Real estate investing is a great way to find opportunities for profit or cash flow, but there are a few steps that you need to take in order to invest in a property. At the core of real estate investing is the art of identifying and making deals.
Sometimes the process is as straightforward as seeing a “for sale” sign and making an offer, but finding promising opportunities is usually more involved than that. Often, the best deals you can find aren’t even for sale, so making the deal work comes with a whole host of unique challenges. In this blog we’ll look at how enterprising investors target off-market properties and use tools like skip tracing to contact property owners before the competition.
How to create an off-market property list
In real estate investing, your goal is to buy as low as possible to maximize your profit. So the first step in your process should be to find a few properties that you’re interested in. The best way to find a house that you can buy at a discount is to search for motivated sellers.
In general, motivated sellers are people who are experiencing a range of potential financial situations that are pressuring them to sell their homes in a short time frame. Some motivated sellers are in pre-foreclosure; some are long-time landlords who are ready to liquidate their portfolios.
There are several ways to find these people, but by far the two best methods are to network with real estate agents and to leverage a real estate lead generation platform. Both of these methods are a great way to find people who need to sell their properties quickly. However, there’s another method that you can use to find damaged or neglected properties that will also sell for a discount.
This strategy is known as driving for dollars. It’s a simple strategy that revolves around picking a neighborhood that you want to invest in and driving around, looking for homes with signs of damage and neglect.
Because the distressed properties you’re looking for with this strategy aren’t in great shape, they may struggle to sell on-market. However, as an investor, you can buy these houses for a discount, making a profit and taking a financial problem off the owners’ hands at the same time.
How to skip trace a property list
Once you’ve built a lead list, you’re ready to launch marketing campaigns. In the world of real estate, marketing tells homeowners that you’re interested in buying their properties. It’s an essential step because it bridges the gap between lead generation and acquisitions. It also helps you weed out homeowners who aren’t interested in selling so you can focus on quality deals.
There are several effective ways to reach out to homeowners, but the industry’s most popular strategy is cold calling. Unfortunately, here’s where we run into a problem. You may have a list of addresses and property owners, but so far you don’t have any phone numbers, and there’s no way to call someone if you don’t know their phone number.
Thankfully, we also have a solution. Real estate skip tracing is the process of unlocking homeowners’ contact information, including their phone numbers and email addresses. The good news is that this isn’t a manual process.
If you’re using lead generation software like BatchLeads, then you can unlock this information with the click of a button. All you have to do is select the records you want to research and the in-app skip tracing tool will do the rest. But what if you’re driving for dollars or you aren’t using a lead generation platform? That’s where a dedicated skip tracing service like BatchSkipTracing comes in.
BatchSkipTracing is a platform that lets you upload property lists and unlock homeowner contact information in near real time. The best part about BatchSkipTracing is that it doesn’t require a subscription. You simply make a free account and then pay for the records you skip trace.
However, unlike many other bulk skip tracing services, you’ll only pay for records that BatchLeads and BatchSkipTracing can return. That means if you request 10,000 records about only 9,000 come back with information, you’re only going to pay for 9,000 records!
When you combine this ease of use with the industry-leading data accuracy and right-party contact information rates that fuel both BatchLeads and BatchSkipTracing, you can’t go wrong with either platform.
Modern real estate data platforms like BatchSkipTracing and BatchLeads have redefined the meaning of skip tracing.
Key Takeaways
It’s possible to find deals and sellers the old way–searching public records, knocking on doors, and scouring social media for information. But in real estate, time and accuracy are money. The faster you build lead lists and obtain accurate phone numbers, the more deals you’re going to close and the more money you’re going to make.
Thankfully, speed and accuracy aren’t limited to big companies with deep pockets anymore. Even if you’re just starting out on your real estate journey, lead generation platforms and skip tracing tools will give you everything you need to invest in real estate. The best part is that they’re affordable and easy to use. As long as you find a data provider with high accuracy rates, you can start finding, evaluating, and landing deals as a solopreneur today!
