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This is the digital nomad quest podcast with Sharon Tseung. teaching people how to build passive income become financially free and design the best lives. Hey guys, Sharon from digital nomad quest, and today we’re gonna go over 10 ways to find cheaper rental properties and invest in off-market deals in real estate. So I’ve been able to buy many properties under $100,000. A lot of people ask me how I’m able to buy such cheap rental properties, they want to know how to get in at a lower price point to build their real estate portfolio. And today, that’s why I wanted to share with you guys my different tips and strategies on getting those real estate deals.Now, I don’t want to say there are actually a lot of deals out there, you just need to know the different ways to get them. And I also want to say that though it might seem like an amazing deal to buy something under $100,000, it might not always be the case, for example, maybe you buy something for $50,000, but it’s negative cash flowing. On the other hand, you could also get an amazing deal at a million-dollar price point. That’s because to me getting a good deal is basically getting a property that is substantially worth more than what you paid for. For example, it’s a pretty good deal to buy a property at $100,000, that’s worth $150,000. Or maybe you buy a distressed property at $100,000, then put in $50,000, and now is worth $250,000. That’s another good deal. Another way you can find a good deal is by getting extremely high cash flow for what you’re paying for. For example, I aim for a cash on cash return of 10 to 12%. But maybe you get amazing cash on cash return of 20 or more presents. And what I mean by cash on cash return is your annual pre-tax cash flow divided by the amount of money you put into the deal. So in my opinion, a good deal basically means getting in at a discount or getting good cash on cash return or maybe a combination of both.Alright, now let’s get into today’s tips on how to get cheap rental properties. Number one, you should connect with agents and wholesalers to send you deals. So when you’re networking, you’ll want to figure out your buying criteria if you’re going to fix and flip or if you’re going to buy and hold. And when you figure that out, you’re going to want to go to meetups and start connecting with agents and wholesalers and maybe taking them out for a cup of coffee. You want to let them know you’re an investor, let them know your buying criteria and then see if they can send you off market deals, not just the stuff on the MLS off market deals are usually the best deals. So some flippers use a strategy connect with a bunch of different agents and have them send them a lot of off market deals so they can work with that wholesaler specifically work on marketing to find cheap properties, they get properties under contract and then sell the rights to the purchase contract to a buyer for a finder’s fee.So wholesalers since they do that marketing, they’re going to grow their network a lot and have a lot of deals for you. By working with wholesalers, you would basically let them do the legwork for you. Now when you get these deals from agents and wholesalers, make sure you vet them out first, make sure you are analyzing numbers and not just trusting their word on it because you want to make sure that they are actually good deals and these people aren’t just sending you stuff without even vetting them out first. Number two is Facebook groups, I’ve actually been able to find a lot of deals through Facebook groups. For example, the moldy house project that we recently got was actually from a Facebook group. So as an example, here, I typed in Kansas investors and you can see their groups like this Kansas City investors and wholesalers. And this is where you can possibly find deals.

Number three is you can actually find deals on bigger pockets, my property that I purchased that $23,000 was through a wholesaler I connected with on bigger pockets. Now when you’re on bigger pockets, you can go into the forums and you can start connecting with people here. And they might have deals as well. Or you can even go into their find deals section and basically be able to use their marketplace to find properties as well. So this is a great resource to find deals because bigger pockets is essentially the place for real estate investors to connect with each other. If you guys don’t know already bigger pockets has over 2 million members who are all about real estate investing. So it’s a great place to get more information, connect with other investors and agents and potentially find deals. Now number four is Craigslist.

So I haven’t found a property through Craigslist yet. But I browse Craigslist sometimes to see if there are any off market properties that I might be interested in. So doing another example, if you go back into Kansas, you can go into real estate for sale. And if you want to start looking for properties, you could possibly sort by price, you can have a price minimum put in a bedroom bathroom count. So here you can see there are different properties that might be of interest to you. So you want to check out and see if there are any Craigslist properties that can work for you as well.

