How to Build Your Buy Box

Ashley :
This is the Real Estate Rookie podcast. I’m Ashley Care, and I’m here with Tony j Robinson.

Tony:
And welcome to the Real Estate Rookie podcast, where every week, three times a week, we bring you the inspiration, motivation, and stories you need to hear to kickstart your investing journey.

Ashley :
We constantly hear from rookies on the forums and in the comments of Facebook and Instagram asking where to find deals in this market. We know finding your first deal can sometimes be the hardest, which is why we’re going to break down all the ways you can source deals today. After this episode, you are going to have the toolkit you need to find your first, second, or maybe even your 15th property.

Tony:
So guys, today we’re going to discuss how important it is to determine your buy box. First ways to source both on and off market deals and how to track your leads and what follow-up strategies you should be using. So

Ashley :
Before we get into where to source deals, Tony, what do you need to do first before you even start looking for deals?

Tony:
Yeah, I think the very first thing is that you have to determine what your purchasing power is. Okay, your purchasing power, and I think this is one of the important places to start because until you know this, you can’t really start to go through the other steps like your buy box and put in offers and all those other things. So when we talk about purchasing power, it’s really two things. It’s how much capital do you have on hand and it’s how much of a loan can you get approved for? Okay, so your cash on hand or access to cash and then your loan approval amount. And these two things kind of work together, but it’s important to know both of them because say you have $300,000 to invest in a deal, but maybe you can’t get approved for a mortgage for whatever reason. Well now you’re limited to paying cash or maybe partner with someone else. And on the opposite, say that you maybe got approved for a million bucks, you can go out and buy a million dollar home, but you only have $10,000 to your name. Well, it doesn’t matter what the loan approval amount, but $10,000 is that limiting factor. So I always start with your purchasing power, how much cash drive I have access to you to cover down payment, closing costs, et cetera. And then what kind of loan can I get approved for?

Ashley :
Yeah, so I think definitely looking at the purchasing power, setting your budget, because how can you even look for deals if you don’t know how much you can spend on something?

Tony:
So Ash, once you have your purchasing power in place, what do you feel is maybe that next step before we can actually start sourcing deals?

Ashley :
Yeah, so you kind of mentioned it a little bit as do you want to know what kind of property you want to buy? And when you first started looking for deals, you had a very specific buy box of what property you wanted. So I actually created a little buy box checklist for you guys. So if you have pen and paper handy or you got your computer handy, take notes on this if you don’t come back and listen to this portion of it. But I’m just going to go ahead and read this off real quick as to here are things you should consider when building out your buy box. So the first thing is property type. You’re going for multifamily storage, family, large multifamily, boutique motels. How many units, what is your range of how many units you’re comfortable with? What is your price range, your budget, parking?

Ashley :
Do you want a property that has garages? How many spots per unit? Are you okay with just off street parking? Do you want purchase it vacant because you want to rehab it? Do you want to purchase it rented? Do you want at least 50% rented location? So with the location in the market, make sure that you are narrowing down to neighborhood and not just a city. So if you did the city of Buffalo, New York in your buy box, that’s not niche enough, that’s not narrowed down enough. You need to get down into a zip code because it can change so rapidly, street by street, just like most cities, how many beds does it need to have? How many baths does it need to have? And then rehab, do you want to a light rehab cosmetic, a medium, a full rehab, then property class. So do you want it in an A neighborhood, a B neighborhood or a C neighborhood?

Ashley :
Your target market, is it low income housing, blue collar worker, luxury apartments, affordable housing? What is your cash on cash return requirement? How much cashflow do you want per unit? What is your rehab budget range? So maybe it will fit everything else in your criteria, but you only have $50,000 available for your rehab funding. Are you going to do seller financing? Conventional commercial sub two? If you’re going to do an FHA loan, remember you’ll have to go through in an FHA inspection. So the property will have to be livable and be not in huge disrepair. Then are you looking for appreciation or growth potential? You can kind of estimate that based off of current stats for the market. And then capital improvements are, do you want to have to replace the roof in a year, the siding in three years, the HVAC in five years, what are you comfortable with for saving up for those capital expenditures? So that’s kind of my list right there. And there’s definitely a lot more things that you could add onto this, but I think this is a great start for a rookie investor to help you build your buy box is thinking of all these scenarios.

