26 Ways to Find Real Estate Deals (17 Are Free!)

Transcript:

On this episode of the Personal Finance Podcast, we're gonna talk about 26 ways to find real estate deals, and 17 of these are free.

What's up everybody, and welcome to the Personal Finance Podcast. I'm your host Andrew, founder of Master money.co. And to today on the Personal Finance podcast, we're gonna talk about 26 ways to find real estate deals and 17 of these. Are free. If you guys have any questions, make sure to hit us up on Instagram or TikTok or Twitter at Master Money Co.

And follow us on Spotify, apple Podcast or whatever podcast player you love listening to this podcast on it. If you want to help out the show, leave a five star rating and review on Apple Podcast. And don't forget to subscribe to the Master Money Newsletter. We are giving you a brand new newsletter every single week on Thursday mornings with a bunch of fresh new content.

Make sure you check that out as you go through some of our other. Content. Now today we are gonna be going through 26 different ways that you can find real estate deals. And if you're interested in investing in real estate, one of the most powerful activities that you can do is go out and find deals.

But deal finding is very difficult for a lot of beginners. They try to do it. In one single way and one single way only. They just search online through Zillow or something along those lines. But I'm gonna show you a bunch of creative ways to find deals, specifically so you can find on-market deals, but also off-market deals.

And to me, my favorite way to find properties is with off-market deals. I've started to get back into really hunting down real estate deals now, and that's one thing that I'm really, really heavily prioritizing this year. And so as I do this, I'm gonna kind of share a bunch of different things that I'm gonna be trying with you and to show you that there are so many different ways to find real estate.

But primarily what I am trying to do now is I used to find all my deals on the mls. I would make a hundred different offers, and every single time was like an exhausting process just to find one deal. In fact, to find one deal, I would have to make 200 plus offers just to get one deal accepted. And so what I figured is going forward, I am gonna be looking for a lot more off-market deals, and I'm trying out a bunch of off-market tactics in order to find some of these deals and deal finding in real estate.

As you know, running your numbers and finding deals is the highest activity that you can make. Why? Because every deal that you add to your portfolio is going to mean that you are building more and more wealth, and you can get wealthier and wealthier by doing so. So, This is something where I'm really excited to share all of these options with you, and you can pick a couple of these and see which ones are actually working for your lifestyle and how you like to operate.

Some of these are for introverts, some of these are for extroverts, but we will kind of go through each and every single option for you so that you can see what is the best option for you. So we are gonna start with all of the free options and there's 17 different free options. And I'm gonna talk about some of the paid options too, where if you really wanna scale your portfolio, you really wanna scale your business.

Then looking at. A combination between free and paid can be a great, great option. So excited to dive into these. Let's build wealth together. So without further ado, let's get into it. All right, so number one is the classic example. This is the one that a lot of people do. This is the way I found most of my properties early on when I first started investing in real estate in 2017.

And this is. Look for deals on the mls. I'm not talking about Zillow or any other, any of these other places, but look for deals with an agent on the mls. Now, when I started looking for rental properties very early on, I realized most agents are not investor friendly, and I completely get it because agents' job is to make money off house sales, off commissions.

It is a waste of time for them to make tons and tons of different offers so that you can get your single deal. Now if you have a bunch of deals in your area and you're making very fair offers, that is one thing, but if you are making offers that fit your investing criteria instead of what the actual price is, which is what I did, then you are gonna have to take matters into your own hands, which is exactly what I did.

So in 2016 or 17, I went out and got my real estate license in the state that I live in, which is the state of Florida. And so when I got that license, I can make all the offers myself. And your boy was making offers left and right. I'm talking about making over a hundred offers every single month, pretty much on every property that hit the market.

And it would take me a hundred to 200 offers to be able to get one to two offers accepted. And so this is one thing where I quickly realized this is not a very scalable activity. And I would do all of it myself, filling out the contracts myself, sending it out to the agents. The agents would scream back at me, what kind of a price is this because I'm giving 'em my price instead of what the actual listing price is.

And this just was not really a fun process to go through, but there is still a way to make money doing this, especially if you can find someone to typically help you out. Now, if you wanna do all the work yourself, you absolutely can, and you can work with an agent who is investor-friendly, who is willing to send out those offers, but.

