Determining Pricing on Duplexes

[Daniel Howard]

I've been searching for a duplex I can house hack. I have a spreadsheet that I've been using to determine a favorable cap rate and cash flow. As I've done research to determine what kind of cash flow I want and a good cap rate (I believe the cap rate in Utah is around 5%-6%, so I'm not looking for anything much higher than that), I have found that most of the listed duplexes that I've looked at (I haven't looked for any off-market or wholesale deals yet), are listed much higher than I would be willing to offer to make the numbers work. Most of the properties I've looked at would require me to make an offer typically between 50% and 67% of the listed price. From what I've read, this seems to be a fairly common situation that real estate investors find themselves in. Also, when I hear local investors talking about a property they've bought, the purchase price was typically very low compared to the current market. I just wanted to make sure that I was on the right track and not being crazy looking for something that doesn't exist.