- Hey guys. How's it going?
Seth here from REtipster
and in this video
I am going to give you a crash course
in driving for for dollars.
So, what is the idea behind
driving for dollars?
Really, what we are doing is
we are going to get in the car and we
are going to drive around and scope out
properties that show
visible signs of distress.
So we are talking like
peeling paint, roofs that are completely destroyed.
Maybe if tenants have thrown trash
all over the lawn or there's broken windows or
boarded up windows.
Anything like that,
that shows that there's a problem going
on at this property.
Because a lot of times, if there are outward
visible signs of distress like this,
there's a pretty good chance this particular
property owner is having problems with the property
and they may be willing to sell
at a significantly discounted price.
They are what we call the classic motivated seller.
So the idea is to find these properties.
And when we do, we want to reach out
and contact that property owner and see
if they may be interested in selling their property.
Now, there's a few reasons why you would
want to do this instead of some of the other
motivated seller strategies out there.
First of all, it is a more time intensive strategy,
but it also doesn't cost a whole lot.
Other than the cost of gas,
and your time driving around looking for these properties,
you don't have to spend hundreds
or thousands of dollars on direct mail.
With things like direct mail or other
advertising strategies. Inevitably, you're
gonna waste a lot of money getting
in front of a lot of people who
will never do business with you and are not
motivated to sell their property.
Where as in this case, you can hyper target
properties where there is a much
higher likelihood that they will be
willing and able to sell at a significant discount.
So what we are gonna to do in this video is
we are gonna to jump in the car
and I am going take you around town
and show you a few examples of properties that
I would consider to be distressed properties.
These are the types of property owners
that I would be looking up, reaching out to
and seeing if they would be interested
in selling their property. So, let's jump
in the car quick, and I'll show you
more about what I am talkin' about here.
(upbeat music)
And all right guys, we are here.
I think we found one. I see a house
right over here that's got some
boarded up windows. I see another
one over there that has like some
plastic sheeting over it. I don't know what's
going on there. I don't know if there's some problem
or issue. Or if maybe there was a fire
or something like that. But whenever I see
signs like that, that tells me pretty clearly
whoever owns that property, there is a good chance
that they either want out of it or they are not
interested in it or for whatever reason,
you know, there is an issue. And I can sort of
show up and offer them a solution.
And my solution is going to be an offer
that's all cash, but significantly less than
full market value. One other really important
thing we want to do at this point, while we are
identifying properties, is to take note of the
addresses we see and also, obviously, the street
that these properties are on. Then we can look
these up online and find the mailing address
of the property owner. So if they don't
actually live at this property,
we can find out how to get ahold of them.
But in order to do that, you have
to know what the address of
the property is. An interesting thing with this
one right here that, apparently had a fire,
there is no address number on it. So the only way
I can find that out is to understand
approximately where the parcel is
and I can do that by taking note
of the address of the property
behind me which is,
26 is the number.
So I am going to take note of that and
go look up that property and then just remember
the one I actually want to contact is the one
across the street, right here. So, that's
a little trick you can use. Even if there's no
number on the house that you are trying to look
up the property information on, that's how you
can find it. So, let's go drive around to a
couple of the ones and I will show some other
examples of what, distressed
properties might look like.
(car engine roaring)
All right guys, So I found one more.
This is another house with some, boarded up
windows and you can just kinda tell this thing
is not in good shape. There's clearly a lot of
problems going on and I can tell by looking at it
nobody is living here. There's not really any
curtains on it and there's no furniture.
There's nothin' inside. So this would be another
example of a type of property where I would
reach out to these property owners after looking
up their information online and I can do that
because I have taken note of what street I am on.
The address number is 1801. So I can
take note of that too if I want it to look this
one up and contact this property owner.
So now that we've got a few written down here,
I am gonna go back to my computer and show you
exactly what I would do if I wanted to look these
properties up, find the owners contact information
and reach out to them. I should also mention that
the ways I am showing you to do this here,
is like the conventional way that
we can drive for dollars.
There's actually a software out there that I did
a completely separate review on called Deal Machine.
Deal Machine is really designed to make this
whole process a lot easier.
Where I can go out and snap pictures of these
properties and really from the road,
from the app on my phone, I can start
sending them mail. And the mail has a picture of
the house that I took to the property owner. So
it's very clear that I, as the sender of the mail,
have been to the property. I know exactly what I
am talkin' about. And it's just a really slick
service that can work really well and
make a lot of this faster and easier. It still
requires that you get out and drive for dollars
and find these properties and do all this stuff.
But in terms of looking up the property owner information
and getting that mail out to them
and starting that conversation it streamlines
a lot of that. It's not terribly expensive.
If you are actually serious about doing
driving for dollars on a regular basis, I think
it's a pretty easy decision to go with that.
