If you knew how to find a deal using Craigslist,
it would change the game for you as a real estate investor. "But wait, I
thought Craigslist was dead. Nobody's over there anymore, are they?" Let's wait and see.
Hey there. My name is Mike Fritz. I'm the founder of Titanium Capital Investments in the multi-family
CEO system. My greatest passion is helping people just like you create financial freedom
with multi-family real estate and in this video, I'm going to walk you through how to leverage
Craigslist, a platform that a lot of people think is dead, to invest in real estate deals over and
over and over again. And if you stick around to the end, I'm going to give you one of my
favorite search strategies with Craigslist that has helped me find more deals than anything else.
Let's get to it. The very first thing you want to do when using Craigslist to find real estate deals
is to use filters. So, up in the right hand side of the screen, there's a place where you can click and
change the filters of the kind of property you're looking for. This helps you be much more time
efficient in your searches and make sure you're not finding properties in areas you would never
invest or finding types of properties that you'd never want to buy. You can filter properties based
on zip codes, based on price, based on types of properties and what this allows you to do
is find the types of properties you're looking for in the areas you're looking
for without wasting time thumbing through properties that don't really fit your criteria.
Having a property profile, a type of property you're looking for is really important when you're
going into real estate investing. Because if you're looking for any type of property in any type of
asset class, it's really hard to stay focused. Well, it's the same on Craigslist. You want to go
on Craigslist and not search for any type of deal, you want to go there and search for a type of deal.
And you want to look specifically for the kinds of deals that fit your criteria. If you're looking
to buy and hold, look for either single family or multi-family properties that you can rent out. If
you're looking to fix and flip, look for distressed properties that are being sold at a compressed
price so you can have room to fix that up and move that property. But go to Craigslist looking for a
specific kind of deal rather than looking for any deal. A side note about searching for deals
on Craigslist is just because you found a seller who wasn't willing to sell their property to you
at the price you're looking for, doesn't mean you don't want to build a relationship with that
seller. That seller may have other properties, that seller may know other sellers, so you want to look
at Craigslist like it's a relationship platform rather than just a property search platform.
People love to do business with people they know like and trust. And if you build a rapport with
somebody and they know, like and trust you, often they're willing to take a lower price in order
to do business with you because they trust you and they really like doing business with you. So, as we
set our filters for the types of properties we're looking for, remember every seller is a potential
relationship that could lead to another deal and another deal and another deal. This is a mindset
shift I want you to get in every piece of real estate. Every person is a potential relationship
that will open up doors and every person is somebody who we exist in order to add value. The
2nd thing you want to do when looking for deals on Craigslist is click the link that says "real
estate for sale." This creates a sub-search inside of Craigslist where instead of searching anything
somebody has for sale, it's searching specific real estate. It'll take out people selling vehicles,
people selling items around their house and it will apply it specifically to real estate. But
when you get inside that world of real estate for sale inside of Craigslist, I want you to understand
their search engine is not smart like Google. It's different and sometimes kind of dumb. We
have to use every single combination of word you can think of in order to surface a deal. Sometimes
I'll do "multi family," sometimes I'll just do "multi," sometimes I'll do "multi-family." I'll use all
types of combinations of these words so that I can actually see the types of properties I'm looking
for. But it's not just a word that the industry calls it, it's a word that anybody would call it.
In the investor world, we call it a multi, but it might be a multi-family, might be a multi-family
unit, might be a duplex. They may call it something different than you and I may call it. So we have
to look for words not only that are industry words, but also that are words that sellers would use to
identify and explain the type of property they're selling. Before I go on to our next tip, make sure
you subscribe to the channel and hit that bell notification so you get notified every time we put
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smash that thumbs up button. It really helps us get our content out to people that really need
it and can start investing in real estate. Let's get back to the content. The 3rd tip to know
when searching real estate deals on Craigslist is that there's a lot less competition there.
A lot of people have moved on from Craigslist so Craigslist has a lot more opportunity than
it used to in many ways. It used to be there was many more properties, now, there's fewer properties
but there's a lot fewer searchers. They've moved on and they're not really using this platform anymore.
This is why we continue to use Craigslist all the time in searching for deals especially localized
to where we're looking to buy. But the other thing you have to realize, in Craigslist or any platform,
is it only takes 1. It takes finding 1 really good deal that can make you a lot of money
and really help you build financial freedom. It just takes 1 deal. We're not looking
for Craigslist to be the way we find 500 deals. In fact there's an old saying in real estate, there's
not one way to find 50 deals, there are 50 ways to find 1 deal, and we need to do them all. Years ago
when my wife and I were continually building our real estate portfolio, my wife got on Craigslist
one day and she found a 3-unit building and we looked at it, the pictures looked kind of nice,
we just kind of wrote it off and then the property left Craigslist. Well, months and months later, this
property came back on. My wife looked at it and she said, "You know what? Why don't we go look at
this property?" So, we drove out, we looked at this property and we ended up finding a really powerful
deal. This was a seller that had a seller financing deal with the person that they bought the home for
so the owner now was living in one of the units. He had just hurt his back and really needed out
of this property, he couldn't make the payments anymore and the seller who had seller-financed
this property, they were carrying the note, they were starting to get frustrated, they weren't
getting paid so there were 2 frustrated people and we came in, found this deal on
Craigslist went and looked at the property and we loved it. In fact, I still own that property today.
We ended up working out a deal where we took over his mortgage. This is actually called a "subject to"
and a subject to is the idea where you take over somebody's mortgage in distress and you make those
payments. He bought this property for $70,000, we took it over for $44
thousand dollars that was left on the note. So, we paid $44,000 for this property,
we just refinanced this property's worth over 150 now because we leveraged Craigslist. Craigslist is
a powerful way to connect with people. Now, this property that we just purchased is a cash cow
for us. We've since paid it off. We've actually leveraged a lot of the equity to buy other deals,
all because we found 1 deal. You don't need to find 20. 1 deal not only led to that specific
deal but after we paid it off, we were able to leverage that money and invest in more deals.
1 deal led to many deals. That's why I'm not telling you to go to Craigslist to find 10 deals.
I'm telling you leverage it to build relationships where you can buy deals over and over and over
again. But I want to give you my favorite ninja trip for search inside of Craigslist. I like to
search with the word "plex" or "unit" because especially in the multi-family world, those
2 words tend to capture all kinds of properties because if people call it a duplex or a triplex
or a fourplex, it's gonna catch all those. People call it a 2 unit, it's gonna catch all those.
People call it a 3 unit, 4 unit, 50 unit, it's going to catch all those because I used the word
"unit." So using the word "plex" and using the word "unit" inside of your search criteria can really
help surface a lot of properties at one time. And I do have to give credit, this is a tip from my
wife. She's one of the best people searching on Craigslist and Facebook that I've ever seen. But
the whole point is she's leveraging this in this specific way. We found loads of properties over
the years on these sites because we leverage search terms that people list their property under.
The number one way to surface properties is use the exact words that people have in their listing
and if you can match the words you're searching with the listing that people
have, that's when you're going to find the properties that you really want to invest in.
I also want to give you a free gift. Down below in the description, there's a link that will take you
to our free multi-family masterclass. It helps you break into one of the most powerful assets in the
world at creating cash flow, appreciation. It's going to set you apart and in this multi-family
master class, I give you 5 ways to bust into multi-family and the things you need to be doing
so you can start making money with multi-family real estate. I'll see you in the training.