If you can't find any investor-friendly agents, maybe you wanna go out and get your real estate license if you feel like it. It also allows you to access these properties on the MLS without having to have an agent with you. You can just walk into the properties, which was very helpful for me and my schedule.

So there are some pros to that, but for most people, you're not gonna wanna go out and get your real estate license. It takes you 60 plus hours to go out and get it, cuz you gotta sit through the classes and then take the test. So for most people, finding an investor-friendly agent, and you can find these a lot of times at real estate meetups, or maybe you find brand new agents who don't have a lot of business yet.

This is gonna help you through some of this process who are willing to be hungry and make a bunch of offers. Also, if you're working with agents, look for the agent in your area. That is some of the best agents in foreclosures. If you can make contacts and rebuild relationships with some of these agents, sometimes they will send you the properties that are coming on market before it actually starts.

I became very good friends with one of the agents in our area who is the number one foreclosure agent. In my area, and so he would send me properties before they came on market. I'd be able to see them. I'd be able to even go look at them at times, depending on what type of property it was so that I could see some of these foreclosures on the market.

Now, this is one freeway to do this, number two, the second freeway is driving for dollars, driving for dollars. If you do not know what this is, is one of the most powerful things that you can do. And now back when I used to do it all the time, I don't do it as much now because I don't have as much time as I used to.

But when I used to do this all the time, I would have to manually drive for dollars. Now let me explain what driving for dollars is, and then I'll talk about some of the tactics that you can use. So what driving for dollars is. Is you go look in neighborhoods that you are looking for to start investing investment properties, and what you're doing in these neighborhoods is you are looking for houses that are in distress.

So maybe the grass is really, really high, maybe the paint is chipping on the outside. You can tell maybe somebody hasn't lived there for a very long time. And or someone is just not taking care of the property, and you are looking for these properties. And once you find one, you're gonna write down the address of that property.

And what happens here is when you drive for dollars, you're gonna start to compile a list of maybe 100 properties to 200 properties where you can do a number of different things. Number one. Is you can skip trace the property. What does skip tracing means is that you put it through a software. The software is gonna spit out information to that property.

Something like their phone number, maybe their address, who owns it, and some additional information, maybe an email if you get lucky. Something along those lines. Then once you have this information, you decide what to do with it. A, you can send out letters to them. You can hand write letters to each individual person, which is what I used to do.

I used to take a yellow notepad with a red pen, and I would write letters. Each person and send them out. Now, there's technology and companies that you could pay, but you have to pay a lot of money where they'll literally hand write for you and send out those letters for you. But there's also apps that do this.

So there are different apps out there that will actually help you pinpoint each of these locations that you see. Then you can also send letters or things automatically to the direct owners. One is called Deal Machine. And Deal Machine actually does this for you. I wish I had this early on. Let me see what deal machine costs as I'm recording this episode.

It's a deal machine for the membership is $59 per month, and what it does is it allows you to look up 10,000 different leads. Drive for dollars. There's data analysis, and then you can mail each letter for 64 cents a letter. So it is not a free option if you're going to mail these letters out, but it is a free option if you're going to contact these sellers.

Maybe you wanna cold call these sellers directly and kind of do the sweat equity for this, and it's going to allow you to kind of find all this information without having to pay a bunch of money. So you can literally go through drive for dollars, find some of these properties, write down the address.

Skip trace some of these addresses and then give some of these sellers a call and or just hand write a letter and send it off to them. Now, each letter you send off, if it's in a postcard, it's gonna be 30 something cents, whatever it is now. And if it's a handwritten letter, it's about 50 cents a stamp.

So it depends on the stamp cost there. So it's not a hundred percent free. I know I'm saying it's a hundred percent free, but if you want it to be a hundred percent free, your options are to try to give them a phone call after you skip trace and or knock on the door, see if anybody will answer the door.

That's a little bit of a more dangerous tactic, but you can do that. So driving for dollars is one of my favorite tactics. I could do an entire episode on this cuz there's a lot more to talk about when it comes to driving for dollars. So we will add that to the podcast list for the future and we will talk more about driving for dollars.

Number three is let everybody that you know know that you are a real estate investor. You would be amazed at how powerful this actually is, because what happens here is once people know that you're a real estate investor, they start to bring things to you. Hey, my mom wants to sell this house. What would you pay for this house?

