Real Estate Investors' Secret Weapon: Finding Invisible Off-Market Properties

One of my favorite things to target are properties that sold for a really low price, and I'll kind of explain what that is here in a minute as we go through this. So I'm going to look up the Hillsborough County property appraiser site, and what I want to find is be able to do a sales search. All right, so here we go. Here it is, sales search. So in a lot of counties, there are real estate transactions that occur that aren't traditional sales like we think, where it's being sold necessarily from one party to another. There's a lot of different things that can happen, either a transfer, somebody inherits a property, there's a quit claim deed, all these different things, and what you'll see is the counties will use some kind of placeholder as the dollar amount for those, and what I want to do is just find a list of all those, and I want to market to those people. So we need to find the sales search, which we did here, and then each market's a little bit different. Some of them, it's $0, some of it's $10, $50, $100, it just depends. So what I'll do is go $0 to $1,500, and as we get the results, we'll pretty easily be able to figure out what the placeholder is in this specific county. But, pick the date range, kind of whatever you want here, and then, let's see, that's good there. Some of these websites will allow you to get very specific on what types, or which properties you want, what markets you want to go in, stuff like that. This one seems to be pretty simple, so we'll just go ahead and run search, and you can see in the search that we did, there's a little bit over 3,800 records. So you can see here that it says the maximum number that you can export is 1,000, so that's a problem. We need to go in and make our search window a lot smaller, so that we can download all of them. So let's just go for the last three weeks. You can also add in some other information here if you want, like if you're not buying vacant land, you can just put in a small number for the square footage. Okay, that's a very, very small list. Let's go back. So you can kind of play with this and get to a happy point where you can make it worth your time. Go ahead and run search. All right, 568, that's good, and then what we'll do from here is select all, and then we should be able to download it. So we'll download, open this file up. All right, so here's a list of everything that has sold in the last couple months for 1,500 or less. Let's see. I'm just looking through this information real quick. Here you can see it's got all the mailing address and stuff like that. It's got the owner's name. If there's a second owner, it has that. Legal description. All that looks good. So one thing that you can see here is that this specific site does not have a street number linked up with a street name, which is not a huge deal. It's just kind of a pain to deal with. So depending on how each specific county works, you have to come in here and kind of get creative with it. So let me look up the formula real quick to combine these two together, and I'll be right back. Okay, so it looks like the formula is going to be equals the first one, ampersand, quote, space, quote, and again, ampersand, then this one, and then press enter. All right, and that's going to combine this cell with this cell. And what we want to do is just take this all the way to the bottom. Now right now, this, if you look at any of these, it's a formula underneath here. So what we want to do is create one more column, copy all this. So I just copied it. Now we want to paste as values. That way the actual information is here and it's no longer this formula. All right, so I'm going to get rid of all this other stuff since we don't need it anymore. Okay, so now we have the property address, city, zip, the state for all these is going to be Florida. Okay, so that's good. And as you can see here, there's a lot of duplicates. So depending upon, you know, you can go through and manually delete them. There's some tools that you can use that will automatically remove these. I won't go through all that in this video, but what you have here is a list that you can mark it to. And so here's the full property address, and again, we have the owner's information over here. We'll have to fix the name because right now it's last name, first name, and then we have the full mailing address as well. One other thing that we may want to pay attention to is the assessed value. You know, depending upon what you're going to go after, what ARV range you want to go after, you can use this to kind of filter some of those out. Now remember, this is going to be based on county property appraiser's value. It's not the actual, but what we can do is go to data, filter, and then we could say, hey, you know, well, it looks like it's not recognizing it as a column of numbers. But what you can do is you could set up a filter that said, hey, don't show me anything under 50,000, or you can come down here and just scroll through and say, hey, all of these are under, let's say the number's 100. I don't want to see anything under 100, so you could delete these like that, and then go from there. Actually, it would probably make more sense to get these in order first. So if you go up here, freeze the top row, and then go data, sort, yeah, you want to expand the selection. There you go. So now it's going from lowest up to highest. Well, not perfectly, but anyway, you can go through here and delete anything that's above what your target is. So like this one down here, 742,000, that's probably a little high, 584, you might want to delete these. So it's up to you, but yeah, that's it, and this is an awesome list. We've had tons of success with it, and I don't know a lot of people doing it. What this also does is it gives you the previous sales price. I also like to look down through this real quick, and so what this is showing you is the sales price prior to the one that we pulled. So if you look here, what I'm looking for is if it sold for a lot of money in the last like three years, I'd delete it. So like this one right here, about a year ago it sold for 120,000, I would delete it. This one sold for a lot, but it was 10 years ago, I would keep it. This one, about a year ago, I would delete it. So I would just run down through here real quick, anything that sold for a lot of money in the last few years, I'd skip it. If not, then I'd mark it to them. So anyway, this is a great way to create a list.