Ashley:
Hey, rookies, we know that when you’re new to real estate, finding a deal and figuring out if it works can be intimidating. And even if you’ve done a few deals before in today’s market conditions, good deals can be harder to find.
Tony:
So that’s why today we’re bringing you a special bonus episode about how to find and analyze deals in any market.
Ashley:
That’s right. Dave Meyer, host of the BiggerPockets Real Estate podcast has used his analytic nerd powers for Good, and he’s putting together a webinar that walks you through this step-by-step.
Tony:
And guys, guys, Dave has a special bonus offer for you. So if you’ve ever thought about signing up for BiggerPockets Pro now just might be the time. With that, let’s turn it over to Dave.
Dave:
There is perhaps no more important skill for a real estate investor today than finding good deals. And of course, there are plenty of other skills and strategies and tactics that you need to be good at to be a successful investor, but given where things are with high interest rates and not a lot of inventory on the market, it’s particularly important in today’s day and age to be very good at identifying deals and being able to analyze them well. So in today’s episode, I’m actually going to share with you a recent webinar that I did on biggerpockets.com all about how to find great deals. And in this webinar, I think I help you understand that with the right tools and the right network, you can still find good often cash flowing deals. And yes, on the MLS even in today’s market, I’m super excited to share this with you because in these webinars that I do on the website, I get to go a little bit deeper and do a bit more in depth education than I do on a regular podcast episode.
So I’m super excited to share this with you and in exchange for listening to it, if you want to unlock all the tools and all the benefits that BiggerPockets Pro has to offer, some of which I’m going to talk about during points of this webinar. So if you want to use all the tools that I’m talking about, go to biggerpockets.com/pro, use the coupon P deal two, four, that’s P as in Paul, D two four, you’re going to get 20% off pro and make sure to stick around to the end of the webinar. I have more offers for you, but don’t worry, no matter whether you want to go pro and use the tools that I talk about in this webinar or not, you’re still going to get tons of great, very practical hands-on step-by-step information about how you can find a deal in today’s market.
So let’s jump into it. So the name of the webinar I did recently was How to Find and Analyze Deals in Any Market in 2024, and of course, I will be updating it and adapting it to this audio podcast format and I’ll describe everything I’m doing now. If you listen to this podcast, you probably know who I am, but if not, my name is Dave Meyer. I’ve been a real estate investor for coming up on 15 years now. I’ve been working at BiggerPockets for almost nine. I obviously host this podcast. I host the On the Market podcast. I’ve written two books and I invest in all sorts of things from short-term rentals, long-term rentals, commercial investing. I also do some private lending right now, but today we’re going to be talking mostly about how to find what I think is as personally my bread and butter and is probably the best real estate strategy for the majority of people out there, which is long-term rentals.
You can also apply a lot of the skills and step-by-step tools that I’m giving you today to other types of deals like short-term rentals. This would work for if you want to do a burr or house hack, all the skills are applicable today, but in the examples that I’m going to give you, it’s going to be for a long-term rental agenda for the webinar, podcast, whatever you call this today is going to be one. I’m going to show you how to build a great buy box to find deals. Secondly, I’m going to teach you a couple steps to taking that buy box and turning them into actual leads that you can analyze for a home run deal. And then I’m actually going to give you a demo of a new tool we have at BiggerPockets called The Deal Finder, which is designed specifically to help real estate investors just like you and me find deals.
And I’ll tell you guys, I have actually found this is true. I have found a real life deal that I went and bought on the Deal finder while we were developing it for BiggerPockets. So I’m really excited to share this tool with you because I’ve been using it and it’s awesome. Before we jump into the deal finding, I just want to take a step back and remind people why they should be considering going through this effort in the first place. Because you probably know that you want to invest in real estate or maybe you’re already investing in real estate, but investing today is hard and you don’t know exactly how you can find deals, but at the same time, you’re motivated because real estate is awesome. It creates tons of cashflow, it gives you tax advantages, it gives you passive income every month. It’s all these amazing things that unlock so much more in your life, like financial independence, generational wealth, all this stuff.
