Why you should pick a housing farm

When we first got started, we shopped for deals anywhere and everywhere.  Three of four days a week we would spend the morning or late at night looking at about ten houses.  After a day of searching, we’d get back and write 4-5 offers. Every distressed property we saw, we’d call the agent, keep track of it and get excited about a potential lead.

After four months of this, we still had 0 accepted offers, and any properties that where legitmate deals seemed to get full price, or above full price offers and be locked up already.

This sucked!

After that we decided to focus on a specific area, about a 10-mile circle.  This made our life much easier:

• Maybe 5 agents control 50% +of the listings that fit our criteria this area.
• Determining the value of these houses is simple, as we spend everyday in this area.
• We can judge trends, up-or-down much easier.
• Once you start buying in this area, you can find a core group of trades and suppliers that live in this area.
• This forces you to have a very narrow focus.

Occasionally, we will still buy good deals in other areas.  But since we are not actively looking those deals generally find us.

We have our MLS search setup to email us daily of any new/changed listings, in our farm, that meet our requirements.  This allows us to make our list of daily properties to go look at, see what prices are doing and check-out our price competition for our existing properties.