The Easiest Way to Find Profitable Rental Properties

Dave:
This is the easiest way to find a rental property that will make you money in 2025. So I know you’re probably out there ready to buy an investment property and start your journey towards financial freedom, but the question then becomes how do you find the rental properties in your area that will generate cashflow now and provide appreciation and upside over time? In this episode, I’m going to break down how to separate the profitable properties from the potential money pits in just a few easy steps. Follow this blueprint and you’ll be ready to start making offers in just a few days.

Dave:
Hey everyone, I’m Dave Meyer. I’ve been buying rental properties for 15 years now and I’m the head of real estate investing at BiggerPockets. If you’ve spent any time browsing listings, looking on Redfin or Zillow or trying to calculate expenses and rental income on a spreadsheet, the process of trying to find a rental property can be difficult and somewhat time consuming. But the good thing is that it doesn’t actually have to be. And today I’m going to share the exact steps that I personally use almost every day to narrow down the best properties for sale and the markets where I invest to analyze those properties to accurately predict things like rental income expenses, cashflow, and all the other key metrics. And I’ll show you a new free tool from BiggerPockets just released to make this entire process way easier even for new investors. Okay, so how to find a rental property right now.

Dave:
Let’s jump right into step one. So first things first, let’s just talk about the different ways that you actually can go about finding a deal. And when you hear me say deal, what I mean is a property like an investment property. This can be a rental property, short-term rental. This is just real estate investor lingo for an actual investment. And there are generally two big broad buckets of where you can find deals. There are on market deals and there are off market deals. When you hear this term on market, it basically just means that it is listed publicly on something called the MLS, the multiple listing service that’s basically deals or properties that you see on realtor.com or Redfin or Zillow, all that, those are on market properties sold in the more traditional way. There is this other bucket of properties called off market deals that can come around in a bunch of different ways.

Dave:
These can be from foreclosures and auctions. They can be something called pocket listings or they could be direct to seller marketing where investors send out emails or texts or actual physical letters to potential sellers to see if they’ll sell ’em their property. So for the purpose of this episode, talking about where to find deals, I’m going to focus on market because to me that’s like the 80 20 of this. This is where you get the most bang for your buck is learning how to find on market deals in a really efficient way because there’s a lot of listings and there’s a lot of bad deals out there. So you need to be able to do this efficiently, and that’s what we’re going to get into today’s episode. Once you pick a market, think the mindset that you really need to start to adapt as a real estate investor is one of volume.

Dave:
You need to look at a lot of potential properties before you actually find a deal. And I’m not talking about five properties, I’m not talking about 10 properties. It could take you 20 properties, it could take you 50 properties. I’ll be honest, sometimes I’ve looked at and screened 100 properties before I’ve actually pulled the trigger and bought one even though I knew I wanted to buy in short order in this particular market, I still looked at that many properties. So just put this concept of a funnel into your mind that you’re basically going to need to look at a lot of properties, let’s just call it a hundred for now. Of those, maybe 20 of them are good enough from your initial screening and your initial analysis to do a deeper dive into. So maybe only 20% of all properties that you look at are even interesting enough to do a full analysis on.

Dave:
Then you’re going to want to take those 20 properties and do a full analysis. You’re going to underwrite them, you’re going to get some good data about them and really dig into which one of these deals makes sense for you. And of those 20, maybe five of them still look pretty good to you at that point. Maybe you send your agent over if you’re investing out of state or you go to these properties in person, if you are an in-state investor and of those five that sort of made sense on paper, maybe one, maybe two, if you’re lucky of those are ones that you want to offer on and ultimately hopefully get accepted. So I know that sounds like a long process, I promise I will show you that this is easier than it sounds, but that’s sort the mentality I want everyone to sort of adopt here is that you are going to have to start with a broad approach looking at a lot of properties and then you’re slowly, each step of the process going to whittle it down until you find that property to invest in.

