Just Click To Find Out-of-State Buyers

Have you been doing some online marketing… and you’re getting leads, but they’re in other states?

Well, first of all – that’s awesome!

Second, you might be wondering now about the next step—finding an out-of-state buyer when you get a deal under contract…

Hey Moguls, Steph Davis here with a helpful strategy, so you can find buyers outside of your local area.

Here’s why it’s so awesome:

It's a very easy to implement.
It's free.
It’s effective.
You can do it from your computer.

This is a strategy I use all the time, both when I am helping students who are out of my area to build their buyers list and also when I get out-of-area leads that come in from the marketing that I'm doing.

I’ve used this this technique in markets all over the country… and it works great everywhere. So, join me today as we head over to Zillow.

Sunshine state case study

So, as I walk through an example of how to do this, I’m using a zip code that's in my neck of the woods: 33713 in St. Petersburg, Florida.

You could do a search in the entire city, but I like to just stay small and do the zip code that the property is located in…

And you'll see in the pic below that it shows a border around that zip code. And I’m searching for all of the single-family properties for sale from the dropdown menu. (I don't want recently sold or for rent listings.)What you want to look for are properties that are listed for sale that have been recently purchased within the past year to year and a half, and have been rehabbed and are now back on the market.

The reason for that is because if there is an investor in this area who recently purchased a property, did a rehab and put it back up for sale… 9 times out of 10 that's going to be a rehabber/investor. That’s someone who could be my buyer. That’s someone I’d get in touch with to see if they would be interested in buying my deal.

So, now what you do is simply start clicking…

Check out each one of the listings by clicking the red dot. When you do that, the property description with pictures opens up. Usually just by looking at the first pic, you can tell if it’s been remodeled. Go ahead and look through the rest of the pics to be sure it’s been rehabbed.

And when you scroll down a bit, you can see the description, which tells you more about the property: beautifully remodeled, 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom bungalow...

Once you know that it has been remodeled, you’ll want to scroll down to the Price/Tax History section. You can glean some really important information from there.

On our example, it shows that the property sold for $63,000 in March of 2017, and then It was put it back on the market in March of 2018 for $225,000.

So, it’s just common sense that this is probably an investor. They picked this property up on the cheap, rehabbed it, and put it back on the market for a lot more.

This would be someone to contact if you had a deal in that area that you were looking to sell because clearly they are purchasing discounted properties in that zip code. So now you need to find out who the owner is and their contact information.

Finding the owner

To do that for our example, I’d head over to the Pinellas County Property Appraiser site, enter the address to hopefully find out who the owner is.

Pro Tip: Depending on what county you're in, it might not be the property appraiser site, it might be the county assessor site. Whatever it’s called, public record sites are extremely useful. You could also use the public records online section of NetRonline.

When the address is entered, the listing comes up and you’d click on Parcel Info. Then, look under Ownership/Mailing Address to see who owns it. In my example, it show a company name, so I simply drop that company in a Google search… and BOOM… the phone number comes up.

Then, you’d just call that company and ask if they’re interested in buying your deal.

Now, when you do these searches, sometimes you have to dig a little further. And sometimes you can't find the person at all. But I don't spend a ton of time doing these searches. If it takes me more than a couple of minutes, I usually just move on.

But this technique can give you great results. And you can do it very quickly... it only takes a couple of seconds to click on each of those red dot listings on Zillow, look at the pictures and the property description… so you could burn through an entire zip code in about half an hour.

So, what if you can’t find any contact info?

I’ve got you covered there too…

At the very bottom of many listings on Zillow is the listing agent. With their phone number. Bam!

Give it a go

So, you can see how easy it is to find some potential buyers very quickly.

If you get a deal in an area where you don't have buyers or even if you're just starting to build your buyer's list, this technique is a great way to find some active buyers within any market.

I actually have a student who was extremely nervous and worried about not being able to find buyers and build a list of cash buyers… well, she went to Zillow, checked out 3 different zip codes and in just a day she easily found 37 cash buyers!

That just shows you how effective this is not only for finding cash buyers but also for doing market research.

If you're going into a new area and you're not sure of what the values are, you don't know what investors are paying or what they're selling their properties for... the Price/Tax History is super helpful because you can see exactly what investors are paying when they buy and when they put them back on the market. And you can also look into how long it took to sell, and then what price it sold for.

So just a really great tool to have in your tool box.

It's available to everyone across the country. And it's free, you can't beat that!