The Real Estate Investing Journey

This is part one of a two part series on finding and acquiring investment properties. Part two deals with submitting offers.

One of the reasons we like real estate investing so much is that we love houses. Even if we weren't buying houses, we still find it fun to drive around and look at them - in almost any price range. We like looking at houses from your blue collar bread and butter houses all the way up to the McMansions. Why not take that positive energy and harness it in a way for business. That same principal can be applied to many areas, not just real estate... do what you're passionate about and the money will take care of itself.

Having said that though, looking at houses takes a lot of time and energy. We do not like driving around looking at 10 houses a day - it's draining and you don't remember at which house you saw what when it's all over (if you do look at houses this way - taking a camera and notepad will help with this). We work best when going to see one house at a time on the way going somewhere else (i.e. on the way to grocery shop, pop by and see _____).

We know our parameters for investment houses and can mostly judge whether a house is a deal by the numbers online before even leaving the house. There are many tools online these days to see quite a lot about a neighborhood from satellite views to Google maps street view. Also, once you work an area long enough, you know if the numbers look good on a house just by instinct- but when you're getting started you need to take extra time to verify home values and rents etc. Look at too many houses which don't meet your criteria and you risk burnout. Once a house looks like a deal by the numbers, you must look at the house to judge condition/repairs/neighborhood etc.

Now here is where we depart from the norm- when we find a candidate online we like to quickly shoot by and do a drive-by (if it is a true candidate, it won't last long so quick action is necessary- at least in our market). From that drive-by we can get a quick and dirty assessment on neighborhood/repairs/etc. Repair estimates will not be precise, but good enough at this point. We then submit our offer (you heard that correct, we have not seen the inside yet) to judge the interest of the seller in our offer. Why do we do it this way? Because it takes time to coordinate meeting with your agent to let you in the house. We will cover submitting offers in more detail in a future post. If our offer is accepted, *then* we take the time to go see inside the house. If there are unforeseen problems we can always back out of the offer (there are clauses in the offer to allow this). Some agents may balk at this approach because they don't like to submit multiple offers- we speak of this in Your Real Estate Investing Team in finding the right agent. If they balk, find a different agent. Once you find the right agent, cultivate and keep that relationship.

However you choose to do your investment house hunting, you must find a way to look at lots of houses and avoid burnout at the same time.

Photo courtesy So, You Want to Buy a House...