Does anyone know of a website where i can find apartment listings for free??
Thanks in advance
Contact a commercial realtor.You may have to qualify.
Call a local Real Estate Investment Specialist. Loopnet is full of deals that have long stagnated on the market. Good deals are brokered internally with the top REI companies.
Try Marcus&Millichap in your local market.
There are numerous web listing sites available- a few have been mention already (CCIMNET, Loopnet, MRIS, CoStar & Craigslist for smaller properties) you should also look at firms that specialize in apartment sales. Most larger comm. firms don’t post listings until they’ve shopped it in-house or to the listing brokers personal client list. That practice I believe is contrary to spirit of the NAR Ethics Rules, but is allowed and generally recognized as a practice by commercial firms to keep both sides of the deal. The one exception is the practice expounded by firms like Sperry Van Ness, in which all listings must be publicly offered within 10 days of the listing date, and if over $1Mil., it will be email blasted to national brokerage community and posted in all major listing services to get the maximum exposure for the listing. This practice is mandatory, not optional. It’s unfortunate that many Sellers are oblivious to the common practice by the larger firms, which results in fewer offers and therefor lower potential sale prices. Of course if you are on the buy side, you want to find the property that is being listed by an inexperience agent that give the listing poor exposure.
HA…if you use realtor.com, it better be http://www.realtor.org/commercial to find commercial property exchanges or commercial brokers. 85-90% of commercial apartments won’t be listed. Maybe 10% are on loopnet, a commercial property exchange, and other listservs.
So Dee, being that you’re a real estate agent, what is your opinion on that…problem?
Wouldn’t it be more efficient [for the broker, and the client] for the CCIM’s to share all of their commercial listings in an MLS-style fashion? Either on Loopnet, the MLS, or whatever?
85-90% is a big %
You are saying that 85%-90% of commercial properties are not ever listed and are handled in house? Am I understanding this correctly? I know that the deals we have done have been word of mouth from people that knew we would be interested, but as the CEO said, that percent seems very high.
DB
That makes it much more about who you know than what you know.
First basica lesson about commercial real estate is that most are not members of NAR and don’t use MLS. About 50% are handled in-house at least. Depends on the brokerage. The rest are off market. I have a buyer, so I call all of my commercial friends who I know have relationships with apartment owners.
The two books I’d recommended in another thread explains how to find commercial deals. Most times, it’s just calling the owner and asking if they want to sell. I like loopnet and property exchange sites, so things are changing, but most deals are still off market. There are issues on big deals. Most landlords don’t want all the tenants knowing the place is for sale. Other times, it’s not for sale until the right buyer makes the right offer, if you know what I mean.
Sellers are often afraid if they put their properties for sale that their tenants will get spooked and move out. A lot of owners don’t want their tenants to know they are thinking of selling. I’ve had investors during an “investor to investor” sale ask me to pretend I was an inspector, a window replacement guy, even one guy asked me to say I was a winterization specialist. Out of respect for the owner I lied a couple of times to the seller’s tenants, but refuse to do it anymore. Basically I think one of the main reasons investors sell to other investors behind the scenes is because they don’t want to spooke the tenants they have. Tenants get very scared when landlords sell their properties.
Personally I don’t see a lot of benefit to selling behind the scenes. I have never seen the seller get much for the their property when they choose to sell in this manner. The times I have put purchase agreements on properties using this method, my offer was far below what they could have received if they would have listed the property. I believe the MLS is still the #1 way to maximize your profits when selling a property. I see very little benefit in not listing a property. But that’s just my experiences.
You can “believe” MLS is the #1 way to sell a property, but commercial brokers will use Loopnet or Commercial Info Exchanges (CIE), which is similar. No one wants a residential agent using MLS bringing a buyer on their commercial property. It’s already bad enough dealing with uneducated agents in residential.
If I placed a commercial property in MLS, guaranteed I’d get a bunch of agents who don’t know what they’re doing. At least by using Loopnet, you can potentially get someone who did at least a little research. If you search these boards, you’d find that even residential investors are having a hard enough time finding an expert, so commercial brokers just don’t want to deal with MLS agents.
Trust me I fully understand the limitation of Realtors. I look at 1-4 unit properties that are being sold in this manner as well as commercial. But I think the seller is giving too much power to the buyer when they limit their properties to only local investors that they or their Realtor knows. The only commercial properties that usually cash flowing are when other investors call me or when one of my Realtors calls me about a place they know. So I have noticed that sellers that sell only by word of month typically don’t get a great price for their property. I don’t mind properties being sold using this method, but it is not going to maximize the profits for the seller, only for the buyer. Again this has only been my experience DeeinAustin.
Also, there are auction houses that handle comercial real estate, too. I saw a 21-unit apartment complex that an auction house still had in their inventory for $75k last year. This is an example of a property that may or may not be on LoopNet, CCIM, or any other commercial listing site, but is out there.
I went to Graduate School for Finance and my wife went to Grad School for Accounting. To me Real Estate is like the stock market, or a business. You need to buy low, and sell high(stock market) and like in business you need to advertise to move product. Without marketing a business will die. If a seller limits there buyers by not marketing than they are failing to create demand (because only a small amt of buyers know about the property). This is why the properties that I have seen use this method do not sell for a good price (low demand = low price).
In the past when mortgage fraud wasn’t watched very closely Realtors would have Non-MLS properties because the seller could be very flexible with creative financing (cash back at closing). But that is not allowed anymore, and is too risky for Realtors and buyers.