How to Find Off Market Real Estate Deals (Averaging $72,000 In Profit)
In this presentation, Dr. Toby Potter (The Unshakeable Investor) explains why sourcing off‑market real estate deals is essential for investors and outlines a step‑by‑step framework for doing so. He begins by stating the three non‑negotiable ingredients for real‑estate success – the right deal, education/information, and capital – and emphasizes that 85% of an investor’s time will be spent finding deals. He cites market data (297,885 flips in 2023, 63% all‑cash, average profit $72,000) to illustrate the profit potential of off‑market transactions, which typically offer a 25‑40% discount to after‑repair value. Potter then details five high‑yield off‑market lead sources: (1) probate and estate leads (conversion 8‑12%, up to 60‑70% with his methods), (2) pre‑foreclosure and notice‑of‑default properties (367,460 filings in 2025, up 14% YoY), (3) tax‑delinquent properties and tax‑lien auctions ($5.02 B in 2024, 50‑60% discounts), (4) “driving for dollars” – physically scouting vacant or distressed homes, and (5) wholesale networks, where the average assignment fee is $13,000 and profits of $15‑20k per deal are common. He stresses building a pipeline, consistent outreach, systematic deal analysis (including an AI‑driven tool), and having an experienced mentor review closings. Throughout, he intersperses calls to action for a free book, coaching, and a personal call. The overall message is that off‑market sourcing, when done systematically, yields far higher equity and cash flow than competing on public MLS listings.
Chapters
Hey everybody, Dr. Toby Potter here, The Unshakeable Investor. Man, do I have some information for you today. I want to go over how to find, how to source off-market deals. It's one of the things you must have to be successful in real estate investing. In fact, there's 3 things you must have. One is the right deal. Number 2, information, education. And number 3, capital. You have to have all 3 things to be successful in real estate investing. Today, we're gonna talk about number 1, how to find the right deal. 85% of your time will be spent looking for deals, especially if you're doing it old school. Well, I'm talking about driving for dollars, postcards, all that stuff. But the one thing you don't wanna do is go through Zillow, realtor.com, Redfin and those. And I'm going to show you today 5 sources that you need to be doing, and this is just scratching the surface. One of the things I want to share with you though before we get into it so that you understand the magnitude of it, there are, or were, 297,885 flips done in 2023. 4. Of that, 63% of them were done all cash, okay? And on those properties, the average earning was $72,000. Average $72,000 money earned, okay? That's a lot of money. This is the place we want to be right there. All right, so I'm going to share with you today how to find these deals, how to get your hands on those $300,000, $300,000 properties that are off market, and how you can turn this thing around. See, when you go to Zillow, you go to realtor.com, you go to Redfin, that's where deals go to die. That is a last resort. That is mass marketing, and every investor in the world has already sifted through all that noise. Do not go there. I'm going to tell you 5 ways to get there. Okay. Number 1, I want you to understand there's 2 pipelines. There's the old way, the Zillow, the MLS. You have, you know, days on the market. You have just people bidding, outbidding, overbidding, overpricing. It's a nightmare. It's like being on a highway in Los Angeles. It's just cluttered. You want to go where there's nobody. You want to go on that dirt road up in the mountains, that off-market source. Because here's the first thing you're going to understand. There's about a 25 to 40% spread below after repair value on those. When you buy those off market, you're getting already a built-in 25 to 40% equity position. There's fewer buyers because they don't know where they're at. And you have motivated sellers that's willing to negotiate your terms because they know that they can— you can expedite. So let's get into how you figure that out, how you find that out. Number 1, where'd my eraser go? Number 1, I want to share with you probate, probate and estate leads. When a property owner dies, the estate often really needs to sell those really quick. The heirs usually live out of town, out of state. They have no emotional attachment to the property, and they need to liquidate the capital sometimes just to take care of the taxes, the burial, the funeral, all that stuff. You know, a lot of mom and dads, grandma and grandpas don't have wills. They don't have a lot of retirement, so they need to sell that property. That was their last asset, and they need that money to execute the final stages of that loved one. And so the conversion rate on, on qualified probate leads is usually around 8 to 12%. And when you enrich it with the way that we teach you how to go find those deals, that will normally double. That closing rate can also go up as fast as 60 to 70%. And here's what I want to— I want to stop right here. Because if you like what you're hearing and you see the value that we provide to you, because you're on here today, I want to gift you this book. This is the actual course. It's How to Find Off-Market Deals. And because you're on here today and you're liking what you see, click the link below and, and give me some information so I can send you this book right here, right now. Okay. I'll give it just a couple seconds, click on it, and then we're going to jump right back into number 2, number 3, number 4, number 5. All right, number 1, probate and estate leads. Those houses have to be moved. And when you build a relationship with the probate attorney, a financial planner, or an estate attorney, when you build that relationship, those conversions soar through the roof because they now know you are a person that can execute. They know that if the family comes to them, says, hey, we live 300 miles away from Grandma's house or Mom and Dad's