As a deal sourcer, your main job is to find deals, but scouring Rightmove and manually analysing every property can take up a lot of valuable time.
Luckily, nowadays there are data providers and deal-sourcing software that makes your job easier as a property deal sourcer.
In this post, I describe 4 property sourcing tools that can make your job as a deal packager easier.
By finding deals quicker, you will have more time to find property investors to work with you.
💡 As a summary, here’s what I recommend:
- If you are fine with spending a small subscription fee then Property Market Intel and PropertyData are the most comprehensive and feature-rich tools for analysis.
- If you want a free tool, Lendlord is the best option for analysis.
- Everyone should use the Property Log chrome extension because it serves a slightly different purpose than the others.
- Everyone should also have some sort of spreadsheet tool like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel for customisable due diligence and in-depth analysis.
Property Data – Aggregate Data
Price: £14 /month to £55 /month
The amount of quality information in this tool is genuinely amazing and all subscription plans have the following included:
- Yield hotspots – to find the best rental yields in the UK.
- Development Calculator – to easily figure out if a development will be profitable.
- Construction costs – shows costs £/sqft in different build types and different regions.
- National HMO Register – see the current HMO register in England & Wales.
- Browser extension – live feed of property market data onto portal listings (e.g. Rightmove, Zoopla).
- Growth zones – see what areas are receiving funding for regeneration.
Areas Covered:
Property Data states that they intend to cover all areas of the United Kingdom but the data differs between the different parts of the UK.
In order of most complete data:
- England has the most complete data.
- Wales follows England.
- Then Scotland.
- Then Northern Ireland.
So if you are looking at England for your property investments, you will have more data on hand than if you were looking at Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
To see more information on the data that’s included for each nation, check out the coverage page for PropertyData.
It’s also handy that you can use a free trial of PropertyData to see if the tool is useful to you.
If you want a detailed video about the tool then check out the video below.
Alternative to Property Data
The best alternative to Property Data is Property Market Intel which is a very similar tool and basically does the same thing.
Lendlord – Aggregate Data
Price: Free with premium features
There are some premium features that you can use but for the majority of people, the free features are enough since the free version already has so much.
Even if you do want the premium features it is fairly inexpensive.
You can see what’s included in the free and premium plans at the link below.
Lendlord uses market data to give you insights on average returns on a property and is a great way to do deal analysis so you can source properties faster.
One of the useful features is that it can show you both your short-term returns on an annual basis, but also a breakdown of long-term returns over a number of years.
This is great because different investors have different criteria so you can cater investments towards specific types of investors.
As always, you should validate and verify these numbers where possible because these will be based on averages in the area, but the particular property may be below or above-average quality.
Another cool feature of Lendlord is that you can add in your own assumptions about particular deals to see how different scenarios would play out for you.
This is great because you can present the likely, best-case and worst-case outcomes to an investor so they can make a more educated decision on any investment.
The video below is a quick example of how you can do deal analysis using Lendlord.
If you want a longer in-depth look at Lendlord and how to use it for deal sourcing and analysis then check out this video instead.
Property Log – Find Motivated Sellers
Price: Free with premium features
It’s free to use with an unspecified limit on usage.
You can then pay £2.99 a month for a subscription which removes the usage limit.
Property Log is a Chrome extension (so you’ll need to use the Google Chrome browser) which helps you monitor price changes on Rightmove.
By default, Rightmove tells you the date that a property has last been reduced, however, it will not tell you the previous price or how long it had been on the market before being reduced.
This is where Property Log is useful because it will tell you the dates of previous price changes so you can get a better idea of how motivated the seller might be.
You can see in the screenshot above how Property Log is showing that the property was initially listed as £550,000 on 19/10/2022 then it was reduced to £500,000 about a month later on 17/12/2022.
This is perfect for deal sourcers to be able to not only find quick deals that are already listed at below market value (BMV), but also be able to negotiate deals where the seller may be more willing to be flexible on price.
The link to the Chrome extension is below:
Spreadsheet Software – Further Due Diligence and In-depth analysis
For spreadsheet software, I recommend that everyone uses either Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel.
Price for Google Sheets: Free
Price for Microsoft Excel: £5.99 per month (personal plan of Microsoft 365)
Good old spreadsheets…
Input any data you have and manipulate it in any way you want so that it suits you and how you like to do analysis.
You can create your own calculators based on your own requirements to work out if deals are worth it for you.
Most importantly you can plug in your own assumptions about any market forecasts, costs or potential profits.
You can easily compare different deals too.
If you need to learn a formula or are having trouble then there are always countless tutorials online for both Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets.
One downside to spreadsheets however is that it is more hands-on.
You have to create the formulas and tables and calculators yourself and you also have to input all the data yourself.
Of course, depending on the data source you can import the data as a CSV or XML.
However, even if you do import the data from an external source you will often still have to manipulate and organise it in a way that works for you.
Either way, I’m not sure how you can get by without some sort of spreadsheet software to do your own due diligence and analysis.
Summary
By now you should have a stack of property sourcing software that you can use to step up your game and find property deals much faster.
- You should be able to do area analysis and quick analysis on properties using Lendlord, Property Market Intel or PropertyData.
- You should be able to find motivated sellers by using the Property Log chrome extension.
- You can then do any final due diligence and in-depth analysis using spreadsheet software like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel.
If you want to know more useful tools and website check out our property investor resource list.