BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - How to Find $150K Rental Properties in 2026
Episode Date: May 20, 2026You’re looking online and seeing properties priced at $300K, $400K, $500K, or more. As a real estate investor, that won’t cut it. What if you could get a deeper discount—we’re talking $150K re...ntal properties. Don’t think it’s possible? Henry has been getting deals just like this in 2026, buying them, making upgrades, and walking into serious equity with way less money in. How does he find them? Today, we’re sharing the exact methods. This is how to find off-market properties priced well below your area’s average, even in 2026, even with methods people have written off as dead. This is the quick guide to getting your first off-market real estate deal. Henry goes over how to spot the “situations” that lead to lower prices, the list he builds to target the best potential investment properties, the methods he uses to contact sellers (it’s not just cold-calling), and the tool he recommends every beginner to use to choose their deal-finding method. Plus, if you don’t have time to search for deals, we’ll share an easier method to get them sent to you. In This Episode We Cover How to find investment properties for around $150K even in 2026 The off-market deal-finding methods beginners can use to get their first discounted property The two things Henry needs on his off-market list before he starts contacting sellers Got no time to look for deals? This method gets deals sent straight to your inbox How to use AI to speed up your deal-finding method and get in the game faster And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1280. Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email advertise@biggerpockets.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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This is how to find investment properties for only $150,000.
The best properties in your market are not on Zillow.
You're scrolling listings every day.
$250,000, $300,000, nothing cash flows.
Meanwhile, other investors in your market are buying properties for $150K or less.
That's because on-market listings are only half the picture.
There's a whole other world out there of properties that you can buy at deep discounts,
if you know where to find them.
I've built my entire real estate business on off-market properties.
That's how I can buy deals at 50 or 60% off of their true value
and create a huge profit margin after I fix them up, of course.
But a lot of investors waste time and money on off-market deal-finding strategies
that will never work for them.
I've researched them all from wholesalers to sending mail, coal calling, door-knocking.
So I'll share with you which are worth the effort and which are a huge waste of your time and money.
If you're tired of competing with every other investor for the same overpriced listings and you're ready to hustle for real value, this is your playbook.
What's going on everybody?
I am Henry Washington, co-host of the Bigger Pockets podcast.
And today, we're going to deep dive on one of my favorite topics, and that is off-market deal finding.
Almost all of my deals have come from these strategies, and I'm going to share them with you right now.
now. First, I'll explain what off-market deals are for anyone who's not heard of this concept,
and then I'll describe some of the more popular strategies for finding off-market deals,
and lastly, I'll give you a framework to help you pick which strategy is right for you and your
goals. Let's start by defining off-market versus on-market. When we're talking about on-market
deals, these are the homes that you can typically see on Zillow or Redfin that are listed for sale.
This is what the majority of people are looking for when they're trying to find a home to buy.
An off-market deal is, well, the opposite of on-market.
It means the property was never listed for sale on the MLS or the open market.
So an off-market deal could be something as simple as you overhear your neighbor talking about thinking of selling their house.
And so you make them an offer to purchase it.
And you're able to buy that property without them listing.
listing it on the open market. Congratulations. You just bought an off market deal. When people
traditionally hear the phrase off market deals, what they're thinking of is investors who spend
time or money and build some sort of system where they find a list of people who may potentially
be willing to sell their home if someone makes them the right offer. And then these investors
go directly to the sellers and shoot their shot. Make them an offer. If somebody says yes,
then they're able to purchase an off-market deal.
So now that we know what an on-market deal is versus an off-market deal,
let's talk about why anybody would want to buy a house off-market anyway.
Seems like it takes more effort.
And you'd be partially correct.
I think finding a good deal either on or off-the-market,
if you want to do it consistently, takes a good amount of time or effort.
Why people specifically search for off-market deals?
Well, the main reason is money.
when you buy a property off market, typically you're able to get the property cheaper than when
you buy a property on market. And that's not necessarily because off market deals are in worse
shape than on market deals. It's merely just more a function of not having to pay the middleman.
If you list your property on the market with a real estate agent, that real estate agent has to get
paid. And when you don't have to pay that agent, it typically means you're able to purchase that
property at a little bit deeper of a discount because there's not an intermediary to pay. So why do I
mostly focus my deal finding strategy off market? Well, same reason. I can get better margins
and have more protection by buying deeper discounts by going direct to seller and not having to pay
the middleman. So how do you go about finding off market deals? Well, we've got to change what you're
looking for just a little bit. When you think about an off market deal, what you are
trying to say is you would like to buy a property, hopefully get some sort of a discount,
and you have an opportunity to make money. And so if you stop thinking about finding off-market
deals as looking for a house to buy and start thinking of finding off-market deals as looking
for the situations that would cause somebody to need to sell their property at a discount,
then it becomes a lot easier to find. No one just wakes up in the morning and says,
I sure would love to sell my house for $100,000 less than after repair retail value, right?
