Real Estate Bird Dog: Scale Your Business With Property Finders

Are you struggling to grow your off-market list? 

Want to learn how you can do more deals in less time with property finders (real estate bird dogs)?

Property Finders (also known as real estate bird dogs) are a great way to find off market properties for your real estate investing business. 

Finding off market deals has never been easier (or more budget friendly) with this real estate marketing strategy.  

Every real estate investor knows that building your off market real estate deals list is one of the most valuable assets in your business.  

So if you are investing in real estate, using property finders to find off market listings is one of the best real estate investing strategies out there.

After reading this post you will know everything you need to know to get started with building your property finder team to start bringing in off market real estate deals. 

Leigh covers this same topic in a training video we published, and you can watch the replay below.

At REI BlackBook we have helped thousands of investors scale their businesses using our software. 

In fact, one of our users, Ryan Moore has generated over 1400 leads using this very property finders method. 

As a real estate investor, one of the most valuable things that you can do for your business is grow your list. But the thing is not all lists are created equal. 

So, a general rule of thumb is if a list is easy for you to get, i.e. something like purchasing a list from a broker, chances are a lot of other people have probably gone out and bought that list too. So the competition for those properties in the list is going to be high.

Now, conversely, the harder a list is to get your hands on, the lower the competition is that you’re going to have to deal with. So, what that means is that building your own off-market property list is one of the most valuable things that you can do for your business. 

And one way to build this off market properties list is to go driving for dollars. 

(NOTE: If you are driving for dollars check out Profit Drive. It’s an app that allows you to locate off market deals and send direct mail on the go.) 

Now, driving for dollars is a killer way to get tons of properties in your market that nobody else is going to have on their radar, or at least it’s very unlikely to have on their radar. 

But the only thing about driving for dollars is it’s very time consuming and it’s difficult to scale because ultimately you’re still just trading your time in your car, driving for dollars. 

So, this is where property finders come in.  

What Is A Property Finder (Real Estate Bird Dog)? 

Property finders, or real estate bird dogs, as some people call them, is a person who goes out and finds a distressed or a discounted property and brings it to you in exchange for a finders fee.

When it comes to paying a property finder, well, that’s something that ultimately you decide.

Typically they will either get paid a flat fee, or they get paid a percentage of any deals that they bring to you that you in fact close. And the cool thing is they don’t get paid unless you get paid. And it really creates a win-win situation for everybody. 

Where Can You Recruit Property Finders? 

So, a question we get a lot is where do I find property finders? 

And the best part of this answer is, it’s pretty much limitless. You can literally find a property finder pretty much anywhere. And a good rule of thumb is to start with people who do a lot of driving for work.

So, think of people like your local mailman, maybe an Uber driver, a Lyft driver, maybe an Amazon Prime, or UPS driver, anybody who is in their car all day everyday already. 

They’re going to love it when you present them with an opportunity to make some extra cash without having to change anything about how they’re spending their time. 

Another way that you can find a property finder is to market for them on a free site like Craigslist, or using paid ads on something like Google, Bing, or Facebook, for example. 

You Recruited Some Property Finders, Now What? 

So, the next question we typically get is what do I do with them once I find them? 

Well, that’s where REI BlackBook comes in. 

We have an entire property finder program built right into our software out of the box and ready to go as soon as you sign up.

This includes a prebuilt landing page that you can send prospective property finders to, to educate them and motivate them to sign up to work with you. 

And if you are marketing for property finders on something like Craigslist, Google, or Facebook, you can actually drive traffic to this page so that people can have all the information that they need to make a decision about whether or not they want to sign up for your program.

In addition to the landing page, we have a property finder portal where they can actually apply to work with you, and then you can either approve or deny their application.

And when their application is approved, they're given access to a portal where they can actually submit properties to you. And within this portal, they have access to a property lead sheet. 

They have an image uploader, so they can actually take pictures of the properties when they're out in the field and upload them for you to review. And there's also a section for notes and this whole thing acts as an open forum where you can go back and forth with your property finders and talk about the properties that they're submitting.

Now from there, you either accept or reject their offer. And if you reject their offer, you can actually use that as an opportunity to give them some feedback about why the property wasn't a good fit for what you're looking for.

You can also include notes as to what they can look for to be a little more in alignment with the kinds of properties and the kinds of deals you're wanting to do for the next time.

So you can understand how with a really streamlined system, like the one we have built into the REI BlackBook software, the opportunity to grow and expand your property finders list becomes tremendous and basically endless. 

If you’ve gotten excited about this whole property finder idea, and you want to go deeper with it, we know we’re only scratching the surface in this post, but we have a great resource available which is The Real Estate Investor's Guide To Generating Motivated Seller Leads.

This guide is going to go into depth on the whole process of property finders with screenshots and tutorials, so that you have literally everything you need to go ahead and get your own property finder program up and running.

Also mentioned earlier, REI BlackBook user Ryan Moore, who has generated over 1400 leads using the property finder program within REI BlackBook, sat down with us for an interview. In the guide there is over an hour long interview with Ryan, where he goes into detail on how he recruits and educates his property finders. 

And not only that, but then what he does with the leads when they come in and how he uses REI BlackBook to convert those leads into deals. 

Using property finders is a budget friendly strategy, and will help produce one of the best lists you can have…

...So, why not implement this in your real estate investing business?