Real estate investing is a fantastic way for you to expand your portfolio and acquire more assets to secure your future. To be successful in this field, it’s critical that you maximize your deal flow, which will allow you to be more selective and therefore to only buy the very best properties. As they say, the profit is made on the purchase price, and therefore finding apartments to invest in is a crucial step.
Many people believe that investing in real estate is the absolute best way to grow your wealth. Multi-family homes specifically are an opportunity that many investors continue to grow interested in. That are many reasons why multi-family apartments are growing in popularity. One of those reasons is the fact that 75 million baby boomers are well on their way to retirement. If you’ve been paying attention to real estate you’d know that many apartment buildings are being converted into apartment-style retirement homes.
Search for Local Auction Houses
In the era of Facebook and Snapchat, lots of investors are allergic to getting on the phone or attending a local auction, but offline opportunities are often the very best. According to Bigos Management, not only do they get far less interest because they are geographically limited, you sometimes find the very best deals at an auction house.
Regardless of where you live you can all but guarantee that there will be at least a handful of auction houses within an hour of your home. Often, they will list the apartments for sale on their website, and you should arrange a viewing through the listing agent. Viewing the apartment can help you to spot problems that weren’t included in the advertisement, as well as give you more information about the proportions of the apartment and its location in the city.
Network with Fellow Investors
Other investors shouldn’t be your enemies; if you frame the deal right, they can be your greatest allies. Often apartments will come up for sale through word of mouth before they hit any of the big markets and this is your best opportunity to snag a deal. By networking with an investor, you can refer deals to each other that aren’t right for you, or when you don’t have the capital to invest.
In return, they’ll be able to do the same for you. Likewise, on larger deals, it’s often the case that a group of investors will raise money together and each own a percentage of an apartment or apartment building, which can give you a stake in a much more significant property.
This could involve something as simple as joining an investment related Meetup group. This will get you acquainted with a community of investors and can be a great networking opportunity. Investors always have different niches and things they’re looking for and getting several referral investment partners can be a massive opportunity for finding a diamond in the rough investment properties.
Get Involved in the Community
The only thing better than knowing other investors is knowing the sellers personally. Getting involved in your community and letting them all know that you’re a real estate investor can ensure that you have the first grasp on a deal. People sell apartments every day and being the go-to buyer can be incredibly advantageous for both parties, especially if they need a quick sale for cash.
One idea might be volunteering around your community. This is a great way to get out and about in the community and to see and be seen. Also, the volunteering can be a trust factor when someone who is pondering the idea of investing with you, being a referral partner, or selling their property to you.
Search Online Listings
Online listings do have their advantages, they give you access to a much greater volume of deals, and you can more quickly run through them to find the needle in the haystack. The main problem with online listings is that the absolute gems tend to have been picked out before they go to the mass market and therefore it can be harder to find incredible bargains.
Using MLS listings, as well as mainstream residential buying websites, can give you access to tens of thousands of apartments with more going live each day. If you don’t want to go through them all yourself, you could create a set of instructions for an employee who can only bring you the very best deals of the day.
Work with a Broker or Real Estate Agent
Real estate agents often get a bad rap, but they sometimes have access to exclusive deals, and while they will take a percentage of the profit from the seller, they can help them to move the sale through quickly. By aligning yourself with a trusted agent or broker you can put yourself in the middle or more negotiations, and once they know what you like, you’ll get a higher success rate through them than any other source.
Having a go-to resource like a real estate agent and the broker is also a great way of staying up to date with current market conditions or changing market trends.
Drive Around the Neighborhood
If you’re still scraping around trying to find more opportunities for you to put your money on the table, you could consider driving around the neighborhoods that you’re interested in. For sale, signs are still commonplace and for larger opportunities, there is nothing better than getting face-to-face contact with the people that you want to buy from. By getting outside of your home, you can often find apartments that have gone unnoticed by others and therefore take advantage of their oversight.
