What is a Property Finder?

A property finder is someone who finds property for other people. They are also sometimes called a property sourcer. Professional property finders are well versed on the buying buying criteria of the people they are sourcing property for.

Alternatively they go out and actively seek out the sorts of properties specified to them by their clients.

Some people make a full time living from being a property finder. The most effective people at being a property finder tend to be those that come across property in their everyday life. So even though just about anybody can be a finder, the ones that make good money from it tend to be property investors or developers themselves or electricians, builders, plumbers, finance brokers or anyone else that naturally comes into contact with property on a regular basis.

These are some of the people that come across properties the most often in their daily lives so as a percentage they have much more opportunity than the average person on the street of finding the deals that investors and developers are looking for.

The one essential ingredient to becoming a successful sourcer of property is that you get to know the buying criteria of your clients, inside out.

You will not survive very long if you are constantly contacting potential clients with junk properties that don’t fit their buying criteria.

A property finder can find out all the key monetary facts and figures for a buyer before they decide to purchase any given property. Such things as; will the vendor come down in price, how much a refurbishment will cost and how quickly the whole buying refurb’ etc. process will take, are normal for a professional finder to have to show his clients.

Property finder costs vary hugely depending on their experience, the part of the country they source properties in and the sort of service they offer. They will obviously charge more if they need to get refurbishment quotes than if they just had to find a below market value property in a given area.

Some finders charge a flat fee, others charge a percentage of the property price while others might want a percentage of the profit.

These days the trend more and more is for property investors to also set themselves up as finders. During their hunt for property themselves they often come across deals that don’t quite fit their own criteria. Where as in the past they would have to just let these deals slip through their fingers, these days they can pass the deals on to other property investors, hence making more money for virtually the same amount of time invested.

Property finders can be very useful to people that either buy and sell or buy and rent out property. They tend to be particularly useful if you want to invest in an area that you don’t live in. For example, if you live in London but you want to buy property in Leeds. It may not be a productive use of your time to be driving up to Leeds on a regular basis to look at lots of different properties, especially if you only end up buying about 5% of all the ones you look at.

In this situation it makes far more sense to employ the services of a finder. They do all the leg work and you don’t actually pay them unless you decide to buy the property. Unless you are paying them to just provide the lead, then you will be paying them whether you buy the property or not.

Being a property finder can be an effective way for someone with a full time job to earn some extra money so that they can go on to buy investment property themselves.

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