{"id":189373,"date":"2026-09-16T10:50:57","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T16:50:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biggerpockets.com\/blog\/?p=189373"},"modified":"2026-09-16T10:51:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T16:51:00","slug":"how-to-find-people-ready-to-sell-in-any-real-estate-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biggerpockets.com\/blog\/how-to-find-people-ready-to-sell-in-any-real-estate-market","title":{"rendered":"How to Find People Ready to Sell in Any Real Estate Market in 20 Minutes"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve had my real estate license since 2016. For the first couple of years that I was trying to find my own deals, I did what basically every new investor does: I drove around and looked for the house with the sagging gutters and the boat in the driveway that hadn’t moved since the Clinton administration, and I’d write the address in my phone as if I’d just found buried treasure.<\/span><\/p>\n

Then I’d spend a week tracking down the owner, finally get them on the phone, and learn the house was worth $240,000 with $228,000 owed on it. The owner would have had to show up at closing with a cashier’s check just <\/span>for the privilege of getting<\/span> rid of their own house, so that call ended about 90 seconds after it started.<\/span><\/p>\n

I burned a lot of Saturdays that way, and I lost $40,000 on a <\/span>flip<\/span><\/a> during roughly the same stretch, so I’m not writing this as a guy who had it figured out early. <\/span>I’m writing <\/span>it<\/span> as a guy who wasted enough time to eventually change the order <\/span>in which<\/span> he does things.<\/span><\/p>\n

These days, I’m mostly hunting land and RV parks in any town with a Dollar General in Texas, and the 20 minutes I\u2019ll outline is what I run before I ever get in the truck. It works about the same in a rural East Texas county as it does in a suburb of Phoenix, because the logic underneath it doesn’t care where you are.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nobody Checks the Math<\/span><\/h2>\n

The mistake is the order of operations, and it’s a sneaky one, because chasing distress feels productive while you’re doing it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Distress is visual: peeling paint, tall grass, and a code violation notice taped to the door. Your brain sees that and fills in a whole story about a motivated seller, so you spend the next three weeks deep-diving into everything you need\u2014until learning that the owner pulled cash out in 2022 and physically can’t sell without bringing a check to the closing table.<\/span><\/p>\n

Equity<\/span><\/a> is what makes a deal possible at all, and every other signal you get excited about only tells you whether the owner wants a deal or not. Run those in the wrong order, and your list fills up with people who would love to sell you their house and legally can’t.<\/span><\/p>\n

So gate for equity first, then layer on the reasons somebody might be tired of owning the thing. Lists built in that order come back much shorter, which is fine, because a list only has two jobs, and being long isn’t one of them.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Target<\/span><\/h2>\n

When I\u2019m driving neighborhoods and see a property that’s clearly been neglected, what I’m actually looking at is evidence about a person rather than an address.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Somebody stopped showing up. Maybe they moved three states away, and the place turned into a chore they handle over the phone. Maybe they inherited it, and nobody in the family wants to <\/span>be the one who deals<\/span> with it. Or maybe they’re 81 years old, and the yard finally <\/span>got to be<\/span> too much. <\/span>The house is just the part you can see from the street, and <\/span>the situation underneath it is<\/span> what I’m <\/span>actually<\/span> trying to read.<\/span><\/p>\n

So the rundown house sends me to the data now instead of straight to a mailing list. I’ll pull up the address in PropStream<\/a> on my phone right there, and within 15 seconds, I know:<\/span><\/p>\n