How To Find Property Investment & Development Sites From Motivated Sellers

byAlanJE

2.2K followers

1 year ago

Hi Everyone.

I hope you have had a great week so far.

I have been doing a property business for a number of years now, and it is interesting to see the new software tools that are now available to property investors and developers, and how these tools cn hel you to save a massive amount of time and money in your property searches.

I have learned from various property gurus, mainly in the UK about the key factors for profitable property investment a d development.

Simon Zutshi is one leading UK property guru who wrote a book about his thoughts about successful property investment, which is called "Property Magic", which is now on the 6th edition of that book.

Simon Zutshi suggests that you need to seek the 5% of sellers of property who are motivated to sell. This is because most sellers re not that motivated to sell quickly. As a property investor or developer you need to find the sellers who are the most motivated to sell, as it is from this small group of the total market that there is a chance to profit. But the big question is

One of Simon Zutshi´s students and followers is a guy called Guillaume Black and he has developed some software called Property Filter which takes the hard work out of finding such motivated sellers. How does this software work?

Property Filter takes the data from all of the platforms advertising property for sale in the UK, and takes certain criteria and analyses this information so as to present it to the subscriber or viewer in different categories, so that you can identify which sellers are the most motivated to sell, and therefore target those properties that best match what you are looking for. This software therefore saves the subscriber an immense amount of time searching the usual platforms and arranging viewings which because they are not targeted towards motivated sellers will most likely be unproductive.

To give an example of the Property Filter system in operation we will take a postcode first, since the first criterion is the location of the property that you are looking for.

Property Filter gives you a pipeline of potential deals or suspect properties that you can carry out your due diligence on, which is the first step in your search for deals that may work for you.

You can do a certain amount of due diligence research from your desktop, but if the research is good, then the next logical step is to organise a viewing of the property.

After viewing the property and confirming that you have not missed anything in your due diligence research, then you can decide to make an offer for the property.

Property Filter can help you with this aspect of evaluation. This is because Property Filter has all of the relevant information about that particular site in its database of information.

You can see from your Property Filter dashboard what the history of the particular site is, specifically dates when it was put on the market, and also taken off the market, as well as the asking price at any time.

Quite a high proportion of sites do not progress to completion. They may be under offer and sold subject to contract, but then there may be a problem with concluding the transaction, and it falls through. The seller may keep it off the market for a while, or they may put it straight back on the market at a different price.

You can see the whole history, including dates when put on the market and when taken off, and the price point at every stage. Sometimes sellers read the market completely wrong and are unrealistic about the real value of their property.

A year ago there was a strong seller´s market in the UK, and many properties were sold at relatively high prices because demand outstripped the supply of available properties.

Now there is a surplus of property on the market and prices are nowhere near as robust. It is now a buyer´s market, and there are many deals to be had at the moment.

You want to locate those sellers who have had their properties on the market the longest, and find the right price to buy from a seller who is probably becoming more motivated as time goes on, especially if they have had one or more sales fall through.

Ideally, though it may sound illogical, you want your first offer for a property that you decided is interesting, to be rejected. You want the seller to reject your first offer because you want to find the right price by negotiation. If your first offer is accepted by the seller, then you know that you have offered too much money for that property, and you may have been able to secure the property at a lower price.

And then the most important thing is to follow up with the dialogue directly with the seller, to see if your offer is not acceptable, then what can be done to overcome that obstacle. After a period of negotiation you may be able to find common ground and agree an acceptable price that also meets the sellers expectations.

Using Property Filter you can set searches within the software for as many locations and criteria that meet your requirements, review them on your desktop and decide which ones to progress to viewing and offer stage, then hopefully to acceptance..

Property filter is one of several software tools that i use to find sites that meet my criteria, and I shall continue to use it because it saves me a massive amount of time searching the other available property marketing platforms.

I will inform you about some of the other software tools that i use for property searching and research in future articles.

I wish you all a happy weekend, wherever you are in the world!

Cheers

Alan