They're doing it because they're usually willing to sacrifice price for convenience.
We all know that if you want to sell your house on the market, there is a process that takes place.
This process could take anywhere from three months to six months or a year.
So it's not a very fast process when a seller wants to sell a home on the market.
but it is a more profitable process because typically they're selling the home for retail value.
With off market, you are looking for people who are saying,
hey, I need to sell this and I need to sell it faster.
Is there someone out there who can help me with that situation?
And if you get good at knowing what those situations are and how to find those situations,
you can put yourself in front of people who need speed and convenience more than they need
top dollar.
So how do you look for those situations?
situations. Well, it's fairly simple. Your job, if you want to find off market deals, is to find or
generate a list of people who own properties in the area you're looking to purchase in, and the
properties are within the buy box that you have. So you need to have those things defined before
you go spending time or money looking for off market deals. And then you have to search for
two things. You need to search for equity and you need to search for motivation.
Why equity? If somebody owes $90,000 and the property is worth $100,000, you can't come in and offer them $50,000 to buy their house.
Because that means they would have to pay $40,000 to sell you the home. No one's going to do that.
But if that same seller only owes $10,000 and they need to sell that property fast and you can meet their need by buying that property and you offer them $50,000 for the property,
well now they walk away with a $40,000 check.
So the house must have equity in order for you to create a win-win situation
where you can make an offer at a price point that makes sense for you
and at a price point that makes sense for the seller.
The second thing every off-market deal needs is motivation.
You need to be looking for motivation.
In other words, what is motivating this seller to need to sell
and get speed and convenience over price?
There are several reasons why someone would need to sell for speed and convenience over price.
Our job is to search for those reasons.
Some of those reasons could be maybe they just need money fast.
They're going through some situation.
They need fast cash.
They're selling their house to get it.
Maybe that situation is they're going through a divorce and they need to settle their estate.
They need to settle it quickly.
And there's a time frame associated with that and they're running out of time.
Maybe they're retiring and they want out of the business.
They're too old to maintain their portfolio.
They would much rather get out of their portfolio and do it quickly so that they can move on to focusing on their family.
Maybe the property has so much distress that they can't afford to pay what it would cost to get this home into preferable condition to be able to sell it in a timely matter on the open market.
There's tons of tools out there where you can literally build a list of sellers in your area who have property.
within your buybox who have equity in their home, and you can actually search for these different
motivations through different filters on the tools. You can simply just Google off-market deal-finding
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And we're back on the Bigger Pockets podcast.
Let's jump back in.
All right.
So now that you know how to get a list of people who have equity in their home and who
have motivation or a reason to want to receive an offer for going price in lieu of convenience,
we have to figure out how to get those people on the phone with us or in front of us to have a
direct conversation.
And this is the part that's going to involve several methods, which you've probably
heard of before listening to this episode, like sending direct mail or making cold calls.
But before you just go doing any of these methods that I'm about to cover after this section,
you need to understand what is involved.
Finding deals, whether on the market or off market,
costs you something. It is not free. If you want to find deals, you have to spend money or you have to
spend time. So before you go spending any of those resources, time or money, take a budget. Sit down
and have a realistic conversation with yourself about how much time you can spend to find leads
each week or month or how many dollars you can allocate to finding leads or deals each month.
Once you have your budget, it will make it a lot easier for you to pick one of the strategies
that we're going to cover because you'll understand if you have enough of the resource that
it takes for that method to be successful. So now let's talk about the actual strategies
that you use to get these sellers to actually talk to you. I would say,
say the one off market deal finding method most people have heard of before is direct mail marketing.
And direct mail marketing is very simple. It's just you sending a piece of mail to the people
on your list saying, hey, I'm an investor in this market. I would like to make you an offer on
one, two, three, main street. I can buy it quick. I can be super convenient. Give me a call. Give me a text.
Give me an email. Whatever your call to action is for them. It's simply just a piece of mail.
and the people who receive that mail and are interested will hopefully call you.
You have the conversation.
You go look at the house.
You make an offer.
The next semi-popular method for finding off-market deals that people have probably heard of before is cold calling.
Cold calling is simply you calling the leads on your list.
Maybe it's you calling them yourself and saying, hey, I'm interested in buying your property at 1-2-3 Main Street.
Or there's other variations where you hire a company who specializes in this.