Tony:
Yeah, so many important things, Ash that you went over. And I guess what might be helpful is if I share my buy box for properties that we’re currently looking at so I can give you guys a sense of what it actually looks like in practice. So on the short-term rental side, we are specifically right now looking for larger properties, four to five bedrooms in markets where the revenue growth has been strong year over year, that we’re not stepping into a market where we’ve seen revenue declines. And we really want the larger properties kind of like those four in those five bedrooms because we’ve seen that be the sweet spot in a lot of markets. And specifically I’m looking for properties that we can bur. So four and five bedrooms that I can get slightly under market value, I can then go in, use private money or hard money to buy it, renovate it, and then refinance it into longer term debt.

Tony:
So that is my current buy box on the short-term rental side. Now we also flip here locally in SoCal. And on the flip side, what I’m looking for are properties again within a certain radius of where I live, but I’m looking for properties that are no more than 2000 square feet, no less than about 900 above 2000. It’s just a bigger job than I want to take on below 900. We find that it gets a little bit hard to find comps that support the flips on the back end. So 900 is probably about as small as we’ll be willing to go. And I really like to keep our initial acquisition costs about 400 k somewhere in that price point or lower because anything above that, it starts to get a little bit too expensive. So now I know as I’m searching for different deals, it’s super easy for me to say yes or no to a lot of these flip opportunities because I’ve built out that buy box. My goal when we flip is that I want to be able to sell to that first time home buyer. And that single story, 13, 1400 square foot home is a really good starter home here in Southern California.

Ashley :
Yeah, that’s such a great point as to also looking at who your end buyer is too, to kind of match the deal as to who you’re actually going for. And that can work. If you have a rental, what kind of tenant are you looking for? Or if you’re flipping a property, what kind of buyer do you want for your home? Okay, you guys stay tuned because after this quick break, we’re going to find out how to source on market deals to get your search kickstarted. You can also get more resources at biggerpockets.com/find a deal. We’ll be right back after this. Okay, welcome back. Let’s talk about on market deals. So let’s go into some tactics of how to find on market and off market deals. So kind of explain that an on market deals, if it’s listed on the MLS buyer real estate agent and it’s available for everyone to see. And then an off market deal is when you find it of property that’s for sale that’s not listed on the MLS. So most of the time it’s for sale by the owner, the person you’ll work directly with the seller, maybe they’re not marketing it, but you make contact with them and they say, yes, we would sell. Or maybe a wholesaler is playing as the middleman to sell you the property. So let’s start with on market first. So Tony, how can new investors find on market deals?

Tony:
Yeah, the easiest way, open up Zillow or Redfin, and there’s really only two types of real estate investors in the world. Either you’re a Redfin investor or you’re a Zillow investor. What

Ashley :
About a realtor.com? I feel like that’s another

Tony:
Who uses realtor.com. Is that your go-to, are you a realtor.com?

Ashley :
No, it’s actually Zillow, but sometimes I will just randomly, I don’t know, but mostly Zillow. Yeah,

Tony:
Yeah, yeah. I’m a Zillow kind of guy, but I think that’s the easiest place to kind of go and see the majority of what’s listed. Now you won’t get all of the kind of notes and details that you might see with the actual MLS, but it’s going to give you pretty much everything you need as you’re shopping for these deals. Now, obviously, you can also work with a real estate agent and they’re going to have access to the actual MLS, and then they can set you up on an email drip where any properties that kind of meet your buy box, you’ll automatically get notified via email to say, Hey, here’s a new listing that meets your criteria. So those are I think, the two easiest ways to go on market.

