Good deals are not easy to find. If they were easy, everyone would be snatching them up. Let’s face it. Finding good deals takes hard work.
The work starts with finding leads. Leads turn into deals. Deals turn into money.
Leads generally come from some group of people who find themselves in trouble. For some reason, many of these groups start with the letter D:
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Divorce
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Death (Probate)
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Debt (Foreclosure)
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Disaster – House needs more work than the owner wants to do (or pay for)
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Diseases – Owners have a medical condition that runs them out of money
Sometimes, lists of the Ds are in the public records. And better yet – some of them are online. But the lists are not all that user-friendly. If the information is online, you can bet, it is not in a nice little spreadsheet suitable for mail merging and sending out.
The Old Way of Finding Leads
Many investors have turned to buying lists and letting someone else do the work of compiling it. That can be expensive. It also means you might have the same list as your competition. And you will have to pay again, every time you update it with the latest and greatest names.
The alternative is to go online yourself, and copy and paste the info into a spreadsheet. Or pay someone (can you say Virtual Assistant?) to do it for you. As a real estate investor, your time is much more valuable than that. Trouble is, you have to pay this person every time you want to update the list with the latest names.
Welcome to the World of Automation
Usually, when there is a problem, you can bet someone will come up with a solution. In this case, programmers have found a way to extract data from websites. Even non-user friendly ones.
The fancy programmer name for extracting data is called scraping. A programmer can write a little program, or script that will go into a website, locate relevant data, and insert the data into a spreadsheet or other database.
Think of web scrapers as something similar to search engines. Search engines send out ‘bots’ that look at a website to see how relevant they are for people’s searches. A scraping script goes to a specific website and grabs the information for you.
Some websites are not thrilled with you ‘scraping’ their data. Craigslist REALLY doesn’t like it. In fact, they have won lawsuits against people scraping data.
Yet, there are still websites out there that help you pull data from Craigslist.
Basically it comes down to a website’s terms. If a website doesn’t want you to scrape it’s data, it should let you know. Private websites don’t want other companies stealing their content and using it for their profit.
Government websites are not so concerned with privacy – at least the ones having to do with real estate. Consequently, there are not a lot of restrictions from scraping public records.
How You Can Play the Scraping Game
There are 3 ways you can scrape websites for the data you need to generate leads:
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Purchase scraping software
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Learn how to code
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Hire a programmer to develop a script for you
To find scraping software to purchase, just do a web search for scraping software. Many of these programs work well and can scrape the data you want.
Like any software, they have their advantages and disadvantages. The software can range from free like Import.io to a one-time fee like Visual Web Ripper for $299 as of the writing of this lesson.
You can also find some that provide monthly plans like Cloud Scrape. But the idea of buying a web scraper is to avoid the monthly charges the list providers have. If you have to pay a monthly fee, it might be easier to just buy a list.
The second alternative is to learn how to code yourself. You may be able to learn just enough to write a simple script for the website you want. We have found that Python is pretty popular for scraping. There are also online learning sites like Lynda or Code Academy that can teach you how to code.
Let’s be honest – do you want to spend your time learning code or finding great real estate deals?
For around $40-$80, you can go onto a website like Fiverr or Upwork and have someone create a script for you. The script may not put the information in a perfect format for sending out direct mail and you may have to manipulate it in Excel, but it sure beats the heck out of copying and pasting all the information yourself.
Remember also that the one-time fee of $40-$80 means you will be able to pull all future updates you need to your list for free.
Once you have a scraper that pulls lists and updates them, you can also sell your lists to other real estate investors. Or keep it to yourself and make a lot of money following up on the leads on those lists.
Scraped Much?
If you have experience scraping, we’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.
Find Leads – Whether through networking, direct mail lists, bandit signs or other marketing, leads are the lifeblood of successful real estate investors.
Target a specific niche – Pick one of the Ds of motivated sellers, for instance, and go after them. Become very good at understanding their needs and solving them. Then you can blow away your competition.
Do What You Do Best and Outsource the Rest – It’s a bit cliché, but it is still true. The more you concentrate on what you are really good at (real estate investing?), the more success you will have.
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.