The Memphis Market and our 2013 strategy

With my brother now in Memphis, we decided to explore the Memphis market.  He started to learn the areas and figure out the good and bad.  We started doing several things.  We refined our strategy to specify the type of house we would look for.  We found a popular realtor site that listed all houses on the MLS.  This is important because without a realtor or an appraisal license (which no one had in TN), you cannot view the MLS.  We did a quick search for houses within 2 miles of my brother and hundreds of results popped up.  We started a spreadsheet which tracked properties in the area from listing all the way through sold.  We started refining our parameters until we got ~50.  Our parameters became the following:
-- 3 bedroom
-- 2 bath
-- $50k - $85 list price
-- 3 miles radius around the center of my brother's zip code.

With between 40 and 50 results to pick through, we had our farm area.  Out of the 50 listings, ~30 were active and 20 were in some state of pending.  Pending in this sense just meant that there was a contract but the purchase had not yet closed.  Why care about pending?  You'll find out later.

Our strategy became this.  We would go through the list and by looking at pictures we would pick 5 properties to go see (regardless of status).  Then after looking at them, we would rank them in order to go after them (we figured 2 or 3 would be suitable).  Part of our strategy was to get them as turnkey as possible since we all had full-time jobs.  We just did not have time to doing any work ourselves or manage a big renovation.  We decided if we had to dump more than $1,000 to get it rent ready, it wasn't for us.

After doing this for about 2 months, we decided to put it into action.  More on that in future posts.