I've spent countless hours sifting through the MLS to get a feel for what's available.

Fast forward 6 months, I am sifting through Offerup and I see someone selling a tiny house near by for pennies on the dollar.

This can lead to having to sift through TONs of properties before finding one we can make an offer on close to asking price....This being said if you find an agent who does both then they will have a better understanding of what your looking for. 

The COMMERCIAL brokers have bull pens of people, on the phones, sifting this information, updating their "BOOKS OF BUSINESS", and generally combing the city, county and most times, the states for this information.Dunn & Bradstreet will be happy to tell you they update their information every few months (BS)!

Do you have copies of the documents you received at the time of purchase (if recent) that you can sift through to find the master COI? 

Note that I do not recommend or agree with all the strategies or principals in these books, but I suggest sifting through and picking the good content and leaving the bad behind.Wish you all the best!

Often when we are taking over management of a property account what we receive is a disorganized box of papers at best which we have to spend hours sifting through, organizing, and often rebuilding 1+ years of records in order to truly analyze the performance of a property.

The MLS is a lot more convenient, but you have to sift through a lot of properties to find one that is a good deal, and even at that you will have to act quickly because everyone else is watching the MLS too so you will have a lot of competition to get it tied up before someone else does.  

As with everything, you'll have to sift and sort through some agents to find a good one.

Here in Queens County, they just point you to a desk and computer and you have to manually sift through names and addresses.