A Guide on How to Find

Multifamily Deals Where No

One Else is Looking…

by Charles Dobens, Esq.

Charles T. Dobens Esq.

Charles Dobens is a multifamily investor, attorney, and mentor to multifamily investors all around the country. Charles founded the Multifamily Investing Academy, where he works with students in his Owner Forum program to train them in the correct way to acquire, operate and own multifamily property.

His legal and consulting practice has one specialty - helping new investors overcome any lack of confidence in moving toward their financial objective of owning and operating apartments.

Charles Dobens is principal at Dobens Law and founder of the Multifamily Investing Academy.

LoopNet: If LoopNet Is Where Deals Go To Die, Why use It?

The most common place that new investors start is called Loop Net, www.loopnet.com. I say that Loop Net is where deals go to die because you've got five million monthly visitors who come to this website looking for deals. Do you honestly think you're going to find a deal when five million other people are doing the exact same thing? It's very unlikely.

Your FIRST SALE in this business is to get a seller to say “Yes” to your Offer!

If you aren’t making offers, this is just an expensive hobby.

So let’s find those deals so you can start making offers!

Why do we start with Loop Net? Because we don't use Loop Net to find deals, we use it to find brokers because this business is a relationship business! We want you to be out there building relationships with brokers. They have deals that never see the light of LoopNet and those are the deals that you want to get ahead of before anyone else does. So that's why we start with Loop Net in order to find the brokers that are doing deals in the marketplace that we're looking at.

NOTE: Whatever you do don't pay for the premium membership on Loop Net. You don't need to. Just don't do it. Save your money.

Two Ways To Find Brokers On LoopNet:

#1: Shotgun Approach to Finding Deals on LoopNet:

• Click find a broker

• Select Multifamily

• Choose a market – If a state is too broad, click a city to narrow it down

270 brokers resulted in my search in Charleston, SC. However, please note many are NOT in Charleston:

You’ve got to be careful and really focus in on exactly the ones that you're looking for.

Next, and this is a great task for a VA (virtual assistant) to do:

• Select a broker

• Click on “send a message”. If you are logged in, this would all be filled out:

• Write a message. What you typically put in here is your elevator speech, or maybe even something a little shorter. My elevator speech (and something we talk about in one of the Owner Forum membership videos is “How to Speak to a Broker”) is: “I'm looking for a property with 1980s construction or newer, separate entrances, pitched roofs, individually metered and has some type of a management issue that I can get in there and fix.”

• Copy (Control C) your message, go to the next person, paste the message (Control V).

Note: Loop Net only allows you to do this about 20 times a day, because you're spamming them and they don't want you to do that. So tomorrow, you or your VA start it up again. Here's the reason why I call this a shotgun approach. I just sent it off to 270 people, not all of them are doing deals. Some of them, like this guy Richard Ayers, has a license but he's a contractor, so maybe he's not really selling anything. I'm going to put the message out there to everybody just to let them know that, hey, I am in business and I am looking to do business in your back yard, let's talk. Sometimes you're going to kiss a lot of frogs.

#2 Rifle Approach to Finding Deals on LoopNet:

• Search “For Sale”

• First, I choose the entire state of South Carolina. Look at all the properties for sale in South Carolina:

Now, I don't care what type of property it is, remember, I am looking for the brokers. That's who I want to meet. I can drill it down a little bit more and look for just multifamily, which narrows it down a little bit more:

• Click “Contact Us” and the broker will reach back out to you.

• The conversation should go something like this: Broker: "Hello, you were looking for more information on a 24 unit in Charleston, South Carolina?" You: "Hi Darcy, that's not really what I was looking for, but I saw that you were the listing agent for it and I wanted to introduce myself. Are you working any other deals that I could take a look at, Darcy? I'm looking to buy some property down in South Carolina."

And so, that's how you start building the relationship with “Darcy”, so remember the first one was the shotgun approach, this one is the rifle approach, and as you can see, it's more of a rifle approach because we are targeting those brokers that are doing deals. That's who we want to work with!

