The gurus will have you beleive that, so you spend tons of money ON THEM to 'learn how to get there early'. They are selling techniques on short-selling and pre-foreclosure. Those are both great ways to do RE, but some of us have tasted a bit a success without ever using such techniques.
My company has bought and sold all of our properties save one from the MLS.
To be clear - I am not knocking those types of RE investing, I am knocking the gurus who charge you to get them to psych you up!
As Christian said, you can find deals on the MLS, especially REOs. However, in my experience, the best deals are never on the MLS. I have gotten my very best deals from personal contacts.
The last house I bought was a woman that called me. She went to church with another woman who knew that I bought houses. To make a long story short, the house had belonged to her father who died and she just wanted to get rid of it. I paid $20,000 for it and closed in a week. A nearly identical house, literally across the street, recently sold for $52,000. This was never on the MLS!
Both right, but to explain how the "Best" deals never make it to the MLS, consider Mike's seller who just "wants to get rid of it." Instead of learning about Mike, she walks into any brokers office and says the same thing to the agent behind the counter. The agent goes to list the property, and has 48 hours to get it on the MLS. Is that agent filling out listing forms, or an offer form? They will either buy it themselves or call an investor and pick up both sides of the commission. When I was an agent, these were listed on the MLS, but instead of giving all the details, it would simply say "sold before print" and was listed only because the MLS requires it so they can include the sale in their statistics.