Wholesaling Real Estate | How To Search Zillow To Find For Sale By Owner Deals
Many new wholesalers that are looking to wholesale will sometimes not look in the most obvious places. Maybe that is because they think that there is some kind of mysterious secret to wholesaling that if they could just discover that secret, then they would learn how to be able to wholesale and flip houses. But there is no secret – other than the fact that some people want to sell their house and have a hard time doing so (many times because there is some kind of damage or issue with the house). If you can find these types of houses then the only thing that the seller wants is for you to make an offer that they will accept to buy their house. They just want to move on and be rid of the house.For you, as a wholesaler or a landlord, or a rehabber your job is to find those deals. If you are good at finding them then you will be rewarded with a lot of profit since if you are a wholesaler you can flip those deals to investors like me who will gladly pay you a fee to buy them.
So regardless of whether you are broke and just starting out learning how to wholesale, or whether you are a seasoned investor, I think we can all agree that you need to be able to find good wholesale deals at prices that are cheap enough for you to make a profit flipping those houses.
The three real estate web sites with the most traffic in the U.S are (in order) # 1 Zillow.com with 15% of the market share, # 2 Realtor.com with 8% of the market share and #3, Trulia.com with 7% of the market share.
Considering that Zillow also owns Trulia, they have a combined 15% market share of all websites on the planet. Add Realtor.com’s 15% of market share and 30% of all real estate traffic in the world is on those 3 web sites. That is one out of 3 people and is not something that you as an investor (or seller) can ignore.
What is remarkable about Zillow is that unlike realtor.com which feeds properties from MLS listings, anyone can post a house for sale on Zillow. That means every single person who wants to sell their house, regardless of whether they use a real estate agent or do not want to use a real estate agent can have their house listed for sale on Zillow.
Why is this important? Because people that want to sell their house For Sale By Owner (FSBO) usually want to save the real estate commission. Prior to Zillow, the only way to find these people was by driving for dollars which means driving up and down looking for For Sale By Owner Signs and calling the owner. While this strategy works, it is very time consuming and there is only so much ground you could cover.
But with Zillow that is not the case since many of these sellers will list their property for sale on Zillow. And they will check off the For Sale By Owner Box and will list their phone number! That is a huge opportunity and I see so many new beginners that are starting out learning how to wholesale spending so much time and money and resources trying to find deals and looking at complicated and costlyl systems when right in front of them is a free system that they could be using. I ask them “have you searched on Zillow or Realtor.com” and usually the answer is no.
Watch this video to see how I do a simple search looking for For Sale By Owners and stumble across a potential deal. I also show you how to use the different check boxes to change the features of your search. Make sure you use all of the tools that are at your disposal when looking for real estate deals including Zillow and other real estate web sites like Trulia.com and Realtor.com
If you are brand new to real estate and want to learn more about how to wholesale real estate and flip houses then please register for the free wholesaling real estate and flipping houses training at this link below:
