3 Things To Do When You Can’t Find Good Flip Deals Easily

Marc Halpern, Part Time Investors LLC

The real estate market in many areas of the United States transitioned into a seller’s market (though not equally across geographies). This has resulted in getting harder to find good deals for flipping in many markets.

 Here are three things to do when you can’t find good deals to flip.

 1. Do more and different marketing

Motivated sellers are born every day. That means that new opportunities for good real estate deals are created every day. The investors who get those deals are the ones actively prospecting for those deals.

If your current marketing methods are not as effective as they used to be, maybe it’s time for you to expand the type of prospecting and message you are using.

• Have you been relying on finding deals only on MLS or have you been sending direct mail marketing campaigns?

• Are you adequately targeting specific market segments of motivated buyers or are you doing shotgun marketing using bandit signs with a generic message?

• Have you contacted divorce attorneys, bankruptcy attorneys or healthcare workers who might know of people who need to sell their houses?

• Have you been asking your barber or hairdresser about who might need to sell their house?

2. Become a part-time investor

 If all your streams of income are related to real estate, they may not be as independent as you think. If you’re a flipper, there is one area of real estate investing that provides a continuous source of income and that is described next.

3. Build your rental portfolio

When you have even a small portfolio of rentals, you have a stream of passive income. If you are good at finding deals for flipping, you are good at finding deals for rentals. You can do this.

 As we cite in other blog posts, 89% of landlords of single family home rentals, own 10 or less of such homes. In most cases, these are the same homes you have been targeting for flipping.

 When you come across a deal that isn’t quite good enough to flip, have you analyzed the deal as a rental? Let’s say you find a property that is not worthwhile to buy-fix-sell. Analyze the positive cash flow from that property after financing, taxes, insurance, vacancy, repairs and administration. If that single family home will generate $300-$700 per month of positive cash flow, then it might be a good candidate to start building a small portfolio.

 I never want to have more than 10 tenants (for happiness reasons) which is why I limit the size of my rental portfolio. I must admit that having $5,000-$6,000 per month of passive income doesn’t meet all my family’s needs, but it sure goes a long way when I have to take a few months off to handle family matters. When you generate a few thousand dollars per month of passive income through rentals, it takes much of the pressure off meeting routine financial needs, especially when the market changes.

Marc Halpern is a chemist and a successful part-time real estate investor. Marc started out with a net worth of less than $3,000 at age 29. He used part-time real estate investing while building his career as a chemist, to put his children through college with no debt, to substantially increase his net worth and to achieve true financial freedom.