How to Find Deals Creatively: Real Estate 101 Podcast

In 2021, Josh Miller, Founder and CEO of GoForClose, sat down with the host of a real estate investing podcast to talk about how he grew his investing business in a little over a year.

In this podcast, you can hear his recommendation on when to leave your 9 to 5 job and go full time into real estate investing, what wholesaling is, how to creatively find the right zip codes and monetize leads, and much, much more!

What the Episode Covers

• 00:00 Intro
• 04:32 Considerations before making the leap from a corporate job to full-time real estate investing
• 09:09 How Josh built up his contracts and rentals in his first year
• 19:23 Marketing strategies Josh uses
• 22:30 How lists are used in real estate investing
• 36:38 How to creatively find the right zip codes and the tools Josh uses to find them
• 39:22 What the difference is between a “right” zip code and a bad zip code
• 44:30 Why starting small is better than going big right away in real estate deals
• 51:42 Action Plan for listeners

Watch the full episode on YouTube.

Cheat Sheet: How to Find Real Estate Investment Deals

1. When to Make the Leap and Ensure You Don’t Have Golden Handcuffs

Look at what your time is worth. To make it easier, let’s say you are being paid $100/hr. If you can hire people for less than $100/hr, people who can maybe even do the job better than you, then you should continue to do what makes you the most money.

If you are good at doing acquisition, and hiring an acquisition manager would cost $150/hr, then it’s better to do it yourself. Of course, you need to have the confidence that you can make it work or already have the passive income.

2. How to Find Good Property Deals

Data and Marketing. First, it’s choosing the right market, and second, choosing the correct list to go after.

Here’s the catch: there are a lot of lists for sale, but there are thousands of investors purchasing the same lists. The hard-to-get lists are the best ones, like arrest records, evictions, water shutoffs, and others which are public but require a lot of work to get, cross-reference, and clean.

3. How to Find the Right Market

The right market is an area with distress, where there are cash buyers buying and investors flipping. For detailed demographic info, you can go to EIG.org, where you can also check crime rates. We recommend staying below the 94 mark; of course, for rental opportunities, you likely want lower.

4. Tips When Starting Out

Look for “low price” zip codes, where house prices are less than $200K (a 2021 figure). The reason for this is, even if you got the numbers wrong, and you overpaid, $10K or $20K is salvageable, but trying to recover from a big number error is much harder.

Or if you are wholesaling, even if you get $0 from it, at least you get it done and establish a relationship with a cash buyer, and use that knowledge to get better at calculating a Maximum Allowable Offer (MAO).

5. Three Actionable Steps

First, stay in your lane, meaning you stick to what you’re good at and outsource the rest.

Second, there are two books you can learn from: Traction by Gino Wickman and Who Not How by Dan Sullivan.

And finally, but not least of all, build the confidence to commit to it fully.

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