Deal Sourcing Online

Last time we covered the topic of how to establish your investment criteria in order to setup a decision matrix to help you filter good v. bad deals. Today we will discuss using online search tools to help you find potential deals so that you can filter them down.

 

CAVEAT: The best deals are not usually found online since deals that wind up online usually deals that the realtors or their investors did not want to buy. So be careful but use online searches as a business tool to find potentials. You can make a potential into a deal by using your structuring and creative negotiating skill set.

 

My firm does real estate deal sourcing predominantly in Northern New Jersey so I am going to provide you tools and resources from this area perspective. I am break apart the search location into Residential and Commercial asset class buckets:

 

Residential (1 to 4units)

 

Setup a user profile on these sites and search for deals based on your established investment criteria. A few tips on how to use these sites more efficient are:

A.   Save Properties that match your investment criteria and request updates to be sent to your email. This allows you to know as soon as an agent changes the price, remarks, or the status of the asset without you having to go back daily. The goal is to more efficient not more laborious.

B.   Setup a search criteria and request the website to send you daily deals that match your criteria. This allows you to comfortably every day sit in front of your email and see what new deals have come into the market that meet your search criteria.

 

Commercial (5+ units, retail, self storage etc.)

http://www.loopnet.com

 
Use these sites to find commercial deals online. These are typically more robust in my opinion that the residential sites so use those features to get more creative. Most investors use these online sites to search for properties in a specific geographical location and/or a specific asset class. Your goal is to be better than the next investor so what if you got creative and combined the geographic/asset search with the keyword search feature.

 

Here is how you can make the keyword search combination to find your next creative or below market deal:
 
Go to the Search Properties for Sale link. Fill in your locations and the asset types that you are interested in investing into. Now here is the creative part, look at the bottom of the screen for the section titled