By S. Jack Butala
If you are a seasoned real estate investment pro or a full-time acquisitions specialist for a Real Estate Investment Trust, you already know how to make thousands of offers at a time and why it works like a charm to buy undervalued property. Your job depends on it.
For the rest of us, here’s the ticket to success and how to do it from your coffee table:
Over View
1) Get access to world class property ownership data.
2) Create your own personal “acquisition criteria.”
3) Manipulate that data (scrub it) so you are left with properties that fit your “Acquisition Criteria.” – Take the list from millions of properties to just hundreds or thousands.
4) Send each property owner in the scrubbed list a customized offer to purchase their property (Mail Merge).
5) Let the offers do all the work for you. Only the owners who are interested in selling will send the offers back or call you to get the deal done. Maximum time and cost efficiency.
This is “hands-down” the most efficient way to reach thousands of potential sellers at a time.
Can you image “driving for dollars” in an hour and making 10,000 offers?
Or putting up 10,000 bandit signs in an hour? How much would that cost even if you could?
How about making 10,000 phone calls to property owners to see if they interested in selling for a way-below-market price.
Orchestrating a well planned and executed direct mail campaign is the only way I know of to buy undervalued property cost and time efficiently.
How to do it (the details)
1) Get access to world class property ownership data. The best property ownership data comes right from the source: the county assessor. This is the data set county authorities use to set the rate of property taxation each year. It’s how they calculate how high or low our property taxes are each year. And it requires a lot of data. Like how valuable is the land and the structure(s) on the land. How much the property sold for last time, if there’s a parking lot or a pool or a farm on all or part of the parcel. etc. They take a look at a ton of data to calculate our taxes and keep track of it all in one place.
What’s great about this information is that our forefathers required that this data legally be a matter of “public record.” I thank them publicly from this blog.
You have two choices about where to get the data: Directly from the county or from the people who need it to write title insurance policies (Title Companies like First American Title – I have no affiliation with them).
I encourage you do seek out both if you plan on taking real estate investment seriously and here’s why. While the county direct data is super accurate, it’s a hodge podge of a mess. Most of us don’t have Master’s Degrees in “data scrubbing.” Title company data is set in a universal format so every county is exactly the same. And the data is user friendly to the person of average talent (like me). Escrow agents and title plant people don’t have advanced degrees in data manipulation either. They need it to be easily usable.
Avoid buying a list on the internet. You only want to buy access to a fresh and real time database. Properties change hands all the time and you want up to date data. There are cheap lists out there and you get what you pay for…
2) Create your own personal “acquisition criteria.” Start with a blank sheet of paper or computer screen and have thoughts like this: If all the planets were aligned and a Jeanie came out of my coffee cup tomorrow morning as said I can buy any property for any low purchase price in any quantity, what would I choose.
SFRs Example:
A $120,000 house for $85,000 that was built after 1985 with four bedrooms and three baths and more than 3,200 square feet without a pool on a lot that is more than an acre in Coconino County, Arizona.
Land Example (my favorite)
40 acre properties with assessed values of less than $50,000 (nothing to do with sale price or value) in Modoc County California. Let’s offer $4,000.00. Sell wholesale for $18K or retail $35K (the internet tells me what they sell for).
Apartment Buildings Example
8-36 unit buildings built after 1991 with an assessed value of less than $435K (nothing to do with sale price or value) in the state of Missouri and the State of Kansas. Each unit has to be bigger than 1,000 square feet so they are probably 3 bed rooms +/-. No pool and in Census Class B neighborhoods or higher. Price can’t be higher than 25,000 a door.
Here’s the math: If you do this correctly and price your offer within reason you will buy a house or two for every thousand offers you send, a parcel of land or two for every 100 offers sent and so on.
We have completed 15,000+ property acquisitions and sales using this methodology and on average double our money in land / mark up houses wholesale about 35%.
I’ve purchased and sold a ton of nursing homes and assisted living buildings this way in the distant past also.
3) Manipulate that data (scrub it) so you are left with properties that fit your “Acquisition Criteria.” – Take the list from millions of properties to just hundreds or thousands.
Now you know what you want with some detail. That county database has tens of thousands of properties in it that you don’t care about. Get them out of there. Title Company Data makes it easy to “sort down.” Maybe you can’t stand data because you’re a deal maker at heart. Hire an expert. There’s limitless access to geeks who live for this stuff on the internet.
Remove office buildings, farms, hospitals swamps, cemeteries, and on and on until all that’s left are the properties you in your Acquisition Criteria.
4) Send each property owner in the scrubbed list a customized offer to purchase their property (Mail Merge).
Take that dataset you just created and create a “Mail Merge.” You can look this up on Youtube or ask your kids how to do it. The result is as follows: each property owner will get a customized offer with all of the specific details pertaining to his property. It looks like you sat down and typed the offer in MSWord one at a time. It’s that detailed and extremely convincing.
Think of it like dating. Women (and most men) want to feel special, like they are they only person in the world for you. Same with sellers. When they call you back the first time they will tell you how impressed they are with your offer (most of them).
5) Let the offers do all the work for you. Only the owners who are interested in selling will send the offers back or call you to get the deal done. Maximum time and cost efficiency.
Thousands of property owners that you hand-picked will get an unsolicited offer to purchase their property. Some of them will sign it and send it back. Some will call you and negotiate the price/terms. And some will be really upset with your offer amount.
The fact is this: You will buy undervalued property from these offers regularly.
You made the sellers come to you.
Most real estate investors get up in the morning and go out looking for deals.
Totally inefficient use of time and money.
Sit and wait at your coffee table to see what’s in the mail box and who might call next.
It takes about the same amount of time to send out 500 or 10,000 offers once you have the process down.
Prepare for a career in sourcing undervalued property. This talent will never go out of demand. Your time is your own and you can produce top dollar for yourself.