- Hey guys.
How's it going?
This is Seth from REtipster,
and if you're looking for low and no cost ways
to find great real estate deals
from highly motivated sellers,
there is an ocean of opportunity at your fingertips,
if you know how to use the multitude
of free ad posting directories out there.
I'm talking about websites like Facebook Marketplace,
Craigslist, Zillow,
and even some of the lesser known websites
that have less traffic,
and sort of come and go with time,
but still they offer access to deals
that you're not gonna find listed
on your local MLS system.
If you have the luxury of time,
and you can start by searching these websites
for motivated sellers,
there's a lot of value to be found here,
and luckily, all these websites give you
a lot of really helpful ways to narrow down your search
so you're really focusing in on the properties
that are most likely to have some good potential for you.
I'm just gonna show you one example here.
Now this is on Craigslist.
A website that pretty much everybody's familiar with.
It gets tons and tons of traffic.
If you wanted to get started looking for deals,
you could start by either clicking
on this housing section here.
That's gonna take you to literally
everything that has to do with housing,
or you could drill down even further,
and click on the real estate for sale button.
I'm gonna go ahead and click on that one right here,
and on this next page,
you can really make use of all the nice filtering options
that they make available on the site.
For example, I might start by specifying
a price range, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms,
and locations that I consider acceptable.
This is with the assumption that I'm looking
for a single family home or a duplex
or something like that.
When it comes to price,
I might put something like, $20,000 to $100,000,
and then for bedrooms, we're gonna say two,
and then bathrooms we're gonna say at least one, obviously,
and already it's starting to
filter out our options over here,
and then for square footage,
I'm gonna just leave that one alone for now.
Availability, I'm gonna leave that as all dates.
It does not need to be furnished.
I don't care if it's smoking or no smoking.
Wheel chair access.
That stuff doesn't matter.
In this example here,
I'm looking for dirt cheap real estate
that I can buy at a discount,
and a lot of times when you get
in those kinds of properties,
it means there's some kind of problem going on.
Something you need to do to step in and fix the problem
or add value in some way.
When it comes to housing type,
if you know exactly what kind of property
you do and do not want,
you can obviously specify all that here.
In my case, I might check house, flat, duplex.
Probably not gonna find many cottages and cabins
in the middle of Chicago, but you never know.
Not really looking for a condo or an apartment.
I know there's tons of those in Chicago,
but I'm not gonna mess with that in this example.
Sure, what the heck.
Click this, click that,
and we'll just call it good for now,
and then laundry.
This doesn't really matter for what I'm looking for.
Parking, I'm willing to accept whatever I can find,
so I'm not gonna mess with that,
and then we can update the search,
and we still have lots of options here.
216 to look at.
Something else we can do here,
is start looking specifically by key words,
and there's a lot of keywords out there
that end up being baked in to the property descriptions
or even the titles of the property listings
that end up being at great deals.
For example, one of those keywords commonly used
is the word fixer,
because that's part of what goes into fixer upper,
and if the property owner,
or the listing agent chose to put that word,
somewhere in their property description,
it's obviously not a guarantee of anything,
but there's probably a higher likelihood,
that you'd actually be able to get a property like this,
at a price that is far below market value,
because if they say it's a fixer upper,
it's probably gonna need some work
and it's gonna be less appealing
to the typical retail buyer
who would be willing to pay full price,
and there's actually a ton
of these types of keywords,
that can help you zero in on the properties
that appeal to investors
who are looking to buy their properties at a lower price.
I've actually got a list of a whopping 50
of these kinds of keywords,
that you can employ in this kind of search.
If you want to see all those keywords
you can check out the blog post
associated with this video,
and I'm gonna have a link to that blog post
right in the description below,
so go ahead and click on that if you're interested,
but simply using these kinds of keywords,
are going to narrow down your list even further,
so that you're only seeing the ones
with those keywords on them.
You can see right here, it's gone down to 53.
If we want to click on any of these,
a lot of these still probably
aren't gonna be exactly what we're looking for,
but when you apply all these filtering criteria in,
put a keyword or two or three in there
that really specify what you're looking for,
it can really help you weed out,
a lot of the junk that you're never
gonna wanna look at anyway,
and just zero in on the properties
that most likely fit the description
of what you actually want.
