How to Find Fixer Upper Houses on Autopilot
Actively searching, finding, filtering and analyzing different properties and determining if they are deals that can ultimately generate a profit can be quite challenging and overall time-consuming.
And yet you can’t neglect this process because your success as a savvy real estate investor depends on it.
“You make money when you buy, not when you sell.”
In this article, you will learn how to find fixer upper houses the conventional way, the challenges and problems involved in this approach, and how you, as a savvy real estate investor, could do the whole process differently, basically on autopilot in just minutes with the right technology.
How to Find Fixer Upper Houses the Conventional Way
There are many different approaches to find real estate deals such as fixer upper houses as an active wholesale investor.
Below, I will discuss what many real estate investment teachers will tell you and what they don’t want you to know.
One of them uses different property listing platforms and classified sites, such as craigslist, then contacting the sellers and making offers.
But before you go to these websites and search manually for deals, you usually predefine what kind of property will qualify as a profitable fixer upper deal for you.
Part of that work is also to determine the area or neighborhood you want to focus on.
The latter depends on how much buyer demand there is.
Why?
Because as a wholesaler, you want to flip the contract or the fixer upper property in the shortest amount of time possible.
It’s not funny to get short-term financing from a hard money lender and then not be able to flip the property.
The next important criterion is to determine if you can potentially make a profit with a particular property. In the end, you want to make money, don’t you?
Many wholesale real estate investors look for fixer upper properties that are offered about 25% below market value.
It is not easy to find these properties, and it can take several hours to go through different property listings on different property listing platforms such as Zillow, for example.
These platforms are not necessarily designed with active real estate investors in mind.
So what happens?
This often means that you will need to go through hundreds, if not thousands of different listings, to find a handful of potential deals, and the usual property listing platforms don’t have exact filters for investors and only some trivial ones.
Again, they are not particularly designed for investors.
You will then often need to manually add the property information in an Excel sheet to crunch the numbers and find out if it qualifies as a potential deal with profit potential where an offer could be made or not to a seller.
Once a potential fixer upper deal is found, you will need to crunch some additional numbers to determine the after repair value.
Some do this before making the first contact with the seller, and others do it later, after getting some further information about the state of the property.
This basically depends on your style of doing business.
One rule of thumb often used to prepare an offer to a seller is to multiply the after repair value by 70% and subtract the repair costs and the wholesaling fee (your profit).
Whether you include a wholesaling fee or not depends on you being a wholesaler just flipping a contract to another wholesaler or if you will flip the property as a fix and flip.
What Are the Challenges With the Conventional Method?
Using an Excel sheet to determine if a property is a fixer upper deal or not can be cumbersome and frustrating and can lead to mistakes.
To speed up the process of looking for deals on these platforms, some use virtual assistants from overseas that first need to be taught what you are looking for.
If you get lucky, this might turn out well, and no mistakes are made, but more often than not, you will need to look for some time to find the right person to delegate this task to.
Another approach that is rather offline is to use some boots on the ground and pay a bird dog to find you fixer upper properties that might qualify as a deal.
These bird dogs then usually look for properties that aren’t yet on the market (can’t be found yet on property listing platforms) but could have some profit potential.
Here, a similar challenge applies as for virtual assistants. It’s not that easy to find the right people to do a good job.
So you might spend more money than you want before you even get to find a potential deal that qualifies for your investment criteria.
But what’s wrong with doing the property research yourself and adding potential deals manually to your tediously crafted Excel sheet?
The reason is your competition.
What some real estate investing teacher won’t necessarily tell you is that your competition might use technology to speed-up the whole deal-finding and analyzing process.
While you may need 1-2 hours to find one deal manually, they might need only 5 minutes with the right technology and/or software.
In using technology, they free up time, which can then be used to focus on making more offers to sellers faster, thus getting a fixer upper deal done before you do.
So while the conventional approach isn’t wrong at all, it might put you in a competitive disadvantage and your competitors, with the help of technology in a competitive advantage.
But What Kind of Technology Could They Possibly Use?
Well, there is a cloud based software out there for savvy real estate investors that not only just finds fixer upper properties taking into consideration your investment criteria but also automatically runs the numbers through any property listed on sites such as Zillow among others.
It only lets the ones through that pass the numbers test. It saves you a lot of time and gives you an unfair advantage.
So, by working smart using this type of software by the click of one button you can go through thousands of properties and find automatically the ones that meet your investing criteria.
But, please don’t take my word for it, and see for yourself.
When you click the link below you will land on the official BirdDogBot website where you can learn about examples of how this software works its magic already for many other real estate investors.
You will learn there how the software can find, track, analyze, and share deals on autopilot for savvy real estate investors like you are.
