How I Find Undervalued Deals on the MLS | Deal Hunting with Jerry Norton (Full Breakdown!)

We cater to the people that need the convenience, speed, and ease most of the time as wholesalers, right? But if you need convenience, speed, and ease, you don't really have the time to call those mailers that you've been getting most of the time, or call, you know, the sign. You might be like, look, I don't have the time for this. So it's interesting that those people— I'd say like 90% of distressed sellers probably even hit the MLS because they don't know about us, right? They don't get our mailers, or they don't have the time to reach out. That's what's really interesting, Jerry. I just did a deal with someone in your program in Salt Lake City. I was telling you about it. So originally they had listed the property at $450K, really distressed. And I reached out, made my offer at $325K. And the agent kind of laughed. He was like, come on, I got an offer $100K above what you just offered. So like $425K. So I was like, no way, that guy can't buy it. There's no way that guy can buy it at $425K. It's not a deal. At $325K, it was a deal. So So, I saw one of your students post on your Facebook group, "Hey, I'm looking for a buyer." So, I went and reached out to him and it was that exact same property I made an offer at $325,000 on, but they had locked it up at $370,000, right? So, I reached out to him, I said, "Hey, look, I made an offer on this property already." I actually did a video of me making an offer. So, that seller, I have the video and everything. Oh, it's with the agent. I said, "Hey, you guys are too high. You're at $370,000. I made an offer at $325,000. You need to be around $325,000." So, So they went back and renegotiated it and back and forth, back and forth. We found out that the property had a property line issue where it was like the record said that they actually like the property line was going over the house. So if they didn't fix it, it was going to be a big problem. So no one was touching it. So we got it fixed. We paid $3,000 for a survey, got it fixed, and we actually got the deal down to $320,000. So we got the house down to $320,000, $5K lower than my original offer at $325,000. And we wholesaled it to one of my buyers for $345,000 for $25,000.

And then JV'd with the student, like you worked.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, but you also, I mean, that's pretty cool, Nathan, because you didn't only help that student in my program, but you, you actually renegotiate, you did the whole negotiation with them.

Told them, yeah. I said, hey, you need to come down because we ran the numbers, you know, and we saw that's where it needed to be. And it's really interesting because at $450,000 where they originally were, if you look at that, you'd be like, man, they're not motivated by that price. All the way down to $320,000. Can you believe that? That's crazy.

That's insane. Yeah. But so that tells you that there's extreme motivation with that seller, even though they're listed with an agent, they're extremely motivated. They want that property sold. That's the beauty of on market is there's lots of distressed properties, but it is work to go through those listings and make the offers and have the conversations. But so is off market. Off market's a lot of work too.

So and honestly, what's been happening over the last 2 years is agents have listed properties way too high and now they're, they're still kind of doing a lot of them are still listing too high and they're doing their clients a disservice because people aren't making offers. Offers on properties that are listed at a decent price pretty even, right? They sometimes be— they're not even making offers. So if they list it too high, they're not getting any traction. So if you guys see something that looks like it's listed way too high, I mean, that might be a good opportunity to just be like, hey, they're probably not getting any hits. But yeah, guys, so what we're going to do right now is I'm just going to kind of show you a little bit of the process of how to make an on-market offer. And then Jerry's going to show us— Jerry, you cool to show us the process in Flipsirr? Uh, yeah, let's go real quick into, uh, the mind map that I share. I shared this with your group Yesterday, Jerry, and what basically what it is, is it's just outlines like the whole process on how to wholesale from pretty much everything and everything, anything. All right. So step 8 of the process of how I teach it, Jerry, is making offers. In the sales process, there's 2 different sales processes, I believe, in making deals. You got on market, off market, right? Off market's a little different than on market. So if we go to on market, making offers to properties that are on market, this is actually the video of the call I did with the agent that of the deal that I did with the student, right? So if you guys ever want to see how to make offers that will get rejected, check this out because it got rejected, but we later did the deal and it was a $25K deal. So it doesn't— you don't always win in the beginning, but it's the follow-up that gets it done. So I made that video for you guys. So when it comes down to doing deals on market, here's a script on how to do it. This is a script that Jerry uses and he teaches. It's the double dip strategy. Proof of funds, you're going to need that. And then I usually, the way I do it is if I can't get the agent to accept an assignment in the beginning, I usually find the buyer and quickly, and then I ask them to sign an addendum allowing me to wholesale it. So there's two different ways. You can tell them up front, or you can just have them sign an addendum saying, hey, I have another property I'm closing on, but I'm having someone buy same price, same everything. Nothing's changing, just the end entity. But let's go to the process right here. So here are the steps, guys. So let's go over really quick. So the first thing you have to do when you're doing this process, and I probably should actually put the numbers in here. You start looking for deals. And what are you looking for? Most of the time when I look for deals that are on market, I'm looking for distress. You know, they're outdated. So distress, just listed, or old listings, like Jerry was saying. Jerry's got a software called Flipster that we're going to dive into. And this is the link if you want to do a 5-day— sorry, a 7-day free trial. So once you dive in and you find distress, the next thing you do is do a quick discovery call to the agent. I usually don't run too big of numbers on these deals. I just kind of get a good idea of where I need to be. And if it sounds like an opportunity, then I analyze deeper, but that's step 2. Step 3, after you find out you potentially have a good opportunity, then you further analyze. You call, you say, hey agent, let me, let me call you back and give you some real numbers, unless you can just knock it out on the phone. Uh, 4, call the agent back, get the contract signed. 5, send offer terms via email or have them write it up. Usually you can just say, hey, I need 7 to 15 days of, you know, close day, 7 days due diligence, whatever you know you can get the deal done. You need to send them the terms that you want. 6, get contract. Check it, sign it, send it back. 7, follow up to make sure every, everyone signs the contract. You know, you, the seller, then you just market it. You send it out to your buyers. And if you guys have buyers already in your market, this should be easy. This should be done deal by this time. If you, if you already have good relationships and then 9 is you agree upon the price and assign it to your buyer. Pretty much you just wait for the close. It's a pretty simple process. I believe, Gary, I think it's pretty easy. Like if you find the deal, you should have buyers in place, or if you don't, shouldn't be hard to find them if you, you negotiated it the right way. All right, Jerry, go ahead if you want to share your screen.

