Newspaper Classified Ads
In the bookmarks of my Ultimate Buying & Selling Machine home study course, there is a section called “newspapers” where you can go to the sources I have provided for you and find any local newspaper in the United States that has a web presence. That way you don’t have to buy the newspapers. With these bookmarks you can find any local newspaper and you’ll be able to save them right to your favorites. This is how I can search extremely fast.
We have approximately 10 different newspapers in our market that we search. I have my bookmarks saved all the way to the Real Estate section of the Classifieds and I can search, in about fifteen minutes, all the newspapers for Real Estate. The other thing that you want to look at is the “businesses for sale” section. Sometimes businesses have real estate for sale. You should also search in the “for rent” section because there may be landlords that are renting property but they’re tired and aggravated landlords and that would be a good source to buy property as well.
In looking at Classifieds, there are also several sources for newspaper ads. Some newspapers use a source like Abracat as their classified search service, so you might want to check that and just look for a local newspaper under that website.
Several of the keywords that you want to look for are: owner transferred, obo (or best offer), divorce, owner financing, no down or low down payment, owner flexible, below appraisal, investor special, handyman special, fixer upper, lease option, rent with option, take up payments or owner desperate. Also, look for out of town phone numbers. When searching the classifieds in Firefox you can highlight the keywords making it easy to find the ads you want to look at.
Another thing to keep in mind is that some people do not know if Saturday or Sunday is your real estate day. For example, some people don’t know that Saturday is the real estate day in my area and think Sunday is the best day to run the ads. So always look in the Sunday’s edition, as well, when you are looking, whether in the physical paper or online. Another source is a legal newspaper or a legal section of your newspaper. You want to look for newly filed Foreclosures or Judgments. Sometimes there are classified ads in there.
Divorce listings are another source. Also in our area, if the property is under code enforcement, which means that the property has code violations that do not meet minimum housing standards; and they cannot find the owner, sometimes they’ll publish a notice looking for the owner. This is a good source as well if you can find the property that is under code enforcement and if you can locate the owner. Sometimes you can buy those properties pretty cheap. Some of the best deals that we have ever gotten have been through code enforcement.