how do I figure out the market value of a house, and houses in the area if I don’t have access to the MLS?
How do you guys do it?
Making friends with real estate agents? How?
Realtors are sellers agents (listing agents) as well as buyers agents. You do not have to be “friends” per se, as it’s their job. I have one agent I use exclusively for finding deals. There are some brokers that deal with a lot of foreclosure/rehab opportunities and those are generally the ones you want to work with. Get in good with an agent and they’ll do things like call you before good deals even hit the MLS, essentially eliminating the competition as you can have first dibs on it if you want.
Learn everything you can about the property values in your area. If you’re in a major metropolitan area, pick a part of it to learn first. Learn what areas are good, what areas are bad, and which way their trending - getting better or worse. The really, truly great deals never even make it to the MLS as the broker would buy it themselves, but there are still a lot of deals to be had and they’ll go fast. That is why it’s important to be an expert in a certain area so when a property does hit the market at a certain price you don’t have to do a great deal of research to know if it’s a good deal or not. The best real estate investors are patient… but when they make a decision they act fast.
MLS aside, you should also be able to find houses that recently sold in the local newspaper or at the city assessor’s office/website. The main paper here in Milwaukee (Milwaukee Journal) lists them every sunday, both in the paper and on the real estate section of their website (http://www.jsonline.com)
awesome help, as always. thank you guys.
but what if when i buy and sell the house, i don’t use a realtor. how can i just go and ask him about the comps on a house that doesn’t go through him?
how do i find one that’s willing to help me?
Don’t use that Yahoo Real Estate website, which is driven from Homegain.com
Not only is the information always outdated, but it’s flat out wrong. I have my realtor’s license and have access to the metro milwaukee MLS. The listings are entirely incorrect, not only the prices, but the reast of the listing information as well. Hell, it says some houses were sold at a certain amount on a certain date and they were never even on the market, much less sold!
I briefly tried the other link and it didn’t correctly either, so it’s probably a waste of time. The NAR (National Association of Realtors) is very against public access to the MLS, so it’s extremely difficult to find accurate comps anywhere on the 'net. If the NAR had it’s way there wouldnt be ANY MLS access whatsoever by the public, even active listings.
Goto Google’s website and type in your city name and the word “foreclosure”. You should be able to find a local listing brokerage that works with a lot of foreclosure listings. I am NOT talking about the national sites like Realtytrac.com or Foreclosurefreesearch.com or any of the other 20,000 foreclosure sites on the 'net all selling the same outdated listings. Call them up and say that you’re considering purchasing some investment property for such-and-such amount. Once you find a property you’re interested in they can run the comps for you and have them sent to your email address.
They can also put you on their “hot list”, meaning you’ll automatically be emailed all qualifying properties as they hit the market, each day.
You don’t need a realtor to find comps. They are sometimes printed on your local newspaper’s website and you can find them with just a little research on your part. Good luck.
Da Wiz