14 Online Tools that help you in real estate investment
In this article, I would like to show you some of the tools which available in the internet that can help you in real estate investment. They are making your real estate investment easy and simple and most of them are free!
As a real estate investor, we always need to go out and search for the good deal available in the market or do some research that will help us to make a better decision. This is a very high energy and time consuming task. However, internet is gaining popularity and more and more people research, sell and buy their property online. Because of this, there are many companies design and provide some great online tools or services in their web site. This really gives a lot of convenience to the end users like us.
So today, I would like to gather and put all the tools in one article here. So this can be one of your real estate references in future. Please don’t forget to bookmark this page!
Without further ado, let’s get started!
Search Your Property
Due to the popularity of internet and high demands, some real estate sites appear as a trend in the internet. This site can let you buy and sell your property online. Some of them even can help you by pass those local real estate agents and help you save some money in the process of property buying and selling properties.
Bidsell.com – This is a real estate market place. Their motto is “Owners list them – Buyers bid on them”. You can search the deal available on the site and bid on those you think is good deal. Besides that you also can sell your property here and get the highest selling price through bidding.
Zillow.com – This is a real estate property search engine where you can search property on sale easily. You just key in the city & state or ZIP code and you can get the properties information and show the data in a map and list. The new feature of Zillow is “Make Me Move” where you can buy a property that not really on sale by offering the owner a good price and make them sell the property to you.
Trulia.com – This is a competitor to Zillow and is another option for you to search your first deal. Just like Zillow, you key the relevant information such as price range, property type and other requirement, Trulia will search the properties accordingly One of the features that I would like to recommend you is Trulia.com’s Heat Maps which offer a visual view of local home price trends. Besides that you also can subscribe to the RSS of your searching and keep updated with the new information easily.
Redfin.com – this is another great tool for you to look for a property deal. Buying with redfin is very easy. You can give a tour to the houses with redfin or on your own. Draft an offer online and Redfin will handle all the procedure after that such as negotiation and closing. This really can save you a lot of time. However, at this moment, redfin only provides service to certain area only such as Boston and L.A.
Property’s Value Estimation Tools
If you ever see and find a good property before, you will wish to know the value of the property. You can ask your real estate agent, appraisals or bankers to find out this information. This is another very time consuming task. However, today, the story is different. There are some free tools on the internet can do this job for you. You will know the value without making any calls and the best thing is - you can just sit in front of the computer.
Real Estate ABC Value – This is a property value search engine. They claim that real estate ABC can give you the power to search on a subject property, compare recent comps and compare to city averages. Overall this tool is not bad as it comes with the comparison feature.
Yahoo Home Values tool – Another great tool from Yahoo. I have nothing to say about these tools but let you try this yourself.
Eppraisal – Eppraisal provides home valuation service along with information about homes recently sold in your neighborhood. Eppraisal even provides more with mobile and professional services. You can get home valuation information through your mobile phone or request some experts to do the valuation for you.
Rentometer – I think this really a great tool. This tool can help you to check the rental market of your area. After you key in your rental address and relevant information, the system will analyze your area and listed several rental properties around your area on the Google Map. From here you can compare the rental market accordingly.
Update:
This site was recommended by Grey. This is really a great tool. Thank you Grey!
Housefront.com – Another site like Eppraisal where you can get the property valuation through your mobile phone. Housefront will help you to keep all your search history so that you can refer back from your computer what property you have searched when you go out for deal hunting. Overall this is a great tool.
Looking for an agent
Real Estate agent is one of the important team members in your investment team. They can help you by providing professional information and also experience which can save you a lot of research time. So I introduce 2 sites for you to find a good and reputable real estate agent by looking at their testimonials and recent business activities.
HomeThinking.com – This is a pretty straight forward site that provides services to help home owners choose the most remarkable real estate agent. They measure the performance of agents by monitoring the real estate transaction they made, for how much and how long on leverage. Besides that you also can read the customers reviews on particular agent to know their reputation.