And the great thing about financial freedom is that it doesn’t actually take that much. It just takes getting the right properties and doing it one at a time. So that’s actually what we’re going to talk about today, is when you look at the skills that I’m going to teach you about finding a deal, don’t get caught up in, oh, I need five of these, I need 10 of these, I need 20 of these. Just learn how to do these steps and find your next deal and then you can apply the exact same skills a year from now, two years from now, whenever you’re ready to buy your next deal. And if you can do this over time, I promise you guys, you can achieve financial freedom. Now, if you’re having doubts and you think, oh, it’s not possible for me to find any deals right now, I can tell you that if you use the right tools, you’re going to feel confident that you can find the right deals.
Maybe you’re worried that you don’t have enough money. We’ll talk about this a little bit later, but once you find good deals, actually finding financing or finding partners becomes a lot easier because you have a valuable asset that people want to participate in. Or maybe you’re worried just like there are no more good deals out there at all. Well, I’m going to help you take out the guesswork, take out that uncertainty and show you how to do it. I know how you feel, guys. It is a tough market. I’ve been in the same position many times throughout my investing career, but I’ve been able to overcome that thanks to the right tools, the right education, the right people, and because of BiggerPockets, when I first started investing, it was back in 2009, I first started trying to figure out how to pull this off, and I was so bad at it.
I was just fumbling around. I didn’t have a network. I had zero people to help me. I didn’t have tools. I was pretty good at Excel, I guess. So I used a lot of that and I did that for six years, just making it all up. Then I found BiggerPockets, I started working there actually and uncovered all these amazing tools and you all get to use that from the beginning or at least from right now. So make sure to use the tools, the networking, the education that BiggerPockets offers you. A lot of it is available for [email protected], so make sure that you check that out. And the other thing I’ve learned other than just use tools and resources that other people have invented at work really well again, is that it doesn’t take a lot of properties, guys. So I don’t want you to get overwhelmed.
Just focus on finding the right properties that you can supplement your income with right now, and over time you will grow your wealth, you will find financial freedom and you will be able to live life on your terms. And yes, this sounds good because it is good, but remember guys, there is work involved in getting there. You do have to put work into real estate, but I’m going to show you today that it’s not that much work. It’s not that complicated and pretty much anyone can do it. So let’s get started. The first step in finding great deals is identifying what your investing strategy is. And like I said, the examples I’m going to give you today are long-term buy and hold because I want to show you all that you can find cash flowing assets on the MLS. I will show you that today.
I’ll give you an example of that today. Then you can use the same skills for Burr fix and flip short-term medium rental. But the key is that you know what you’re going to try and buy. You need to know that strategy. You need to know what market you’re going to invest in. So maybe you’re choosing between investing locally or investing long distance. We have tools for that on BiggerPockets. You can go to biggerpockets.com/markets, help you find a great market to invest in, and once you know those two things, once you have a strategy and a market, that’s when it’s time to start moving forward on deal finding. Some people start just looking around for deals, but it gets really overwhelming when you’re considering a lot of different markets and a lot of different strategies. If you’re like, oh, maybe I’ll do a burr in Cleveland or I’ll flip a house in Phoenix, or I’ll do a long-term rental in Dallas, that’s so many options.
It’s too many options. Take the time right now to just say like, I want to do this strategy. This is the market I’m going to invest in, and then move on to the five step framework. I’m going to share with you right now the five steps to finding a home run deal starts with part one, which is building your buy box. You might have heard this term before. A buy box is basically just a list of specific criteria that you’re going to target when you go out and look for deals, and it’s the same thinking that I just shared with you about markets and strategies. If you’re willing to invest in any asset, any type of property, there’s too many, there’s 140 million properties in the United States, you need to narrow it down a little bit so you narrow it down by strategy and market. But also when you’re creating a buy box, I recommend thinking like something like asset class.
So do you want to buy a single family home? Are you willing to consider condos? Or maybe you want a small multifamily like a two to four unit. Consider what your property class is going to be. Do you want to buy in a neighborhood? A neighborhoods sound great, but they are usually more expensive and generate less cashflow, whereas you can buy something in a C class neighborhood and although there’s probably more cashflow, there’s going to be greater maintenance costs. There’s no right answer, right? There’s just a trade off and you need to think about these things for yourself. So I’ll just give you a list of eight different things that I think about in my buy box. First is deal type. So that’s kind of like the strategy we were just talking about. So rental property, flip. Do you want to do a short-term rental commercial classes?