Number five is going to require a lot more work. But it’s contacting homeowners to see if they’re ready to sell. Now instead of going to wholesalers who are usually doing this work and paying them a commission, you could do this work yourself, you’re going to go straight to the source contact homeowners and see if they would like to sell you their home. So there’s going to be a lot of different methods I’m going to talk about in this tip. So instead of breaking it out, I’m just going to cover a bunch of different strategies. Under this tip. The best way to find homeowners is actually through a tool called prop string. And prop strings mobile app actually lets you do driving for dollars, which I’ll talk about in a bit. And then once you use that tool to find the homeowners you’re gonna use a bunch of different strategies like door knocking or cold Calling or direct mail. Now let me start going through this one by one. All right, this is what prop stream looks like. So if I wanted to look into Kansas, let’s just like go here, there’s a bunch of different properties, but you’re gonna want to filter it down, maybe you want to find an owner occupied property, you want something residential, maybe a single family home, and let’s say three bedroom and one bathroom or less do 2000 or earlier, so an older home, let’s do not on market, so we want off market properties, owner type individual, and instead of corporation estimated equity 35% or more, let’s exclude foreclosures for occupy for the occupancy status.

And then for ownership was put 10 years or more of ownership. Now we have a list of 30 190 properties. And the reason why I made this list is its kind of like a scenario, right? You have someone who’s owned this property for 10 or more years, they bought a three-bedroom, one bath property that’s kind of older, it’s 2000. Or earlier, they have 35%, or more equity in the home already, they might want to move into a bigger place, maybe they have a family, maybe the kids are growing up, and maybe one bathroom isn’t enough for them. And they need a property with more bathrooms and more bedrooms. So this is an example scenario of a list of properties that I could contact, right, because all of these addresses are here for me to contact, I could do direct mail here, or if I want to cold call these homeowners, I could go to skip tracing here. And it’s 10 cents per property to get their phone and email information, you can start contacting these people. And make sure you check for regulations to see if you’re allowed to kind of cold call people and stuff like that. But generally, this is what investors like to do. This is what wholesalers do to try to get leads on properties. And prop stream is one of the best tools to get these lists who call homeowners to contact them. And if you guys want to try prop stream, I have a link for a free seven-day trial in the link in the description below.

Now, aside from the skip tracing and cold calling, you can actually go into campaigns, and you can actually send out postcards. So here they have postcard pricing. So if you guys want to do direct mail, you can actually do it within the Prop stream. So it’s very nice that they have this capability. So if you wanted to go in person and develop a relationship with these homeowners, you can actually go and knock on doors and start talking to them. See if they would be interested in selling their home. Maybe you want to build a relationship first before you outright say I want to buy your home. So to reiterate, you could try door knocking cold calling, or direct mail to start contacting homeowners and seeing if they’re ready to sell well a lot of investors pull lists like this, you could actually go ahead and drive around the neighborhood and see if there are any distressed properties in nice locations, that means you’re going to do the work that a lot of people might not want to do. So that basically means you’re looking for homeowners who think of their property as a burden, and they want to let go of it. That might mean they just don’t want to maintain the property anymore.

It’s like a distressed property, maybe you’ll see boarded-up windows a deteriorating exterior because people don’t want to maintain the home or overgrown lawn and bushes, that’s usually a good sign to see if they are caring for the property or not. And you can actually use the prop strings mobile app to help you a lot. So when I was driving for dollars is actually really easy using their app because if you try to do it without an app, you might start driving in circles and forgetting which properties you’re marking. Whereas with the app, you can record where you’re going and then tap certain homes and then click favorite, because it just follows you around while you’re driving around. And then once you have that list of favorited properties after you’ve just tapped a bunch of them on your app, they actually export into a list so you can start contacting them.