Dave:
So to me, historically the hardest part has been the first step where you take those hundred properties and narrow them down to 20. That is at least what has traditionally been the most time consuming option here because you know, sign onto these listing platforms. If you go onto Zillow, if you go onto Redfin, all these properties are going to pop up, right? You’re going to have a hundred different properties, you’re going to have a thousand different properties. If you look at a whole metro area, how do you know which one to look for? Is it two bed, one bath that needs a lot of work better than a four bed, three bath that’s in really good shape? I don’t really know. And what you traditionally have had to do is just analyze those deals one by one. You would go estimate what the rent is going to cost, estimate what all the expenses are going to be, do a quick calculation, see if it cash flows, see what the long-term upside is and then move on.

Dave:
But as you can probably imagine, doing that a hundred times takes a lot of work. And actually that’s what I’m so excited about right now is that BiggerPockets has just released a brand new tool. It’s free to anyone to use and it allows you to screen properties, buy all of the important real estate investing metrics. So when you go on to bigger deals, you can go to biggerpockets.com/listings right now and check this out. It’s free and it’s up there right now. You can go on and you can see it’s sort of like [email protected], but just instead of just seeing shiny pictures, what bigger deals is going to show you is what the cashflow is estimated to be, what the cap rate is estimated to be, what the internal rate of return is going to be, what the rents are going to be. So I’m going to show you using this tool how you can cut down this research from, I don’t know, 20, 30 hours into maybe an hour. And yes, there is still a little bit of work here, but I hope as a real estate investor that you’re willing to put in a couple of hours looking for a deal before you invest potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is a big decision and doing this research is super important. I’m just going to show you a way to do it more accurately and more efficiently. Alright, we do have to take a quick break, but we’ll be back with more of the BiggerPockets podcast right after this.

Dave:
Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. We’re here talking about the easiest way to find a profitable rental property in 2025. So I’m just going to describe and talk to you guys about how you can actually do this. And for anyone who’s listening on the podcast, you can go and follow along yourself at some point. Go to biggerpockets.com/listings For everyone who’s watching on YouTube, I’m actually going to do a quick screen share here. So I’m just going to pull up an example here and use Indianapolis. This is a city I have long been thinking about investing in. I’ve honestly never been for real estate purposes, I just like it on paper. So I’m going to pull this up and what I’m looking at looks very similar to other listings platforms, but instead of just seeing the price point and some features and some fluffy verbiage about this dream home that I could be buying, I’m actually looking at this property.

Dave:
I’m just going to tell you it’s on New Jersey Street in Indianapolis and all of a sudden right away I can see the cash flow for this property. I could see the cash on cash return, I could see the rent to value ratio, the rent to price ratio, I could see the cap rate. All of these are really important metrics that as an investor I really care about. Previously, I would’ve had to go and research what the rents and expenses were going to be for each of these properties. But now just using this tool for BiggerPockets for free, I could just go and screen these things right away. What I’m seeing is pretty encouraging. So I’m not seeing, it’s not all positive cashflow and I think that’s good because realistically, as I said, you’re going to have to look at a lot of deals to determine what’s good and what’s not good.

Dave:
And so I’m seeing deals that are as bad as having negative $1,800 a month cashflow, but there’s also really good things out there. I’m going to click on this one right here. So 4 44 Keystone Avenue. This is a three bed, three bath. This looks like a pretty nice property. We’re going to look at all the photos here. It still has all the photos, looks recently renovated. It has, I think those are vinyl floors, but there’s canned lights. It looks like someone put a lot of work into this. It’s three bed, three bath, 2,800 square feet on a 10th acre lot. So this is looking like a pretty nice place on the market for 2 85. Now I’m just looking easy. I didn’t have to do any original research here, and what I can see is that the rents here are 2,500 bucks. So getting close to the 1% rule and after I factor in what the projected expenses and carrying costs and all that’s going to be, we come out to $265 a month of cashflow for a 5% cash on cash return.

Dave:
That’s amazing. This would’ve taken hours and hours and hours of all the properties listing on Zillow to find one that cashflows 5% would literally have taken me tens, dozen hours at least I just found this in a matter of minutes just clicking around here. Now of course, the way this tool works is making a lot of assumptions like what your expenses are going to be, what your down payment amount is going to be, and if you want to, you can actually customize this beyond what the assumptions are. So if I said this assumption that I was looking at, assume 20% down, but since I am more of an out-of-state investor, I don’t live in Indianapolis, I would probably have to put 25% down and I’ll just be conservative on this interest rate and say that it’s 6.75. That’s about what we’re looking at today. We’re in mid to April right now.

Dave:
They’re changing constantly, but if I just go and update that, that actually increases my cashflow and my cash on cash return probably just because putting more money down. So there’s obviously a trade off there. We’ll have to bring more cash to the closing table, but that’s reality for me. As an out-of-state investors, I’m putting 25% down either way. And so seeing that it goes up to a 5.1% cash on cash return and I’d be making nearly three 50 a month in cashflow, this is a deal I would legitimately consider buying. Now, I think it’s important to remember here that I am not saying I’m going to go offer on this right now. Remember sort of the funnel approach that I talked about earlier. I said that you were going to probably have to look at a hundred different prospects, find 20 of them that passed the initial sniff test, then we’re going to dig in further with the new bigger deals platform.

Dave:
You kind of get to skip that a hundred deals process and you can just go ahead and try and find 20 deals that look like this one that passed the initial sniff test and this one definitely does to me. Now, I told you at the beginning that I would share with you what I am looking for in these types of deals, and I’ve shared this a lot this year on the podcast, but my general belief about real estate investing is that you should be looking in this day and age for at least break even cashflow. And I really mean break even here, you got to be factoring in vacancy, turnover, costs, repairs and maintenance on top of your mortgage payment, insurance taxes, all that needs to be considered and you need to be breaking even in that first year minimum. That to me as an out-of-state investor, I’m not buying anything that doesn’t cashflow in that regards, but how much cashflow I need really depends on the upside side of things.

Dave:
So if I’m buying a property that is in a path of progress and has great opportunity to appreciate or there’s great zoning upside or there’s great value add opportunity, then I’m willing to take cashflow that’s maybe one or 2% cash on cash return off the bat because I know that over the next couple of years I’m going to turn that from a 2% cash on cash return to 10 or 12 or 15% and I’m going to try and build a lot of equity. On the other hand, if this deal was in an area that’s probably not going to appreciate that there’s some risk in, I would need my cash on cash return to probably be six or eight or even up to 10% depending on the risks and how limited the upsides are. And so by that criteria, I think that this property that I just found here with a 5% cash on cash return given these assumptions is one that I would definitely consider.

Dave:
I would count this as one of the 20 prospects that I’m going to dig in further. And I’ll just click around here in Indianapolis a little bit more. Here’s another property. This one is on Warman Avenue. This one I need to customize the inputs again. So I’m going to change this to 25% down and then I’m going to change my mortgage rate up a little bit just to be realistic here about what has happened in the last couple of days at 6.75 and when I get here is actually even better. A 6.3% cash on cash return 1 75. This place needs a little bit more work, I would say, but it still looks close to rent ready. I think you could do a cosmetic rehab here and get this thing up and running pretty quickly. So this is another deal that would meet my criteria. Now, once you’ve used this tool to find those 20 prospects that you’re going to dig into further, what do you do then? What is the additional steps and research that you need to do? I’ll get to that right after this break. Stick with us. We’ll be right back.

Dave:
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m here talking about how you can find deals on the market in today’s day and age in a pretty efficient way. So far what we talked about is adopting a mindset of a funnel where you start with a lot of prospects. I said like a hundred deals. You narrow that down to 20 that you think past the sniff test and you’re going to do a deeper dive on. And as I shared, the new bigger deals tool is a great way from not having to do that a hundred and just being able to find 20 good deals that meet your buy box, your meet criteria right off the bat so that you can move more quickly into the next stage, which was the underwriting ordeal analysis phase. Now, the difference between the previous stage and this next one may not seem obvious, but let me just explain it a little bit here.

