February 15, 2021
The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Finding Great Deals In Any Market With Anson Young On Bigger Pockets With Brandon Turner
Key Takeaways
- The first step to real estate investing is to decide on your immediate goals, end goals, your budget, and how much time you have
- External accountability is a big factor in starting out and being successful
- Don’t compare yourself because that’ll easily derail and discourage you
- Identify neighborhoods you’re interested to invest in then go and drive every street of that neighborhood
- Look for motivation, and you’ll find realistic expectations
- Make your mail eye-catching: bright, colorful, with your logo
- Best tip for real estate – look at days on the market
- Cold call, email, do anything you can do to get in front of a seller
- Make sure you’re consistent and follow up because a lot of investors don’t do that
Intro
Anson Young (@anson young) is a real estate agent and the owner of Anson Property Group, which is based in Denver, CO, and specializes in distressed property purchases.
First Steps in Real Estate
- Decide on your immediate goals, end goals, your budget, and how much time you have allocated to real estate investing
- Make sure that you just have what it takes to stick with whatever you’re doing to get to that goal
- Consistency is important – two, three, four months of consistent effort will pay off
- A lot of people quit at month two but the real magic happens in month four, five or six
How Not to Get Discouraged
- External accountability is a big factor in starting out and being successful
- Meet as a team and talk about what you’re doing, which keeps you engaged
- “When you’re around other people that are doing the same thing, you are more likely to follow the path that it would take you to get to success.”
- Don’t compare yourself because that’ll easily derail and discourage you
- When you’re discouraged, you’re not going to put in the work to kind of get to where you want to go
How to Land that First Deal
- Learn how to analyze your market
- Go into the Redfin and the Zillow and look at neighborhoods
- Find out what properties are selling for and renting for
- Take time to get in your car and look at the neighborhoods
Driving for dollars
- Identify neighborhoods you’re interested to invest in then go and drive every street of that neighborhood
- Write down the addresses and then look up who owns those properties and get in touch with them
- The easiest way is to look up on County tax records if your state allows it
- Or go to a site like whitepages.com
- If you want to cold call, if you want to direct mail, if you want to go knock on their doors, just do it; do whatever is in your comfort zone
- Become knowledgeable of what’s going on in different neighborhoods, so you can have a better idea of where to go focus
How to Reach Out to people
- Once you know who they are and have some information about them, start calling those people
- You’ll know if they’re interested or not in moving the process forward
- You’re using time and your cell phone, so it’s cost-effective
Non-Motivated sellers
- “Yes they hammer those people for like two months and they kind of spin their wheels and waste their time without really doing a needs analysis”
- Look for motivation, and you’ll find realistic expectations
- Don’t waste time on somebody who’s not motivated enough
How to Find That First Deal
- The next step up is time-intensive: creating mailers, getting together lists
- If you don’t have time for that, but you got the money, pay someone else to do it or hire a company
- “You’re building a business around the deal-finding process, rather than just being the all-around guy who does everything and has no time to do anything else because you’re busy stuffing envelopes and taking phone calls”
Creating A List
- Niche lists are what you should look for because there’s less competition
- When you go after foreclosures, it’s a public list in almost every single state – everybody’s going to have that on their list
- The easier the properties are to get, the higher a competition you’re going to be facing
- Probate is a good example – if somebody passes away without a will, the state will decide what to do with all of that person’s bank accounts and house and belongings
- You got to be better than the competition
Tips on How to Improve Direct Mail Response Rate?
- Make your mail eye-catching: bright, colorful, with your logo – branded mail
- Make it look professional versus an anonymous yellow letter
- Your goal for direct mail – keep it handcrafted and high quality
- Mix the personal touch of a yellow letter with the professional touch of a professional letter
- Stand out in a very crowded market
Use Different Strategies for Different Markets
- If you’re in a smaller kind of market, you probably can find deals just off the Multiple Listing Service (MLS)
- If you’re in a low competitive market with higher inventory, you can wait until they hit 90 or 120 days on market and then go in with a lower offer
- In big markets, you don’t have that opportunity
Best Tips for Real Estate
- Look at days on the market
- “It’s the biggest secret in real estate – I need to get this thing sold. Boom. Now, I’ve got the motivation. They don’t have any other options.”
- Get into a short sale to find some equity where people don’t want to deal with right now
- Cold call, email, do anything you can do to get in front of the seller, door knock, or leave voicemails
- Make sure that you’re consistent and make sure that you’re following up because that’s a thing that a lot of investors don’t do
- You get good from just doing it
Real Estate Books
- Finding and Funding Great Deals by Anson Young
- Profit Like the Pros by Ken Corsini
- Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink
