3 Practical Tips to Become a Successful Real Estate Birddog
If you are aiming at becoming a real estate birddog, you will have to hone your detective skills and assessment abilities. Do you remember your nosy neighbor that use to scout around what you are up to? Well, to become a good birddog, you will have to develop the same quality.
Actually a good real estate birddog is one half a nosy neighbor and one half a property assessor. If you want to become valuable and useful to a real estate investor, you have to have the skill to dig up all the inside details that will provide an expert or beginning investor a clear upper hand in a real investment deal. The better a deal the investor can secure, the more useful you are proven to be as a birddog.
Your starting fees as a birddog may be around $500. But as you take real estate training and go on sharpening your investigative skills and become increasingly helpful to the investors, your fees will increase too. There are many examples of people who started the business of birddogging for an extra income, but later on took it as a full-time occupation.
1. Start with an Area You Love
If you want to become an expert birddog, a good idea to start with is to find a niche that interests you the most and start your activities from there. Take an example of a lovely lake area with a 10-mile radius that you especially enjoy. Now find out every detail about that area. Know about the neighborhood parks, crime statistics, area culture and everything else that adds value to the area. Map out the accurate radius and slowly learn about every residential and commercial property in the area. This will need some research and persistence. That’s the reason you should choose an area you particularly love and enjoy.
2. Know about Property Owners
Once you come to know about the area, learn about their property owners. You can get a lot of vital information online including how often each property changed hands, when, how much it was sold for, when it was last revamped and so on.
3. Maintain Accounts of Interesting Properties
Maintain files on properties that you feel good about. These may include homes that have never changed hands and has lately been in bad condition. This may be an indication of problems resulting in making the property available. If you become an expert for a particular territory, real estate investor will soon come to know about you and will start approaching you for leads and referrals. And you will soon go far beyond the $500 starting fee.
Develop your skills in this way and you can become a successful real estate birddog.