The Easiest Ways to Find Off-Market Properties in 2026 (Our Exact Playbook)

0:00MLS deals barely pencil in 2026 and every rookie keeps hearing go off market without anyone showing them the actual playbook. Today, we'll pull back the curtain on the off market deals that built our portfolios. The list, the scripts, the introductions and the exact moments each one almost didn't happen.

0:25This is the Real Estate Rookie Podcast. I'm Ashley Kerr.

0:28Tony J. Robinson:And I'm Tony J. Robinson. And like Ashley said, today, we're going to travel back into time. And Ash and I are going to talk about the first off market deals that we did in our portfolios. And then we'll also look forward to some of the off market strategies that maybe we want to try as we continue to build our portfolio. So Ash, I'm going to interview you first, you'll be in the hot seat. And let's talk about your first off market deal. So take us back to the first off market deal you ever closed. What was the strategy? And how did the lead actually land in your lap? So I started off buying off the MLS.

1:01I didn't really know that off-market deals were a thing. So it was probably not until like my sixth or seventh property that I bought that was actually an off-market deal. And this off-market deal came about because I was driving and driving for dollars. And I saw a for sale sign on a commercial building. I called the agent that was listed on there and he ended up being the father of the person that was selling it. And he said, my dad actually has a whole bunch of properties in this area. I think there was like maybe 10 in total and said, would you be interested in looking at more properties? And I said, yes.

1:39So we, even though he was a commercial broker, none of these other duplexes that he was selling were actually listed on the MLS. So it was kind of through that connection that I got this off-market deal by calling and asking about a commercial property. And I did think it was weird because the broker kept asking me more questions about myself, almost like he was vetting me. And I'm like, does this guy want to sell a property or not? And then that's when he kind of said, well, actually, my dad is the owner of this property and he has a bunch more and I'd like you to look at them.

2:12Tony J. Robinson:Thanks. Okay. Well, first, for rookies that don't know, what is driving for dollars? And were you actually driving for dollars or were you just driving and you stumble across this property? I was just driving and always, like anytime I drove back then, now I have my kids pretty trained that they do this so I can keep my eyes on the road. But I was always looking at properties as a dilapidated, as what was piquing my interest, the electric meters and gas meters. Did it have two or three? Then it was probably a duplex or a triplex. So I wasn't specifically out looking for properties, but this was in a town that I drove through often.

2:51My kids went to school in this town, too.

2:53Tony J. Robinson:So Ricky's like driving for dollars is exactly what Ashley said, where you're just in your car and you're looking for physical signals on a property that show maybe signs of distress. And to Ash's point, it could be just the overall physical, you know, the house is in disrepair, right? Just the physical shape of the property. It could be things like maybe it's in decent condition, but the windows are boarded up. Maybe there's a lot of overgrown grass and trees, and there's the notices from the city or the county on the front door. A bunch of mail piled up outside, but just some signs that maybe this house isn't really being taken care of to the best of its ability, and that might be a sign you can reach out to that owner.

3:30Or even just a for sale sign in the yard. And like, especially the more rural you get, like that actually happens quite often where there's literally just a for sale sign. Another one too is a for rent sign. Like somebody's renting out the property that maybe while it's vacant, maybe they're sick of turnover. Maybe they had a bad experience with eviction. I've bought several properties where the landlord had just went through a bad eviction. And that is why they are selling the property because they don't want to deal with it anymore.

4:00Tony J. Robinson:So Ash, after you dial this broker who becomes the son of the investor, what property did you actually get? What did you pay for if you remember? And what do you think that property would have been worth had you bought it on the MLS? So they had, I think it was like 10 properties, and I didn't buy all of them. First of all, I didn't know how I was going to buy these properties. But I ended up buying, let's see, it was one, two, three, three duplexes from them and one six unit building. So the six unit building, it was like all on one parcel, but it was actually two or three duplexes on one parcel together in the same address.

4:43So technically a six unit, but they were separated as duplexes. So altogether it was six duplexes that I ended up purchasing. and this is where I found bigger pockets because I was Googling, figuring out how to pay for this and how to make it work. And the first thing I did was on one of my rental properties, I went and got a commercial line of credit and I could use that to purchase the smaller, the three extra duplexes that weren't part of the six unit. Then I asked for seller financing and the seller owned all of these properties free and clear. So we ended up doing seller financing for 12 months.

5:28I think it was interest only at like 3%. This was in 2018, we ended up closing on it. And so it was just seller financing interest only for 12 months. And that would give me time to do some updates to the property and then go and refinance with a bank. And then the other ones, I used my commercial line of credit and I paid cash for those. And one was$20 ,000. One was$22 ,000. And the other one was$52 ,000. And then the sixth unit was$152 ,000.

