Show notes
Anson Young is a real estate agent and the owner of Anson Property Group, which is based in Denver, CO, and specializes in distressed property purchases. As a full-time real estate investor for the past ten years, he has completed more than 120 wholesale deals and 95 flips. Anson and his team specialize in marketing directly to sellers for off-market deals, using many of the methods that can be found in his book Finding & Funding Great Deals. A common talking point today is that supply is low, demand is high, and cash-flowing deals are hard to come by. Anson pushes back on this by focusing on finding off-market deals. These off-market properties, otherwise known as pocket listings, are a great source of leads for those that know how to find them. By using some old-fashioned elbow grease, Anson is able to find cash-flowing deals in competitive markets. Today, Anson shares his insights on how he finds off-market deals in today's market. Episode links: https://www.instagram.com/younganson/?hl=en https://www.biggerpockets.com/users/anson https://www.youtube.com/c/ansonyoung --- Transcripts Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals. Michael: What's going on everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum, and today I'm joined by Anson Young, who is an investor, agent, wholesaler out in the Denver, Colorado area and he's gonna be talking to us today about how do you find off market deals in today's market environment. So let's get into it. Hey, everyone, before jumping into the episode today, I would just like to encourage everyone to leave us a rating or review wherever it is you listen to your podcasts, they are super, super helpful for us in getting out there to a wider audience. So if you'd like the content we're producing, or even if you don't like the content we're producing, we'd love to hear from you. Let us know how we can improve and do better, so thanks so much and well let's get into the episode, Anson Young, what's going on, man, thanks so much for hanging out with me today, appreciate you. Anson: Yeah, thanks for having me. It is awesome. Michael: Now, I'm super excited. So I know a little bit about your background. But I would love if you could share with our listeners who might not be familiar with you, who you are, where you come from, and what is your doing in real estate. Anson: Yeah, so I come from Denver and we were just talking about how there's not many natives left. But I was born and raised here and what I do is for since 2006-2005, I've done investment, real estate fix and flips wholesale. Wholesale are just now getting into kind of burr buying holds looking more into short term market and I've been licensed since about 2007. So I've been licensed almost as long as I've been investing. Michael: So right on we actually like just before this episode, we're recording with another guy who is a broker, licensed broker agent as well, as an investor we were talking about, does it make sense for investors to go get their license and kind of vice versa and so that was a really interesting discussion. Has it helped you in your investing being a licensed agent? Anson: Yeah, I don't know honestly, how people do without it, because I can't stand waiting for waiting on other people. So if I had to wait for somebody to send me comps, or if I had to wait for somebody to submit an offer, I would probably go insane. So being able just to do that myself, is huge. So but besides that there's a lot of advantages for sure. I have never regretted it. There are a couple of like very niche, creative real estate things that I can't do because I'm licensed, but it's never affected me. I don't do like sandwich wrap, lease options, whatever, I don't do any of that. So it doesn't affect me at all. Michael: It's not applicable. Wow, love the hot take, man. This is perfect timing, right on and so okay, so you just also spoke at the recent Bigger Pockets Conference, which if anybody was there, they hopefully heard tell us what that was all about. Anson: Yeah. So that was their first rookie conference, so they have a rookie podcast, hosted by Ashley and Tony and they, and they decided, You know what, they've been doing a rookie boot camp. That's a like a 12 week virtual boot camp and they decided, hey, why not do like a two day live event and so they did and so they put all their power behind it and it was geared completely towards rookies. I did like an informal poll, when I did my, my speaking of you know, who's done zero deals, who's done, you know, 12,35,10 deals and there was like one guy who did 10 deals, and I was like, why are you here? But for the most part, wrong conference, I was like, whoa, hey, doors over there. Could be a good guy. But no, like, I think that everybody there has done zero to one, maybe two deals and they were just looking to have guidance on how to do more how to finance them, how to find them, how to structure their business, how to implement systems, you know, basically just how to scale and how to grow. What to do next. So yeah, it was it was a really good vibe, I've, I spoke at the, you know, the big BP conference and the rookie conference, and the rookie was smaller, and more intimate and definitely, everybody's there just to learn, you know, as much as they can, so it's awesome environment. Michael: That's so, so cool and so you were speaking specifically about off market deals, right? Anson: I was yep how to like how to find deals at any market. Michael: Yeah, okay, awesome, which I think is so important for this market and kind of where we find ourselves. So give us just a little bit of insight, so you know what people who are at the conference got to hear about. Anson: So I do say, like any market, because I learned really quick, like if I'm in Denver, and I just do Denver things, and then somebody comes to me, and they're like, Hey, I bought, you know, 100 properties last year, and they're all $20,000 and I sent out yellow letters, and they're like, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, or something like those things, you know, that like the things that he's doing there might not work in my kind of a plus capital city market and so being from, you know, being working here in this market, and then now I'm also working in smaller markets, I feel like I can speak a little bit more to like finding deals in any market, because it's, you know, I'm kind of working from the top down, I'm working from what works and like, the highest competitive, insane market and when I implement that strategy down into a less competitive market, it still works really well and so whereas I think the reverse isn't always true, where they're like, you know, I've talked to guys who have done exactly that they're still selling, sending yellow letters to, you know, just basic, generic lists and they're still getting, you know, a dozen deals a month or something like that. It's like, that just does not work here. Whereas my methods definitely work there. So I feel like, you know, I feel like a little bit of elitist there. But no, but, you know, we definitely, we definitely talked about, you know, I wanted to implement, you know, hey, here's what's working today, here's what's working, not just in my market, but in multiple markets, and also kind of how to how to do like a fast start. So like what you should do when you get home. Here's kind of a fast start guide, based on the things that I talked about. So we talked about some