Those are the deal type. Then I move on to asset class, which is like single family condo, small multifamily. Then I move on to management plan and I’m going to be passive or am I going to be active? That’s going to come in handy when we analyze deals a little bit later. Then think about your business plan. Are you going to do a big rehab or do you just want to buy something that’s stabilized? Hold onto it, do nothing to it, do the least amount of work. Both are fine, but you need to target the right property based on your intention. Then we have things like property class. We already talked about location, and then of course at the end, purchase price. You have to buy something that you can afford and something that just makes sense for an investor. Usually buying a 1 million single family home, probably not going to generate some cashflow for you as an investor.
So think about what purchase price works in the market that you intend to invest in. So just as an example, so let’s just say that I’m a relatively new investor. I’m out there trying to buy, let’s say it’s my first property. I would say, alright, I’m willing to buy single family homes or small multifamily. I’m open to either, I don’t really want to spend more than about two 50 or $300,000 total. That’s what I’ve got. I have enough saved up for that and maybe a little bit of a rehab. I am thinking about doing it in a college town with some student housing. I want to find fixed rate debt. I want to be able to do a rehab, but nothing more than a cosmetic rehab because I’m new and I don’t have a lot of experience in that. I’m going to do a long-term rental.
So once I come up with those criteria, then it’s a lot easier to find deals because I can narrow down once you have the buy box done. That brings us to part two of the five-step framework, which is finding deals. So part two is trying to find deals the hard way, and I don’t mean this as bad, it’s not necessarily hard if you’re really good at it, but it is time consuming and it does take work. So you’ve probably heard of off market deals and how amazing they can be and they really can be. You can get fantastic deals if you do off market deals, but you should know that they are time consuming. Most off market deals come from something called direct to seller marketing. So there are different ways to do this. You can do direct mail, you can literally send mail to people, you can knock on people’s doors, you can cold call, you can put out advertising, but off market deals basically involve you as the investor going out there and identifying a property that you want to buy, contacting the seller before they put it on the MLS before they put it on Zillow or Redfin and negotiating directly with them.
Now you can find great deals this way if you find the right kind of seller who’s motivated to work with you and to negotiate, but it’s a numbers game, you’re going to have to call hundreds if not thousands of people. Same thing with direct mail. You have to put money and time into that. So that is one step to finding deals that you can consider. I have done one off market deal in my entire career. It was a good deal, but I don’t really do this because I work full-time and I prefer other types of deal finding strategies. If you’re a full-time real estate investor, highly recommend off market deal and direct to seller marketing. It could be really effective if you have the time and money to do it. Like I said, those aren’t personally what I do. Instead, I do these other two steps.
So part three of my framework, if you can try the hard way, but you should do part three for sure, which is finding deals through people, networking with people. Tell people that you’re looking, I know this sounds so weird. You don’t want to just walk up to people on the street and be like, Hey, I’m looking for houses, but tell people in the industry, go to a real estate meetup. Tell them what you’re looking for when you meet your agent, when you meet your lender, when you talk to your property manager, go and tell them the type of property that you’re looking for and they might hear from someone that they know either personally or professionally that they want to sell and they might connect you. So that’s a great way to do it. You can build your network with other investors. Obviously I just mentioned meetups is one way to do that.
You could also do that on the BiggerPockets forums. That’s an entirely free way to build your network. Another free way to network and find deals through people is to work with an investor friendly agent. This is such an easy way to do it. I have found the majority of the deals I’ve done in my life through an agent and BiggerPockets can actually match you with an agent who specifically works with investors. That’s also free. Just go to biggerpockets.com/agent, but highly recommend doing that. I find a lot of people get hung up on trying to find a deal and they’ve never even talked to an agent, which is a little weird to me because that is the easiest way to figure out one, they might have deals for you, but even if they don’t, they can tell you how to build your network and maybe even help you advise you and off market strategies or advise you on how to build out your buy box in a better way.
So definitely talk to a lender. That brings us to part four of our deal finding framework, which is another tactic finding deals with tools. Now, I told you at BiggerPockets, we’ve actually been working on this deal finder for a while now. I’ve had the pleasure of getting to work on it myself, and we’ve basically built a listing service. It’s similar to other listing platforms, but it’s specifically designed to help real estate investors find deals. So when I go on biggerpockets.com, you could just go to the find deals tab if you want to follow along. Obviously you can’t see what I’m looking at on my screen right now, but I will do my best to describe it to you. But if you’re driving at the gym, whatever, when you go home, just go to biggerpockets.com. There’s a little thing that says find deals and you can check this out.
