To find off-market properties, build targeted seller lists, check public records, look for neglected homes while driving, contact owners directly, market online, and network with local real estate professionals. Follow up consistently to turn those leads into conversations before the property reaches the MLS.
By definition, properties sold on the public market through the MLS sell for market pricing. So if you want to buy properties under market value, you need to go off-market.
That immediately raises a question however: How can I find motivated sellers before they list their properties?
You have to get proactive to find and contact them. Here’s how to find off-market properties and motivated seller leads.
Find Off-Market Property Leads with Targeted Lists
Motivated sellers tend to share a few common traits. Typically, they’re either in financial distress of some sort or another, or they’re disinterested in the property. For the deal to make sense, they also need to have substantial equity in the property.
Common lead categories include:
- Pre-foreclosure properties
- Tax-delinquent properties
- Inherited or probate properties
- Absentee owners and out-of-state landlords
- Vacant or neglected properties
- Long-term owners with substantial equity
Sound hard to find? REsimpli can pull this data for you with its list pulling feature. You filter by geography, property type, bedroom count and a slew of other optional filters, to grab lists of your ideal prospects.
Here’s where it gets even more fun and easy: you can stack these lists to find the overlap between them. Because the most likely sellers have two or more of the traits above, so by identifying those high-probability sellers, you can focus your limited resources on the best leads.
Local Public Records
As great as digital list data from REsimpli is, it never hurts to pull lists from multiple sources.
Look into the process of pulling data from your local sources like tax assessors, county clerks, probate courts and code enforcement departments. Once you have these exported lists of prospects, you can upload them directly to the REsimpli CRM.
From there, sorting the lists is a cinch. Use list stacking to find the overlapping properties that hit multiple triggers, or to find properties that your other data sources missed.
Drive for Dollars to Discover Overlooked Properties
Lists of leads make life easy, but they can miss vacant or neglected properties. The kind of properties that you can only spot by physically putting eyes on them.
An oldie-but-goodie strategy, driving for dollars involves exactly that: scouting for unloved and distressed properties. You know the type, with overgrown landscaping, boarded windows, accumulated mail, deferred maintenance and other visible signs of neglect.
Once you spot these homes, the REsimpli CRM has a tool that makes driving for dollars faster and more efficient than ever.
You (or your staff) can log addresses, snap photos, take notes, pull up public records and contact information for any given property — directly within REsimpli’s CRM. Then with the click of a button, you can shoot the owner an email, send them direct mail or call them.
Outbound Marketing: Contact Property Owners Directly
Lists of off-market property leads are only as useful as your ability to contact them and start a conversation. Personalized direct outreach to property owners gives you a practical way to start that conversation.
You can reach out to prospective sellers in several ways. The classic option is direct mail, since you know the property address, and can easily pull the owner’s address if they don’t live at the property. It costs money of course, but not as much as you might think, with postcards starting at $0.63 apiece through REsimpli’s platform. And because the CRM tracks the cost of each lead and closed deal, you’ll always know the exact return on investment for each of your marketing campaigns.
In today’s world, you can often find sellers’ email addresses and phone numbers as well. REsimpli can send emails to prospects, or have an AI agent call them to start the conversation, or assign the call to a human worker on your team. Cold calling remains incredibly effective — precisely because so few competitors want to do it.
For hard-to-find sellers, use REsimpli’s skip tracing tool.
Just remember that these distressed leads are people who are often going through a terrible time. As you reach out to them, do so with compassion and empathy, and you’ll find them much more receptive to talking to you about selling.
Inbound & Online Marketing
You can also use online marketing to help prospective sellers in your market find you.
For example, you can run local SEO campaigns targeting phrases such as “sell my house fast in [city]” and “cash home buyers in [city].” When homeowners search that phrase in Google, ideally your company pops up first.
You can also run targeted local ad campaigns on Google, Facebook and other social media platforms. Again, all marketing campaigns cost money — the trick is to track your ROI for each one.
If you go this route, you’ll need a website of course. Although you should have one anyway, as even people you mail or call will likely look you up to learn more about you. REsimpli offers easy click-to-edit website templates to get your professional website up and running in a few minutes.
Network with Local Real Estate Agents & Investors
Often leads and deals pass by word of mouth. A real estate agent might know a homeowner who’s been thinking about selling, but hasn’t decided to list yet. A fellow investor might come across a deal they’d love to take down, but they don’t have the available cash or renovation crews at the moment.
And so it goes with wholesalers, property managers, contractors, probate attorneys, estate sale professionals and more. You’ve heard the old expression “Your net worth reflects your network.” Nowhere is that truer than real estate investing.
Start by attending local real estate investor associations (REIAs) to meet other investors and service providers in your area. Become a connector, constantly introducing people to others who might have synergy with the kind of work they do.
Use the REsimpli real estate CRM to organize referral contacts, record conversations, assign follow-up tasks and track opportunities that came about through your networking efforts.
Consistent Follow-Up Is Key
Most prospects won’t suddenly agree to sell their most valuable asset to you at a discount in their first email or phone conversation with you. It takes time to establish trust and comfort.
According to one sales study by The Close, 80% of deals require at least five follow-up “touches” before they close. Yet most salespeople give up after just one or two follow-ups.
Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to automate follow-up drip campaigns. REsimpli automates this for you with different templates for aggressive, moderate and slow long-term follow-up campaigns. These include reaching out by text message, phone, email and direct mail, in an order and cadence that you set.
Better yet, REsimpli AI agents can customize the language in these to reflect your past conversations with leads. They’ll reference when you spoke last and other data collected in the lead’s file. The agents also update your lead file as they respond as well, so it remains up to date without you having to manually enter the latest updates.
How to Find Off-Market Real Estate Deals — Scalably
To build a business around off-market property leads, you need systems. Systems for how to find off-market properties, and for sorting and filtering those motivated seller leads. Systems for contacting them to open the conversation about selling. And then systems to automate the follow-up with them, because the more consistently you follow up, the higher your close rate and the lower your cost per deal.
Before making an offer, compare each potential investment property with local comparable sales and estimated repair costs to see whether it fits your exit strategy
REsimpli’s CRM can help you not just build but automate all of those systems.
Ultimately, the best businesses are machines that require less and less of the founder’s time and effort. You might start out as a scrappy solopreneur wearing ten different hats in your business, but you didn’t start a business so you could work twice as hard in ten times as many roles. Build a lean, mean, green-money-printing machine with a small but mighty team, supported by the best automations in the industry.
What are the best ways to find off-market deals without an agent? The simplest ones, which involve pulling lists, filtering them, contacting them and following up — all on auto-pilot.
