Finding Comps

I am relatively new at this. I’m looking to wholesale and possibly rehab. I have an ad in my local paper, and signs all over town and have been generating some calls from some potentially motivated sellers. I am having trouble coming up with reliable comps for the properties I am looking at in order to come up with a reasonable after repair value. Any advice for finding good comp info? Thanks for any tips!

Get a realtor on your team.

agreed, your realtor will be your best bet. If you try the MLS it will give a relative ballpark figure but it might be a little high or low.

www.electronicappraiser.com

There are several free sites which, generally, are worth what they cost you. . .
For accurate numbers you’ll have to spring a few bucks and get some real sales data. With this in mind you can try:
www.homesmartreports.com
www.homeprofile.com
www.sitexdata.com

I check the County Assessor’s office (among other things) for recent sold comps. They aren’t biased, they simply report the numbers.

Depending on where the property is, Zillow is OK as a ball park, but check their page that rates their accuracy in each given state. Some states have limited info available so the accuracy can be low.

It’s great having a Realtor on your team if you do business with them, but if you are finding deals on your own and turning them on your own, what’s in it for them? Nobody likes to do work for nothing.

What I always do is call several appraisers when I venture into a new market and get 1 or 2 that will give a value estimate when I ask for them. They pull their comps from MLS. I tell them I am an investor/wholesaler and will be doing a bunch of deals over the next while, and will use him/her to appraise properties when ever I can. I always do my personal research first, tell them what I think it’s worth and ask them to confirm or debunk.

I have been having a realtor send me the MLS listings for any sold house. I created a small database and anytime I get a MLS email for a sold property that is in my target areas I just add it too the database.

It only takes a few minutes and hopefully within 6-12 months I will have a good sized database that tells me what houses are selling for in certain areas.