I was working with one of my private clients recently and she related how frustrated she was after wasting so much time following some bad advice she found on various real estate investment programs about how to find good deals.

Unfortunately, she was not the first to be caught in this trap. Several of my clients have told me similar stories, and to be totally frank, even I wasted 2 years following these ideas only to end up with absolutely nothing to show for it.

So DON’T waste your time following these “free” techniques to find great deals:

Work with real estate agents: Now before you get mad at me and think I’m putting real estate agents down, I’m not. In fact, I trust them in my business… but not to find deals.

What’s irritating is the number of programs that tell you to contact real estate agents to find deals. They will tell you that real estate agents can search the MLS and pull up all the listings with keywords like: pre-foreclosure; special handyman; TLC; motivated seller.

It is true that real estate agents will find dozens and dozens of these properties. And it won’t cost you anything. And that? What you will soon find out after a lot of work is that none of these owners are willing to sell at the price we need to buy.

Before long, real estate agents will realize that you’ll never pay anything close to list price and will fire you as a customer by telling you that the prices you want to pay don’t exist.

And they are right.

Buying prices for 50%-60% of the market do not exist…in MLS.

Why?

Because truly motivated sellers… the ones who will sell at that discount… don’t list their home with a real estate agent for these reasons:

1. They don’t think they have time to wait to find a buyer.
2. They don’t think they can pay the commissions.
3. They don’t have the money for the repairs needed to put a house up for sale.
4. They don’t want strangers walking into their house and seeing the chaos their life has become.

So, for some or all of these reasons, they don’t list their house with a real estate agent. So real estate agents are a huge waste of time when it comes to finding these deals. The offers are simply not listed on MLS.

FSBO: The next technique that the programs tell you is to work on all FSBO (For Sale By Owner) ads. Once again, you are working in the wrong market. What you’ll quickly discover is that FSBOs are trying to squeeze every penny they can out of the sale by saving the realtor’s commission. These owners are not going to sell at a deep discount.

Truly motivated sellers do not try to sell FSBOs. They already have too much stress in their lives. Figuring out how to sell a house, drafting contracts, and closing is just too much extra stress.

Another popular technique that is often taught is working vacant houses. Except… well, by definition, there’s no one there. By the time you investigate and find the owner, weeks may have passed only to discover that the owner is not only not a motivated seller, but he doesn’t want to sell at all. They have plans for the house.

I have seen more real estate investors get burned by these techniques than I have ever seen succeed. I personally was almost a victim of this flawed training.

It’s not like you’ll never find a single offer using these techniques. It’s that they are so few and far between that it makes it difficult to identify a deal let alone do business with it.

If you want to create a steady stream of profitable deals in your business, the only way is to market your business. That’s why when I start working with a new client, one of the first things we do is develop a marketing campaign. You must develop a 6-month marketing plan that includes targeted lists and targeted areas using various marketing mediums.

With good solid marketing, you’ll have motivated salespeople calling you; and you’ll be able to create offers right from your desktop and stop driving around town looking at a bunch of houses you’ll never buy.

Don’t get caught out wasting your precious time.

expect plenty,

louis castle