Dave:
So in the first stage, I was just trying to make sure that using some rules of thumbs and general ideas about what expenses and rent were going to be that it’s worth my time to dig deeper on, but that is not enough to actually make an investment. So what you need to do next is shore up your assumptions because in our bigger deals tool or any estimator that you might use, or if you go to a property and just sort of do some back of the envelope math, that is really helpful. You need to do that to not waste your own time, but you need to really get clear about the assumptions before you move onto offering on a property and ultimately buying anything. So the first thing I would do here is focus on your rent and get as accurate a rent estimate as possible.

Dave:
Now we have tools on BiggerPockets that help you estimate that you can use our rent estimator. We have that in the bigger deals, but I would go one step further before you buy anything and talk to people in your area. I think that’s really important. If you have a property manager or you’re thinking about working with a property manager, call them. Ask them what they think that they can rent for. Go on a listing platform like apartments.com or Zillow and see what similar comps are renting for in your area. Or better yet, I mean if you know people who are renters in that neighborhood, call them and ask them what they are paying for rent and if they think the property that you’re considering buying is a reasonable comp because so much of your ultimate returns for real estate are going to be based on that initial rent and how high you can get it.

Dave:
And that’s the first thing I would do in this next stage. And to be clear, I would start doing this for all 20 of my prospects, but I would just do this one at a time. So start with one property, really get good at figuring out what that rent is and then move on to your assumptions about expenses. Now, some expenses are really easy to estimate, like taxes for example. That’s public knowledge that’s usually on a listing and you can just find that pretty easily. Insurance is usually easy to guess, but at this stage you may want to call an insurance agent and see what a property in your area, in this neighborhood, this size, this replacement costs is going to cost to insure because those are going to be a lot of your big expenses. If you know what your interest rate on your mortgage is going to be, your taxes and your insurance costs, that’s going to be a lot of your expenses.

Dave:
But the next stage actually is sort of one of the hardest parts and really just takes some practice and experience. And that’s estimating some of the variable costs, the ones that aren’t the same every year or every month. And these are things like repairs and maintenance, vacancy, capital expenditures. If you’re going to try and get good at something in this analysis process, that’s one of the key areas where people really should focus because getting good at that’s going to help you throughout the entirety of your real estate investing career because I’m sure you can imagine if you go on and find some deals, that first deal that I was looking at just now was renovated. So my expenses are probably going to be a little bit lower. I’ll probably pay more for that property because it’s already been renovated, but my repairs and CapEx and maintenance costs are probably going to be lower.

Dave:
How much lower is hard to say. You need to sort of talk to other investors. Maybe if you’re a homeowner or renter, you can talk to your landlord or you can make comps based on your own property. But I find that the easiest way to do this is talking to other investors, whether it’s on biggerpockets.com, you could do this for free on the forums or a local meetup. They’ll give you a good sense of how much they keep in reserve for these types of expenses, whether you have an A class property, a B class property or a C class property. And if you don’t know what that means, a class is really nice property recently renovated, probably doesn’t have high repair costs. B class is kind of in the middle. And then C class is a property that’s going to need some work and will probably have higher expenses.

Dave:
Once you’ve done all of these things, once you’ve sort of shored up your rent estimations, you know what your borrowing costs are going to be for your mortgage, you feel confident about your variable expenses, that’s when you really do the underwriting. So you can go to biggerpockets.com/calculators and use your rental property calculator, put the numbers in there, and that’s where you’ll get the really detailed output about what your investment will look like, not just in year one but over the lifetime of your investment. So I’m actually just going to do this now. Let’s use that deal that I was looking at. Just take the street address, put this in here, and then I’m going to go on to our purchase price. And for now, I’m going to assume that I’m paying full asking price, which is 2 85. Maybe you can get it for cheaper, but I don’t know during your screening process looking for a deal, I usually assume I’m paying full purchase price.

