Hello! My name is Daniel McDougall, I am a Real Estate Agent based out of Bellevue, Wa. I started my career working with investor buyers and I still love to help them get great deals. It’s really challenging to find great investment properties when the Seattle metro real estate market is as hot as a fresh coffee and inventory is at an all time low. However, I found an awesome residential real estate platform that has enabled me to find great investment properties quickly, with smart analysis already done for me.
Grab a cup of coffee☕ and I will tell you how you can gain back precious time in your day while offering a great service to your clients!
This used to be tried and true investment advice: search through and analyze 100 properties to find 10 potentially good ones. Then cull those down to the best 1 that matches your investment goals. Are you shaking your head at that thought? No way! Thats too much work!
I never actually did analyze an entire batch of 100 properties to pick out 1. Going through a few dozen would often turn up good properties, and even that was a lot of work. Although I do appreciate what that process taught me, I admit I do not enjoy analyzing rentals just for the sake of it (I’m nerdy, but not that nerdy).
These days, we have a much tighter market, lower inventory, and all of us feel more squeezed for our time. I still look through properties for my investor clients and occasionally analyze them, but it’s just not efficient to go through dozens of them anymore.
So how can we honor the principle of digging for gems for our clients without spending too much time on it?
For me the answer is InBestment’s residential real estate platform. It is a platform built by agents for agents to help us grow our business. You can find their story here.
With InBestments, I can do the work for three or four clients faster than I used to be able to help one.
InBestments gives us a significant time advantage over traditional methods of property analysis. Using a direct MLS feed updated every 10 minutes, and smooth analysis tools, you can instantly dig down in a particular area and get an idea of the potential profits (or lack thereof). Because the analysis and number crunching is more automated and so quick, I find it helps me to get my head OUT of the numbers and consider other criteria that can be just as important.
What investment “type” do you typically work with? Buy and Hold? Flips? Anything that makes money?
I originally worked for investors that were looking to flip. I would setup my spreadsheets, and working with each investor, we would adjust our opinions of various projected costs. The process could be tedious, took a lot of back and forth, and usually required several meetings. With InBestments, the client can login, go to the property you recommend, then input all their numbers on their own schedule. Typically this can help lead to faster decisions, which is absolutely necessary in this market. Or, as the agent, you can input your opinion of the various costs, and then broadcast that property to your network of investors and see if anyone is interested. It becomes a marketing and data analysis tool.
You can ditch your spreadsheets and still do some great analysis quickly.
Lately I’ve been more focused on helping investors that are looking to buy and hold. Again, I use spreadsheets. I have the formulas input for quickly finding cash-on-cash return, cap rate, expected appreciation, etc. Then I layer in the other data points and start looking at things like location, amenities, etc. I never got into graphic presentation tools much, though I probably should have. But Inbestments has all the advantages of the spreadsheet, with the graphics already there. As well as an easy user interface and better collaboration with your clients. So you can ditch your spreadsheets and still do some great analysis quickly.
I appreciate other key features as well: the ability to exclusively stamp my brand so my clients see only my brand, free SEO optimized agent profile that helps with lead generation, deeper engagement and collaboration with my clients, a polished CMA builder for price and rental comps, built-in email marketing, Portfolio Builder which helps in demonstrating the power of real estate investment to my clients, and control over the flow of information, these features make it so much more than an analysis tool but a highly automated platform.
Good agents are always finding ways to make themselves more valuable and differentiate themselves. Perhaps InBestments will do that for you, like it did for me. But don’t take my word for it!
If you are curious to learn and experience whether InBestments is a good fit for your business, check out what they have to offer for agents.
So…how’s your coffee☕? Still warm? 🙂 Happy Hunting!