All right, so you can see I'm in Flipster right now. Do you guys see that?

Yep.

Okay, so the idea behind the way we created Flipster, which we built this in 2014 and we've been constantly improving it since then, and so you see here you got the sidebar with all these different things. First thing you'll do is you'll go to find deals and you'll go to the lead finder dashboard. And one of the questions I saw was, can Flipster replace PropStream? Yes, we actually have just as much data as PropStream now and more. And we actually update our data more frequently than PropStream does on a lot of the leads. Wow. So what'll happen is you'll go to— yeah, we have over 150 million records. So let's say 33604. So let's say I want to go to 33604, which is Tampa. I'll put the zip code in, and then what it'll do is it'll show me how many how many leads we have in all these different categories. So 105 MLS, look at how many absentee owners and so on. Uh, there's even a cash buyer category. And then you can say, well, let's take a look at some absentee owners and then it'll give you, you know, this list. And, you know, clearly it's showing me only 1 out of 50 out of 2,000. So you can do some things now where you can go individually. Like, let's say we wanted to take a look at this one. We'll click on it. I'll just go through it real quickly. So let's say this one, Rampart. If I pull this up here, now it's gonna gimme all my data on that property as much as is available. Mm-hmm. And you can see here, it's got owner name. Wow. Agent state absentee. Yep. Here's a Google map. So pretty cool. It gives me some equity and things over here so I can get an idea of what's going on there. And I can start to go through a process here. If I wanna work this lead, then I can add this to properties. And then what's gonna happen here is you can create custom lists, but I'm just gonna add it to the general properties. Properties category. Okay. So if I open this, well, whoops, let me go back here. I can do what's called a workflow. So I can go to property workflow. And then what this is gonna do is this is now gonna allow me to work through this lead. So you guys remember Nathan showed you like 10 steps. It's kind of that idea. So first is here's all my info about this property. Again, kind of high level. I can look at owner and equity information. I can look at a map view. Um, if we've got any reports, we can do a report. We can actually create a folder and create images, but the next step is going to be making contact. So here's some scripts. If you were to call, it's like, here's a text script. If you're doing some text blasting, then there's email, ringless voicemail, cold call. So it walks you through whatever level of marketing you want to do. Here's your deal analyzer. So you can run your numbers. So we have a custom deal analyzer. You would decide, okay, what do I want to do here? Is this a fix and flip, light, average, heavy? I'll just go through this real quickly. And for now I'll just say, no, I'm not wholesaling. We can add that later. And then it's going to open up and create a deal Analyzer. It actually has all the numbers in here based on those preset formulas. So it took the average price per square foot and told me the ARV is $329,000. Now, is that accurate? Maybe, maybe not, because it's ballparking based off the zip code, but at least it gives you a ballpark number. If I wanted to make a $15,000 wholesale fee, I'd add that in, and now my buy is $177,000. So right there, I could be on the phone making an offer and have an idea. This is basically the 70% formula. So whatever you're— you can adjust these numbers, but see, I'm still working in step 2. I can skip trace now. I can go to my, uh, motivated seller site. If you've got that level, you, you actually have your own site.

That's sweet.