Basically, after you start driving for dollars, you use the same methods I mentioned like cold calling direct mail, or door-knocking to potentially get leads. Now I know that was a hefty one. But let’s move on to the next one. And number six is auctioned you can find auctions through local governments, real estate agents, and online sites like auction calm the problem with Auctions is you’re going to need to come at it with all cash and they usually don’t really allow a home inspection, they don’t have some legal way for you to check the interior, you’re basically buying it as is and you want to have to check for liens as many won’t have clear title number seven is bandit signs. I’ve never really done this, but you might see signs all around the neighborhood saying We Buy Houses for Cash. And that’s basically what I’m referring to. So people put this up and then add their phone number. It’s usually on a plastic board, usually 12 by 18 inches or 18 by 24 inches, and it’s just all over the city. But as a warning, there are many cities that actually don’t allow you to do this. So you definitely want to do your due diligence to check if this is legal in your location. And not only do people do it on bandit signs, I see people wearing shirts with advertisements, putting it on trucks, putting it on billboards anywhere they can put their hands on so as long as it’s legal.

You can try creative marketing methods like this to get leads. Number eight is you can create your own SEO-friendly website to get deals. And if you don’t know already, I do have a blog that I’ve owned for maybe six years now or more. And that’s how I started talking about SEO and how to rank your website. So because I have that experience, I have some knowledge around SEO Which basically means that you’re trying to optimize your website to get it ranked on search engines like Google, if you’re interested in SEO, go ahead and check out some of my previous videos around blogging and SEO and start learning the basics. Now relating this to real estate, if you’re able to rank a website for a keyword like I want to sell my home in Kansas or something like that, it can be really powerful, because these are motivated sellers who want to actually contact you, right? When you are doing direct mail and cold calling, you might get responses where people are angry that you are contacting them. Whereas if they are actually going to your own website and filling out your form, trying to get their house sold, that’s a good way to get deals, if you’re able to attract a bunch of these homeowners to sign up for your form, you’re gonna have a ton of leads. Now in general, when it comes to SEO, Google is going to rank your site, if you have a good credible website in their eyes, that means a high click-through rate.

So that basically means if the search results come up, and most people who land on that page, actually click your certain link, that means you have a high click-through rate, it also might mean a low bounce rate. So when people land on your page, they’re not just leaving your page right away. If they leave it right away, it might mean that oh, this is not what they’re looking forward to the low-quality website, then it also means that they might be signing up for your offering. So if you have a form, where you are trying to see if people want to sell their homes, and they actually fill it out and submit that tells Google that they’re actually signing up for whatever you are offering, which means that your site may have higher authority, you also want to get backlinks which basically means if more sites are linking to you, especially the ones that are more relevant and high authority is basically saying these websites are vouching for you. So Google should rank it higher. So that’s kind of the basics of SEO.

And it can be really powerful if you know how to rank a website where homeowners are searching for your website to actually sell their home to you. Number nine is meetups and your sphere of influence. I didn’t talk about meetups in the first point, but essentially by just continuously going to meetups and talking to different people, you’re basically letting people know that you are an investor, you’re introducing yourself letting them know that you’re getting into real estate investing or looking for your next deal. And it also means that in your own circles, you are proud of talking about it, you are blasting it on social media, that you’re an investor that you’re looking for deals people will think of you top of mind in your own circles when they’re thinking about selling their home. You know, a lot of people don’t shout out that they are real estate investors and they’re missing out on their own circles who might be interested in selling their homes to you or maybe know somebody who wants to sell their homes to you.

And then finally at number 10, you can look on the MLS and sites like Redfin. So since Redfin is a brokerage they actually pull from the MLS which is the multiple listing service. It’s cooperatively updated by real estate agents regularly for maximum accuracy on Redfin, you can filter for bedroom bathroom count, price range, price per square footage, and sort by price as well. Now when you’re on Redfin, you usually want to look for the ugly homes in nice locations.

You also want to look for listings that have been on the MLS for a long time, and you might even want to look for listings that go pending and then go back on sale. For example, this scenario happened when we bought our Dallas home actually found this listing that went pending and then went back on sale because the buyer’s financing didn’t go through. I knew because of that the seller was motivated to sell they were worried about it not going through with other buyers so I felt like I could just put an offer with no contingencies and then probably get my offer accepted. I’ve done it multiple times I found properties on Redfin on MLS and even though it’s on market you can still get a good deal so don’t forget to look there.

So I hope you guys enjoyed this episode, please make sure to rate review, and subscribe. It really helps our podcast grow. And thanks again. I’ll see you guys in the next one.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai