You will discover easy steps for you to buy wholesale real estate just by finding vacant houses and by calling the vacant house owners.

One of the easiest tips on how to get a hold of discounted wholesale property deals in your particular town is to find each areas of town that happen to be traditionally listed below the median price of a house and are also working rental areas.

Get up early on a Saturday morning and begin cruising the streets. Bring a a small note book and a pencil and begin noting all the addresses of homes that look like they are vacant, deserted, boarded up, distressed, have fire damage or you name it. If the vacant house is ugly that is ideal, and when it is beat-up or run down that would be better still. Write the home address down.

SIGNS OF VACANT HOUSES

Here are some of the obvious signals of distress. Just one clue is definitely high grass in the yard. Or perhaps, when you are living in a cold and snowy state and drive through a neighborhood after having a snow storm, here is what you could possibly see. When many of the homes in the community have tracks in the driveway, but you discover a house that does not, it can be a great sign that nobody lives in the house and it could be a vacant house.

The most obvious clues will be boarded up windows, cracked windows and in some cases disconnected gas meters. There are a variety of signals that the home is possibly not lived in, forgotten as well as vacant for reasons unknown. These tend to be the ideal addresses to note while driving through the different areas of town and build your list of homes.

SEARCH FOR THE OWNERS OF THE VACANT HOUSES

As soon as you have your list of vacant houses , visit your local county assessor or maybe clerk and recorder website. One way to quickly find the website for your local county clerk or assessor is to visit Google and type a search for your county name plus clerk & recorder or assessor. Search for the real estate or perhaps property details section and search for the street address of the vacant houses on your list.

With just about every tax record, there will be a mailing address for the owner and you have the residence address of the house you wrote on your vacant house list. Many times they are the same but sometimes they may be different. In the event the mailing address and property address are the same, then the owner resides in the home. But, if the addresses are different, then an owner likely does not reside in the property, and so the residence might be a rental or just abandoned. What you are researching for is to find the address of the owner of the property.

THESE ARE EASILY THE BEST WHOLESALE HOUSES

During my 10 years of buying cheap houses, the very best bargains tend to be properties when the mailing address and the property address are different and the owner lives out of state. Think about this, you stumble upon a vacant house and the owner resides out of state, they may not realize that that they own a vacant house. They may have no clue what is going on.

Here is what you will do next. As soon as you get hold of the name of the owner plus their address, you will go online and research for his or her contact number. To start this, you will take their name and their home address, visit anywho.com, whitepages.com, 411.com and look up the owner information. Start building the list of all of the people that own these types of vacant houses.

PICK UP THE PHONE AND CALL THE VACANT HOUSE OWNER

The next thing is to pick up the telephone and contact the owner of the vacant house. Make the connection to the owners and start the conversation to inform them of the vacant houses. It truly is more valuable to pay attention to finding out the motivation for selling than it is to focus on information of the home. Develop rapport and be pleasant. You are trying to assist them clear up a situation. If that results in the fact that you finally end up purchasing their house, then that is great. But, if it solely ends up that you are kind enough to tell them that their house may be abandoned, well that is ok too.

The more relationship you build today with as many owners of vacant houses as possible, the greater your chances will be to acquire cheap houses from a vacant house owner in the near future.

Hey it’s Rob.  Watch this short video as I explain wholesale real estate and the keys you need to know to successfully learn to wholesale real estate.  Remember, once you learn how this works, it is easy to make an extra $5,000 to $7,000 each month using no money and no credit.  Even if you’re brand new to real estate investing.  Learn wholesale real estate today, it will change your life.  No joke.  Don’t forget to comment below, ask questions and let me know what you think.

No money down real estate investing is about using proven strategies.  Learning how to wholesale houses with assignments and the double closing is critical to your success.  Watch this exciting video as Rob Swanson teaches you the little known secrets of these 2 no money down techniques.

Watch Rob Swanson in this short video and learn how you can find the owners of vacant houses to get super cheap wholesale real estate deals. Abandoned and vacant houses are many times the best wholesale houses you can find.  Watch now and if you’re new here, claim your 100% FREE copy of Wholesaling Newsletter today.

Buying foreclosed property and foreclosed houses from HUD foreclosure listings can be a great way to get started searching for foreclosure deals.  But, there are a few things you need to know in order to make your efforts worthwhile.  HUD foreclosure listings are distributed through a relationship from the Housing and Urban Development government agency.  HUD has very specific rules and regulations for buying foreclosed property.

2 Sides Of Buying Foreclosed Property

Let’s take a look at a few of the things you want to consider buying foreclosed houses and how HUD foreclosure listings affect what you do.  Basically, I’m just going to break your buying foreclosed property effort into two different pieces.  On one side of your effort you’ll do research and on the other side of your effort you’ll actually make offers and buy cheap foreclosed houses.

Now, to tackle your HUD foreclosure listing research and actually find foreclosed houses, you can do a couple of things.  You can spend quite a bit of time searching the internet for foreclosed houses by yourself, you can subscribe to expensive HUD foreclosure listing services and you can build a relationship with a local real estate agent that understands buying foreclosed property.

Finding HUD Foreclosure Listings

There are some pros and cons to each one, so let’s talk about each briefly.  On the one side is the free list option but that requires a lot of manual effort to do all of the foreclosed property research yourself.  If you are new to the process of buying foreclosed houses it is going to take even more effort and its going to be confusing.  On the other side, the subscription process is okay but it can be expensive.  Again, if you are not experienced with buying HUD foreclosed listings, it can be a lot of wasted time and effort and ultimately you will need to contact a real estate agent to help you.  So, I believe you might as well do it for free with the help of a HUD foreclosure listing specialist right off the bat.

My recommended method is to contact a local real estate agent that has experience working with foreclosed houses and HUD foreclosure listings.  I am not a licensed agent, so I have to bias in saying this.  I am a real estate investor and have found that the best way to start buying foreclosed property is to contact a local real estate agent and have them help you perform your initial research.  This will save you time and a lot of frustration.

Making Offers On Foreclosed Houses

When it comes to making offers and buying foreclosed property, there are a couple things to consider as well.  HUD foreclosure listings have very specific timelines where you, as a real estate investor, are not allowed to make offers on the foreclosed houses.  You have to wait for what is known as the HUD owner occupied period to expire before making your initial offer.  During this period of time only someone that plans to live in the house can actually make an offer. As a real estate investor buying foreclosed property, you have to wait for that period of time to expire.

The easiest way to track all of that is to get with a local real estate agent who can log into the local multiple listing service, also known as the MLS, and check the HUD foreclosure listings status.  They can help you with research, managing your timelines and the status of each HUD foreclosure listing as well as managing the timeline so you follow the rules.  I hope this helps you figure out how to buy foreclosed property and gives you a good head start in finding great HUD foreclosure listings.

Free foreclosure lists are everywhere.  Your about to learn whether the free foreclosure listings you get are really what they are cracked up to be.  Here’s what you need to know about a free foreclosure list.

Free foreclosure lists are one simple approach to finding discounted houses. No matter if you are searching for fix and flip houses, rental properties or even various other good property purchases, free foreclosure listings are great solutions to begin your research. When you are looking for free foreclosure lists, there are a few things you need to consider so that your efforts pay off.

Each free foreclosure listing and each free foreclosure list is likely somewhat different. And, there are essentially four different types of free foreclosure lists you will find when you begin searching.Probably the most important points that you should know after you find your list is what kind of free foreclosure list you have. This is important because the laws and regulations change depending on what list you are looking at. So, allow me to simply dive in and show you the 4 different types of free foreclosure listings that you will find.

List 1: The Free Foreclosure List Before The Filing Date

The first free foreclosure list is what I will refer to as pre-foreclosure before the filing date since the houses on this list happen to be essentially shown before the initial foreclosure filing is performed. There has been no paperwork recorded from the lender at this time. The owners of the home may be behind with their payments and the situation is probably not looking great in financial terms for them but they are actually not to the stage of getting the Notice of Election and Demand actually filed. This is one of the types of free foreclosure lists that you will find in your search.

List 2: The Free Foreclosure List After The Filing Date

The next set of free foreclosure listings will be posted after the recording date. Once the bank has taken the motion to file the Notice of Election and Demand, the free foreclosure list moves into what I would call a pre-foreclosure after the recording date. Now, several important things change when you get a property foreclosure list that is within this specific period of time. It becomes an important detail to know because legally, from state to state, what you can do to address the homeowners financial problems at this stage in time varies dramatically. This is the second kind of free foreclosure list that you are going to find.

List 3: The Free Foreclosure List At The Sale

The next listing is what I will call the sale date foreclosure list. This is the actual list with homes schedule to go to foreclosure with the public trustee or county. This foreclosure list is available at the point in time when the bank has moved through the entire process and gone through their alternatives other than foreclosure but now the foreclosure is becoming nearly unavoidable. There is a day fixed with the public trustee or county and the property is actually destined to be sold in the foreclosure sale. This kind of free foreclosure list is actually during that time period after the recording day but prior to the actual foreclosure day.

List 4: The Free Foreclosure List After The Sale

Last but not least, the 4th free foreclosure list you will see, and you should find these free foreclosure listings in pretty much every town across the country, is following the foreclosure sale itself. This list moves to what is known as bank owned properties or REO. So the fourth free foreclosure listing group that you are going to locate are bank owned properties. The foreclosure has occurred and after this the real estate are actually owned by the lender.

