Websites You Can Use August 09

Hey, this is Larry Goins and in this month’s issue of web sites you can use I wanted to give you some web sites that are online that give you some really good tools not only for finding properties but evaluating properties, obtaining comps, deal making, and some social networking or social media sites that are real estate specific.

The first one is a community site. It’s a great site. I know the owner personally. It’s http://www.BiggerPockets.com. It has a lot of good information. It is a really good community site. It is a Web 2.0 site. It is very useful and I like it a lot for networking. I like the owner as well. He’s a great friend of mine, Joshua Dorkin.

The next site is http://www.Zillow.com. A lot of you know that I’ve never been a big fan of Zillow as far as evaluation of properties goes. But they have really tightened up. Not only is the value information on properties better but it now shows comparatives as well. It is one of the most popular real estate sites. People know it and respect the information. You can go to http://www.Zillow.com and post properties for sale to generate leads, go to a buyers list, and search for properties, etc.

The next site is http://www.RealEstateABC.com. They have a property evaluation tool that is similar to Zillow but it uses Google Maps. It has some really cool tools like adjusting the values of properties given certain market conditions and variables. You’ll like this one a lot. One of the neat things about real estate sites that interface with Google Maps is that you can check out an entire neighborhood visually right from your computer!

http://www.Trulia.com basically scrapes or compiles all the different real estate sites and finds different listings pulling the information all together in one place that is really easy to look at and use. The format is awesome. They use Google Maps and RSS Feeds and have a lot of different property listings. I love it and you can find a lot of good deals right there for your real estate investing business.

Another really cool web site is http://www.PropBot.com. This site’s creator, Joel Webb, is a really good friend of mine who also created The Creative Investor. I’ll tell you more about that in just a minute. PropBot.com is a site that pulls listings from millions and millions of different listings at thousands of different sites. Realtors can have their properties listed there. It uses API so it interfaces with a lot of other web sites. Other people have their sites and listings post on PropBot automatically. It’s a great place to look for properties and even search for certain keywords. Especially when you invest like I do and you aren’t concerned with locations, you can find properties that match certain keywords such as “handyman special” or “fixer upper” or for certain price ranges.

The next site is http://www.TheCreativeInvestor.com which is also a Joel Webb flagship site. It’s a community site with a lot of good information and articles. You can join for free and network and use the forums. It is a very useful site for investors and a great place to find buyers, sellers, investors, etc.

Check out http://www.PropSmart.com. It is another site that searches the internet for property listings. It also uses Google Maps and provides lots of useful information for mapping out properties you might be interested in and for finding real estate listings.

Another great site is http://www.HousingMaps.com. It’s a really great site that has lots of useful information. Housing Maps let’s you search for properties in certain price ranges and pull up listings. It puts them on a map and gives you really good information. It’s powered by Craigslist and Google Maps.

You know I buy and sell 5-10 or more houses per month without ever looking at a single one. Now you have a whole set of online resources so you can do the same thing!