different strategies that we talked about, like, hey, this is exactly what I would do. If I was starting today, in almost any market, it would be applicable. So that's kind of what we went over. Michael: Awesome. Can you give us a little bit of insight into like, what that starter guide looks like? I mean, what would you do starting today. Anson: My favorite, like, like, so, you got to look at like your lists of who you're targeting, especially when you're going off market, your list of who you're targeting, and then how you're targeting them. So what you're sending them how you're contacting them and so my who is definitely my favorite list, if I'm a rookie, and I don't have a lot of money, but I might have more time than money, I'm gonna go driving for dollars, I think it's still, it's still my favorite list, it's still, you know, the least amount of competition on any of our lists, it's almost like nobody wants to just jump in their car, put in the work to, you know, write down the addresses of, you know, the 10 worst properties in a neighborhood or whatever that looks like so. So for us, you know, we're all we're almost like one of one or one of two people who are contacting these, these homeowners, because they may not be in foreclosure divorce, they may not be dead. The only thing wrong is that their house looks terrible and there's no list for that and so unless you go and you and you put eyeballs directly on to those properties, and so. So if I was just starting out, I would start there and then again, if I had more time than money, I would cold call that list, that's going to be the most aggressive, direct way to get a hold of those homeowners to figure out if they do need to sell if this is something that that might work for them and so, you know, and everything depends on goals and if you're looking for 100 properties this year, versus like two rentals, your entire strategy is going to be totally different. But, you know, in general, if I'm a rookie, I'm going to start there. I'm going to network with agents in the area, see if they have any upcoming listings that are maybe pocket listings, or, you know, if they ever come across a hoarder house, or if they ever come across something that's just so far outside their wheelhouse, like, I'm their solution, right? I'm the guy that can come and help save the day and then I'm going to go network with wholesalers as well and so, between those three activities, you know, you should be able to kick start, you know, finding deals in pretty much any market because now you're in front of two, two gatekeepers, you have wholesalers and agents who are in front of deals, and you're going out and you're looking for deals yourself and contacting homeowners directly. Michael: I love it. Dude, that's such a cool like three pronged approach. So when it comes to finding lists or scraping lists, I mean, I hear it all the time. What are some actionable like programs or sites that people can go to and use to come up with these lists or get access to these lists? Anson: Yeah, if you look at kind of ease of use, you know, something that you can go in 15 minutes later pop out a list, you know, something like a prop stream type product is going to be just, I mean, it's designed to be easy that way, right? So you can go in there, sign up for an account, I think they have like a 14 day free trial or something like that. Go in there, say I want all of the pre foreclosures in these zip codes and boom, it'll, it'll give that to you, you might have to pay extra for it, for exporting it or something like that. But, but that's like, you know, five button clicks, and you should have some sort of lists, you know, high equity absentee, you know, they have different metrics in there that you can kind of just click a couple buttons and have a list in your hands. If you want a little bit more hands on, you could go to List source, which is kind of kind of the gold standard of just backbone lists that almost everybody goes in. But there's like a million different options inside of there. So I can understand that it'd be confusing to kind of find exactly what you're looking for because there's, there's so many different options inside of there and then you could export a list that just does you pay for, and it doesn't make sense, because you just clicked one wrong button or something like that. So I understand like ease of use, it's not the easiest thing to use but if you look at title companies, they they'll use lists, sources, their backbone for all of their, their data, like land title, uses them as a backbone, my MLS, for being an agent, and our tax system is all based on the same company that owns list source and so all that core logic data, it's, it's, you know that there's hundreds of MLS systems that use the core logic, list source backbone. So it's kind of an industry standard for title companies, agents, and where that data lives. So I like to go directly to where the data lives because I don't know where prop stream gets their data. It seems to be okay but I kind of I like going directly to the source but I understand it's hard to use. Michael: Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense and that's a really good tip and then, so when it comes to agents and wholesalers, so from the agent side of things, talking about pocket listings, or off market deals, I think a lot of investors struggle, especially newer investors struggle, because they haven't built a name for themselves. They're having trouble getting access to those types of deals. So what is something an investor can do, especially when he's just starting out to position themselves to be able to take advantage of or get access to some of these popular things or off market deals? Anson: Yeah, so for, you know, for agents, agents do get hit up by investors pretty often. I mean, I probably get a couple texts a week from investors that are kind of saying the same thing, like, hey, we're looking for more projects, if you have any, you know, listings that that are just outside of your wheelhouse, let us know, we'll come in, we'll pay cash we'll do you know, they'll do all the investor things. The whole nine yards. Yeah, so I get that it is kind of competitive, I think it comes down to like rapport, you know, building up a relate an actual relationship with agents and not just kind of a transactional, like, hey, I'm going to be nice to you. So you can give me deals or something like that, like, I think people can, can see through some of that. So if you want to actually like form a strategic partnership with people, you know, sit down, buy them coffee, you know, talk to them about what they're doing and if there's any way that you can help them because if you're an investor, and you don't have your license, you will come across sellers who want to just list their house and so having a resource as an investor of like, hey, you know, my, my friend, James, is an agent and he can take care of you and so if you're, if you're kind of reciprocating, and giving, you know, to an agent or a few agents, they're going to be more, you know, much more willing to give you a deal when it comes across their desk, like hey, this you know, hoarder House came across in my brokerage. Everybody's like pointing and going, like, what the heck do we do with this thing and, you know, this could be a good opportunity for you to take a look at, but yeah, being i…
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