All Forum Posts by: Douglas Mallett

Here’s an epic tale from reddit - it may hold the answer to your question.

“Went on a date with someone, pretty cute, looked legit, very entertaining and fun… Went home and they barfed on my carpet, stole my meds and scrolled through my tinder while I wasn’t looking.”

“Should I keep our second date?”

!

Here is your very first strategy tip.

Act.

Be the DM you want to send.

Schedule the life you want to live. 

If we wait for others, we will wait until the last day.

That's all.

Best of luck!

Hello Zach!

One option you have for deal-finding is to ‘roll your own’ datasets and make highly targeted lists for contacting sellers.

This data is mostly free, and the paid data is not too expensive.

Your local assessor’s office has most of the data you are looking for - it keeps the master records on all parcels in the county, and the commercial data brokers and realty platforms use these exact county records for their own data and reselling.

The county parcel records typically have fields for property class (residential, commercial, timber, etc), property type (sfr, 2/3/4 plex, 5+MF, etc) , bedrooms, bathrooms, sq footage, lot footage, building condition, building grade, and more.

Here is a screenshot of some of their fields…

You can append this list with even more county data, adding any past tax delinquencies, building permit applications, etc, and then you can start to make your data selections. Now, instead of contacting 100k property owners randomly, you are targeting perhaps 15k owners that are exactly in your sweet spot.

You can then start appending commercially obtained data such as contact phone numbers, emails, etc, and depending upon your method(s), you can then start reaching out however you wish - cold calls, mailers, door knocking, etc.

You can even load these lists on your phone in Google maps and just drive around town, looking at where nearby properties are… drive up, click on the icon and read all about the house - yr built, sq footage, owner name, age, phones and email, etc. This is a very powerful method.

An excellent GIS app is QGIS - it’s open source, free and very robust.

Google Docs has some very basic database tools, and there are tons of open source solutions available. (https://opensource.com/alternatives/access)

The nice thing is that you don't even need to be a geek to use a lot of this data nowadays - you can hire data slingers on upwork to extract and merge, and the send you a list that is your subset (ie all SFRs in Dallas county at least 25 years old, less than 3k sq feet, last non-zero dollar sale at least 15 years ago, assessed at 300k or less, etc)

GIS data for Dallas: https://dallascad.org/GISDataP...

There is much more, but this is a start… best of luck!

A typical assessor record (truncated for brevity) with custom combined data fields 

QGIS rocking an assessor's dataset for King County, color-coded by valuation.

A good broker with experience can and will represent you assertively, and will have no problem telling you what the deal is, either with the seller and their property or with your own offer price and deal structure.

It is good to recall that every competent broker will be evaluating *you* as you interview them, looking carefully at your knowledge, skill and experience.

Like attracts like, and a lot of great brokers will not represent beginning investors, as it is too much of a learning curve for them to teach. It's very easy to determine experience levels, and Realist/county records are just a click away for vetting any new clients.

That being said, it is possible to find a great broker, even if you are new in the space.

How?

By knowing your facts, markets and numbers - and by being a good business partner with your realtor.

Bring complete data to the table, know exactly what you want, be reasonable and practical, etc, etc. Make them happy to talk with you, instead of looking at the caller ID and... groaning.

Re vetting -

Highly Recommended Suggestion #1 - see if they answer their phone on the first call, or return your call immediately. This is absolutely the most accurate Turing test for realtor competence. Make some calls and see the truth of this for yourself - it's easy, and you can learn a lot quickly.

Some other suggestions...

Ask the brokers very direct questions when you call, and listen to how they respond. This is how they will respond to your seller's very direct questions.

The same goes for negotiating - ask them to reduce their commission, and see what they say. Again, this is how they will respond to the seller asking for concessions, a higher price, etc.

Ask them some hypotheticals - 'how would you respond to x or y counter offer' or 'what is an alternative to (some sticky situation), etc... This will give you a good idea of how they think on their feet, how creative and persuasive they are, and so on.

Ask for a followup email, and see how long it takes to arrive, if it has info gaps, typos, etc.

That's the gist of it... There's more but it's basically all the same - just paying attention to what's in front of us.

Someone once said something wise - "You don't need to ask people who they are. Just observe, and they will tell you everything."

With all my best!