" OR "construction tech" OR "PropTech SaaS"). The structure stays identical.

4

Company headcount · the 2-200 sweet spot

RE syndication firms over 200 employees are usually public REITs or institutional shops where decisions move through committee. RE firms under 2 employees are usually solo operators with no budget. The sweet spot is 2-10, 11-50, 51-200 selected together. That captures boutique sponsors with budget but without bureaucracy. Excluded: 201-500, 501-1000, 1001-5000, 5000+.

What to copy. For institutional-allocator outbound (family offices, RIAs, endowments) shift the range to 2-50 and add a wealth-management company keyword. For PropTech outbound, widen to 2-500.

5

Company revenue · under $50M

Filters out the institutional shops that headcount missed. A 180-person firm at $200M revenue is Blackstone-scale; a 180-person firm at $30M revenue is a boutique sponsor. The cap at $50M removes Cerberus, KKR Real Estate, Blackstone subsidiaries, and the insurance-arm landlords. Keeps every firm where a Managing Partner can sign a $5k-$15k/mo agency engagement letter without going to a committee.

What to copy. Apollo's revenue is estimated with a +/- 25% margin. Cross-check the bigger players against PitchBook AUM (covered in Chapter 7) before assuming the number is exact.

6

Industry · the 4 verticals that matter

Selecting Real Estate alone misses family offices and investment-management shops that allocate to RE. The four verticals that catch every relevant allocator: Real Estate, Investment Management, Financial Services, Venture Capital & Private Equity. Excluded: Banking, Insurance, Construction. Banking and Insurance often hold real estate but the LPs inside those institutions never source deals from cold email.

What to copy. VC & PE is the least obvious of the four. Include it because PE firms with growth-equity arms often allocate to property-tech and prop-equity deals, and their principals reply at 12-15% rates to cold outreach.

7

Location · the 7 RE capital hubs

In 2026, 78% of US RE syndication AUM operates from 7 MSAs: New York, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix. Selecting these 7 cuts your list to the geography that actually transacts, which improves reply rate because RE-focused outreach lands better on someone who lives inside an active RE market than someone who allocates from a city with no RE thesis.

What to copy. The 7 hubs are the 2026 list. Charlotte and Nashville are climbing fast and may join the top tier in 2027. For RE debt + credit outbound, add Chicago.

8

Email status · Verified only

Apollo flags every email as Verified (passed Apollo's SMTP check), Likely (pattern + confidence score), or Unverified (no check passed). Sending to Likely drives bounce rate from 2% to roughly 11%. Always filter to Verified only at this step. Likely belongs in a separate retest queue routed through MillionVerifier (covered in Chapter 4).

What to copy. If your cohort drops too small after Verified-only, the answer is not to relax this filter. The answer is to widen Industry or Location until Verified-only count is back where you need it.

9

Technology stack · the gold-tier signal

The strongest single signal that a firm is actively syndicating today is its investor-management software. Five products cover 92% of active US syndicators with $5M+ AUM: "Juniper Square" OR "InvestNext" OR "Cashflow Portal" OR "AppFolio Investment Management" OR "Groundbreaker". Juniper Square = $50M+ AUM, professional GP. InvestNext = $10-50M, growth-stage syndicator. Cashflow Portal = $5-20M boutique. The combo flags every real GP and excludes every aspirational website.

What to copy. The technology filter is gated to Apollo Basic ($59/mo) and above. The free Apollo tier locks it. If you are on free, upgrade for one month to extract a 1,000-row tech-stack-filtered list, then drop back to free.

10

Funding raised + recency overlay

Two filters that work as a pair. Total funding raised: $5M-$250M narrows to companies large enough to need outsourced help but small enough to still buy externally. Last funding date: within 90 days overlays the funded-=-budget window from Chapter 7. The combination is the highest-converting Apollo cohort for PropTech and RE-platform outbound: every contact in the result has fresh capital and an active mandate to deploy it.