But you can check out the separate review I did
for Deal Machine and just get a really good idea
for how that works and whether or not it's
something you want to explore.
But with that, let's head back to, uh, my office
and we will start looking these
property owners up.
- [Seth] Okay, so now that I am
sitting down at my computer, I just
want to reiterate the reason why we are doing
this thing called driving for dollars.
And really the primary reason is because
it doesn't cost a whole lot of money and when you
compare this strategy to things like direct mail
and other forms of paid advertising,
which inevitably are going to include
a lot of wasted money on reaching out to people
who just aren't a good fit for what we are doing.
With driving for dollars, we are able to target
very specifically, which properties we want
to go after and be a lot more intelligent about
the ones we choose to pursue from the very
beginning. The downside about driving for dollars
is that it takes a lot more time and it's not
very scalable because of this bottle neck
where you can only go after as many properties as
you are welling to drive out and identify
and then send mail to. This whole strategy is
definitely not the right fit for everybody.
But you know who you are. If you don't have
a lot of money, but you do have time to go look for
opportunities, that's when you might want
to consider going through this process.
And I'd also say that, it usually doesn't make sense
to do this with just one or two properties
at a time like we are doing in this video.
If you are really serious about doing this and
find a lot of deals, at the highest
scale possible, it usually makes a lot more sense
to go out on one trip and get dozens maybe even
hundreds of properties and batch the process
to the extent that you can.
And again, a tool like Deal Machine
can make this process a lot faster.
You don't have to use that, but if you are really
serious about scaling this to the extent possible,
Deal Machine could be worth checking out.
I think it's also important to understand
what types of people have the ability and the
desire to sell their property at a huge discount.
For example, if the owner lives in another state,
so there property is basically
out of sight out of mind, statistically
those types of property owners tend to be
much more willing to sell their
property at a discount. Also, obviously like we
have already shown in this video, properties
that are in total disrepair or are clearly in
need of help in some way. Another situation
where property owners are able to sell at a huge
discount is when they have little or no mortgage
balance. And there's actually a lot
of properties out there up to a third
of properties that don't have a mortgage on them.
And it's usually because those properties are
not very expensive to begin with. And or they've
just been owned for a long time by the same person
so they've owned it long enough to pay
off that mortgage. And luckily, as I'll show you
in this video, we are actually able to see that
as we go and start researching these
properties individually. But ultimately, I think
the more layers of potential motivation you can
apply to each property, the greater likelihood
you'll have of finding a deal because there's
not just one potential reason why they'd be
willing to sell at a discount. There's a lot
of reasons stacked up on top of each other.
So that's just another thing to keep in mind.
Now there are several ways you can go about
finding the owner's contact information.
And many counties and cities in the US,
you can look up the owner's information
for free on the city or county website.
If you can find it and if the local
government makes that information available
and convenient for you.
But not all of them do this. Some of them
make it really hard and even when they do make
it available, it's definitely not a user friendly
experience. But, just to show you one of many
examples of what this could look like, I am gonna
try to look up this property's info on
the Marion County, Indiana website
because this property is in Indianapolis.
So let's go ahead and stat there. We are going
to type out Marion County, Indiana property tax
search just to see what that gives us.
And I am not really sure which one of these is
the best one to start with so we will just pick
one and see where it leads us.
Okay, so just based on the information we have,
we have the address and that's pretty much all
we've got. So we are gonna go ahead and
search by address and remember I don't have
the address of the property that I am targeting.
That one that was clearly burned out and had
some kind of a fire. All I have is the address
of the property across the street from that.
And the address of that property
was, I think, 26 Adler.
So, let's see what that gives us.
Okay, it looks like this is 26 East Adler.
So we will click on that and that gives us
this information. Let's go ahead and click
on this and see what we get. So, what I can see
here is the owner's name and I can see
the owner's address which is clearly
a different address than the address of the
property itself. So I know right off the bat,
this is an absentee owner which was actually
pretty evident just by looking
at that property. This also tells me how much the
property was sold for and when it was sold and
a bunch of different stuff like that. However,
remember the reason I am even searching for
this property is because I am trying to find
the address and owner information of the one
across the street from it. And just based on
what this PDF is telling me, I don't really see
that info. So, another thing I can do is go to
Google Maps and try and look up something like
that and it looks like with Google Maps
I am able to click on any one of this parcels
and see the address of that property.
Which is actually really, really helpful.
I am not sure if the functionality works everywhere
or if it's just in bigger cities like
Indianapolis, but that right there can
give us everything we need to know.
That 1902 because now we can go back
to this website here and look it up that way.
There we go. Let's go ahead and click on that and
now we can download this property report.