Ashley :
So another thing is finding a real estate agent. So they can send you these deals directly. You can sign up for the emails, but if you need a real estate agent, you should go to biggerpockets.com/agent finder to get connected with an agent who is investor friendly that can help you maybe with a little market research can help you through the property, especially if they’re investor themselves in that market, will be huge valuable resource to have them on your team. But there’s also, agents can also give you pocket listings where if they get a deal brought to them that somebody has the intention to list on the MLS agents do have the availability to go to people and say, Hey, I’m about to list this property, but do you want to make an offer on it before it actually gets listed? Which doesn’t seem fair, but it is a great way to find deals if you’re working with an agent that will bring you properties before they’re actually listed on the MLS.

Ashley :
And that’s why it’s so important to have your buy box so that your agent will think of you whenever they see a deal and say, oh my gosh, I think I already have a buyer for this. Let me check with them. Okay. Auctions are another kind of public place to purchase a property where it’s listed out there for everyone to take a look at. One thing is I feel like there’s a lot less competition for auction properties than a property that’s listed on the MLS, and there are some reasons for that. Some of the times you can’t have access to the property, sometimes you can’t, or there’s actually a tenant in place at the property or somebody living there. So there’s a lot of unknowns sometimes when purchasing auction properties. But then there are times when you can have access to property and you can see the property.

Ashley :
And then there’s also the fact that sometimes you have to pay in cash, so you don’t have the option of going to get an FHA loan, but some of those auction websites are zm, that’s XOME auction.com, hub Zoo. And then also HUD has a website, hud homes usa.org, which is a government website that sells properties and then treasury.gov. And then this one I actually purchased property from this one before is the surplus land auction for New York State. So there’s definitely a lot of unique and there’s probably a lot more auctions that Tony and I don’t even know about, but there’s a lot of options out there for sure.

Tony:
Yeah, we should probably do a deep dive episode on buying at auction. I’ve never personally done it, but I know a lot of investors who use that as almost like their main acquisition strategy because like you said, there’s a little less competition. So that’s on market ash, what do you think about going off market, right? Things that aren’t readily available to the general public. Let’s maybe actually get into the X’s and O’s of going off market. So when I think about the different ways, so again, when we say off market, it just means the property’s not publicly listed, so you have to find some other way to get in touch with the seller of that property. And things that we’ve done, we’ve done direct mail where we’ve sent out a bunch of postcards and letters and things like that to get deals. Actually, the very first off market deal that we sourced ourselves came from a postcard. So someone got one of our postcards called this up and said, yeah, I’m willing to sell. And I think we made a pretty decent profit on that deal.

Ashley :
Tony, real quick before we go into the next one, do you want to explain the different ways of sending those mailers and doing direct mail of how you get their address and pulling it, things like that?

Tony:
Yeah, great point, Ash. Thank you. Allowing me to clarify that. So in order to actually send these pieces of mail out, first you’ve got to build a list of potential properties to target, and there are pieces of software out there. You have prop Stream, you have in Velo Privy, there’s a lot of options out there to help you create and build these lists out. But you got to build a list of potential properties to target, okay? Once you have your list, then you have to do what’s called skip tracing, where you look up the contact information of those property owners, their mailing address, phone numbers, email addresses, just all the different ways that you can contact those folks. And then you’re able to put that into another piece of software that kind of mass produces either the postcards or the letters for you, which you then drop in the mail and wait for a call to come back. So that’s kind of the process we typically follow.

Ashley :
Or you could just be driving for dollars to your property, write down the address, and then send them a letter too.