6:05Tony J. Robinson:So a lot of numbers here. Or what do you think the entire portfolio was worth compared to what you actually picked it up for? Just like ballpark, if you remember. I don't remember then. I definitely, part of the reasoning, like some of the duplexes were 20 and one was 52 is because of his ownership interest. Where I said, this is what I'm willing to pay as a total. And he's the one that actually went and broke it down per property. And part of this was because the one duplex he put is$52 ,000, he owned himself. And the other ones that were like$20 ,000, he owned with a family member. So he wanted more being allocated to himself of what he owned.

6:47But there wasn't a ton that I had to do for the six-unit property. And I ended up going and getting it when I refinanced. it appraised for more than enough to pay him off. And we actually got our money back for rehab too. So we were like pretty, you know, had zero money into the six unit after a year. And then also the duplex that he had put as 52 ,000, I ended up going and refinancing that and getting a loan on to take my cash back out. And I can't remember offhand, but it appraised for more than what I had paid for it at the time. But the duplex actually right now, I'm selling that property.

7:36And then the two smaller ones I had unloaded in like 2021 when the market was going crazy. and one of them I sold for like 60 ,000 and the other one I think I sold for I think it was like 55 ,000 but they both had like doubled in value even more plus I did you know some stuff to them but nothing crazy like probably no more than 10 grand was put into each of these duplexes so I got really lucky I bought at the right time and I sold them at the right time yeah well actually

8:11Tony J. Robinson:let me ask, right? Because there was a little bit of happenstance and maybe just like good timing in the way that you found this deal to where this broker just happened to be the son of this other investor who was ready to unload several properties. But if there was something that a rookie, if they had to copy maybe one thing from your story, what's like the lowest skill, highest leverage move they can make? Getting in front of the seller and figuring out their motivation for selling. So I got to meet the seller. I walked to the properties with him. I learned how he had owned these properties for like some of the properties his parents had even owned, like they had been in his life a long time.

8:50And a lot of them were also pretty dilapidated where, you know, he didn't seem to have any interest in keeping up on them anymore. So I think a real like low hanging fruit and low lift and no experience is something you can do. It's like find out the seller's motivations, their intention, things like that. Then the second thing was I made multiple offers. So my offer wasn't just seller financing. It was I can go to the bank. I've been pre-approved for the bank. Here's my offer, which is going to be lower getting bank financing. or here's my seller financing option. If you do seller financing, I can pay more and this is what it would look like.

9:36So then that's what actually what I did. I went and I met them, um, at a restaurant and I handed them my two offers and I said, here they are, um, you know, please look them over. Let me know if you have any questions. And we were probably there for like 10 minutes. Um, but I would say like, those are two things that any rookie could do is talk with the seller, get as much information as you can and submit multiple offers with different creative financing.

10:05Tony J. Robinson:Yeah. Well, Ash, I mean, it's gotta be one of the better off market deals I've seen when you look at the overall ROI of this one, you know, chance meeting with this one broker, right? Like, I mean, you, you got an appreciating asset, you got properties that doubled in value, you got cashflow, like, like there was a lot of good things working from this one deal. And it's all because you went off market. Two years later, they had two more properties left they needed to sell. And I actually ended up buying the four unit they had for$20 ,000, which then I think we dumped. I don't remember. All in, it was around like$100 ,000 after we did all the rehab and renovations to it.

10:40And it appraised for$220 ,000.

10:42Tony J. Robinson:Oh, my goodness. So, yeah. It was a good - It blows my mind when you talk about that. Those don't happen to me anymore. I was going to say, I know it was a few years ago, but it blows my mind when you talk about buying a four unit for$20 ,000. But also too, I think that I also was way more motivated. A rookie investor has way more energy, more time because you have less properties. You're not spread out managing your current portfolio. that I had several properties then, but like not anything near where I had now. But I do like look back and I think like I used to accomplish so much. I really do think that.

11:27And I think that part of it is like I've gotten lazy and I've gotten to like start to enjoy. I mean, I would say up till 3 a.m. working, analyzing deals, like doing lease renewals, like all this stuff, I hustled and hustled. But I think that was also why I found those deals is because I was always in acquisition mode, which can be a detriment because I let the operations fall apart and had to pick up these systems and processes in place. But I definitely think that it wasn't just the market. It wasn't the timing. I was really motivated. I really wanted to become debt-free. I really wanted financial security.

12:10And I think that's like a big part of it is I really had the drive then. So it wasn't just luck of the market or like that's what prices were. Like you can still find good deals. I was just always looking and always analyzing. All right.

12:26Tony J. Robinson:Well, Ash walked us through her first deal. And coming up after the break, I'm going to answer those same five questions that I just asked Ash, so you can get a sense of what my first off-market deal looks like. So we'll cover that right after a quick word from today's show sponsors. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast, easy? Just use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. That means you can stop struggling to get your job notice on other job sites. Indeed's sponsored job posts help you stand out and hire the right people quickly.

