Searching for Deals and Coming Up with Criteria

[Mike Huang]

Hi everyone, I'm a budding investor who's in the midst of earning a CPA and looking for his first investment. I'm mostly looking around NY, NJ, CT and PA areas for buy and hold investment opportunities.

I have several questions that I hope the BP community can help me out with: 

1. What is the best place to look for deals from a distance? Is it the MLS (which I heard you need to be a real estate agent to access)? And what about other sites? Perhaps I have just been looking at the wrong sites but I feel that they do not provide enough information.

2. How can you tell when a house that catches your eye qualifies for a closer look? I suppose this has to do with developing criteria you can trust enough. What are some of the best criteria that help investor pick houses?

Perhaps it's just the lack of experience but I do feel lost whenever I move on from deciding that a certain area is a good market to actually looking for properties. So any tips on that would be much appreciated!