There are tons of third-party companies who make cold calls for living, for real estate investors, or for other products or services.
So you can hire somebody to call for you or you can hire a person like a VA or a freelancer to make the calls for you.
But all of them are variations of the same thing, which is to call the phone number of the leads on your list and see if they would be willing to let you make them an offer for their property.
And probably the third method that people have heard of is to simply door knocking or knocking doors.
That's what James Standard calls it, right?
Lots of real estate investors got their start knocking doors.
And knocking doors is simply just you going to the addresses on the list that you have
and physically knocking on the door and seeing at the seller's home and having the conversation
about you potentially making them an offer for your property.
Now, I can tell you one thing.
There's probably nobody listening to this episode that heard me talk about any of these methods
that didn't get a little bit of a knot in their stomach because all of these methods share a
common denominator.
And that is, they're all a little bit uncomfortable, right?
You can't really escape the uncomfortability.
The goal is to find the strategy that you have the budget of time or money to afford to do properly
and afford to do in enough volume and afford to do long enough for it to produce the result
that you're looking for.
The best part about deal-finding strategies both on and off-market is they all work.
Every single strategy I've talked about now or that I will talk about in this episode works.
Where people fail with deal-finding strategies both on and off-market,
isn't because the strategy doesn't work. It's because they don't do it in the right amount of volume
or spend the right amount of time or money or it's just too uncomfortable for them to want to
proceed with the strategy. So it is imperative that you choose a strategy you can afford to fund
with your time or money and that you know you can stick to even though it's slightly
uncomfortable. This is why I don't knock on doors. I hate the concept of knocking on a
door. I could lie to myself and say, I'm going to knock 20 doors today no matter what. And then I'd knock on
one, I'd get scared, and I'd never do it again. That strategy is way too uncomfortable for me,
for my personality, for what I feel comfortable doing. I also don't do cold calling. I've
used cold calling in the past, but I paid a third party to do it because I don't want to cold call
people and have conversations. That's too uncomfortable for me. I know I wouldn't stick to it. So I chose direct mail
as one of my strategies because the people who are calling me from my direct mail actually want to be
having a conversation with me. They may want to curse me out for sending a mail, but at least they
want to be talking to me. And so it makes that level of uncomfortability comfortable enough for me to
know that I can stick with it. So pick a strategy you can afford to fund and that fits who you are.
Don't lie to yourself. When you spend enough of the resource that it takes, you do it for long enough
and you're not uncomfortable with the strategy,
the strategy will produce the result.
That's the best part about deal finding.
All right, we've got to pause here,
but we're going to have more about finding off-market deals
right after this break.
All right, we're back on the Bigger Pockets podcast.
Talking about finding off-market deals, let's get back in.
So if those methods are a little too uncomfortable for you,
let's talk about some methods that are less uncomfortable,
but maybe won't be as profitable, and I'll tell you why in a second.
So the main strategy people use who want to find off-market deals, but they don't want to do
the work to find off-market deals, is they leverage wholesalers.
Wholesalers are real estate investors who do all of the marketing and put in all of the work
that we outlined previously, and they generate the leads, but they aren't the ones who typically
close on the properties.
They go spend the time or the money.
They use off-market deal-finding strategies.
they generate leads or people who say, hey, I would like to have you buy my house for this price point.
And then they take that contract a piece of paper and they go find a real estate investor like myself
who is willing to spend the money to buy that deal.
And then they charge what's called an assignment fee.
And they make a fee for connecting the buyer and the seller.
And so if you don't want to go do all this uncomfortable work that we've been talking about,
you can leverage wholesalers who are willing to go do that work and then provide you with
the deals, obviously for a fee. You're not going to get as good of a deal because, again, you're paying a
middleman, but it is a way to get potentially better deals than you can find on the MLS because
it's still leveraging off-market deals. Another strategy that was pretty popular, maybe about
10 years ago and then fell off for a while, but now is coming back, quite a bit actually, are
auctions. Auctions are typically some sort of foreclosure.
property. So pre-foreclosures, foreclosures, sheriff sales where property has been seized in some sort of
criminal activity, all of these properties can get auctioned off and every city, state, or municipality
probably has some sort of property auction that they do on a weekly or monthly basis. You can do
some Googling or calling down to your city or municipalities head offices and seeing if they have
auctions and when they are. Again, it's a more comfortable strategy.
because you're not truly dealing directly with the seller.
And so it's not as personal as talking to a person who lived in the home.
But there's some caveats with auctions.
A lot of auctions, you're not allowed to actually see the inside of the property before you bid on it.
