This article is presented by Propstream.
The world of real estate investing is almost unthinkable today without software tools geared toward generating leads, calculating risk, and working out a viable business strategy.
It’s safe to say that for most people entering the real estate industry today, the days of just asking someone in the area if they know someone with a property they might want to sell are truly gone. Most investors will at least check Zillow and/or Redfin to get historical sales data and check local market conditions. Of course, there are now many dedicated online platforms that promise to dig much deeper into the market, helping investors identify suitable properties and connect with prospective sellers.
It sounds great—why wouldn’t you avail yourself of the expanded opportunities and time saved by optimizing how your real estate investment business operates?
Different Platforms for Different Kinds of Investors
The devil is, as it usually is, in the details. There really isn’t such a thing as a generic “real estate investor” anymore. Instead, there are multiple niches, each populated by people with goals, strategies, timelines, and definitions of opportunity that can vary significantly. If you’re researching real estate platforms, you need to make sure that the services of the platform you’re considering match your business strategy and priorities.
Let’s imagine you’re a house flipper. You will be prioritizing distressed properties, rehab potential, and equity spread. As a bare minimum, an investment platform should offer you an ARV (after-repair value) calculator and financing opportunities, as you typically won’t have access to conventional financing when investing in a distressed/abandoned property. And that’s on top of lead generation, of course.
If, on the other hand, you are a buy-and-hold investor, your priority is, above all else, the long-term viability of your investment. Unlike the distressed property buyer, who is focused primarily on the cost/time paradigm (i.e., How can I flip this as fast as possible and as cheaply as possible?), you will need to find a platform that will do high-quality due diligence for you. This will include analyzing full net operating income (NOI), rental value, and the long-term stability of a specific property you’re looking into. Essentially, you’re looking for help in performing a thorough stress test of your prospective lead—you’re in it for the long haul.
Wholesale investors will have a whole different set of priorities. Obviously, you’ll be looking for motivated sellers (you want those deals closed fast), but you also need to be connected to a pool of buyers. All that requires substantial local market knowledge. On top of that, you’ll be looking for help with key metrics like cash-on-cash return and cap rates.
Finally, did you know that real estate agents also use real estate investment platforms? They do this to identify off-market opportunities, better understand local inventory, connect with prospective clients through skip tracing and outbound marketing, and build more robust outreach strategies.
What to Consider
You may now go off Googling a specific platform tailored to your type of real estate investing. It’s not a bad place to start. But actually, some of the bigger and better platforms have already mastered the art of differentiating investors and their needs.
Propstream, for example, comes with filters, list stacking, comps, skip tracing, outbound marketing, and evolving roadmap support for professionals at every stage of the real estate process, while still recognizing that each user approaches risk and opportunity through a very different lens.
If you’re thinking of benefiting from a larger and better-established platform like Propstream, think of “filters” as your keyword when doing your research. You want a platform that has multiple approaches to investing baked into its product design and allows you to really hone in on what you need, rather than treating you as a generic real estate investor.