Tony:
And honestly, driving for dollars might be the best list because now, because guys, think about it, when you’re using something like Prop Stream, they have these kind of preset filters and not only are you using those preset filters, but every single other person who’s shopping in your market for off-market deals is also using those preset filters. So you’re all kind of going after that same pool of people, but the filters can only be so smart. But if you drive that neighborhood yourself and you start to kind of see the properties that are showing signs, they may look fine on paper, you’d think that it was a distressed property on paper, but actually seeing it kind of gives you that opportunity. So direct mail, that one worked pretty well for us. But postcards, letters, et cetera, Ashley’s absolute favorite, maybe her second favorite behind door knocking, but you got cold calling.

Ashley :
I thought maybe you were skipping cold calling going to word of mouth, which is actually my

Tony:
Favorite. Yeah, if you guys don’t know, maybe her biggest fear is cold calling and door knocking. But yeah, cold calling, right? And we’ve done that before as well. There’s software out there that helps you be a little bit more efficient with that. We’ve used Mojo Dialer in the past and there’s a bunch of other software out there as well, but that’s, you load up all of the phone numbers for these owners and it’s going to help you just mass dial a bunch of these people, hopefully get one on the phone. And that is almost like there’s an art to that. You’ve got to have a little bit of a sales backbone to be able to do that effectively because you’re kind of working these people through that sales process. But direct mail, cold calling, Ashley, you just said word of mouth, so maybe jump into why that one’s an important one as well.

Ashley :
Word of mouth. That one I got right away because that was definitely a majority of my deals and kind of still is like the one I was just telling you about where the heat went off the plumbing issue. That was just because the person knew my dad and knew that I bought rental properties. Nobody else was even offered the property for sale. So word of mouth, just talking about what you do, what you’re looking for will make people think of you to actually tell you about a deal, even if it’s not their deal saying, oh, my cousin’s selling their property, maybe you’d be interested. So I love word of mouth, but big disclaimer, that shouldn’t be the only way that you are sourcing deals. Just a little extra bonus.

Tony:
And I think the reason why the word of mouth said it’s a great thing to layer in, we should all be talking about it, but it’s a slightly more passive way of getting the deals to come in. Because if I want to get a deal today, I can go call 5,000 different property owners and just by the law of averages, there’s a good chance I might find at least one or two deals, but I don’t necessarily have control over the word of mouth. It’s not an activity based thing. Whereas if I go to an event and I just tell everyone there, the chance of that coming back in the same way might be a little bit different. But like Ashley said, it’s good to have that in your toolkit because you never know the mailman might give you the best deal of your life if you share the right information with them. So those are kind of the direct to seller options, Ashley. Now, wholesalers are another way to go off market as well, and they’re going to do a lot of that heavy lifting for you where they’re doing all the activity, the door knocking, the cold, calling the postcards to source all these deals, and then they’re kind of taken a spread when they resell that deal to you. So I guess, have you closed on deals working with wholesalers in the past before Ashley? And if so, how did you find them? No,

Ashley :
No, I’ve never used a before, no.

Tony:
Interesting. Alright, so we’ve purchased a few deals from wholesalers and what I found to kind of be the best place, so one, if you own real estate, a lot of times they’ll call you. So just say like, Hey, I’m not interested, but put me on your list. That’s an easy way to get onto the list. If you see those signs, the bandit signs around your neighborhood that says we buy homes for cash, just call ’em. Say, Hey, I’m not looking to sell but I’m a buyer. Put me on your list. Or

Ashley :
Just Google that. Sell my house fast too and sell my house fast in Buffalo, New York.

Tony:
Yeah, because the people that are advertising for that are probably going to be bigger wholesalers as well. You can get on their list. Local meetups, usually if it’s a big enough meetup, there’s usually at least a handful of wholesalers there as well. And I honestly kind of like the meetup piece because you get kind of the smaller wholesalers that aren’t necessarily running this huge 50 person organization that’s doing multiple millions of year. It’s like I wholesale one deal a month maybe, and those are the wholesalers that maybe you can kind of build a relationship with. And then also local Facebook groups, depending on your market. But in most kind of bigger cities, there’s probably a few real estate Facebook groups in your area. And if you just go in there, you post your name, you post your buy box, you say send your deals here, you’ll start to get a flow of incoming emails and texts about, Hey, I’ve got this deal. I saw your name in the Facebook group, I’d love to chat. So those are kind of the ways that I found to work best with wholesalers.