Now remember, if you're gonna go this route,
you're gonna have to be smart about it,
because you can waste a ton of time
just looking line by line at every single listing
and the truth is,
the vast majority of these listings
will not be worth your while,
so it's important to use this kind
of search functionality to keep the fluff
out of your searches, and zero in on,
exactly what you're looking for,
and if you want to take this even further,
you can actually set some automation in place
by having these search results
delivered right to your email inbox,
so you don't even have to get in here
and like keep an eye on this stuff manually
every single day.
All you have to do is go over here to save search,
and then it's gonna remember all those things
you specified, which market,
which housing type,
the maximum and minimum price,
bedrooms, bathrooms,
all the stuff we just did,
it's basically just going to remember that
and send you alerts for this right to your inbox.
Go ahead and click on edit here.
We can give this alert a name.
Whatever we want that to be,
like, I don't know.
I might call this Chicago Fixer,
or something like that,
and then we also need to make sure
we're clicking this email thing,
so that it actually does send us email
because if we don't, obviously nothing's gonna happen.
I'll go ahead and save that,
and another thing, I just kinda want to point out here
is that you can take this even further.
If you go back here to the search page,
and let's say there's actually
several different keywords
that you want to have included,
and, or there's several keywords
that you don't want to have included.
It's really easy to specify all that too,
just by putting a comma in here,
adding all the stuff that you want to have included
and then also if there's words
that you don't want to have included,
you just put a minus sign,
and then put that word in there as well.
Luxury would be a word,
that I probably would not be looking for
if I'm looking for great deals.
Not really looking for anything with a view.
Maybe take out some of these buzzwords
that people like to use when they're trying
to play up the value of their property.
You get the idea.
It's obviously up to you to specify
which kinds of keywords you do or don't want
to appear in your listings.
Hopefully that just shows you a little further
just how much you can specify this,
and then again, once you've searched for that,
looks like that was a little too specific,
because now we got absolutely nothing here,
but once you've got your results dialed in
to something that's actually working for you,
you can go ahead and save it,
and get alerts every time those results pop up.
Go ahead and save that search.
We've got another one.
Go ahead and click this.
Make sure that the alerts are actually on,
and is labeled the way we want,
and you get the idea.
Just to give you a quick idea
what those search alerts look like,
when you get the email from Craigslist,
it looks something like this,
basically just has the alert,
with that label that you created
in the subject line, and you scroll down,
you can see all the main pictures.
There's links to the actual listings themselves,
if you want to check them out, you can do that,
and it basically, in this example anyway,
it's showing me the first 20 results.
I think that's what it does all the time,
but if you want to see the rest,
you can click view all the results,
and if you want to unsubscribe,
you can do that pretty easily.
It's pretty straightforward,
and in terms of how frequently
these email alerts get sent out.
This is the frequently asked questions
about saved searches and alerts
on the Craigslist website,
and that when you go down here,
it asks when will my search alert email me?
Basically doesn't answer the question all that well.
The next one here,
how are search alert emails scheduled?
Based on the number of results in the last alert.
The fewer the results,
the more frequent the search.
Again, doesn't exactly tell us
specifically, how frequently,
or when these emails are gonna come through,
but again folks, it's Craigslist.
It's free.
What do you expect?
But it does work,
and it will certainly save you some time,
versus having to manually go to the site
and look for this stuff every single day
and it also should go without saying,
but I'll say it anyway.
In order to do all this stuff,
you need to actually have a Craigslist account.
If you don't have one yet,
it's really easy to sign up.
Again, it's free.
Not hard to do,
but be sure to do that as well,
so you can keep moving on this.
Some other quick tips.
If you are going to use Craigslist,
to try to find deals like this.
If you're going to search for deals
on sites like Craigslist,
make sure you're doing it daily,
and actually stay on top of your leads
and the alerts that get sent through.
These listings are a moving target.
New opportunities showing up each day
that weren't there before,
so you really need to pay attention,
or you're definitely gonna miss things,
and also try to develop a system.
Even if it's just a spreadsheet
or a pretty basic CRM system
just to keep track of which listings
you've already contacted,
and which ones on your list,
you still want to reach out to,
and also follow up after your initial contact.
A lot of sellers are gonna ignore
or overlook the first contact that comes in
whether it's by phone or email.
When it comes in again,
it becomes a much harder to miss.
Just remember there's a lot of success,
in simply following up after the first contact.
If you want to see the full blog post
associated with this video,
you can click on the link in the description below.
It will take you right there,
and you can see a lot more details,
about what we've covered here
and a lot of other stuff.
Thanks for watching.
Hope you found this helpful,
and I'll talk to you again in the next video.