Those are the two ways that we use Loop Net. Let me give you a third little trick with LoopNet:

#3 - Another Way to Find Deals on LoopNet:

• Clear filters and start over with LoopNet

• Search “For Sale”

• Do not select an area

• Select “More Filters”, “Multifamily”

• Use a keyword, “Seller Financing”, for example

• Select “Business for Sale”, “Properties”, “Search”:

This appears in my search - Two properties, $7 million portfolio sale:

Scroll down, and you see “Financing Available for Qualified Buyers”:

Oftentimes, when you drill down by keywords, you don’t find what you are looking for:

Click on it and then you see this: “Traditional sale with no seller financing, commercial financing, cash or 1031 only”.

You never know what you're going to get, but in this case I have 96 more to go. You can dig down deep and get creative. Don't just use “Seller Financing”

“Owner Financing – “Rehab” - “Short Sale “- “Value Add” - “Reduction” - “Motivated” - “Price Reduced”.

• Set all Searches up on Auto by making them ‘Saved Searches’.

This is a great way to use LoopNet if you're bird dogging for people, trying to find something with interesting aspects that you know the buyers on the buyers list are interested in.

CIMLS (www.CIMLS.com)

CIMLS is very similar to LoopNet:

• Once again, you can do the exact same thing here. You can search for properties in a particular region, then narrow it down to just multi-family.

• Click ‘For Sale’ -> Repeat the same searches as with LoopNet above.

• Set them up as saved searches

• GET SIGNED UP WITH EVERY COMMERCIAL BROKERAGE HOUSE When you do, make sure that you take advantage of the automatic notifications that each company has. This way you can set your searches up on auto-pilot.

Google (www.google.com)

• Go to Google -> type in multifamily -> then you put in the market that you're looking (Manchester, New Hampshire, for example):

• Of course, you're going to have the ones that pop up right away, Realtor.com, Zillo.com, Trulia, etc. what I call “below the radar brokers”. I clicked on Hearthside Realty” and you can see, he's got some nice multifamily nice listings in Manchester:

This is why I say LoopNet is where deals go to die. If all you do is sit on a site like LoopNet you'll never find these types of properties! Check this out. I click on LoopNet, I put in Manchester, New Hampshire, look what pops up. Three things, that's it:

…and none of those things were on Hearthside Realty’s page. This guy doesn't advertise on LoopNet. He advertises on his own web page because he has relationships. That's where you want to get to as we go down the list, but this is exactly how the other side buys their properties. They don't buy them on LoopNet.

One of my clients has over 4,000 units. The deals just drop in his lap because the sellers know that this guy can perform, so that's why he gets all the deals before you ever do. That's why you’ve got to work harder at finding those deals and that's why we get out there and hustle, because the first sale is the hardest.

Society of Exchange Counselors (www.SECounselors.com)

“CCIM” (Certified Commercial Investment Member) is probably the best designation you can get in this industry. The Society of Exchange Counselors is a group of CCIMs that meet every quarter, and put deals together.

You can't buy anything on this site. You will want to partner up with a CCIM who is a member of this group and then they will present you to the group. That's how you get these deals accomplished.

FIND PROPERTIES ON SECounselors.com: 1. Go to www.secounselors.com 2. Click on Property Search -> Multifamily

3. Put in your parameters (I would recommend that you leave these as broad as possible). 4. Review every property by clicking ‘Detail’. Very important! You can get extra information here. You can find properties for sale here that you will NOT find on LoopNet!

BUILD RELATIONSHIPS with CCIM Members on SECounselors.com: Contact every S.E. Counselor on the list. These guys are doing deals and you want to work with them. 1. Go to www.secounselors.com 2. Go to Property/Member Search.

3. Click ‘Search All Members’ then Search

4. Contact all of them directly. Do not do a mass mailing to this group. They all know each other and they all talk to each other. 5. Get your elevator speech ready and start building relationships with these experts.

This has been a quick little multifamily leads cheat sheet to get you up and running. Inside the Owner Forum membership site, we actually have over two hours of videos showing you exactly how to find deals where no one else is looking. I have scores of examples of these types of sites that will explain it in more detail, but I just wanted to get you up and running quickly today, and that's how you do it. I hope this was helpful! Please let me know if I can ever be of any assistance. Thank you very much.

-Charles Dobens, The Multifamily Attorney