Ashley :
So we’re going to take one last quick ad break and when we’re back, we’re going to cover how to stay on top of tracking your leads. An important step a lot of rookies might miss out on. Okay, so Tony, why is tracking your leads so important? And maybe first describe what is a lead?

Tony:
Yeah, so when we talk about leads, it is like an actionable person or property for you to follow up with. The leads are either the people or the properties that you’re potentially having conversations with to acquire.

Ashley :
Okay? So I use monday.com to track my leads. Right now, what’s the most important information to be tracking your leads? So for me it’s the address of the property, the contact information of the person I talked to about the property, the status of the lead as we made an offer, as we’re scheduling a, showing what strategy I’m going after, how did I actually source the deal. So if I got it from an MLS listing, I’m adding that. I’m going to start a Google Drive folder with any information about the property that I have, maybe the property taxes. I’m going to do a BiggerPockets calculator report, any underwriting notes, photos of the property. I use prop Stream a lot. So pulling a prop stream report, I’ll attach all that and then I just kind of save all that information. The deal, I call it a dead deal if it ends up going nowhere, but I still save all that information. So if the deal rises from the grave and presents an opportunity, again, I already have all my information in my data from when I did my quick analysis the first time of looking at that property. Is there anything that I didn’t mention, Tony, that’s really important to you when you are tracking the lead as to keeping that information?

Tony:
I think you hit ’em all. Yeah, I think you hit ’em all actually. All the important pieces, and we use Monday as well, but there are also, they’re software companies out there that kind of specialize in helping real estate investors keep track of different leads in that way. So simply is one that I’ve seen pop up quite a bit. One that I had tried in the past is called RE, I reply, that one was pretty cool. But if you guys just search like real estate investing or wholesaling CRM, you’ll find a lot of those opportunities out there. But I think getting some level of software to keep track of what’s coming in and what’s coming out will be important. I’ll share a quick story Pace. Morby actually shared this with me and he said that his team, they track properties that potentially fit their buy box to come on the market and they just wait for those listings to expire.

Tony:
And then they’re tracking this every single day. So every day he opens up his CRM, he says, okay, here’s everything that’s no longer listed, and they just reach out to the owner directly. It’s like the day that it goes expired. And what impeccable timing to be able to reach out to an owner as soon as they failed to sell their property and say, Hey, look, I saw your property sat for 180 days, didn’t get sold. Here’s my offer. That is probably someone who’s pretty motivated to move forward. So that’s the power I think of having to really, really dial in CRM.

Ashley :
And then, besides the ones that Tony mentioned, I mean you could just use Google Sheets, Excel, take the time when you’re sitting down to look at a deal, you get a deal sent to you. Take the time to write down the steps that you’re going through, what’s the process you go through when somebody sends you an address of a property and then kind of just create a board, create a sheet off of that as to every time I see an address that somebody’s sending me, here’s the information that I want to know each time. That’s pretty quick and convenient for you to pull without wasting too much time. But also you want to make sure that that fits your buy box too. So have some kind of checklist in there as to here’s what my buy box is, does this property need it? No. Okay, I’m not going to spend any more time pulling the prop stream report, looking at the property taxes, scheduling a showing to look at the property so those having this kind of system and process in place can save you so much time that’s just wasted on analyzing deals when it ends up it had a pool in the backyard and you don’t even want a in the backyard because of the maintenance and the costs.

Ashley :
But also if you are joining the Rookie Bootcamp coming up soon, we actually will be giving examples of SOP and help you build out SOPs. So make sure you go to biggerpockets.com/bootcamps and I’ll see you in the rookie bootcamp so you can build out your own SOPs.