Basically when I pull it up, it has heat maps of prices so I can find areas where they’re in my price point crime, which a lot of landlords care about or forecast. So I’m actually looking at Tuscaloosa, Alabama whenever I do market analysis, Tuscaloosa comes up and I really like the idea of investing in college towns. It’s where the University of Alabama is by the way. So I’m looking at Tuscaloosa and right now I can see heat maps by zip code, by neighborhood of which areas are forecast to grow the fastest. So I’m looking at this area, it’s called Skyland Park, and I can see that it’s forecast to grow like 6% in the next year. That’s really good. Meanwhile, there’s a place not far away called Mimosa Manor, that fun Mimosa Manor is forecast to grow only 2% in the next year. Now, I’m not going to make my entire decision based on that, but since I don’t know this market well, I’m going to look for deals that are located mostly in those neighborhoods.
Next thing I’m going to do is set up my buy box. That’s what this entire tool is designed to do. So I’m going to put my price point in and I’m going to use that example of a buy box I mentioned to you earlier. So my max price is going to be 300,000 for property type. I’m going to do house. I don’t want to buy a townhouse in this example. Then I really like buying rentals that have a bunch of bedrooms, so I’m going to do three bedrooms at least, and then I’m going to put on a couple other filters. Now, the filters that I’ve mentioned so far are things that you can find elsewhere. You can filter for beds and baths and square foot and all these things on Zillow. But what you can’t do on Zillow, but you can do on the BiggerPockets deal finder is I can filter by forecast.
So I’m going to say I only want deals that are forecast to grow at least 3% in the next year. Then I’m going to open my advanced filters and get rid of anything that’s an F or a D grade neighborhood. They’re graded for you right there, and that is a subjective tool. So you may want to analyze that a bit more for yourself, but just know that those are subjective. There is no definitive. This is a D neighborhood, this is a B. It’s really up to each individual investor to decide for themselves. Then I’m going to do something called rental yield, which is an estimate for cashflow. So I could actually go on and look for properties on the MLS based on whether or not they’re predicted to cashflow. And when I do this in Tuscaloosa, I’ve actually found a couple two different properties in Skyland Park.
I’m doing this live, guys, I’m doing this. I’ve never done this before. I’m doing this well, I’ve used the tool before. I’ve never done it in this area of Tuscaloosa. I’m just doing this on my computer as I go through this. I found two deals. One is a three bed, two bath. It’s like 1500 square feet for two 19, basically two 20. So I’m actually going to open this up, look at this deal, get some more information about it and see what I can learn. And this is the other really cool part of what we have in the deal finder is not only do you get to see things like the basic information about the property, but right there in the listing you get to see rental estimates, which I’m seeing at 1850. I could see my price growth for one years and five years.
I can see the estimated home value and reasons why. So you see this estimate, it doesn’t tell you why they come up with that number. On the BiggerPockets deal finder, we tell you, Hey, this property is under the average of the area because the lot size is smaller or it’s bigger, it has more bedrooms than the average one in the neighborhood, but that lets you as the investor sort of understand where these analytics are coming from in a way that’s really helpful in making your decisions. So this has been really helpful. I’ve found a couple of deals that I can analyze right now, but before we move on to the fifth step of our deal finding framework, I just want to call out one last thing here, which is that when you’re searching for deals, you can actually save your buy box. So make sure to save it and then anytime a new deal hits the market that meets your buy box, we’re going to send you an email that is such a valuable tool.
You can say anytime there’s a deal that is predicted to cashflow in Tuscaloosa that meets all of my personal criteria, please email me and we’re going to do that for you. That is the real power of the BiggerPockets deal finder. So highly recommend you guys all check that out. Alright, now that we’ve talked about the three different ways of finding deals in our framework, just as a reminder is finding deals, what I call the hard way. It’s a great way, but it is the time consuming way which is direct to seller off market deals. The second one is finding deals through people like an agent, your network, just people. And the third was finding deals through tools like the BiggerPockets deal finder. When I say finding deals in those three different ways, it’s a bit of a misnomer because what I actually mean is finding leads because when you talk to an agent, when you use the deal finder, they’re not actually deals yet.