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15:43Tony J. Robinson:Yeah, so my first off market deal was actually a wholesale deal. So meaning I actually wholesaled this deal to someone else. So this was like early 2021. And this is shortly after I went full time into real estate. And you know, as we were trying to build our acquisition engine, I said, Well, hey, why don't we try and go off market? I'd never done it before. So but it's worth a shot. So we had the market that we were focused on. And we actually bought, I want to say it was maybe postcards or letters through prop prop stream, like we did like the, you know, kind of the lowest effort way to get started.

16:16Tony J. Robinson:We pulled the list through prop stream, it was like absentee owners. You know, I think we might have added like an equity filter. I don't quite remember the list. It was definitely absentee owners. And then we just chose one of the cheaper postcard options from, from PropStream. And we sent them off. And I've joked about this before on the podcast. But literally, the very first call that we got from those postcards was a deal that we ended up closing on, which is like totally not realistic for anyone like usually need to mail for like months and months and months before you get an actual deal.

16:48Tony J. Robinson:But for us, it was the literal first person to call it from the from the postcards was a deal we ended up closing on. Um, but it was a very, very, uh, kind of worn down and beat up property. Um, like at the time it was probably the worst property I'd ever seen, like personally in my life, you know? Um, but like we get there and it was like an older guy. He had the, the property had been in the family for a while, but it was just kind of like their, their getaway house for the weekend. Um, but it was in very, very poor condition. Um, like there was no, there was no running water, uh, anywhere on the property.

17:20Tony J. Robinson:There wasn't even a septic tank. like there was there was a lines that came out from the property but they just like went out into the dirt like there was no septic tank um just like a very very rough property but um he just wanted to get rid of it and he would actually go out there and he would just park his camper van on the on the like on the lot and he would just kind of like go inside the house for like whatever reason but he was like mostly sleeping inside of uh inside of his camper but just using the lot that was there um but he was ready to give it up he wanted some cash um so we got there we walked the property.

17:52Tony J. Robinson:And man, I was trying to look it up to see if I could find the numbers, but because it was so early in my investing career, my organization wasn't all that great. But we ended up talking this guy down. And I want to say that we had it under contract for maybe 120, somewhere in that ballpark. But because it was such a heavy renovation, we didn't want to do it ourselves. So we knew we had to wholesale. So once we got the property under contract, it's when we kind of pivoted to say, okay, what can we actually do to disposition in this property. So with this property, did you disclose that you were going to wholesale it?

18:25Like, let's break down, I guess, the steps if somebody else finds a property like this, where they don't want to take on the rehab, but they want to wholesale it. How do you work that out with the seller? And how did you work it in this situation?

18:40Tony J. Robinson:Yeah, we told them, we were honest, like, hey, we're investors. We might take this, you know, we might rehab this ourself, or we might bring it to like a different partner of who will end up doing the rehab for us. So we kind of framed it that way, just to kind of give us some flexibility, because we really weren't sure what we're going to do because it was my first time doing this. I'm like, learning as we're going. But when when the when the when the person called, and he was like, like, you know, like, maybe might have been like in the 60s. But when he called, the first things we tried to figure out was kind of what you alluded to earlier, Ash, just like, hey, what's, what are their motivations?

19:13Tony J. Robinson:And I specifically remember when started doing you know trying to go off market i wouldn't i watched um uh brent daniels and he's like uh talk to people ttp uh on on youtube so if you go you know if you look up ttp and he had like these four motivations it's like if you ask these questions that's a really good like starting point for any off-market transaction but it was um the condition of the property um gosh i can't remember what all four of them are now the four pillars it was like condition uh motivation price and timing I think were like the four things. He was like, try and get all four of those things when we have that conversation.

19:48Tony J. Robinson:That's what I did, right? I just like tried to get all that information from him and that's how we kind of understood like what his motivation was. But that's how we structured that conversation. We tried to get all four of those things and then we told him like, hey, it might be us. It might be one of our partners, but we'll need a little bit of access between now and closing to make sure we can get inspections and things like that done. So that was the approach that we took. Now, how did you end up finding a buyer for this deal? Did you have a list of investors lined up or how did you go and solicit someone?

20:17Tony J. Robinson:Absolutely not. You know, we did not have a big network at that time. And I mean, gosh, I think this was like maybe four months into me even being like the host of this podcast. So it's like I wasn't, you know, my network isn't what it is today. Yeah, right. Like I wasn't really known at that point, you know. So we luckily, I actually did have a few friends who were just like local who were in real estate. And I just kind of reached out to some of them. I said, like, Hey, look, I found this deal. Any chance you would be interested? I reached out to other investors who I saw had flipped other properties in that market.

20:51Tony J. Robinson:Like there's a property I'd actually walked a few months before that was like, renovated beautifully. And I just found out who that owner was. And I reached out to him and he sent some folks out. So just trying to hustle, you know, to find anyone that I could knowing what I know now, instead of trying to go find my own in buyer, I probably would have first went to other wholesalers in those markets because they've got an infinitely larger reach than me trying to reach out to individual investors. And even if I'm potentially giving up a good percentage of that deal, the fact that I would have a much wider net, maybe the overall, you know, assignment fee would have been larger.