Distressed apartment buildings offer tremendous earning potential for real estate brokers and investors. You can often buy these properties at drastically reduced prices, which means you save money on your initial investment. You might, however, need to invest in rehabilitating parts of the building. Choosing the right apartment building makes it possible for you to control costs and start earning revenues soon.
In the following post, you will learn some of the most effective ways to find distressed apartment buildings that make great investment opportunities.
Explore Your Area for Visibly Distressed Apartment Buildings
Driving around your area is a fairly effective way to find visibly distressed apartment buildings. It requires a lot of time and work, though, which ultimately leads to a lower return on your investment. When you spend hours exploring neighborhoods for derelict buildings, you can’t devote as much time to forging relationships with leads.
Some common signs of a distressed property include:
- Peeling exterior paint
- Tall grass and unmaintained landscaping
- Broken windows
- Damaged doors
- Crumbling porches and stairs
- Dirty siding and roofs
Unfortunately, you cannot get a look inside the buildings to find other signs of distress. Still, this approach can give you a list of addresses owned by people who might want to sell.
Pay Attention to Social Media to Find Tenant Complaints
Social media can also give you opportunities to identify distressed apartment buildings. This approach also takes quite a bit of time and energy, but you can do it from your computer or mobile device instead of driving around town.
About 72% of Americans use some type of social media. Use this to your advantage by searching for keywords people would use would complaining about derelict apartment buildings. For example, you might search Twitter for hashtags like:
- #clogged
- #badlandlord
- #apartment
- #outage
- #noelectricity
If you can find a group of people complaining about similar problems, you might have identified a building in bad condition. Browse the posts to see if someone names the building or owner. That gives you a good starting point for reaching out to the property owner to discuss a sale. You might learn that the current owner would love to unload the property so they can stop dealing with maintenance and tenant complaints.
Search for Multifamily Buildings at Risk of Foreclosure
Not all distressed apartment buildings have physical problems that will prevent you from renting units. For investors, “distressed” can simply mean that the current owner has fallen behind in their payments. They may have even entered foreclosure.
Ideally, you do not want to wait until distressed apartment buildings enter the foreclosure process. At that point, you might need to pay cash to acquire the property from the lender.
Knowing how to find financially distressed apartment buildings before foreclosure could make it easier for you to purchase the property without jumping through a lot of hoops. It will also let you cast a wider net that helps you identify more leads.
Consider that the national foreclosure rate is actually very low (about 0.2% in June 2021). However, a lot of property owners are 30 days or more past due on their payments. In June 2021, about 4.4% of mortgages were delinquent. Reaching out to the owners in the early stages of financial distress gives you an opportunity to position selling the building as a better option than losing the property to a lender.
Of course, you’re there willing to take the property off their hands at a fair price and prevent them from suffering more financial trouble. It’s a win-win situation that lets you acquire an investment property at a lot price while they avoid damage to their credit history.
Identify Potential Investments With ProspectNow’s Predictive Analytics
It’s probably obvious by now that most strategies for finding distressed apartment buildings force you to spend a lot of time and effort on projects that might not result in any returns. You could spend all week looking for an investment opportunity without converting any leads. You might not even find any leads.
ProspectNow makes the process much easier so you can increase your ROI without wasting time. The database contains more than 100 million residential properties and 42 million commercial properties. Each listing also gives you the owner’s real contact information. You don’t need to worry about getting a corporate address or phone number that makes it impossible for you to reach a decision-maker. Instead, you get current, real information that lets you talk to the property owner.
Perhaps most importantly, ProspectNow uses predictive analytics to find properties that will likely get put on the market within the next 12 months. Through machine learning and artificial intelligence, the platform can identify off-market apartment buildings in your city.
Once you use ProspectNow to find distressed apartment buildings in your area, you can reach out to the owners to talk about whether they want to sell. Some of them will not show any interest. Still, you plant the idea that they might want to sell. Over the next year, the pressure of managing a distressed property could encourage them to change their minds. When that happens, you can take advantage of the opportunity by adding their property to your portfolio.
Find Distressed Apartment Buildings With Help From ProspectNow
ProspectNow has been around since 2008. The data that users can get from ProspectNow is a lot more expensive on other competing platforms. By using ProspectNow, you will close more deals, which means you can make more money! ProspectNow is a vital tool for business success in real estate and real estate marketing. Additionally, ProspectNow is a trustworthy provider of reliable data.
Start your free trial now to see how much easier you can find distressed apartment buildings when you have access to ProspectNow’s database and AI.