They’re just perspective deals, what I would call a lead to turn them from a lead into a deal, you actually have to analyze them. You need to go run the numbers for this specific property and make sure that it actually works for you, your strategy, your financial goals, all of that. Because listen, the reality is 99% of properties, 99% of deals out there, or leads I should say out there are not the right ones for you. Some of them won’t cashflow, some of them are too complex of a rehab. Some of them might be good deals, but they’re just not the right fit for your portfolio mix that you’re trying to accomplish. So that’s why you really need to not just guess. If a deal meets your criteria, you need to analyze it and luckily at BiggerPockets we have another tool for you that you can use to analyze deals really easily.
It’s called the BiggerPockets Rental Property Calculator, and I’m going to describe to you how to use it. Of course, again, you can’t see what I’m doing here, but later on when you’re home, just go to the analyze deal section. We make it really easy for you to find Hit the rental property calculator and that will take you to the interface that I’m going to be describing. I’m actually going to walk you through the property, the lead that we were just talking about in Tuscaloosa and show you how to analyze it. And on the BiggerPockets calculators there’s basically five steps to analyzing deals. You’re going to put in your property info, your purchase information, loan details, rental income, and that’s it. And that might sound like a lot five steps, but I’ll show you guys that we can do this really, really quickly. It starts with literally just copy and pasting.
I’m going to copy and paste the address of this property and when I hit next, we’re actually going to get a bunch of information pulled in from BiggerPockets. We have tax information, square footage, that kind of stuff gets pulled in so that we’ll do that for you. Then I’m going to add some photos of the property to make sure that I remember what it looks like and if you’re looking at a lot of leads, for example, if you look at 10 or 15 a week, which I think you should because that’s how you find good deals, you might want pictures to remember. That’s just a pro tip after having done this a lot of times. So that was the first step. Then I’m going to move on to my purchase information. So for now, let’s just assume I’m going to buy it at full price, which is $219,900.
Closing costs are going to be like five grand, and when I look at the pictures, I don’t know if I need to do a rehab. I’m looking at this and there’s brand new luxury vinyl plank on the floors. It looks really well painted. I actually think someone renovated this relatively recently. There’s nice white subway tile. We got stainless steel counters. The cabinets actually look a bit dated. They’re maybe from the eighties, but they’ve painted them and they actually look quite nice. So when I’m looking at this deal, I’m going to analyze it right now, assuming that we don’t need to put a lot of money into it, I’m not going to rehab it. I’m going to try and do this one turnkey. So that’s the purchase section. So we’ve done property info and purchase. We’ve already done two of the five. Next we’re going to go to loan details.
Now I’m going to put 25% down. As an investor who’s not going to live in this property, I’m going to put 25% down. For my interest rate, I’m going to put 6.5%. That’s about what they are. When I’m recording this in the middle of 2024 for points charged, I’m going to put zero and for loan term I’m going to put 30 years. Now I’ve done enough real estate deals to just know how to rule of thumb estimate some of these inputs. If you need some help on the calculator that I’m using, there’s these little help buttons that can help give you rules of thumb so you don’t get stuck on any particular input. We can help you know that what the average interest rate is, what loan term you should be using, how much most people put down. There’s some tips on there that you should definitely check out.
Next, moving on to step four of deal analysis. We’re going to go to rental income. I’ve already told you that we had rental income right on our listing at 1850, but pro tip for you all, we actually have another tool called the Rent Estimator on BiggerPockets. So if you want to learn more about rent in the area, you can do that. You can basically look for rental comps. You can see what’s called the distribution of different rents. So you can see like, okay, the average one is 1850, but a nice place, the one that we’re looking at, because it’s been recently renovated, we’d call that maybe the 75th percentile for the 75th percentile. It’s actually 1925, and so that’s what I’m going to put in for my calculator. This is a nice place and I’m going to put in 1925, I think I can get toward the higher end of rent.