Or Would you be willing to take this off her hands or, Friends who are agents, for example, or friends who are property managers, for example, will bring you property and say, Hey, this seller wants to get rid of this property. They don't want it anymore. Do you want it? And talk through some of those things.

So let everybody know whether you go to church or you go to weekly meetups, or you just go hang out with your friends that night. Let everybody know because as word starts to spread that you're the real estate person, then more deals. Will flow your way. Number four, and this is a very, very good one, is participate in real estate clubs.

Now, I've talked about a couple of the real estate clubs that I used to go to all the time, and I don't go to them as much anymore, only because I just don't have enough time. Once I started to have kids, my time was very limited into when I could go to these real estate clubs. But if you find a local club in your area, this is where you're gonna meet like kind investors that are trying to do the same exact thing that you are.

And or there's also a lot of really, really seasoned investors there. And I'll talk about a couple, uh, clubs that I went to. So one of them I used to go to was in the back of a Chinese restaurant. And we'd go all the way to the back of this Chinese restaurant. They rented out like this big giant room in the back of this restaurant, and there was like a hundred investors there that would go every single week, every single Monday night.

And we would be there and there would be talks going on and people would talk about deals that they're looking for. People would talk about things that they're looking for, and they would kind of go through some of this stuff. And some deals were made at that real estate meetup. But then later on, I found where the advanced investors would go and where they would go would be this real estate meetup.

It still happens every single Thursday morning inside of a Denny's, and this real estate meetup is filled with millionaires. I'm talking 20, 30 millionaires in this one real estate meetup and they call it the real estate exchange. And what they do at this meetup is they literally bring up properties and everybody comes up and says, Hey.

Does anybody have any properties they wanna get rid of or they wanna trade or they wanna swap and everybody brings out the properties that they want to get rid of, trade or swap. And then people come out and they start making offers on them. And the offers are all different types of things. And you can see how creative real estate can get just by watching some of these offers.

And it's amazing because people are swapping properties left and right or they're putting up cash or different real estate notes or all these various things. Some people are trading cars for properties. And there's so many different weird things going on in this meetup. And then all of a sudden I started to talk to some of these people.

And these people look like they're very normal everyday people. And yes, hey, well, how many doors do you have? And they'll tell me, 1000 doors, 1200 doors, 700 doors, 500 doors. These are really se serious. Real estate investors, and some of them have been doing it for 30, 40, 50 years. There's one guy in there who is in his eighties who has been doing it since he was 21, and he has an incredible amount of properties.

He had well over a thousand properties and is still just buying and acquiring properties and doing it every single day. This is an amazing way to learn from people and to build wealth. So if you have some of those secret meetups, just kind of hang around some of the meetups. Even if you don't love it, hang around some of those meetups.

And once you get to know people, they'll start inviting you to some of these other meetups, and then you can really, really make a big difference once you find some of these meetups. Number five is identify pre foreclosure properties. So there's a couple of different ways that you can do that, but if you don't know what a pre foreclosure is, it is people who are in the process of potentially getting foreclosed on if they don't pay their mortgage and they haven't paid their mortgage for a very long time.

So if they haven't paid their mortgage for the last. 60 to 90 days is typically when they'll go into pre foreclosure and they're real danger of actually losing their home. So if you pull some of these lists, you can actually contact some of these people and talk through and say, Hey, listen, I buy real estate.

If you can't afford the payments on this house, there's a bunch of different things we can do. We can do create a financing, which we're gonna have a guest. Coming on this podcast talking about creative financing, well, we'll dive into it, but you could do subject two type deals. You can do deals where you do seller financing, and there's some really, really great deals that you can find on these pre foreclosure property lists.

But you have to make sure that when you do this, you actually have a solid list. So you can buy lists from a bunch of different places. Prop Stream is one, there's a bunch of other ones out there. Or you can go to the county courthouse and grab some of these lists for free. Or you can also go places like Zillow, and Zillow has this little thing on there that says pre foreclosure and will kind of give you some of the properties.

I don't know if it's a hundred percent accurate, but it does have pre foreclosure lists on Zillow that you can check out. Also, number six is to show up to the courthouse steps so you can actually show up to the courthouse steps and bid on properties. A lot of it happens online now. But you can actually bid on properties that were either foreclosed on and or properties that have a bunch of different other issues.