Tony:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, Ashley. I think having that system kind of dial then building out your checklist is going to help you be a little bit more efficient. So Ashley, I guess one final thought here as we start to wrap things up. I think what’s really important for all of the rookies that are listening is that what we went over are a lot of different options to find deals both on market and off market. And obviously this wasn’t meant to be like a masterclass in one specific strategy, but more so to give you an overview of the different options. But the next step for those of you that are listening are to choose maybe one or two of those different strategies and really get good at that one thing going on market, it’s going to be super easy. So I’d say add that in there because why not?

Tony:
And then maybe choose at least one off market strategy that you feel aligns best with your specific goals. Maybe you have a background in digital marketing and your day job. Okay, cool. Then maybe doing something like pay-per-click might be a good option for you. Maybe you are a salesman in your W2 job or a salesperson, then going direct to seller and door knocking or cold calling will be great for you. Maybe you’re a master networker and focus on finding wholesalers and working that angle. But I think I see people struggle at times, and I’m sure you do as well, Ashley, that they focus on too many things at once. So just pick one or two of these strategies and then go really deep to get skillful at that. One thing.

Ashley :
I think one thing that I have definitely been guilty of for any of the businesses I’ve started and over the years I’ve gotten way better at this, but not spending so much time focusing on the marketing as in your logo design, your slogan, your branding for the website, what colors you want, what color scheme you want. I think that it’s definitely beneficial to look professional, but you can still source deals and find them without paying for a website subscription and paying for all these things just to get your first, second, third, fourth, fifth deal. If you’re looking to go for big volume, then yes, paying for these services probably be beneficial, but it’s can very easily be done without having to pay all of these costs or focusing on your logo. Putting time and attention into your logo is just procrastinating actually going and finding a deal.

Ashley :
So you don’t need to have a name, you don’t need to have an LLC yet you can create your LLC once you get the property under contract. So just kind of think about as you’re doing things for your real estate investing, is it something that’s actually moving the needle? Is it an actionable item that’s getting you to the next step? Or is it just something that’s actually procrastination that isn’t getting you closer to the next deal? Tony, if you are approached by somebody, they both have two similar deals. If one has your favorite colors and a more beautiful logo, are you going to automatically go with that person or are you going to consider both people and run the numbers and see what’s actually the bigger deal compared to the other person who has no logo, no website, nothing. They literally just sent you an Instagram dm. Tony, I listened to your rookie episode where you talked about your buy box. I have a deal, doesn’t matter.

Tony:
You could write the details of the property in the back of a napkin, right? And I would still consider it. So yeah, I think it all comes down to the merit of the deal that’s being presented. So couldn’t agree more. Asha. I think for a lot of the rookie audience, a lot of times we get caught up in the busy work and the minutiae, the things that make us feel as if we’re making progress when in reality we’re just spinning our wheels, focus on the things that are going to move to lever. And like you said, it’s how do I find a good deal? All those other things can come later.

Ashley :
Well you guys, thank you so much for joining us on this episode where we did a little breakdown on how to source a deal. We would love for you to comment below if you’re watching on YouTube, as to what are the ways that you’re finding deals right now in today’s market to share with everybody that’s watching and listening. If you are listening on your favorite podcast platform, make sure you follow along. And if you’re on YouTube, make sure to like this video. Thank you guys so much for listening and watching. I’m Ashley. And he’s Tony. And we’ll see you guys next time on the Real Estate Rookie podcast.

Tony:
This bigger podcast, podcast is produced by Daniel ti, edited by Exodus Media Copywriting by Calico content.

Ashley :
I’m Ashley. He’s Tony, and you have been listening to Real Estate Rookie.

Tony:
And if you want to be a guest on a BiggerPockets show, apply at biggerpockets.com/guest.