The big problem isn't finding properties. It's organization.

 So, for those that know me, I spent some time in the IT battlefields, and I'm currently transitioning, with the support of my loving and terrified family, into working in Real Estate full time . My last day is April 4th at the old day job.

When I worked in real estate before, I had a lot more people with me and helping me, while now I'm basically running solo. This means that I'm having to find a way to cope with one of my weak points- organization- before it bites me in the butt.

There are over 8,000 banks in the United States and I track each of them quarterly. I run campaigns where I will contact each bank in a state, and usually I work 3 states at a time, spread across time zones, so when I am working the banks hard, I can skip around and avoid lunches, and also call from 7 am my time (when the East Coast banks open) until 7 pm my time (when the California banks close). Most of the banks have some form of real estate that they need to get rid of, but getting the information on the properties can be like pulling teeth. Even with the smaller start I've got right now, my inventory of properties is getting close to a thousand.

The trick is, I have no good way of organizing it (it's scattered in PDF's, excel spreadsheets, email attachments, etc across my computer). And I have no way of searching it to check if the properties match my buyer's criteria.

I also have no way of going the other direction- putting in a property and figuring out of it fits the buying needs of any of my buyers.

I have a decent buyers list, but it's mostly corporate buyers who want large properties- they aren't terribly interested in the single family homes I'm coming across, and those tend to be only of interest to specific REIT's, or individual investors. This means I not only need to dramatically increase my buyer's list, but I need to make it so that it's based on metropolitan statistical areas, and I should probably be running data collection and interest collection marketing in all the MSA's my major banks are in.

At the point where I have 800 buyers, 8,000 banks and hundreds of properties, I stop being able to juggle it all in my head.

So I'm creating a custom cloud-based database for myself, to try to get that problem fixed. Once it's working the way I need it to, I'll probably make some squeeze pages to get the information of buyers all over the US, to help me move things. 

The trick is? I've never built a database before in my life. So the next two weeks I'm going to cram as hard as I can about database schemas, relationship modeling, and entity relationship criteria so I can try to make a tool that will let me do my business without going insane. 

Long story short: good tools are important. Technology should help, not hinder you. I also have too much on my plate right now, but with the right tools that should settle down.