And a lot of auctions require you to pay cash in full on the day of the auction if you win the bid.
So it's a very cash liquid business.
You need to have cash or access to quick cash, typically to be able to buy them.
There are exceptions to this and auctions that do allow you to use lending.
So please do your due diligence.
Make sure you research heavily the auction and the rules before you just go start bidding on properties
and end up in a world of hurt because you bought a deal that's a piece of junk or you got to come up with a whole bunch of cash you ain't got time to get.
And the other methods, and honestly, this is the methods most people choose when they're doing off-market deal.
strategy because they're the most comfortable is just networking. So that's going to real estate events,
telling people you're looking for a deal, hoping that they have a lead for you and they give you a
lead, or working with agents who have what they call pocket listing. So a lot of agents sometimes get
leads for listings and they don't actually list the property because they know that the seller
maybe doesn't have the time or maybe doesn't have the money to fix up the property. And they don't
think it's worthwhile to list it, but they know it's a lead for the right buyer. And if you can network
with these agents and get them to send you some of these pocket listings, you can essentially
buy the property. You'll have to pay the agent and they will typically get their commission as
being an agent that represents either you or the seller in the transaction. But usually you can get
these properties at a little bit of a discount because, again, they don't fit the typical on-market
deal mold. So those are several ways.
that you can use to find off-market deals. Some are going to be easy and not as profitable. Some may be
harder, but yield more profit. You've got to figure out which ones are right for you, the deals you're
trying to buy, given the resources that you have. I can hear everybody now. I know what you're
thinking. Man, just tell me how much time or how much money I need to have ready to go in order for
these deal-finding methods to work. I'll be honest. I wish I had a perfect answer for you that would
tell you exactly how much time or money you need and then it's going to work perfectly.
It doesn't work like that. Different strategies work at different time frames and at different
cost levels in different markets. If you're going to send direct mail in a massive city like
Houston, Texas, there's tons of investors sending tons of mail and people are used to getting
mail. And the more used to mail people are, the lower the response rates are. Versus if you live or
invest in a smaller, more rural market with less investor activity, sending direct mail, this may be the
first time somebody's sent them mail to make an offer on their property. So your response rates are
higher. In other words, you're going to have to spend more money and more time in bigger, more popular
markets than you would spend in lesser more rule markets. What I would urge you to do is, you to do,
is to leverage some sort of AI tool, cloud chat, GPT, whatever your preference. But feed it your budget.
Let it know how much money and how much time you have. Let it know the strategies you're comfortable
with and the strategies you're uncomfortable with. Let it know your goals, how many properties you're
looking to buy and in what time frame you're looking to buy those properties. And then ask it,
based on my budget and based on what I'm looking for, do some research and let me know what
methods for finding deals off market would be best to maximize my budget and help me meet my goals.
And then before you go spending money, make sure you bounce your plan off of seasoned investors,
go to networking events, talk to investors who have implemented some of these strategies.
Stress test it and see, hey, this is the plan I have. Do you think this is enough? Why or why not?
Because every market's got its different intricacies. You have to do the work yourself to determine
what your budget needs to be or what success will look like and how much that takes.
But we've got a lot of great tools and data literally at our fingertips that can help us narrow that down.
All right.
Well, now you know about off-market deal funding and hopefully you have a whole lot more frame of reference
to help you determine if looking off-market for deals is right for you.
Again, off-market deals are simply just deals that are not listed on the MLS.
There are people who are willing to sacrifice price for convenience.
We have to figure out how to find those people.
And then we have to determine if we have enough of the resource it takes to find off-market
deals in order for us to produce leads consistently.
So how much time do you have and how much money do you have?
And then you marry that to an off-market deal-finding strategy that your budget can
afford to do until it works and that you can stick to.
even though it's slightly uncomfortable.
If you put all those pieces together
and you implement an off-market deal-finding strategy,
I promise you it will produce results.
Where people fail in off-market deal-finding
is they simply don't spend enough of the resource that it takes
and do the strategy long enough.
I promise you these methods work.
That's why they work in so many other industries besides real estate.
You get direct mail from the cable company,
your lawn care companies, from the solar companies. They all send you mail or postcards or letters.
Lenders are sending you mail. Credit card offers are sending you direct mail all the time.
All these super smart companies wouldn't be doing it unless it works, but they have the budget.
They can afford to do it for long enough for it to produce the results. That's our job as investors.
Can we afford to do it and can we afford to do it long enough to produce the result?
If you do, you are going to be well on your way to finding very profitable deals, off-market
deal finding.
All right, everybody, thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Bigger Pockets
podcast.
I hope you got some valuable information, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.
Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast.
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