The one indisputable truth about real estate is that it is almost always a local market. While you will get a small number of people doing transactions from remote locations or moving across the country, the vast majority of transactions encountered in the day to day life of a real estate investor are local – whether it be for contractors, to find new homes to purchase, to rent out a house, etc.
And probably since about two days after its inception, we have all heard that the internet is so powerful because of its international reach. It is the World Wide Web after all. But if you look at the internet with this mindset, you are losing out on all the power that is available to help you grow your investing business. In reality, the internet is about connections – global AND local.
Lets take a look at some of these local connections that can benefit you as a real estate investor.
Pay Per Click Advertising – If you are an active real estate investor, chances are you have a website to allow you to give more information to local residents looking to sell or buy houses among other things. Many of the larger pay per click engines – like Google Adwords – allow you to run your ads locally. That means if you are advertising for someone wanting to sell their house you could start an adwords campaign that would show up only for people who live in your city.
Just think how powerful that is. Rather than having to run an ad that shows up all over the world and costs you a fortune per useful lead, you can run an ad that only shows up to people who live near where you invest. That means your cost per lead drops dramatically and the quality of each lead rises because they are local leads only.
Local Classified Sites and Bulletin Boards – Every community has a variety of local sites that allow you to post and respond to various ads. They may be community calendar type of sites or local classified sites or even big classified sites that offer city categorization like craigslist.com, backpage.com or citynews.com. You can find all the sites you could ever use by using your favorite search engine and typing the name of your city followed by the words classified ads (Houston classified ads as an example.) Even eBay.com has a real estate section where you can occasionally find or sell properties in your area.
Newspapers and Other Real Estate Databases – Every daily newspaper is online now. And every city MLS has some public access point that can be found on local realtors websites. And there are other places like byowner.com and a variety of small databases of houses for sale that can be found by a simple search with your favorite search engine. All these places are sources for leads for your real estate business. You will find many houses for sale by letting your fingers do a bit of walking in the databases that you will not find by just talking to realtors or driving around town.
Government Resources – Chances are your local government is online. That means you can check out prior sales of a property, the name and address of the current owner, how much they purchased the house for, the current taxes on the house and much more – all from the comfort of your home. You can also do name searches in most government databases so you can see what other properties the owner may have which could lead to more property acquisitions for you. There are many online government resources that can benefit you in addition to the property records. Most government databases are online – even things like pet registration databases – which can be used to help track down the owner of a vacant house.
People finders – While not strictly a local resource, people finders must be mentioned as many investors come across situations where the owner cannot be located. There are a large number of companies out there that let you do massive nationwide record searches at a very reasonable cost to help you locate an absentee owner. Do some searching around on the internet and try a few out to find the one or two that you like the best – and be sure to bookmark the site(s) for future reference. Finding and making a deal with just one “disappeared” owner will pay back the small investment many, many times over.
And here is a good final tip for you. When you find a web site you like, use the bookmark feature of your web browser to save any site you find useful for easy future reference.
So next time you turn on the computer and open your web browser, think local instead of global. And stretch your mind to see how many ways you can come up with to build a list of local online resources that can help you grow your real estate investment business. You will find the time investment paying you dividends for many years to come.
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