Buy Box Essentials: How to Avoid Bad Real Estate Deals

**Michael Zuber** (0:02)
All righty, folks, this is the By Box deep dive. This is a session that I thought about when I was on my trip in Southeast Asia about how we can go deeper into really understanding the power of One Rental At A Time. I think the power of One Rental At A Time is actually in its simplicity. I know myself included, sometimes I over complicate simplicity. So I thought the best thing we could do is a session like this, inviting up to 100 people to talk about a buy box, bring your questions, bring your sample. I am doing this as a meeting, so that's where you can see all the wonderful people here. Ideally, I will allow them to share screens so we could see theirs. But we're really going to go deep on a buy box, answer any and all questions. My initial thinking and planning for this is this buy box discussion may take an hour, may take an hour and 15 minutes. If it takes the full two hours and it's valuable, so be it. But what my hope is, is we go from the buy box, in-depth review to the tracking and how you do that. Because again, what I promise with the buy box is with focus and daily discipline is the ability to learn average. It takes time. I think, I don't know, quote unquote, the smartest of us, the ones with the most experience, it might take 60 days. It didn't take me that it took me far closer to 90 days, because again, it was a city I didn't know. I didn't know anyone. So it takes time. And with focus and daily discipline, I know that it can feel monotonous, it can feel repetitive, and I know you want to do more. I hear it all the time. That is a mistake. So hopefully, we're going to go from the buy box discussion to building the spreadsheet, again, answering any and all questions. This will go till 10 o'clock. I do have a hard stop at 10 o'clock, so we will go all the way till that. If we exhaust questions earlier, so be it. So what we're going to do first is I'm actually going to bring up realtor.com and I'm going to show you how simple I made it for me. And again, this is very similar to what I did back in 2002 or 2003, the application is different, all of that. But it is this simple. So I'm going to share my screen. Again, hopefully technology will allow me. And then ultimately, I'm going to turn it back over to some of you. And we're going to talk about your buy box. So hopefully everybody can see that. And again, I've just pulled up realtor.com. You can see the link up here. It's just their base sign.
So again, what I'm going to do here is pretend like I don't know Fresno. So I'm going to come in and go, OK, I'm going to choose Fresno, California.
All right, so that comes in. And if you see here over in the left hand corner, right now, today, this is actually a shockingly low number. There are 1,159 available properties.
Too much, too big. It's too much. So again, if you know my story, I went from looking at Fresno, California, to looking at the Mayfair District, which happens to be 93703
So again, I'm not telling you what city or any of that. I'm just showing you how you refine your buy box down because the goal of your first buy box is 20 to 40 active listings. Anything less than 20, it's too small. Anything more than 40, in my experience, is too much. I want the buy box to be something you can ultimately scan through in 20 minutes a day. For the first week, the first two weeks, because it's new, because you're updating your spreadsheet, it will take more time, undoubtedly. But very quickly, by the end of the second week, you should be at 20 minutes is the goal. Okay, so Fresno, California, too much. I actually don't know what this is going to produce, so let's see. Oh, so now we have 50 available properties. Again, in the real world, I would want to be between 20 and 40, so 50 is too much. For this exercise, I'm going to just try to put a number at, I'm going to try to find a query or a search that gets me about 25, just to show what I would do. So the first thing I would do is I would come in and change the property type, because again, it shows you everything. Right, so I only want single family homes. I have no idea what this is going to change, but it will probably change something. Oh, now we're at 39 Okay, great. Well, that's not low enough, because again, in real life, like if I was doing this back in 2002, I'd be done, right? 20 to 40, 39 is between 20 and 40 For this exercise, given limited inventory, I'm going to try to target 25 So the first thing I would do is go, you know what? I don't want any one or two bedrooms, because if you guys don't know, there are very small homes sometimes in these older cities. So I'm going to say I want three bedrooms in a bath, three bedrooms and above. Damn it, still too much. There's 28 listings. Well, you know what? I don't want one bath. This ought to change it a bunch. Oh, 14 Darn it, maybe that's too little. Well, okay, let's come back and do one bath and above. So I'm back to 28