I’m obviously not going to put 90th percentile or a hundredth percentile. That’s overly ambitious, but when I look at the comps on the rent estimator, this is one of the nicest properties in the area, and so I think I can get 75th percentile. Now we move on just to our last thing here, our last part of deal analysis, and that is expenses and we break expenses down into a couple of different categories. We have taxes and insurance, which are what I call fixed costs. So it’s basically things that you know what they’re going to cost every year. Obviously they change, but we know for this property, for example, due to public record that property taxes are $525 a year. That is very cheap compared to what I pay for my property taxes elsewhere, but that’s maybe one of the great things about Alabama. Next, insurance insurance is actually pretty high in Alabama and it’s about $2,000 per year for this property, which isn’t a lot for a more expensive property, but given that this property is only about $220,000 purchase price, I consider that pretty high, but that’s what it costs.
So I’m going to put it in for repairs and maintenance. I’m going to put 10% in here because I don’t know this property, I’m not going to renovate it, so I have to assume there’s probably some lurking things broken that I don’t know about. So I’m going to set aside 10% of my revenue to make sure that I have money there. I’m going to do the same thing for vacancy. I’m going to put a 6% vacancy rate and capital expenditures. I’m going to put 5% CapEx or capital expenditures. It’s similar to repairs and maintenance, but it’s for bigger things like replacing your HVAC or your roof. These stuff looks pretty new. Of course, if I was going to actually buy this deal, I would make sure that all of my assumptions are right, but just for now, while this is still a lead, before I offer on it, I’m going to use these rules of thumb and move on to my management fee, which is 8%.
That’s what I pay my property managers right now. And then the last thing we do is put in utility information for this property because it’s a single family home. I’m going to leave these all blank because for the single family properties I own, the tenants pay their own utilities, they pay the gas, they pay the water, they pay the garbage using it. I don’t need to get involved with that. Sometimes if you buy a duplex and there’s only one electrical meter, you as the landlord should pay that and collect some portion of it from your tenant. So we have spaces for that in the calculator, but you don’t need to do that for the type of deal that I’m looking at here, which is a single family home. So that’s it guys. Hopefully you can see how easy it is to analyze deals using this type of tool.
I was talking a lot, but you can honestly do it in three to five minutes once you get good at this. And what I see from this property is that this deal is borderline, but I probably wouldn’t buy it to be honest. So what I’m seeing is that the cashflow from this deal would be $136 a month, not bad cash on cash return is just about 3%. Again, that’s not bad. I would actually buy a property that has a 3% cash on cash return. If there was a value add opportunity, if I knew that I could make some upgrades to the property and boost the cashflow in the future, I would consider it. But this is a stabilized asset, and so 3% cash on cash return is a little low for me. Now, you might be thinking, okay, time to move on to the next lead.
Let’s go analyze another one, and maybe you’re right. But before you do that, I highly recommend you think about what would make this a good deal because you don’t have to just accept the first analysis or the seller’s first offer. This property that I’ve been looking at has been on the market for 38 days. The average property right now sits on the market for like 15 days in this area. So we know that the seller is not moving this property at the current price, which means it’s probably overpriced. So using the BiggerPockets calculator, these little sliders here, I can say, what if I was able to get it from two 19 to two 12? Okay, well now it’s 3.6%. Still sort of borderline for me, but maybe I’ll say, actually, I’ll see if this seller is willing to do a rate for me. This is something that a lot of sellers are willing to do right now.
If they can’t move product, maybe they’ll give you a rate and instead of paying 6.5%, you’re going to pay 6%. Alright, that gets me to a 5% cash on cash return, which is a lot closer to what I might buy, but to be honest, I probably usually want to get about a 6% return. So I would need to get the sale price down to about 200,000. That’s really what would get me to buy this deal. So because I’ve used this analysis tool, I can say, I need this property for $200,000 and I can print out a really cool PDF that shows all of the relevant information, all of my calculations, to share with potential lenders to share with potential partners and maybe even share with the seller because I have no idea if the seller will accept 200 grand, that’s 10% off their asking price.
They might tell me absolutely not. No way I’m going to take my chances. But if you go to them with your analysis and say, Hey, listen, I’m an investor. This has to make sense for me. I’m not buying it to live in it. I’m buying it to earn a return and I need a 6% cash on cash return to make this work, and that’s why I’m offering you $200,000. I’m not trying to nickel and dime you, I’m just offering you what would make this deal work for me. The seller has the choice to take it or leave it, but you as the investor, because you have these analysis tools, can sort of figure out what the right offers to make are, and that is an incredibly valuable tool. So just don’t forget, don’t just analyze the deal when you’re in these calculators, think about how to optimize your deal, how to make the best structure for your offer to give you the best chance of getting it accepted and to give you the best chance of getting a great deal.
