The Science of Finding Real Estate Deals

[Wendell De Guzman]

Finding deals is crucial to success in the life of a real estate investor. I've never met a successful real estate investor who has not made finding deals into a repeatable system. Maybe one can get lucky finding a good deal or two. In bowling, an amateur can luckily strike once or twice but the pro's are the ones who can bowl a strike 5 times in a row or...once in a while, score a perfect game and bowl 12 strikes in a row. The successful real estate investor strikes many times in a row, consistently. Month in and month out, the successful real estate investor finds a good deal.

The key is consistently finding good deals.

How do you find good deals consistently?

Have you boiled it down to a science?

Only science can produce repeatable results.

Donald Trump has his book "Art of the Deal". Art is not repeatable. Science is.

Science can get boring. But boring is good in business.

I learned that from @Brian Burke who has done a lot of fix-n-flips even in an expensive market like north California.

Let me share with you BP Nation, my science of finding deals. My hope is experienced investors will chime in and help give the rest of BP Nation some ideas on how to find good deals. I will be sharing my techniques of finding good deals over several forum posts...even blog posts.

So here we go:

Science of Finding Deals, Post #1: CONCEPT OF THE LEAD PIPELINE

I grew up in a third world country and worse...we were POOR. We didn't have running water in our house. Every time we need water, I have to go out to a nearby pump and crank that thing to get water out and into 2 buckets. As a thin, malnourished kid, it was a lot of work to carry those 2 heavy buckets of water into the house. But I had to do what I had to do.

Most beginning real estate investors view finding deals as getting water into those 2 buckets. It was a lot of work. Every time they need a deal, they have to work hard. That's why getting deals is NOT consistent.

Plumbing and running water is a god-send. Every time you need water, you just turn that knob and out came water. It was easy. It was predictable. It was consistent.

Putting the plumbing throughout the house is a lot work (and in fact, the work is HARDER than getting water into buckets) - in the beginning. But once that work is done, getting water is a heck of a lot easier than getting water by the bucket. It's the same thing in finding good deals in real estate. You need to build a LEAD PIPELINE. In fact, you need several lead PIPELINES. When you do so, getting deals is as easy as turning the knob and out comes DEALS.

What are my lead pipelines?

My biggest and most important lead pipeline is COIN - short for - CENTERS OF INFLUENCE NETWORK. These are people already in real estate, or people who know a lot of people - who can refer you leads. When these influential people think of real estate or they encounter a real estate related problem, they should be thinking of YOU and calling YOU.

An example of a good COIN as a lead pipeline is an EVICTION ATTORNEY. A landlord having evictions is likely a motivated seller. Having an eviction attorney or several eviction attorneys refer you to their clients is a good pipeline because you will get a steady stream of leads from them. (Of course the eviction attorney cannot refer their clients to you - as that will be a violation of attorney-client privilege but the reverse - the eviction attorney passing out your business cards to their clients is totally allowed and legal).

Of course, don't expect for this to work with a single phone call. You have to establish the pipeline. You got to do some work. You got to establish enough credibility with an eviction attorney so the attorney sees you as a legitimate real estate investor and solutions-provider. You got to follow them up.

Let's do the math why working with eviction attorneys makes sense. Let's say a good eviction attorney will have 20 clients. Let's say an average client has 3 houses. That's 60 houses - 60 evictions. What if you get just 1 of those houses? What if you work with 20 eviction attorneys - and each one of them provides you 1 house each in an entire year? That's 20 houses per year - from just one lead pipeline!

What about the more experienced real estate investors out there? What are you lead pipelines?