I tend to get this call a good number of times every week, from folks I know super well, and from those that I’ve never met, but got my name somehow, someway. Everyone seems to be after an off-market deal, but are they really deals or not? “Good question” I say. What is an off-market deal? If you don’t know the term, it’s a property that an owner says to us that if we sent them an offer to purchase, they’d consider it. And frankly, any property owner should always have an open door to anyone who desires what they own, because if you don’t want to sell it, it takes all of 3 seconds to say “No thank you, but I appreciate your interest”.

Back to is it a deal? Maybe. Smart property owner, not motivated to sell, is probably not a good deal in the general sense. They’ll sell, but the price/number has to be good for them. Which may not be good for the buyer. But with such an excruciating low/lack of supply in our market right now, just having a target is worth a bit of a price reach in my opinion. Your cash isn’t doing any good in a bank or under the mattress, at least in any proper income property, it’ll make a good hunk more return than the CD rate at your local bank, 3 to 4 times that amount actually, which really isn’t saying all that much since a CD rate is like 1.5% or so for a longer term jumbo rate.

So off-market, for me, is neither good nor bad, it’s both. But by overall definition for me, it’s always good if I can take a buyer from no options, to an option, make a seller happy, a buyer happy, even if the price was a bit of a stretch, and so goes the economy as the currency moves from one point to the next. They are fun, sometimes frustrating, in the end, it’s like creating something from nothing, and good Brokers know how to do that very well.