Dave:
Maybe if when you’re screening the deals and looking at them on bigger deals, you see that it’s been sitting on the market for 80 days or a hundred days, maybe you take 5% off and assume that you can do better. But this property I think was just recently listed. So I’m going to do that. I’m going to put in my purchase closing costs, which is something that you should really know at this stage. And I find that a lot of people get hung up on this. They’re like, I don’t know what my lender’s going to charge me or what an appraisal costs. Call and find out. This is super easy to do. Call a lender, call a title company, figure out what these expenses are going to be. Remember, at this stage, what you’re really trying to do is make sure all your assumptions in your calculations are as accurate as possible.

Dave:
And so yeah, you can use a rule of thumb for purchase closing costs, but why you could just call this as a super easy one to find right now for the purposes of this, because I’m not really buying this deal, I’m doing this live truly, I’m just going to assume $5,000. But if this were you, you should get a really accurate number here. Now, I’m not going to be rehabbing this property, so I’m just going to move on to my deal analysis. Put 25% down at 6.75 interest rate and assume that I’m getting a 30 year fixed rate mortgage and my income, let’s just call it twenty five fifty because I actually looked into this quickly and although our estimate of 2,500 I think is good, I think you could actually do better based on some of the other data that I’m seeing. I think we can get 25 50 for this property pretty comfortably.

Dave:
So I’m going to do that and move on. I’m going to say our property taxes here are $2,200 and our insurance should be about 1500 bucks. I just googled this before. And then for repairs and maintenance, because this is a relatively new property, I’ll put 5% in here vacancy. I’m also going to put 6% because I want to make sure in case those inevitable vacancies happen that I’m covered. And for capital expenditures, I’m going to put 5% in here as well. Because I’m an out-of-state investor, I’m going to put 8% here for management fees, but zero for any of my utilities because I’m going to just have my tenant pay those because this is a single family property. Then I hit finish and what I come out with is slightly lower than what I saw on the bigger deals, but it’s actually pretty close. So when it comes out, even after I’ve refined my assumptions, I’m looking at a deal that I would actually consider buying.

Dave:
This is a cash on cash return of 4% or about two 50 a month in cashflow. And again, this is a deal I would consider if there was considerable upside, if I was in a path of progress and this place is going to see its rent grow over the next couple of years, I would definitely consider buying this in today’s day and age because I’ve done a pretty thorough job here. I’m assuming high expenses, I’m being pretty conservative, and this is an example of a deal that I would move on to that next stage of going to visit it in person again. I would still do a little bit more work if I can’t go in person, I’d have my agent go, but this is the type of deal on paper that least to me as an out-of-state investor makes a lot of sense to do.

Dave:
Now, not everything that you put into the calculator is going to make this much sense. As I said at the beginning, and these are just rules of thumb. Remember, if you’re doing 20 of these calculator reports to really do the underwriting, maybe five of them are going to get to this next stage. One out of four, one out of five are probably going to be good and the rest are not going to make sense to you. And that’s okay. That is part of it. I know it can be frustrating when you’re first starting out and investing that you see a lot of deals that doesn’t work. That’s just part of the game. You have to get over that and just keep hunting for those deals. Some markets it might be one out of 10 is good, some might be one out of 20 is good.

Dave:
And still that is okay because there are good deals. We’re in this actually kind of interesting time in the housing market where, yeah, there are a lot of bad deals out there, but the good deals are almost getting better in my opinion. But you have to be patient and you have to develop this efficient framework for looking for deals, and that’s what we’re talking about here today. So the last step here is once you get to those five properties that make sense on the calculator, I recommend if you can going to visit them in person or if you have a trusted team in place to have them go visit it, because there’s just some things from pictures and from the numbers that just you can’t tell. Sometimes I think I’ve found this deal that’s amazing and it’s three bed, two bath, and you get in there and then you’re like, actually, that second bedroom doesn’t really make sense.