Incredibleagents.com – As its name indicated, this site can help you to find an incredible agent for your investment. In this site, you will read a lot of information about agent’s profiles and the reviews from old customers. Personally, I think you can read a lot of great reviews over agents here.
Renting Out Your Property
Renting out your rental property is another challenge for a real estate investor. You have to know the marketing skills in order to rent out your property faster to the targeted customers. If you are looking for some communities that full of targeted customers, then the following sites can help you on this.
Apartments.com – In this site, you can be an advertiser to advertise your rental property to the world. First you sign up to become their advertiser and then select an ad package to expose your rental property to market.
HotPads.com – You can list your property on the market free in this site. Just type you address, City and select the state, then your property will be listed in this site. There is a free video provided by HotPads to help you on this.
RentMineOnline.com – This is a site that connects millions of owners and renters through a convenient online market place. If you go to their site, you will know that they are combining their network, members’ network and also Local rental companies’ network into a big trusted market place. If you want to rent out your property, this is a good place to get started.
TenantMarket.com – This is a search engine site that let you to search renters and landlords accordingly. The search engine is quite easy to use. Just key in the relevant information and the potential tenants will be showed on the screen. Besides that, there is a virtual assistance appears at the site to help you on how to use the their service
This is an article that I wrote and put in the “How to Invest Your Money” which is about achieve financial freedom by making more money. You can read other relevant articles over here.
A review on Starting a Drop Shipping Business, Part 4
This is part 4 of the series on Starting a Drop Shipping Business. You can read the previous article of this Series below:
- Part 1 : What is drop shipping and the advantages of drop shipping.
- Part 2 : The Disadvantages of drop shipping business and should you start it?
- Part 3 : The Basic Steps to get started with drop shipping.
In order to make money in drop shipping business, you have to find and get a good drop shipper as your business partner. This is a crucial step for your drop shipping business.
So in this part 4 of the series, I would like to discuss the tips that will help you to get a good drop shipper for you business.
How to select a Reputable Drop Shipper
Drop shipping is a very hot and popular ways to make money from internet. Maybe because of this, many scams have arisen around the industry. So you have to be careful in this industry to choose the reputable drop shipper for your business.
But don’t worry and don’t let this scare you away. If you really want to make money from drop shipping, then you must take some time and research your drop shipper. To help you out, below are some of the tips that you must consider when selecting your business partner – drop shipper.
- Middleman or drop shipper? Please ensure this before dealing with any parties. Some of the companies claim that they are drop shippers, but in fact, they might be the middleman and use other drop shipper to delivery the products to you.
- Product list updates. How often a drop shipper updates their product list? This will ensure that you will have different kinds of products to sell from time to time.
- The Wholesale Price. You need to make sure the wholesale price a drop shipper offers is low enough so that you can have more margins and make more money in every sale.
- How they handle delivery. Some drop shippers will add the delivery costs into their wholesale price and some of them just charge you a handling fee for delivery. As a business owner, you must clear with this as it is directly affect your business expenses and profits.
- The Availability guarantee. I hope you don’t want let your customer down with stock not available after them making the decision to buy. If possible, please pay attention on the system how you can check the stock availability.
- Read previous customer testimonials. Nothing is better than review of experienced users. If everyone is giving positive reviews on a drop shipper, then they are obviously doing something right.
- How drop shipper helps you to make money. Most reputable drop shipper will provide tools and information to help you in business. After all, both of you are business partner. If you can make money, they can too.
- Returns and refund Policy. Read the terms and condition of the drop shipper and pay attention on the lines which talk about returns and refund. This is the after sales service and guaranteed that your business giving to customers. Obviously this is very important if you want to build up a good business relationship with your customers.
Above are 8 tips that I can give you to select a good and reputable drop shipper for your business. Of course, you have to spend some time here and don’t rush. This is the most basic and yet important step that you must take to ensure the success of your business in future.