And so if you are looking for free foreclosure listings, these are the four various kinds of free foreclosure lists that are out there that you can get a hold of. You can use this knowledge to buy greatly discount properties which you can purchase as great real estate investments.

In the next few minutes you are going to learn a couple of quick tips on finding the owners of vacant and abandoned houses.

One of the fastest ways to find great wholesale real estate deals in your city is to find the neighborhoods which are typically priced below the median price of a home and are working class rental neighborhoods.

Get out there on a Saturday morning, start driving the streets, take a notepad and a pen and start writing down the addresses of houses that look like they are vacant, abandoned, boarded up, distressed, have fire damage or you name it.  If it is ugly and when you see a house that is beat-up or run down, write the address down.

Signs Of Wholesale Real Estate And Bargain Houses

Here are some of the tell tale signs of distress.  One sign is tall grass in the front yard.  Or, if you live in a snowy state and drive through a neighborhood after a snowstorm, here is what you might see.  If most of the houses in the neighborhood have tracks in the driveway, but you see a house that does not, it is a great indication that nobody lives in the house.

The obvious ones are boarded up windows, broken windows and even disconnected gas meters.  There are a lot of signs that a house is either not lived in, abandoned or vacant for some reason.  These are the best addresses to write down.

Contact The Owners Of The Wholesale Real Estate

Once you have your list of property addresses, check out your local county assessor or county clerk & recorder website.  In order to find the website for your local county clerk or assessor, go to Google and search for your county name plus clerk & recorder or tax assessor.  Locate the real estate or property records section and search for the address.

On every tax record, there is a mailing address for the owner and then there is the property address of the house you wrote down.  Sometimes they are the same and sometimes they are different.  If the mailing address and the property address match, then the owner lives in the house.  If the addresses are different, then the owner does not live at the property, so the property may be a rental or just abandoned.  What you are looking for is the owner of the property.

In my ten years of experience, the best deals are properties where the mailing address and the property address are different and the owner lives out of state.  Think about this, you find a vacant and abandoned house and the owner lives out of state, they may not even know that their tenants have moved out and abandoned the property.  They may not even know what is going on.

Here is what you are going to do next.  Once you get the name of the owner and their address, you are going to go online and look up their phone number.  To do this, you will take their name and their address, go to anywho.com, whitepages.com, 411.com and look up the owner information.  Start building your list of all the owners of these abandoned, vacant houses.

Pick Up The Phone And Call

The next step is to pick up the phone and call the owner.  Make the connection with the owners and start the dialogue.  It is more important to focus on finding out the motivation for selling than it is to focus on the details of the house.  Build rapport and be pleasant.  You are trying to help them solve a problem.  If that means you end up buying their house, then that is great.  If it only means that you were kind enough to inform them that their house has been abandoned, well that is ok too.

The more rapport you build today with as many out of state owners of distressed houses as you can, the more likely you are to buy a wholesale real estate deal very soon.

Rob Swanson is the editor of http://www.WholesalingNewsletter.com.  Claim your 100% free copy of Wholesaling Newsletter right now to learn how you can quickly wholesale real estate without cash, credit or risk.

Rob Swanson is the editor of <a href=”http://www.WholesalingNewsletter.com”>Wholesaling Newsletter</a>.  Claim your 100% free copy right now to learn how you can quickly wholesale real estate without cash, credit or risk.

Here are three easy steps sell wholesale real estate to cash buyers fast.  Wholesaling real estate is easy and it starts with finding your wholesale buyers and exactly what they want first.  Here is exactly what you do in order to go find wholesale real estate buyers and get yourself to a spot where you know exactly what kind of houses they want.  Once you figure this out, you can make a quick $3, $5 or $10 thousand dollars or more just for finding and wholesaling real estate to cash buyers in your city.

Step 1: Go to your local real estate classifieds

Get a copy of your local newspaper or go to your local online classifieds at sites such as Craigslist.com or Backpage.com.  What you are looking for is the real estate section such as the houses wanted, the real estate services or even the real estate finance section.  Here you want to look for ads that say something like we buy houses cash, call Joe or cash for houses, call Susan.

Take a notepad and a pen and start writing down all the names and phone numbers that you can find.  You are starting to build your list of wholesale cash buyers.  This is free, easy and anybody can do it.

Another way to do this is to take time in the evening or on a Saturday and head out into neighborhoods.  Typically, you will want to go into working class or rental type neighborhoods.  I just want you to start driving the streets.  You are looking for houses that are currently under construction and being rehabbed.

Once you spot one, you are going to pull up to the curb, get out of the car and walk up and introduce yourself like this.  Hi, my name is Rob, and I am a real estate wholesaler.  Are you the owner of the house or is the owner around?  That is an awesome way to meet your buyers.