Dave:
No one’s going to want to live in there and you realize you’re not going to be able to rent it out for as much as you want. I actually, on the other hand, I bought a property I lived in for several years. It was listed on the market as a two unit. One was a four bedroom and one was a three bedroom. And when I got there, I’m looking around and I’m like, this is an okay deal. I was thinking about it and I opened a door and there was a staircase and I walked up the staircase and there was a one bedroom apartment up there that wasn’t listed on the property. There was a third unit that I didn’t know about. Now that is an extreme example, but these things do happen when you actually go in person, even if you don’t see a whole extra unit, maybe there’s an unfinished basement that you can turn into another unit, maybe in the upside era, you’re interested in looking for zoning upside and you see that there’s a huge backyard and you’re able to add an A DU in that neighborhood.

Dave:
These are the types of things you can do online, but really help to see in person. So if I’m getting that staged between underwriting and actually making an offer, I recommend getting eyes on it, whether it’s yourself or someone that you trust. It could be your property manager, it could be your agent, ideally both. I’ve done that. I’ve done deals sight unseen, but I have a trusted agent and property manager who go and look at the deals for me and can either do a FaceTime with me and look at those things. And then ideally, all five of those are worth offering on. Realistically, you’re going to see some things that come up that make you not like it. Maybe it’s on a busy street or the neighborhood’s just giving you the wrong vibes and it’s not right for your strategy. That’s totally okay. If you start out with 20 deals from bigger deals, you do the analysis on five and you owner offer on one or two, that’s great.

Dave:
That’s a win in my book. Maybe they get accepted, hopefully they do. But if they don’t, you just keep going and just keep going. And I know that this funnel approach may sound like it takes a lot of time, and at first it will take you a little time. You’re going to have to get used to looking at these expenses and maybe it will take you 15 or 20 minutes per calculator report. And to run 20 of those is going to take you five hours. That’s totally worth it. Taking you five hours to find a real estate investment, that is an entirely reasonable thing. You’re talking about a proven asset class that can bring you to financial freedom. I hope you are willing to spend five hours looking for a deal because this could change your entire life and eventually it’s not going to take you five hours, I promise, looking through 20 deals.

Dave:
Sooner or later, it’s going to take you two hours. And then this whole process is just going to get easier and easier and more and more efficient over the lifetime of your investing career. So my main lesson to you today and when we talking about finding on market deals is this mindset, right? To adopt the mindset of the funnel. Start as broad as you can. Identify 20 different deals that make sense, your strategy on paper. Then dig into every single number as much as you can. Analyze them, put ’em in the BiggerPockets calculator, and try to find three to five deals that really make sense and that you feel really good about your assumptions on. Then go visit those places in person, and ideally you find one or two that you’re going to make an offer on. And if you get those offer accepted, that’s when you pull the trigger, right?

Dave:
Because you’ve done all this work, you don’t have to second guess yourself and say, is this a great deal? Could I find something else? Because you’ve done the work, you’ve cast a broad net, you’ve looked at tons of different properties in your neighborhood, and you can say with confidence that you’ve found one of, if not the best deal on the market in your area. And if that doesn’t give you confidence to go out and buy something, I don’t know what will. So hopefully this makes sense to you. This is the process that I’ve literally been using for 15 years as a real estate investor, and I think it’s something that absolutely anyone can learn. And luckily this has gotten easier than ever with the new bigger deals tool. And again, if you want to check that out, go to biggerpockets.com/listings and you can try that for free.

Dave:
So if you’ve been waiting either for your first deal or to scale your portfolio to the next deal, go do this right now. Go check out as many properties as you can and before you say there’s no deals out there or cashflow is dead, go actually check this out. And if you do this, I’m confident you’ll start to get a sense of what a good deal is in your market. If you need to adjust your strategy a little bit, you can do that because now you’ll have data and information to base that on rather than just assuming that you can’t find good deals. Because I just found a couple just looking in a city I’ve never been to. I’m actively looking at deals all across the Midwest, and I know tons of other real estate investors who are investing in the Southwest on the West coast in expensive northeast markets right now because they’ve done this work to understand their assumptions, understand what works in their market, and do the work of analyzing lots of deals until they find the one that makes sense for them. Alright, that’s all I got for you guys today. Thank you so much for being here for this episode of the BiggerPockets podcast. We really appreciate you. We’ll see you next time.