Alright, that was the BiggerPockets calculator, and we have now gone through our five steps of finding deals. So remember, what you first need to do is build out your buy box. That’s things like picking your market, your strategy, your price point, all of that. Then you can choose to find deals or find leads in three different ways. You can look for off market deals, you can network and use people to find deals, or you can use tools like the BiggerPockets deal finder to find more leads. Then the last step, which we just went over is analyzing those leads to find out which ones are the right ones for you, how to structure your offer to hopefully get a great deal, accept it, and that’s it guys. Hopefully you can see that finding deals is not that hard. I just walked you through and I found a pretty solid lead just going on the MLS and picking a random one, right?
That deal, I don’t know if it would actually work for any of you, but I know people who would buy that deal as is at full price. Tuscaloosa is just a rapidly appreciating market and people might say, Hey, I’ll take 3% cashflow, or maybe you can go and find other deals in Tuscaloosa. Other markets like that that are cashflowing even more, I just looked at one deal and was able to find something with positive cashflow. So if you spend the time looking, I assure you, if you find the right markets have the right buy box, you’re going to be able to find deals. So that’s what we learned today. But listen, I know that even with these steps that I just shared with you, even with these tools, real estate investing can feel a bit scary to people. Someone wants described it to me as jumping off a cliff, and I really don’t think of it that way.
I know when you’re new to this, it can feel that way, but I actually think that real estate investing is a much less extreme thing. I actually think real estate investing is not base jumping. It’s not paragliding, it’s a mellow hike, right? It’s walking uphill. So you do have to put in some effort, but you are following a trail. You’re following a path that other people have laid for you, and it is not rocket science as long as you put in the effort. If you keep taking steps consistently, you absolutely can get to your financial destination. And at BiggerPockets, we build tools to help investors on their journey towards financial freedom. This is not just theory, this is stuff that we work on every single day at BiggerPockets. We have tens of thousands of real estate investors find financial freedom that includes me. So before we get out of here, I have two simple questions to ask you guys.
First and foremost, are you committed to buying your first or next real estate deal in the next 12 months? And second, are you prepared to follow and execute a daily plan? Because if you do the steps that I just talked about, identifying what you want, building a buy box and looking for deals, analyzing those leads and making good offers, if you follow that daily and do it consistently, you can reach your full potential. So if you answer yes to both of those questions, let’s talk for a second about how to make 2024 a year of change for you because real estate investing works and our goal at BiggerPockets is to help you take real estate investing frameworks that work and apply them to your own life. And that’s why we’ve created all these tools to help you get to financial freedom faster and with less pain.
And we’ve bundled all those tools into a single subscription called BiggerPockets Pro. It is specifically designed to be a one-stop shop to help you start scale and manage your entire portfolio. And if you’re wondering how can one subscription provide everything an investor needs, let me show you. So first thing that PRO offers you is great, really world-class analysis tools. This comes from nine different calculators that you can use. I only showed you one or described one of them today. There are tons of different other deal calculators and rent estimators that you can use. You get full access to the deal finder I described where you can create custom buy boxes, save those buy boxes, so you get notified when new deals come up. You get interactive market finder where you can find new markets. All of those tools come with pro. The second benefit of PRO is really top tier education.
Now we have a lot of free education at BiggerPockets, which is great. You should take advantage of all of it. You also get access to pro exclusive webinars and exclusive workshops, many of which I host. Those are only available for pro. They’re much more interactive. There’s more q and a. So if you want access to that, you have to be a BiggerPockets Pro. The third benefit of Pro is building your network faster. We found that BiggerPockets Pro build their network on biggerpockets.com three times faster. You get three times more connections, I should say, by being a pro than being a free member. That’s by hanging out in the BiggerPockets Pro forums or just by signaling to the rest of the community that you’re a serious investor and that you’re actively participating and working on deals. And then the fourth and last pro benefit I will share with you today is the Landlord Command Center.
