Hard time with comps

[Allen Ayres]

I have sent out a bunch of yellow letters with a great response. So far I am getting a little over 13% response rate. The trouble I am having is with comps and making an initial offer over the phone. What I have been doing is checking out zillow and looking at solds in the area. From there I will take 70% of that and subtract my fee and a little in repairs ranging from 5-10k. This is just to give them an initial number for me to see if we are in the ball park and from there I can go look at the property and get a more locked in number. Am I handling this in the right way?

Also, when I look at comps a lot of the time I see a lot of really low numbers. This leads me to believe that this was investors buying these properties. I have actually checked this some by looking up the owners of some of the properties on the tax assessors website and some of these low comparable sales were to LLC's which would mean that it was in fact investors buying at these prices. If this is in fact investor prices, would I just take the comparable sold pricing and subtract my fee? or do I still need to take 70% minus fee and repairs?