Finding your buyers criteria.

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Finding your buyers criteria.

Antonio Bodley
AL · Member since 2010 · 522 posts · 31 votes

When you find your buyers to wholesale deals to, how do you find what your buyers are looking for? I mean do you ride around the neighborhood locating what they want, pay someome else to find the deals, or use advertisement? If you ride around the neighborhood to locate the deals they want, how does that work out for you. Lets say you find a buyer who is looking for a 3 bed 2 bathroom house built in 1960. How would you be able to locate their criteria just by riding through some random area looking at homes without being able to see the homes from the inside to tell how many bedrooms and bathrooms it has or what year it was built. I use to bird dog for some that was extremely specific about the type of houses he wanted and it was difficult to locate a specific house for this investor. Sure I travel around some random spot looking at homes I guess could match their criteria. The problem is without having inside access to these vacant homes, I wouldn't know upfront if it matches my buyers criteria based on the number or bedrooms and bathrooms they want or the year it was built. I could care less about the year built but this picky investor I birddooged for did care.

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  • Shannon Grace
    Wholesaler · Austin, TX · Member since 2013 · 27 posts · 10 votes
    13y

    Antonio- it's easy to start getting a good idea of how many beds/baths a house has once you get to know the area. There aren't many areas in a city with a heavy concentration of 2/1 or 2/2 houses, those were mostly built pre-world war 2. They're smaller, tend to be on long, skinny lots (for a while most cities charged property tax on how many feet of street access you had, so you had a lot of long, skinny lots), and are in older areas of town.

    You can also find out the years properties were built by checking out the county records, or other means of snooping on one's neighbors- like http://www.city-data.com/, which is a good, free resource to get demographics of an area, and you can also go up and down streets (in my city at least) and find out what the tax records say- bedrooms, bathrooms, tax appraised value, all that good stuff.

    There's lots of places and tools to get that information, but that's one of the sites I use a lot. It does take a lot of work to get used to it, and sometimes it's a PAIN to find the info you need, but it beats trying to get the information out of some outdated GIS three states away.

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  • Shannon Grace
    Wholesaler · Austin, TX · Member since 2013 · 27 posts · 10 votes
    13y

    You might also want to spend some time in the library reading about architectural history and trends, or just looking at an MLS and start guessing when the property was built. Architecture is fashion just like clothing. If you see a person in bell bottoms and a tie dye shirt, you know that's 70's, and if you see a ranch house with a Japanese inspired entry and a 5/12 or shallower roof, with large windows, situated across almost the entire lot with a large front and back yard and a lot of stone work, you know you're looking at midcentury modern- in my area that puts it firmly in the late 50's to mid 60's.

    It doesn't take too much work to be able to spot within a few years when a house was built- just like a car nut can easily tell the difference between a 1920 and an 1950 Ford, or a fashion queen can tell when a poodle skirt fits and what trends are in or out this year. I picked it up just looking at a whoooooole lot of houses.

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