Then I'll go to, then I'll go to analyze this. We already did it on the quick because oftentimes you need to do your analysis before you can contact the seller. But here's your formal analysis step. Then we get to the contract. Flipster has built-in digital contracts. So you can create your contract, email it over for signature. This is where you would work with your buyer. So we, here's where you could market and find your buyer. So it's got, again, all these different steps to find your buyer. Step 6 would be your contract with your buyer. So this would be your assignment, create your assignment, again, digital, right built into the system. If it's a fix and flip, then you would have this. So right now this is on, you can switch this between wholesale or fix and flip. It'll change the steps because one of them you're wholesaling, one of them you're keeping, but you would decide that right here. And then, you know, how are you getting this funded? And then you're closing and getting paid. And again, so it's got all these different built-in tools. This is just your workflow. So it's really nice because you can keep yourself on track and move along your leads hopefully to closing. So that's kind of a big picture. You know, you got all these other things in here on the tab, so you can go through and do all these different marketing things. And so some of the things that are in the workflow are also over here. So you could go straight to some of these options under managing deals. We've got a bunch of tools for fix and flip, like a rehab scope of work, a budget tracker, things like that. We have funding solutions if you are doing fix and flip. In the training tab, we've got a lot of resources like Nathan was showing you. If you go to like the resources tab, we've got like all these different things. Every time we, every time I create something new and useful and helpful that gets added in here to your resource tab. So it's pretty powerful. It's very custom to flipping. So wholesaling and flipping. So like if someone were to say to me, well, what's the difference between this and PropStream? Well, PropStream is primarily just a data source. So you're just getting your data there. What we've done with Flipsure is we've got also data. We've got the data as well, but then also custom tools just for your wholesaling and flipping.

That makes sense. Yeah. And Jared, it's been a while since I checked it out, but this looks like you guys revamped the data side. That's awesome.

Yeah. We've been doing a lot with the data. Yeah. We've been really working, working hard on making it more functional, you know, better UI to move through stuff, more leads, better leads. And then we've got our custom stuff. So we've got also our, uh, let me just go real quick back to 33604, 33604, back to Tampa. Oh, then here's our MLS. So we've got, and then we've also, don't forget, we've got these flipper scores. So what we've done is we've created an algorithm. Algorithm that kind of will score the properties. So it kind of helps you know, you know, which ones are really worth going after. Higher the score, the better. And then, you know, so like this one, you could click on this, should be able to click this MLS link. There's that property.

Yeah, that's sweet.

So yeah, cool. That's kind of big, big picture down and dirty.

Yeah, that's awesome. And, and, and Jerry, I mean, I'd love to, love to have you back. Um, I know you're super busy, but, uh, a lot of these questions that are coming through, I think a lot of them would be answered if you guys just try— I mean, I have the link for you guys to just try it for 7 days. You don't— it's free, right, Gary? Like, they don't—

the link that I'm sending you guys, like, yeah, yeah, that link will get you a 7-day free trial. Test drive it, you know, play around in there. There's 3 levels: Basic, Pro, Prime. And each level gets you access to just a whole bunch more tools. Like, we have a cash buyer website to post all your properties. We have a seller site for doing marketing to sellers. Uh, we have funding solutions and all these different things. If you are doing on market and you like Flipster, I would really consider Pro or Prime because that gets you that proof of custom proof of funds letters, which is huge.

Yeah, Jerry, I appreciate your time. We want to honor your time. We said an hour, so, uh, you know, we'd love to have you back. I think everyone learned a ton from you. My goal would be to do as we work together is show people the process of actually applying the whole thing, you know, and let's try and get some deals this way and show people that it's not scary to call agents. Maybe it can be a little intimidating, but you just got to go for it.

And, uh, yeah, Nathan, we could do where we, uh, look look up some of these on markets and call right on the training. We could try to call some off markets. Yeah. We have to skip trace and then cold call. Less chance of getting a hold of somebody than an agent, but might be fun to do.

Yeah. No, I think that'd be a great opportunity to show people the power, you know, the flips or what you can do. And also show the process, like the sales process, because it shouldn't be that scary, you know. As I talk to new people that are trying to get into this industry, I think that they research, they watch your videos, they want to learn, but when it comes down to just taking the action that's necessary, they're hesitant. And my goal is to be like, hey, let's get that barrier out of the way. Let's show you how it's done. And, uh, it shouldn't be scary because it's not like you're trying to make someone sell their house at discount. You're trying to find the right opportunity. And once you have that mind shift that you don't have to be an amazing negotiator, you, you just have to find someone that has, you know, a problem you can solve. So that, uh, that's what we're— I'm excited to do. Yeah, guys, I appreciate your participation. Jerry, again, thanks for your time. Have fun and, uh, have a great holiday.

Nathan, keep up the good work. Thank you, Nathan Payne.

Have a good one, Jared. We'll talk to you later.