And if you do this, you can find properties that are available. The bad thing about this is a lot of times you cannot go into the property or look at the property. So you were biting these things sight unseen, and you were trying to figure it out as you go there. Number seven, it's check eviction records.

So when you check eviction records, what's gonna happen here, and I used to specialize in this, is you are gonna find deals. With struggling entire landlords, and these were my favorite deals to go out and find because you'd find landlords who just are not seasoned and screening tenants to go into their property and they have really bad tenants in their property who may not be paying or they're not doing well inside the property and they can't figure out how to get them outta the property.

And so what you can do is go in there and you can check out eviction records and just start calling up tired landlords and saying, Hey. I've noticed you had a couple evictions at this property. Would you be willing to sell this property? It sounds like it's giving you a whole lot of headaches. Maybe we can work out a deal together where we can buy this property.

And a lot of times it's a win-win situation. They wanna get this property off of their hands, and you can take over a property potentially at a discounted rate, depending on what they're willing to sell it to you for. Number eight now, used to do this every single day and refresh it. It's post a Craigslist ad.

Just say, Hey, I buy property. I buy houses. No matter what the condition is, just post it on Craigslist. Now you make a few phone calls from this and that's it, but you may find a property this way and it's completely free. You can also search Craigslist. So Craigslist is not dead yet, even though it. Seems like it is, but there's still people who post things on Craigslist.

You can go on Craigslist, see what properties are actually on there. A lot of for sale by owner. People are on there. And there's also some other things that you can find on Craigslist, like rental property owners who are listing things for rent. But guess what? The owner's phone number is right there. And so you can call up those owners and say, Hey, would you be willing to sell this property?

Or Would you be interested and selling this property look for for sale by owner signs? Now, this is one that I've never had real success with this, but it is one that I know. People who have had success with this. And the reason why a lot of forced sale by owners are selling it themselves is cuz they are not willing to pay commissions or some additional things and they also want more for their house than it's actually worth.

So when this is the case, a lot of times it's really hard to negotiate with these folks because they think their house is worth more than it actually is worth. But if you are someone who is willing to go through and weed through some of those folks, this is a great free way to do it. Looking for those for sale by owner signs.

There's also for sale. By owner websites where for sale by owners sell on those websites. You could check those out. Browse expired listings is the next one. So expired listings are when the real estate agent posts something on the mls and they leave it on the MLS until their contract expires. And typically that's around six months when these listings expire.

At least in my state, that's what it is. I don't know what it is in other states. And so when these listings expire, What happens next is that either another agent's gonna pick it up and try to do a better job of selling this property and or investors like you and I, we can go and start calling some of these folks and saying, Hey, why is this property not selling?

Is there some deal that we can work out where you could be creative? Maybe they want too much money for that property, for example. Well, you can do some creative financing like seller financing, which would allow you to get into that property and maybe cashflow it if you can run the numbers correctly and figure out if that works or.

If they're underwater on their mortgage, maybe you could do a subject to deal and figure out how you can actually figure out some of these numbers. Number 12, tell your family and friends. If your family and friends do not know that you're looking to buy real estate, you need to tell as many as people as possible because if they do not know, maybe they know people who are selling stuff.

This happens all the time where family and friends know that I'm someone who is interested in real estate and they will tell me, Hey, so and so is about to sell their house, so and so. Once they get rid of their house, their mother just died and they don't know what to do with the property. All these different things.

So make sure you are telling your family and friends Create content. Number 13. So all the big real estate investors who create content, the reason why they create content is because they want to create awareness around what they do. So if you're really interested in wholesaling properties, for example, you could start a social media, you could start a website where you just talk about.

Wholesaling properties, and then people in that area that all of a sudden realize, Hey, this person is in my area. I'm gonna bring them some properties so that they can buy them and wholesale 'em for me. You can be able to create that content and go through that process. And the same token, number 14, is make sure your website is search engine optimized.

If you're a real estate investor, you wanna have a website. There's a bunch of free websites that you can make out there, but make sure it's SEO friendly or search engine optimized, where if they Google. Houses in Toledo, Ohio, and you invest in Toledo, Ohio. Your website comes up on the first page. You gotta make sure that you are SEO optimized because people are gonna Google that and you wanna make sure that you are on the very first page.

