How to Find People Ready to Sell in Any Real Estate Market in 20 Minutes

I’ve had my real estate license since 2016. For the first couple of years that I was trying to find my own deals, I did what basically every new investor does: I drove around and looked for the house with the sagging gutters and the boat in the driveway that hadn’t moved since the Clinton administration, and I’d write the address in my phone as if I’d just found buried treasure. Then I’d spend a week tracking down the owner, finally get them on the phone, and learn the house was worth $240,000 with $228,000 owed on it. The owner would have had to show up at closing with a cashier’s check just for the privilege of getting rid of their own house, so that call ended about 90 seconds after it started. I burned a lot of Saturdays that way, and I lost $40,000 on a flip during roughly the same stretch, so I’m not writing this as a guy who had it figured out early. I’m writing it as a guy who wasted enough time to eventually change the order in which he does things. These days, I’m mostly hunting land and RV parks in any town with a Dollar General in Texas, and the 20 minutes I’ll outline is what I run before I ever get in the truck. It works about the same in a rural East Texas county as ...