house, we really don't have time to find a contractor to get it fixed back up, find a realtor, get it listed, deal with the closing. We don't want to mess with it. The attorney, the financial planner says, you know what, I got a guy, I got a gal. Let me, let me handle that for you. And now that counselor becomes the hero again. It solves a problem. You solve a problem for the attorney. He solves a problem for the family. And you guys become hand-in-hand partners to grow your business. So look at probate estate leads. We can show you how to go after those, how to market those, how to build offer letters that makes those attorneys call you first every time. Number 2, pre-foreclosures and notice of default. Let me show you the statistic right here. 367,460 foreclosure filings, filings. In 2025. That is a ton of properties. That is up, up 14% year over year. All right. That's huge. And I promise you, it's going to only continue to grow. That's 367,000 motivated sellers, motivated banks, motivated attorneys who say, I need this property off my books. So source number 2, pre-foreclosures, notice of defaults. This owner is not paying anymore. The bank is taking it back. The trustee, the attorney, has got to move the property to get it off the books. And so the seller, which is that financial institution, is extremely motivated. The homeowner is normally 120 days late or longer. So the bank is now willing to negotiate. They've already taken a huge loss. They know they're not getting any more money from the, from the owner. So they're willing to take whatever they can to get it off their books. And usually you have a loan officer, a mortgage guy that's at that bank that's in the hot seat because he allowed it to get there. And when you find these individuals, and we can show you how to do that, they love you also. Because you now become their hero. You now solve a problem that is irritating the crap out of their boss and put them in the hot seat. You come in, you make offers, and normally we can short sell those. Short sell means I'm buying it for less than it's owed. And I've already got built-in equity. Then I go in there. Sometimes the homeowner took care of the property. He just got into a financial situation that he couldn't make the payments. And so all you gotta do is lipstick ticket. Carpet, paint, appliances, back on the market, put it into rental. Easy, easy money. All right, easy money. Number 3, tax delinquent property and tax lien auctions. Let me show you this statistic. You're gonna— this is gonna blow your mind. This is absolutely gonna blow your mind. Tax liens, auctions, and delinquencies. 5.02 billion, billion tax lien properties on the market. Unbelievable statistic. Unbelievable. Okay, $5 billion in 2024 of tax lien properties, and normally there are about 50 to 60 discounted. Now, if that doesn't get your blood flowing, I don't know what will. This is huge. This is huge. We're not going to go in to show you how to get these. We could coach you, we can teach you. But this is source number 3. Okay, source number 3. And there's so many ways to skin that cat. That you can sort through hundreds and hundreds of properties to find the ones in your area, in your backyard, that are most profitable. Properties with delinquent taxes, they signal that the owners who are financially distressed, they're usually absentee and have abandoned the property. So they're vacant, they're being vandalized. Man, you just scrape those up in a heartbeat. And the tax deed auctioneers, they sell usually, like I said, 50, 60% off market value. You buy them, you go in there, you rehab them, you resell them. Money in the bank, right? Money in the bank. Number 4, driving for dollars, vacant property listings. Here's what I want to teach you. Everybody said, oh my gosh, I don't want to drive for dollars. You know what the price of gas is here in Texas? It's like, I have a diesel truck, it's $5. I don't want to drive for dollars. You're right. But when you do a deal, when you have a property that you're already rehabbing, drive for dollars in that neighborhood, you're already going from your house, from Home Depot, from Lowe's, from the hardware store to the house. Drive a different way every time. Never drive the same way. See, people don't use their head. You've got a 5-mile radius around your house that you can go up and down a street, a different street every day. And drive for dollars and make notation as to a house that is vacant, abandoned, run down, and you will always run into somebody in that neighborhood who knows who that owner is. It's another trade secret that we'll teach you, but not today. We're just going over the 5 sources. We can go so deep into this. I can spend days with you showing you how to capitalize on these deals and make you a multimillionaire overnight. Okay, and number 5, wholesale networks, direct-to-wholesale deals. See, a lot of people say, well, I want to get into real estate investing, I don't have any money. Wholesaling is your king. Wholesaling is the absolute way you can get into real estate and never spend a dime, never spend a dime. I can show you so many ways for you to take down all those properties I showed you that are on probate, that are on tax lien, that are on, uh, that are abandoned. I'm sure you had to buy all those properties, sell them, and never spend a dime. But in the wholesale world, what I want you to understand is that your net worth is equally proportionate to your network. The greater your network, the greater your net worth. If you have no network, if I ask you how many people can you talk to that will help you find, analyze real estate? And you say 5, I'm gonna tell you you're broke. You tell me 50, I say, well, you probably can buy me McDonald's Happy Meal. You tell me 500, we can have a steak dinner. You tell me 5,000, we can have steak dinner and a glass of wine. You tell me 50,000, now I'm willing to talk to you. So your network has to be massive for 2 reasons. One is they're bringing you deals that they can't fund, that they've wholesaled, and you're finding deals that you can