What to copy. Cross-reference this Apollo cohort against the Crunchbase + PitchBook + Form D triangulation in Chapter 7. Triangulated rows score +20 on internal ICP ranking, which pushes them to the front of the sequence.

11

Seniority · Owner, Founder, C-Suite, VP, Director

Apollo seniority is a useful sanity check on title. Some firms use titles like Principal for both equity partners and 24-year-old associates. Selecting Owner, Founder, C-Suite, VP, Director removes the second case. Manager and senior IC are excluded because almost none of them carry budget authority for outsourced raise work, even when their title sounds senior on LinkedIn.

What to copy. If you sell into the IR-team analyst level (which most agencies should not, but some content / data services do), shift the cap to Director-and-below and add Manager. The reply rate drops about 40% but the cohort triples.

12

Recently changed jobs · last 90 days

The single highest-yield filter in Apollo for RE-capital outbound. A new IR Director or Head of Capital Markets has 90 days to prove they can deliver on their mandate, which makes them 3.4x more likely to take a discovery call than a tenured equivalent at the same firm. Combined with Director+ seniority and Real Estate industry, this cohort runs 18.7% reply rates on Leadfins' 2026 campaigns. Re-run this filter monthly.

What to copy. The 90-day window is the strongest signal Apollo offers. 30 days is too narrow (the person has not picked their inbox priority yet), 180 days is too wide (the honeymoon mandate has expired).

13

Headcount growth · positive trend

A complementary signal. Firms growing headcount more than 10% over the trailing 6 months are growing revenue, deploying capital, and hiring externally faster than steady firms. Combined with technology = Juniper Square and last-funding-date = 90 days, this is the top-decile cohort across all 5 recipes. Real names in the result: Wildhorn Capital +18%, Cadre +24%, Arrived Homes +31%, Republic Real Estate +14%.

What to copy. Headcount growth lags revenue by 3-6 months. A firm that started growing in March is the right outreach target in June, not March.

14

Save the search + daily alerts

Every filter combination worth running once is worth saving. Click Save search, name the recipe, and turn on the daily alert. Apollo emails the new contacts that matched the recipe overnight at 8 AM ET. The push target is set to the matching Apollo Saved List, which then routes by webhook to PlusVibe or another sequencing tool. Real-world example: the Juniper Square recipe added 23 new contacts in 7 days, cost 23 credits ($1.15 at Basic), and produced 4 booked calls in week 1.

What to copy. Save 5 to 10 recipes per ICP. Turn alerts on for the top 5. Review the alert digest every morning during your inbox routine.

15

Bulk export + CSV cleanup

Apollo's bulk export charges 1 credit per email revealed and returns a 21-column CSV with everything from first name to last funding amount. Always run a 5-step Python cleanup before pushing to PlusVibe: drop unverified rows, drop personal email domains (gmail / yahoo / aol / outlook), dedupe by company domain (one contact per firm), tag P1 vs P2 by phone presence, then write the PlusVibe-ready CSV. Real outcome on the 487-row May 24 export: 391 final contacts, 162 P1 with phone, ready for the sequence.

What to copy. The dedupe-by-domain step is the most important. Without it, every sequence has 3-7 contacts at the same firm and burns the entire firm's inboxes if one of them flags spam.

16

The 5 saved-search recipes

The 5 recipes Leadfins reruns every week, with real 2026 reply rates. Recipe 1: Active RE syndicators with Juniper Square (13.4%). Recipe 2: Recently funded RE startups (16.1%). Recipe 3: Family office decision-makers (9.2%). Recipe 4: IR pros who changed jobs this quarter (18.7%, the highest cohort Leadfins has measured). Recipe 5: Capital markets directors at boutique sponsors (11.6%). Copy each filter block straight into Apollo's panel.

What to copy. Run Recipe 4 monthly, the rest weekly. Recipe 4 is rate-limited by how many people change jobs into IR roles in a 30-day window (roughly 248 in May 2026); running it weekly wastes effort.

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