- [Seth] Hey everyone, this is Seth from the REtipster blog.
Today I was doing some research on a piece of vacant land
and I started to realize that there's a couple of tools
that I use all the time, every single time I'm
researching land, whether or not I live near the property.
In this particular one, I'm not necessarily researching
for myself but I'm teaching somebody how to do it
so while I'm doing that, I just wanna show you the process
that I go through just to make sure that I am really,
really, really getting a very good look at this property
to truly understand what it is that I'm getting into.
So the first tool that I use is Agent Pro 247
as you see right here
and the other tool that I use is Google Earth.
So first of all, we're gonna go here to Agent Pro
and log in and I'm gonna show you exactly what I look at.
Now once you're logged in,
you're first gonna go up here and choose the criteria
by which you're gonna search.
In this case, I just happen to know the parcel number.
A lot of times I'll search by the address or the owner name.
Then you go over here to the county.
Put in the name there.
I'm gonna pick that and I'll put in the parcel number
and we search and now here's the parcel right here.
Now first of all, you would obviously want to pull up
a profile report if you're a subscriber
which is basically just gonna bring this up
and show you a lot of the inner working details
of the property, but just for the purpose of what
I'm trying to show you here,
as you can see with this parcel map,
it shows you the dimensions and the size of the property.
You can turn on the labels here and see all this.
You can even do this bird's eye view and zoom in,
turn around, you see this kind of thing.
But even this, it's helpful
but it doesn't tell you everything.
What I would love to have is just the ability to drive
by the property and see it on site.
We obviously can't do that when the property is on
the other side of the country.
That is where Google Earth comes in.
What you do here is you go to the profile report
and you take these two numbers, the latitude and longitude
and I'm gonna paste those right into Google Earth like so,
put a comma between them,
put that in there and then we're gonna search
and this is going to bring us back to the exact pinpoint
location of the property based on what Agent Pro said.
We can actually zoom in and get the actual
street view of the property.
And I think what's gonna be interesting once we see this
is that over here we've got
what looks like a torn down building.
This doesn't look too great over here
so let's actually see it on site.
We have the street view.
We can look around.
You can sort of drive down the road a little bit,
see what's going on here.
Let's go down here.
We look to our left, just get an idea for what kinds
of houses are around, what kind of condition they're in
and it basically gives us an idea for whether or not
this area is even desirable to live in
and what kind of people would want to live there.
Keep going.
So you can see that.
If we exit street view again, maybe wanna go over here,
see what it looks like.
Okay, we've got another torn down building.
It looks like just another really nice
luxury mansion down here.
So as you can see, you get a much better idea for what
this place looks like on site
and what the surroundings are like and ask yourself,
if you're in the market for land,
is this the kind of property that you'd be looking for?
Would this be your first pick?
If it is, what kind of price would you be willing to pay
for that or what kinds of prices are similar properties
in the area selling for right now?
If you didn't have access to Google Earth
or any of this stuff,
you obviously couldn't get this kind of insight
into the actual neighborhood.
At the time of recording, street view is not available
everywhere especially in some of the really rural areas.
You're not gonna be able to have access to this,
but even if you can't, I think it's always worth
first of all at least checking and then when it comes to
the topography of a place like this,
you can see the levels of the land.
This particular area is not a very hilly place,
but if there were mountains,
I can just show you can example quick.
We're gonna click over to Colorado Springs
and just see what that looks like.
When we zoom in on a place like this,
and by the way I'm just using my right and left mouse
buttons to do all this,
and then if you hold down control or shift,
you can tilt the world on its axis.
So as you can see when you zoom around here,
if there are hills or if the property is on a cliff
or something like that,
you would never be able to see that if this was all you had
access to because this just looks directly down from the top
but Google Earth obviously gives you a lot more information.
Really pretty much every other month or so,
it looks like they're improving the system
in some way or another.
It looks like you can now see even the outlines of buildings
and stuff like that which they didn't have just last year.
Anyway, whenever you're researching vacant land
or really for that matter any kind of property,
if you can't go there and see it yourself
or if it's even inconvenient to do so,
Google Earth is really making it extremely, extremely
convenient for us to get a lot of this information
and insight without necessarily going there
and seeing it on the spot.
So hopefully you found this helpful,
appreciate you checking out the video
and I wish you all the best.
See ya.