Step 2: Call and qualify the wholesale cash buyers on your list

When you call, say something like this.  Hey this is Rob.  I am a real estate wholesaler.  I noticed your ad in the online classified section that you are buying wholesale real estate houses.  Do you have a few minutes to talk?  Get their permission, since you called them and open a dialogue and say something like this.  Hey, let me ask you a question.  If you could find the best house, your perfect wholesale real estate deal, what would it be?

The people that give you the most detailed answers are typically your most qualified buyers.  So many people go to seminars and will tell you that they will buy anything that is a great deal.  That is not specific enough for you to be a successful real estate wholesaler.  They are not real buyers.

You want to find out the neighborhood, the type of house, the location, the price ranges that your buyers want their wholesale houses in.  You need to get the details.  A person that will give you that level of detail is a highly qualified wholesale real estate buyer.

Step 3: Evaluate, summarize and compare the criteria

This is where the qualification takes the next step.  Organize all of the criteria you just got from your wholesale cash buyers and then write it down and summarize the type of houses, the neighborhoods, the locations, the price ranges and the exact buying criteria.

You will find that there are a lot of similarities in the types of deals that your wholesale buyers are looking for.  You do not have to recreate the wheel, as you see, you just have to ask.  Once you build your wholesale buyers list, pick up the phone and start talking to people, you will be able to figure out exactly what types of wholesale houses people want to buy.  These are the types of wholesale houses you should go out and find.

Once you find these wholesale houses, pick up the whole again and call your wholesale cash buyers and tell them that you have exactly what they told you they want.  Now, just go do it and you will see immediate results.

Written by: Rob Swanson

Investing in real estate is an often over-complicated topic.

Why?

Well in general, it’s because investing in real estate is real people, investing real money and depending on your prior experiences with investments, that can be scary.

To compensate for the fear, most people make it out to be much more complicated that it really has to be.

Warren Buffet says it best, “Price is what you pay, Value is what you buy.”

That simple phrase is your key to success as a real estate investor.  You must pay little for something of much greater value.

Let me explain.

A single family neighborhood consists of 2 bedroom 1 bath houses, 3 bedroom 1 bath houses and 3 bedroom 2 bath houses.  Some of the houses have basements and some have garages.

GROUP PROPERTY TYPES
So, the first thing to do is to determine value.  Here’s how to do it.  Group each of the properties in the neighborhood.

What I mean is simply this.  If the property is a 3 bedroom, 1 bath house with no basement and a 1 car garage, compare the value of that property to the other properties in the same area that are exactly the same.

Notice here that I did not say compare price.  It is impossible to compare price.

Your objective is to determine the approximate value of a particular property type in a particular area.

DETERMINE VALUE
When you “evaluate” a real estate investment, I want you to evaluate the deal as if the property was already fixed up.

This is all about perspective.  You see most people look at a beat-up out house and only see a beat-up house.  From that perspective, it’s very complicated to wrap your mind around both price and value.

Here’s what I want you to do.  You must evaluate the potential of the deal as if the property was already fixed up.

As you look at the property I don’t want you to see a bad roof, broken windows and a moldy bathroom.  You need to see a new roof, all new double pane vinyl windows and a brand new clean bathroom.  Then, based on that future “fixed” up condition, determine the fixed up value of the property.

This is known as the After Repaired Value or ARV.

Ok, you now have a value anchor from which you can start determining price.

ESTIMATE FIX-UP COSTS
The next part to the puzzle are this.

You must estimate the cost to fix up the property.  Now notice this.  I did not say that you must determine to the penny your exact fix up budget.  I said that you must estimate your fix up costs.

You’ll get more detailed later in your process, but up front, it is important to move quickly and efficiently and not get bogged down with the minute details that are important later, but right now rob you of precious time.

From here you can quickly and easily determine price.

CALCULATE YOUR MAXIMUM OFFER PRICE
How?  Well, let’s think about it really quick.

What do you know so far?

You know value and you know the estimated cost it will take to get that value.  From there it is a relatively straight forward calculation to land on your maximum purchase price.  You just need to subtract the fix up cost and all the “extra” costs that go into the deal, like closing costs, holding costs, the cost of money, sales costs and (don’t forget) your profit from your ARV anchor and you’ve can quickly and easily determined your maximum purchase price each and every time.

Rob Swanson is a real estate wholesaler and publisher of the Wholesaling Newsletter, a free monthly newsletter publication specifically for real estate wholesalers and investors that want the best properties at the cheapest price.  You’ll learn proven ways to find deals fast, build a huge buyers list and increase your profits starting with the very first issue.  Claim your copy today at www.WholesalingNewsletter.com.