This review on drop shipping business is almost comes to the end. If you feel that drop shipping is suitable for you, then you can take action base on the tips that I shared in the previous parts. But if you want to start another kind of business, then you must read my next article about the comparison between drop shipping and blogging.
Yes, you can make money from both of them. However there are certain reasons I choose blogging over the drop shipping. Do you want to know the reasons? Then you must subscribe to my RSS feeds or bookmark this site by pressing CTRL + D for the next updates.
This is an article that I wrote and put in the “How to Make More Money” which is about achieve financial freedom by making more money. You can read other relevant articles over here.
The Characters of a Successful Entrepreneur
Recently I have some thinking that what it takes to be a great entrepreneur. Do they have special trails that distinguish them from others? Or they are some kind of business Genius that makes them so different? Should we measure the success of an entrepreneur base on his/her wealth, business, ideas or money? This is a few questions that I always think and want to look for the answers.
After doing some research, I found that there are a few points you must know that really make them so different, or become a successful entrepreneur. The answers are really eye-opening and I put them in this article for you to read.
- Entrepreneur is not a risk taker.This is a myth. Many people think that entrepreneur is a risk taker. However research shows that they are trying their best to control the risks and will not take unnecessary risks. Every time they start a business or try to push out something new to the market, they seems like taking risks, but in fact they have their plan and strategy to control the risks. They know that they are not gamblers and in order to be success, they must learn how to minimize and control the risks. Because of this, they can take more risks compare to others and achieve something that others always dream about.
- Entrepreneur is stubborn. Entrepreneur is stubborn with their vision and ideas. This is very important at the early stage especially with the new business and ideas that are not proven yet. Usually at this stage, there are a lot of rejections, criticism and negative comments from others. Their stubbornness will make them move forward here no matter what happen in this stage.
- Entrepreneur is using KISS. KISS is “Keep It Simple and Stupid”. It seems like entrepreneur is good to keep everything as simple as possible. They know that only the simple thing that can be accepted by all kind of market and hence can boost their level of success. In fact, if you able to keep everything is simple, everything will seem more easy for you. Of course, because of this, you also can take action easily.
- Entrepreneur can see “success”. Successful entrepreneurs can see success in their future. Many of the top businessmen around can see the potential of their product and believe that their business can bring them to the next level of success. For example, Michael Dell believes the potential of computers and spent most of his time to build up the business in his dorm room. This is a great example how an entrepreneur visualizes the success and plans the road to achieve it.
- Entrepreneur is perseverant. This is another stubbornness of entrepreneurs. They can persevere in their goal in any condition. They know their goals are, they set a deadline, they understand the tasks that they must accomplish to achieve the goals and also the obstacles that they might receive in the tasks. So they can just focus on their goals and work hard no matter what happens on them.
- Entrepreneur is discipline. Discipline is the key to success in any field. As an entrepreneur, besides working hard, he/she must be discipline and work hard again and again. We often see that there are a lot of fast ways to success being introduced to the market. However, in most cases, this is impossible especially you want to long term success. Entrepreneur understands that only discipline and hard work can bring them the rewards.
- Entrepreneur is good in time management. Every day there are a lot of tasks waiting for entrepreneurs to accomplish. So time management is important for them to accomplish all the tasks on time. They can make decision, take action and accomplish their tasks very fast. Because of this, you can always feel that being an entrepreneur, they are productive and high effective.
- Entrepreneur has good habits. Generally, entrepreneur has a lot of good habits that make them success. Good habits such as punctual, polite and remain cool under pressure are very common among them. You will know this if you have an entrepreneur as a friend.
Conclusion
I can see that the most important thing to be a great entrepreneur is habits and mindset. Both of them are related to our inner self and this is the hardest part if you want to train up a new habit and mindset. Maybe because of this not everyone is suitable to have the name of “Entrepreneur”.
