Creating Your Entourage of Experts – Part 3- Choosing a Realtor
If you missed the previous article – Creating your Entourage of Experts – Part 2
As a full-time Canadian real estate investor, we must be conscious of creating multiple streams of income. In other words, creating a real business, not just a part time business. This can be achieved through many various forms of marketing that we do on our own.
It is also good to have realtors on our team that are bringing us business. The realtors we need on our team must be like minded people, in other words, they must also be investors. These realtors also need to deal exclusively, or almost exclusively with investors as the primary source of their business.
Are they too conventional?
Most realtors have a very conventional way of doing business. We must accept that. As non-conventional real estate investors, we will be dealing with many real estate professionals that ultimately do business conventionally. We need to find people that are open to learning how we like do business and are teachable.
What to ask in the interview
We need to interview our realtor with a number of questions that allow us to understand if they are indeed the sort of person that we want on our team. We want to ask if the realtor can gather pertinent data on any property that we may ask them to investigate; by that I mean can they tell us fair market value of the property, when the property was last purchased, what the property value was at the last purchase, etc. You can also ask if they can tell us the current fair market value rents for 1, 2, or 3 bedroom units, single family homes and basement apartments. They should be able to find out if there are any liens, zoning issues, etc. that come with that property.
More questions
The realtor should be able to provide us other information including: where rental areas are located, vacancy rates, amenities, key local economic factors, appreciation in the neighbourhood. They must be able to provide this information quickly for us as we need to make decisions as expediently as possible. As time is always of the essence so we need that realtor to get back to us, once we leave a message, within two to four business hours.
Great bird dogs
Realtors can be great bird dogs for you and can alert you to some great MLS deals. Some can also alert you to expired listings, to properties where there has been issues like a death in the property, grow houses, or things of that nature where you are able to purchase property at a discount.
Canadian Wealth Builders offers many unique, practical, “out of the box” real estate investor trainings which offers the student hands on, in the trenches style instruction to facilitate both a different mindset as well as a successful and lucrative real estate investment business. To find out more, please go to www.canadianwealthbuilders.com
For the next article in the series – Building your Entourage of Experts – Part 4 – Choosing a Mortgage Broker
Your success is our business!
Navtaj Chandhoke
1-416-409-7300
