Sometimes, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut when you’re using ineffective strategies to find off market house deals. Whether you’re struggling to get your message ahead of other investors or coming up blank one too many times, facing a deficit of leads is a surefire way to hurt your company. And that’s why I made it a priority to become an expert on scraping through the off market when I started my house flipping business.

After reinventing my approach about three times, I finally found a combination of methods that worked. Before that, I’d been doing everything wrong and wasting tons of my money (and time) in the process. If you feel like your off market efforts aren’t working, I have news for you: You’re probably doing it wrong. But there are better ways, and I’m here to help you get (re)started on the right foot.

Why Finding Off Market House Deals Isn’t Easy

Most real estate investors struggle to find off market housing deals. There are a few reasons for this, including:

• Low response rates for most of the popular lead generation methods
• Low quality leads
• Difficult negotiations with homeowners
• Some markets don’t have many (or any) off market deals to find

Pretty much every market is going to force you to deal with the first three, but there isn’t always a workable strategy for the last one. Sometimes, it makes more sense to widen your scope to look for off market house deals in another market than to invest more effort into scraping the barrel in a cold market.

Due to the general difficulty of finding off market leads even when they exist, however, you won’t always know whether you’re simply coming up short due to the nature of the game or because there’s genuinely nothing to find. And that can lead you to waste tremendous amounts of time and money if you don’t know when to call it quits. At the same time, it’s also often true that putting in a bit more effort—or being a bit more creative—than the next investor is the trick to scrounging off market leads. So quitting too soon could result in you leaving a few leads on the table.

Getting creative is a reliable remedy for finding off market leads, but implementing new ideas is often quite expensive. One investor I worked with in Beverly Hills found that an effective method for finding off market homes for sale was to hold networking events with free food for the wealthy folks living in his target neighborhood. Then, he’d try to listen for hints that someone would be willing to sell their home. Of course, he spent plenty of cash and time, but the deals he made were significant. And most other investors wouldn’t be willing to take such an outlandish approach, so they never had a chance at scooping his prospects. But there’s little chance that that strategy would work in many other markets or segments, and it’s clear that there’s little hope of newer investors making it work.

The Market Has Changed, And Now You’re Doing It Wrong

One other challenge with finding off market leads is that the real estate market in the U.S. has changed significantly in the last 20 years, and many of the older lead generation methods are simply obsolete now.

For instance, many investors try to use lead-generating techniques like cold calling, cold mailing, and putting up flyers to attract homeowners that want to sell. As commendable as putting that kind of sweat equity into your business may be, those methods won’t do the trick anymore. People decline calls from numbers they don’t recognize, and even if they don’t, a business inquiry from a stranger looking to buy their home is very frequently an unwelcome interruption. Unsolicited mailings get dropped into the recycling bin, typically unopened. And in a modern urban landscape, flyers are both ubiquitous and fully ignored by nearly all passers-by.

Other traditional methods like setting up billboards to advertise yourself as a buyer might have some staying power, but leveraging the flow of physical traffic still pales in comparison to the efficacy of similarly-intensive efforts focused on digital traffic. And that’s where you need to be if you want your business to grow.

The new tools of the trade are social media campaigns, internet advertisements, mass emails, targeted emails, influencer marketing, and other digital lead-generation schemes. If you plan to use off-market leads to find off-market house deals, you’ll need to be skilled in all of the above, so there’s no time like the present to get started.

Mastering The Off Market Is Possible

If you’re balking at the prospect of needing to learn an entirely new skill set to develop your off-market deals, you don’t have to go it alone. There’s a nationwide real estate investing franchise that’s ready to make your life a lot easier. When you become an independently owned and operated HomeVestors® franchise owner, you’ll gain access to their marketing campaigns, lead generation platform, and network of fellow investors that’ll streamline the entire off-market lead harvesting process for you.

With HomeVestors®, you’ll have all the tools you need to find off-market house deals, starting with the ValueChek® home valuation software that empowers you to screen leads and turn them into prospects. Plus, you’ll receive the right training to negotiate better with homeowners, fund your deals, and grow your business. If you’re not the kind of investor willing to hold parties in Beverly Hills for the sake of finding leads, working with HomeVestors® is a great option to supercharge your off-market game, and I highly recommend it.

Juicing your deal flow by finding off-market house deals starts with teamwork. Get started by requesting more information about joining HomeVestors® today. 

Each franchise office is independently owned and operated.