Number 15 is find a commercial broker. If you wanna do larger deals, make sure you are talking to commercial brokers and you are looking in different places where you can find properties that size, especially if you wanna do apartment buildings or you wanna do commercial real estate. If you wanna do anything bigger, make sure you're working with a commercial broker.

Number 16. You can search online marketplaces depending on what your niche is. So there's things like LoopNet. If you're looking for commercial real estate, there are things like if you're interested in mobile homes, there's mobile home park, store.com. There's all these different things that you can look for.

Make sure you're searching those online marketplaces consistently. And then number 17 is buy a deal from a wholesaler. I have purchased deals from wholesalers. I have one under contract right now with a wholesaler, and sometimes you can find good deals with wholesalers. Why? Because wholesalers can find good deals, so they find a good deal.

Then they sell it to you. If you don't know what a wholesaler is, a wholesaler. Wholesaler is someone who buys a property at a specific price. So they send out letters or their door knock, or they'll do all these different things to try to find properties. Which door knocking is another strategy that's free.

So I need to call this 26 plus ways to find real estate. But buying a deal from a wholesaler is one where the wholesaler's gonna buy a property, where they find the property, they send out letters or whatever, and they get that property under contract. Then they assign that contract to their list of real estate investors.

So they go and take that property and say they get it for $120,000 and then they sell it to a real estate investor for $140,000, for example. And so they make $20,000. They are the middleman in between, but they get these properties sometimes at a low enough price where it is still a good deal. They find people with problems and typically, All real estate is, is solving other people's problems.

So they find people with problems and then they're going to sell that property to somebody else with a different problem. So the property I have in a contract right now has a problem, and the problem is that it has a squatter inside of the property. And so once we close on that property, the process to get a squatter out of your house is a very simple process in the state of Florida.

So we'll be able to kind of go through that process. But the risk with it is, is that the squatter could completely destroy your house. And that's kind of to be expected. But we have a ton of equity in the price that we are buying this property at, so it makes a lot more sense. So buying from wholesalers can be a great option.

Usually the properties are distressed and or they need some work. And so it's great for flippers. You can get some hard money loans in order to flip those properties and or you can go out there and you can figure out some other creative ways to kind of find those properties. So I will give you a report back on the squatter whole situation.

Maybe we'll do a YouTube video on it throughout the whole process. Cause I think that's gonna. Make a fun video, but it is one that is gonna be an interesting adventure cuz that's not one we've had to deal with yet. I've had to deal with evictions and all sorts of different things, but never had to deal with a squatter, so that's gonna be a fun one.

So those are the 17 different ways to find things for free. I like a lot of those options. Some of my favorites are finding one from a wholesaler. I like driving for dollars. I like searching for expired listings. I like pre foreclosure properties. I love real estate clubs. I love looking for deals on the mls if you're willing to make a bunch of offers.

Checking eviction records is another great one. Even going through for sale by owners is another great one. So those are some of my top ones off that list if you're trying to narrow those down a little bit and look for some free options. Now let's dive into some of the paid options, which some of these are really, really powerful to scale your business.

Yes. Alright, so let's go through some of these paid versions of how you can find real estate deals. And these are really scalable. What I mean by that is the more money that you earn, you can reinvest some of those profits into doing some of these things and you can really increase your deal flow and or you can figure out what to do with these, these deals.

Because a lot of deals have different options where sometimes you're gonna find some of these deals and you may wanna keep it as a rental property. Sometimes if that house has a ton of equity in it and it just needs some cosmetic repairs, maybe you wanna flip the property, take that cash and put it towards some of your future investments.

Third option is that you can also wholesale the property, which we just talked about. We'll buy it for a certain price and then go ahead and take that and send it out to a group of investors that you know and sell it at another price. So these are all great things that you can do, but those are the major three options.

Those are the three things that you can do with properties typically is wholesale. Use it as a rental. Or flip the property. Those are the three things I want you to keep in mind. So number one is do direct mail marketing. So this is one I'm gonna be experimenting with, where you're sending out letters and you're sending out postcards to people.

And really this is a volume game. You're gonna wanna send out as many as you can. And from all the folks that I've talked to, you get like a 1% response rate, sometimes less than 1%, half a percent on some of these other ones. But you're really just sending in it out as a volume game. So I've been told, you know, you spend five, $10,000 to get one deal, and that's kind of what happens.

So this is a very expensive way to go out and find deals. But is it worth it if you can find a real estate deal that actually cash flows for 5,000 bucks? To me, that is a worthwhile trade off as long as I can find those deals. So I'm gonna test this out. I will report back to you guys on some of the results with this.

I, for years and years and years I've wanted to try it. I'm just too frugal to actually make it happen. But now we are actually gonna give it a shot. So we'll see how that works, and I will let you guys know. Number two is buy a tax lien. So you can actually buy tax liens, which means someone didn't pay their taxes.

And you get the right to buy the property and get a great deal. So buying tax liens is how some people find all of their properties. It's a very interesting way to find properties. I've never tried it before, but I know people who have and people who do it, and they do very well doing this. So look in your local state, look in your local county, and then look at your local city and town and see how you can buy tax Lane number three.

Put a sign in your front yard or use bandit signs if they're legal in your area. So if you don't know what a Bandit sign is, it's illegal in my area, so we can't do 'em. People still do 'em, but we can't do 'em here. People still do 'em, but I don't do any kind of gray scale stuff. I make sure everything is kind of above bar and everything's by the book the way that we do it.

But you can put signs out like on the side of the road, for example, and say we buy house's cash, and you can put those bandit signs out and so people have the recognition and then you put either your business phone number or whatever else you wanna put on there, and then people start calling you and trying to figure out, hey, Can you buy my property and or do you have any properties to wholesale to me too?

So that's another option. Number four is an old school way. We're gonna have a couple old school ways on here. Rent yourself a billboard. So billboards now are still a way to get advertisement. If you could find a really busy road with some good prices out there, maybe you find an agent who rents out billboards and they can find you some good prices.

That may be one where you can go out, go bold, rent yourself a billboard on the side of the highway, and get thousands of people to see your message every single day. Or you could do it with like YouTube ads also. So there's those two options. Number five is get a magnetic sign for your car. This is probably the cheapest way to do it here.

So you go to like somewhere like Vistaprint, get a magnetic sign for the side of your car, and as you're driving and you're commuting to work every single day or whatever else you drive, you can have this sign on the side of your car that says, Hey, I buy houses. I buy them in any condition. If you wanna sell them to me, you know, here's my phone number.

And people I know get deals by doing that. That's something I'm interested in doing. This is not the way I roll, but a lot of people. I know who do that, get one or two deals a year from that. So that's just another option that you can have there. It's a hundred bucks to get that magnet made and you can go ahead and be on your way.

Number six is to create a radio commercial. So in your local area, you can create radio commercials that may convert into interest buyers and sellers, especially the baby boomer community who listens to radio more so than they do other things. And they have the most property out there right now. That'd be a community who would kind of hear those commercials.

You can also place an ad in the newspaper, same community as the folks who most likely read the newspaper and you could put an ad in the newspaper. You can also post an ad in a landlord magazine, especially if you have a local landlord magazine that has like a great spot to do it where you could put it in there for landlords and try to find other landlords who have rental properties to sell to you, cuz they're the ones who are gonna be owning multifamily and some of those other pieces.

And the number nine is to pay for ads. On Google. So every time somebody Googles something, you can use Google AdWords. And every time somebody Googles, let's use the same example as before, someone who buys houses in Toledo, Ohio, for example. Then you could pay for your website to show up first, and that's going to allow you to make sure that you are number one in the search results when people search for that.

So that's just another great option if you are interested in finding properties. And you wanna pay for Google ads. That's not something I've ever done before, but I know people who have and people who do very well doing that. So that is another option that you have available to you to find these properties in a paid version.

The first one I'll be trying on this list is doing a direct mail marketing, and then we are also gonna be trying the tax lanes in the future. So those are the two main ones that I am looking at. The other ones are some old school style stuff, but you gotta get a little scrappy when you do this stuff. So getting scrappy with the first 17 ways that are free and then taking one or two paid versions and getting ahold of those, whatever fits your style and your criteria is a great way to go out and find properties.

If you guys think I missed any on this list, please let me know cause I would love to hear your ways that you find properties. And if you guys have any questions, make sure to hit me up. I hope you learned a ton about how to find renter properties today. Again, my entire goal is to bring you as much value as possible in every single episode.

So thank you guys so much for listening to this episode, and we will see ya on the next episode.