Question about building a team of realtors to find rentals (SFR - 4 unit)

[Steve Balinski]

One of my struggles while searching for rental properties is not knowing the rental prices in the area.  As you know, rent can change just across the street in some neighborhoods and more significantly from 1 neighborhood to the next.

My preference is to have an individual realtor for each town, a realtor that actually knows the neighborhoods vs a realtor who just uses online data to make a guess... I can't confidently make a purchase based on a guess of what rent would be, $100-200 per month could be the difference between a good purchase and a bad one.

How do you all remedy this obstacle?  I'm in WI and open to buying a property pretty much anywhere.  I've tried using Rentometer and Redfin to get rental prices, but often i'm seeing theres no equal "comps" to evalute with.

[Drew Sygit]

@Steve Balinski your best bet is to get friendly with a local PMC.

Most agents do NOT know rental amounts - they're too busy doing sales, so they do know sales prices.

One of your big challenges will be your expectation that everyone should help you for free. You will expect that you can call an agent or PMC and they will have a 15+ minute conversation with you and share all their hard-earned knowledge - when you may decide not to buy a rental in that area.

Why should they do this for free?

Attorneys, doctors, CPAs, etc. don't really do this, but consumers think so little of real estate professionals that they use & abuse their time without a second thought:(

Why don't you instead, invest some time in learning to use Rentometer, Redfin & Zillow data to analyze rents?