wholesale back. It works back and forth. It's a two-way street. On an assignment fee on a wholesale, the average assignment fee nationwide is $13,000. So you're telling me, Toby, that I can get a wholesale property, never spend a dime, and make $13,000? Absolutely, without a doubt. Some of our wholesalers make somewhere around $20,000 to $25,000 because they've mastered it. And they've got such a great reputation. People know when they go to them and they have a deal, it's a sweet deal for everybody. And they're willing to pay more because they know it's solid. They know they're going to make money when they're done. And the sweet thing about it is that 63% of those deals are done all cash. So you minimize everybody's out-of-pocket expenses. A significant share of the 2024 flips that came through that I showed you on that earlier slide was all done through wholesalers. A significant amount. And the average earnings on those was between $15,000 and $20,000 per transaction. So you say, I want to get in, but I have no capital. Wholesaling, number 5, is the way to do it, but you have to build a network. So if you like everything that we're talking about today, click the link below, share, subscribe, comment, DM me, I'm in, and I'm going to set you up and let you do a personal call coaching on how to get started. See, a cost per deal comparison that I want to share with you real quick. If I have two columns here, one of them is through the Zillow MLS, okay? And the other one is off market. When you're going through all this, your Zillow deals are all going to be retail priced. And they're perfect for somebody who's trying to buy a primary residence, but there's no equity in it and it's too expensive. You got realtor fees, you got listing fees, you got title fees, you got lender fees, you got all this stuff that compounds on it. And so retail is for your primary residence only, okay? That's the best way to go. When you're looking at off-market, it is exclusively for investors, okay? Exclusively, because you control the situation. You control how much you want to pay. You then know how much you're going to earn, and you— it allows you to be in control from the beginning to the end. Okay, and so when you're looking at the Zillow MLS, it's all retail and everybody's going through it. When you're going through Zillow MLS and, um, you analyze these deals The market is like a major highway, okay? Major highway. It is crowded. It is crowded. Everybody does that. Why? Because it's simple. It's easy. Lazy people go through the Zillow MLS. Smart, calculated people go to the places that nobody's out. That's your off-market. Your off-market is what I call off-road, okay? Off-road, hard to get to, okay? Therefore, you're not fighting with all the auctions, all the mass, uh, uh, bidding prices and all that stuff. You're able to talk one-on-one. And the other thing, when I go to the Zillow MLS you have a realtor involved. Okay. Now, I love realtors. In fact, I probably work with about 75 to 80 realtors year round. But I will tell you, as an investor, a realtor will mess up a deal faster than anything because they don't want to offend anybody. And so realtors have a job, and that is especially the listing agent. They have a fiduciary duty to make sure that the seller gets the maximum price for their property. They have an obligation. When you're doing off-market, when you're doing off-market here, you don't have a realtor involved. It's between— it's you and the seller. You can now negotiate that. So you have stronger negotiation. Okay, stronger negotiations. And therefore you have complete control over the situation. All right. Now, how do I start sourcing off-market deals? Number 1, you have to pick a source. We gave you 5. All right, we gave you 5. Number 2, you have to build a pipeline. Number 3, outreach consistently. Here's what I would tell you: consistency outperforms talent every day. Consistency outperforms talent every day in every genre. Doesn't matter if you are consistent, you are diligent, you will outperform everybody else. Number 4, analyze every deal with a system. We have a profound AI-driven system. If you haven't seen it, you need to see it. If you really like what you're seeing here, again, DM me, go in here into the comments and say, I'm in, and I'm going to personally invite you to the opportunity of a lifetime for you to see a tool that handles all this for you in seconds. And then number 5, get an expert to review your closings. One of the things you must have One of the things you must have as a coach, you have to have somebody who's been there, who's done that. Without that, you will lose your butt. Remember I said there's 3 things you must have? Write these down. So I'm going to write them down for you. Okay. I'm going to write these down for you. And then I want you to screenshot it. I want you to take a picture of it. There's 3 things you must have. Okay, 3 things you must have to be successful in real estate. Number 1, the right deal. Okay, write that down, the right deal. Number 2, knowledge. Okay. Education. They go hand in hand. I have to be educated. I have to have knowledge. I have to know that it's the right deal. I have to know that it's the right deal. And then number 3, capital. Okay. You got to have money. These are the things you must have. The 3 things you must have to be successful in real estate investing. Here at The Unshakeable Investor, we give you all three. We show you how to find the right deal. We show you and educate you and coach you and mentor you for knowledge and education. And then we help provide and show you capital. We give you all three of these. So like I said, if you like what you're hearing, like, share, subscribe. Put in a comment, I'm in. I'm gonna personally reach out to you, schedule a call, and show you how I can transform your life to give you everything you've ever wanted through real estate investing. Quicker, simpler, and more profitable than anything you can ever imagine. Hey, my name is Dr. Toby Potter. I appreciate you being on here. Uh, I look for you on the next reel.
