HOW TO FIND OFF MARKET PROPERTY?
David Barr
September 17th 2021
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Across the UK there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of property investors looking to try and find the best opportunities available and to maximise their yield profits. A lot of these investors will spend their days trawling through Rightmove, trying to work out potential yields on hopeful properties – but there’s so much competition to find those deals that they very quickly get swept up or turn into a bit of a bidding war.
So, how do you get around this? Well, one way is to find a property before it even makes its way to Rightmove or Zoopla, before it even attracts the competition, which is referred to as off-market property.
In this article, we go through everything you need to know about an off-market property, and how you can find it.
We touched on it earlier in the introduction, but before we get stuck in, what exactly is an off-market property? It’s kind of straight forward really – it’s a property that is up for sale, but never actually reaches the market in a traditional fashion, which is typical to get featured by an estate agent on Rightmove, Zoopla or any other such property portals.
That makes this kind of property really hard to find, and we’ll go through in more detail how exactly you can go about doing that later in the article.
There are a couple of reasons that people might choose to sell off-market, and it’s typically a landlord or the general public that do so, rather than a developer or agent for instance.
The main reason people choose to go down this option is simply discretion if a landlord has tenants that they don’t want to upset for example – or a house owner doesn’t want others to know that they are selling, whatever reason it may be, an off-market sale means it’s a lot more discreet.
The other reason is speed, private sales are often quicker as the buyer is already lined up without having to go through the whole process of getting it listed. Buyers of off-market properties tend to be investors, such as yourselves, and therefore savvy and quick when it comes to the house buying process, so there are typically fewer hurdles to jump through in the sale process.
Don’t be concerned, just because a property is off-market, doesn’t mean it has something wrong with it, there are several genuine reasons for off-market property sales. It’s a great way to find a property that meets your criteria and have a lower amount of competition.
There are several benefits as a buyer to buying a property off-market, some you might not have even considered. We’ve detailed a few of the main benefits and explained them for you below:
- It’s quicker – This is for buyers & sellers, there’s no estate agent involved which adds an extra step in the process. More often than not, you’ll generally find that you’re the only person bidding on the property which means that you have time and can open up the conversation to determine exactly how much the seller wants, without having to have partial conversations through an estate agent.
- There’s less competition – This is obviously a significant factor and benefit of buying a property off the market. You are likely to be the only potential buyer, meaning you don’t have to compete with rival bids that might drive the price up. You won’t get drawn into a bidding war, they also don’t have estate agent fees to pay which you can factor in, so what we’re saying is it’s essentially a great way to secure a bargain!
- The transaction is smoother – Generally speaking, an estate agent usually complicates the process. They act as an in-between for buyer and seller, but as you can’t talk to each other directly, you don’t have a property conversation about the price. Communication takes a while, having small parts of conversations over the space of days, using an estate agent which at the best of times can be tricky to get a hold of. Buying and selling off-market resolves all of this, as you can speak to the other party directly.
- Privacy – We touched on this earlier, but the biggest thing for both buyer and seller is privacy. From a buyers perspective, privacy means you are unlikely to get gazumped, and for the seller it allows them to sell discreetly without informing the wider public, neighbours or tenants.
Hopefully, now we’ve got you interested and on the edge of your seat, eager to find out where you can get these fantastic off-market property deals. Great! Well there are a couple of good ways you can find these diamonds in the rough, and here are some of the main ones that we suggest you look into:
This one is more luck than anything, it’s when a family or friend, even friends of friends, you might have heard are looking to sell their property. If you are close to them, they might lean towards a private sale as opposed to going on the open market, which will also cost them extra.
You can advertise yourself to find these opportunities, just like a company would. If you have a bit of money and time, put some effort into getting your name out into the local papers, use social media and more. You can advertise exactly what you are looking for, and that way hopefully the sellers will come directly to you before jumping on the market.
This does require time, effort and potential funds on your part, depending on how much you want to pour into it.
This strictly wouldn’t be off-market, so to speak, but people do sometimes advertise their properties in non-traditional places to save on estate agent costs, this could involve looking through Gumtree, Facebook Market Place & another website that you generally might not have considered. Again this method takes time, but it’s not something every investor tries, so your competition will likely still be a lot lower.
Get yourself to property events and start networking with fellow investors, property developers and anybody that has an interest in the area. This might mean that you are sometimes thrown opportunities by these kinds of people, often there are investors out there who may find a deal that doesn’t quite work for them financially, and may pass it off to a fellow investor for a small kickback.
Arguably the best way to find off-market properties, but of course we’d say that wouldn’t we! We can find you great deals that are off-market, all you have to do is get in touch with us and tell us what kind of properties that you’re looking to purchase, and we’ll get to work finding it for you!
We’re part of a larger group of companies that includes a cash property buying company, meaning we get homeowners coming directly to us to sell their property before it’s gone on the market.
Interested?
We can help you find off-market property. As the UK’s leading property sourcing company, we can help you find investment properties across England and Wales. Join us today!
David Barr
September 17th 2021
Share this post
Start your property portfolio today!
