In almost every real estate investing seminar I’ve ever attended, a lot of time has been invested in teaching real estate investors and potential real estate investor on how to find good deals. Because deal-finding is so crucial to one‚Äôs investing success and longevity in the real estate investing business, I recently decided to chat with a real estate investment friend and look back and see which methods have generated the most deals and the best deals for him.. In reviewing the 200 properties he has bought or flipped over the last 5 years, I was surprised to find that many of the “traditional” sources of great deals haven’t worked for him, while some less obvious methods have been great lead generators. I’d like to share with you the results of my study.

The Multiple Listing Service. The MLS is essentially a catalog of all the properties listed for sale by brokers. Needless to say, some of them are good deals for investors, and some aren’t.  Sometimes there is a great foreclosure in there, sometimes not. The trick is to ferret out which properties have motivated sellers without making offers on all of them. I’ve honed this skill through years of translating agent lingo like, “Handyman’s special” (looks bad, smells bad, has at least one major system that doesn’t function), “needs TLC” (ugly, but not smelly, and everything works).  What you’re going to find is a lot of cost, markup and competition has set the price.  As an investor, you really want to find ways around the ‘traditional real estate sales’ databases if at all possible.

Properties listed in the MLS are for sale.  To anyone, including the real estate investor. This may seem pretty profound, but some of the other methods touted as great ways to find deals involve locating owners, then finding out if they want to sell. Properties in the MLS also have the advantage that all of the information about the property is pretty much laid out for you – a major time saver. For the average real estate investor, time really is money.  And, with the sophisticated, computerized access available to your agent, it’s a matter of a few keystrokes to view all of the properties that are handyman’s specials, or bank-owned, or in estate, or priced under a certain dollar figure – whatever you‚Äôd like to concentrate on.  The disadvantage is that if you’re after foreclosures, you may not find the deals here.

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