And now this tells us the name of the company
that owns it, their mailing address, and that
right there is pretty much all we would need to
go about sending mail to that owner to start the
conversation of whether or not they would
be interested in selling. So, that's the free
version of how to go about finding the property
information. The problem is if I were to go and
try to do this in the county next door,
first of all, I don't know if they would
even have a website like this available.
And even if they did, it would be a totally
different format. I'd have to completely relearn
where and how to find the information
I am looking for. I don't know if Google Maps
would provide this same kind of address
information on any property I clicked on.
So, I'm not telling you it can't work,
but I'm saying there's a lot of potential
obstacles you could encounter especially
if you want to have a consistently reliable place
to go and get this information.
So, another way to go about doing this is with a
service called Data Tree.
And REtipster has an affiliate relationship with
these guys where you can get some discounted
pricing on the normal price. If you
are at all interested in that
I'm gonna have that affiliate link beneath
this video if you decide you want to do this.
Again, no pressure. There's lots of other companies
that do a very similar thing, but this is
the one we use. And it's not just because of
the price. They also do a really good job of
providing a ton of information. Not just for
property research, but also
for direct mail throughout the US.
So, I am gonna to go ahead and log in to my
Date Tree account and show you how I would go
about looking up a property owner's
information that way.
So, I am gonna go here and log in
and once I log in to my Data Tree account,
I'm gonna want to go up here and search by
the address because, again, that's all we really
had to start with. I'm gonna start by entering
in the address of that property across the street,
remember, because that's all we had.
And then, there we go, go ahead and click on that
and the first thing it's gonna show us is
not only all the basic property information
and a street view of the property, but also
I can see this map over here which shows me
very quickly which parcel that one is.
And the nice thing about Data Tree is that I can
see without going anywhere else,
that right across the street this is the property
I am going for and all I have to do is click
on it and it's gonna show me, not just the
address of that property, but also the name of
the property owner and all I got to do is
click on view the property right here
then I am gonna to go right over here where
it says property data reports.
And there's a couple of different options that
can serve my purposes. I could either do
the property detail report that's gonna show
me all the basics or the total view report which
is gonna show me like every possible thing
that's available on this property.
So, I'm gonna click that one and I'm gonna click
order down here and then you can see
it's processing up here and then just like that
it kind of blows you away with a lot of information.
I can see the owner name. I can see that it's a
company. I can see the company's mailing address.
I can see the approximate value range of the property.
If it was like retail ready and on the market.
Obviously, this property is not retail ready
since it's like halfway burned up.
But, that at least gives me some frame of
reference. I can also see any public liens
on the property. If there were any
loans or mortgages on the property.
Those would show up here. However, this one
is owned free and clear by Simple Quarters LLC.
We can also see assessed value, property tax
amount, comparable properties, nearby listings,
market trend statistics.
A ton of information that's available right here
through this total view report in Data Tree.
So, it's super simple just through the click
of this order button to get a lot of information
to get very educated on this property before we
even start talking to this person.
And I'd tell ya, if I started researching
a property like this, say one that was not
burned out like this particular example is,
and I saw that this property address was the
exact same as the owner's mailing address,
in other words, this is an owner occupied property.
And say they had a huge mortgage on the property,
that would give me a lot of different clues that
it is probably a lot less likely that this person
is willing and able to sell it at discount
because they got a mortgage and this is their
actual home. Why would they sell the roof over
their head for pennies on the dollar?
A lot of that information to give you clues,
one way or another, is available
right here in Data Tree.
And, you can not necessarily get all this information
just by using the free methods that the county
may or may not make available to you.
So, again, if you think Data Tree would be a
helpful resource, by all means, we got that affiliate
link with the discounted pricing.
Feel free to check it out.
And of course, there are a lot of other services
out there that do a very similar thing to Data Tree.
So it's not like you have to use this,
it just happens to be the one that we use
and since we have the discounted pricing
available, we wanted to make sure you were
aware of that too.
So, that's pretty much it. Thanks a lot for
watching. I hope you learned a lot from this video.
Driving for dollars is not for everyone,
but for the right person it can make
a lot of sense, just in terms of getting started
and finding deals without spending a fortune
on your upfront marketing.
And of you are at this point in the
process of researching the property owner,
the next natural question might be, okay,
what kind of mail am I suppose to send them?
What do I say? Do I send a letter?
Do I send a postcard? How frequently do I send it?
There's a lot of different philosophies
and ideas behind how to approach this,
but if you're looking for a direct mail template
I actually do have a few examples on the blog
you can check out if you have no idea where to
start and these are post card examples.
These are ones I have actually used in many
of my direct mail campaigns and they have
all worked really well.
So, if you have no idea where to start, you can
feel free to check out those. I will be sure
to include a link to that blog post.
One way or another, I hope you find those helpful.
Thanks again for watchin'.
And I wish you all the best as you get out there
and start findin' deals.