Across the UK there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of property investors looking to try and find the best opportunities available and to maximise their yield profits. A lot of these investors will spend their days trawling through Rightmove, trying to work out potential yields on hopeful properties – but there’s so much competition to find those deals that they very quickly get swept up or turn into a bit of a bidding war.
So, how do you get around this? Well, one way is to find a property before it even makes its way to Rightmove or Zoopla, before it even attracts the competition, which is referred to as off-market property.
In this article, we go through everything you need to know about an off-market property, and how you can find it.
We touched on it earlier in the introduction, but before we get stuck in, what exactly is an off-market property? It’s kind of straight forward really – it’s a property that is up for sale, but never actually reaches the market in a traditional fashion, which is typical to get featured by an estate agent on Rightmove, Zoopla or any other such property portals.
That makes this kind of property really hard to find, and we’ll go through in more detail how exactly you can go about doing that later in the article.
There are a couple of reasons that people might choose to sell off-market, and it’s typically a landlord or the general public that do so, rather than a developer or agent for instance.
The main reason people choose to go down this option is simply discretion if a landlord has tenants that they don’t want to upset for example – or a house owner doesn’t want others to know that they are selling, whatever reason it may be, an off-market sale means it’s a lot more discreet.
The other reason is speed, private sales are often quicker as the buyer is already lined up without having to go through the whole process of getting it listed. Buyers of off-market properties tend to be investors, such as yourselves, and therefore savvy and quick when it comes to the house buying process, so there are typically fewer hurdles to jump through in the sale process.
Don’t be concerned, just because a property is off-market, doesn’t mean it has something wrong with it, there are several genuine reasons for off-market property sales. It’s a great way to find a property that meets your criteria and have a lower amount of competition.
There are several benefits as a buyer to buying a property off-market, some you might not have even considered. We’ve detailed a few of the main benefits and explained them for you below:
- It’s quicker – This is for buyers & sellers, there’s no estate agent involved which adds an extra step in the process. More often than not, you’ll generally find that you’re the only person bidding on the property which means that you have time and can open up the conversation to determine exactly how much the seller wants, without having to have partial conversations through an estate agent.
- There’s less competition – This is obviously a significant factor and benefit of buying a property off the market. You are likely to be the only potential buyer, meaning you don’t have to compete with rival bids that might drive the price up. You won’t get drawn into a bidding war, they also don’t have estate agent fees to pay which you can factor in, so what we’re saying is it’s essentially a great way to secure a bargain!
- The transaction is smoother – Generally speaking, an estate agent usually complicates the process. They act as an in-between for buyer and seller, but as you can’t talk to each other directly, you don’t have a property conversation about the price. Communication takes a while, having small parts of conversations over the space of days, using an estate agent which at the best of times can be tricky to get a hold of. Buying and selling off-market resolves all of this, as you can speak to the other party directly.
- Privacy – We touched on this earlier, but the biggest thing for both buyer and seller is privacy. From a buyers perspective, privacy means you are unlikely to get gazumped, and for the seller it allows them to sell discreetly without informing the wider public, neighbours or tenants.
Hopefully, now we’ve got you interested and on the edge of your seat, eager to find out where you can get these fantastic off-market property deals. Great! Well there are a couple of good ways you can find these diamonds in the rough, and here are some of the main ones that we suggest you look into:
This one is more luck than anything, it’s when a family or friend, even friends of friends, you might have heard are looking to sell their property. If you are close to them, they might lean towards a private sale as opposed to going on the open market, which will also cost them extra.
You can advertise yourself to find these opportunities, just like a company would. If you have a bit of money and time, put some effort into getting your name out into the local papers, use social media and more. You can advertise exactly what you are looking for, and that way hopefully the sellers will come directly to you before jumping on the market.
This does require time, effort and potential funds on your part, depending on how much you want to pour into it.
This strictly wouldn’t be off-market, so to speak, but people do sometimes advertise their properties in non-traditional places to save on estate agent costs, this could involve looking through Gumtree, Facebook Market Place & another website that you generally might not have considered. Again this method takes time, but it’s not something every investor tries, so your competition will likely still be a lot lower.
Get yourself to property events and start networking with fellow investors, property developers and anybody that has an interest in the area. This might mean that you are sometimes thrown opportunities by these kinds of people, often there are investors out there who may find a deal that doesn’t quite work for them financially, and may pass it off to a fellow investor for a small kickback.
Arguably the best way to find off-market properties, but of course we’d say that wouldn’t we! We can find you great deals that are off-market, all you have to do is get in touch with us and tell us what kind of properties that you’re looking to purchase, and we’ll get to work finding it for you!
We’re part of a larger group of companies that includes a cash property buying company, meaning we get homeowners coming directly to us to sell their property before it’s gone on the market.
Interested?
We can help you find off-market property. As the UK’s leading property sourcing company, we can help you find investment properties across England and Wales. Join us today!
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Get in touch and we’ll establish what type of property you’re searching for, before talking you through our current investment opportunities. We’ll also keep you posted as we acquire new deals.
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