This is where you get all this different software that you need to run your actual business. So everyone needs property management software and we have Rent ready for you for free. Rent Ready is an amazing tool. It’s usually like 240 bucks, but we’re going to give it to you for free by being a pro. You’ll also get portfolio monitoring and accounting software from essa Plus you get all the legal documents like leases, PET addendums, all that for all 50 states just by being a BiggerPockets Pro that is so incredibly valuable. So just to summarize, pro helps you by giving world-class analysis tools, the expert education. You can supercharge your network and you get access to the landlord command center, and it actually might even be tax deductible. Talk to your CPA about that. Now, I obviously of course believe in BiggerPockets Pro because I’ve helped build these tools.
I use these tools all the time, but take it from our pro members like Aaron C who said there is no way he could analyze the volume of properties he does without being a BiggerPockets Pro or from Beth who says it’s the foundation of her real estate investing endeavor. Or Jackie who says it’s a small cost for something that adds so much value. So speaking of value, you’re probably wondering how much BiggerPockets Pro costs. Well, if you added up all the individual components, it would actually come out to just about $5,000. Now, that actually would be worth it. Finding just one good deal will net you more than $5,000 over your investing career. But at BiggerPockets, our goal is to help democratize real estate investing to make it accessible for everyone. And so we price our products so that anyone can afford it because five grand is a steep investment.
BiggerPockets Pro is normally just $468 a year, which is an amazing, amazing value for all the tools and value that you get from it. But it’ll give you a special tip because that’s the price. If you pay monthly, if you pay annually, we actually drop the price to 390 bucks a year. And remember at the beginning of this podcast, I told you if you use the Code P deal 24, you’ll get 20% off, which drops the price even further down to $312 a year. So make sure to use that code. But before we go, remember I also told you that we had some special offers for you today, and we have some very generous bonuses for anyone who wants to go pro today. We really want to get everyone on that path to financial freedom to start transacting as soon as possible. And so we’re going to throw in three bonuses plus that 20% off.
If you go pro today, the first bonus is the Show Me the Money Starter Pack. It features a six step eliminating Debt and repairing credit ebook. It comes with worksheets on building pillars of wealth and a nine hour workshop on and low money down investing this starter pack is $470 normally, but you’re getting it for free if you become a pro today. The second bonus deals with demystifying the housing market. This is our housing market bundle and it features a guide to de-risking investments in a changing economy. It has videos on investing in an uncertain market, and it features my very own 2024 estate of real estate investing report that’s worth over 500 bucks on its own, but we’re giving you that for free. And then last, but my favorite bonus, ACE, your analysis toolkit, this is my favorite bonus because I get to give you my book for free.
I wrote a book with Jay Scott called Real Estate By the Numbers. It’s all about deal analysis, how to get really good at knowing which leads are the right ones for your portfolio. I’m going to give you that book plus all of my Excel files plus videos and how to use all of that for free. If you go pro today, that’s usually 229 bucks, but you’re going to get it by going for Pro today. And just as a reminder, I don’t know if I said this before, but just so you know, if you go pro and don’t use this stuff, you get a hundred percent refund within 30 days. Just email [email protected] and we’ll give you your money back, no questions asked if you’re not using this stuff. So as a reminder, if you go pro today using the Code P deal 24, that’s P as in Paul, DEAL two four at biggerpockets.com/pro, you’re going to get that 20% off.
So Pro is just 312 bucks a year, plus the show me the Money Starter pack demystifying the housing market bundle and that ace your analysis toolkit. Listen, this is the best deal we ever offer on Pro. So if you’ve been thinking about going pro, you might as well do it now because you’re getting all of these great bundles plus the 20% off. Okay, everyone, that’s all I got for you today. I hope you learn something from this webinar podcast mashup, and you can see that finding deals is not this mysterious difficult thing. If you follow the right steps of building a buy box, considering off market deals, building your network, using deal finding tools and analyzing leads, you can absolutely find deals. I got close to finding a deal on my first try on the MLS, and you can do the exact same thing if you put inconsistent work and consistent action towards your financial goals. Alright, that’s it. I’m actually getting out of here now for BiggerPockets. I am Dave Meyer and I should mention if you guys have any questions about this, anything that I went over today, you can always find me on biggerpockets.com. I hang out there. You can also find me on Instagram where I’m at the data deli. And of course, I will see you again very soon for another episode of the BiggerPockets podcast in just a couple of days.
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