I have been investing in real estate for years now and am now up to 7 rental properties. If there is one thing I have ever wanted or needed to help me research these investment properties even further, its access to the MLS. Oh man, if only I had my own MLS access then I would be set! I could pull up all the sold comparisons within the last six months or a year to make sure I am not over paying for any property, I could check to see how fast it sold which sometimes matters and I also wish I had MLS access so I could submit my own offers. But that is another story.
Luckily for us investors, there is a really awesome tool available for FREE that can give you sold comparisons. You can find your own sold comps without having to bother a real estate agent or having actual access to the MLS. This is great news! Don’t get me wrong here, realtors are great people and are great to work with but when you want to analyze dozens of properties per week, I really don’t want to keep bothering the agent to pull all these comps for me time after time. Plus I hate relying on anyone for anything.
Quite frankly, when I first discovered this tool was apprehensive about the data and thought it would be outdated or just not accurate. But today I have confirmed that it is legit and pulls up data rather quickly on recently sold houses. How do I know this? Well because the investment property that I just bought last month from the MLS is already on this site and its accurate with the price and date. This is great news for all of us.
I will show you how easy it is to pull comps below with screenshots and all. Enjoy and happy investing!
How to find your own Sold Comps on real estate without an agent or MLS
1) Go to www.redfin.com and sign up for a FREE login if you don’t already have one. You have to login to get access to the sold comparison data.
2) On the home page, make sure you select “Find a Home” and enter a zip code. Then press the search button.
3) You will now see all the active for sale listings in your zip code. In this case, im showing the Fountain Square neighborhood in Indianapolis, IN. On this page, make sure you go to the “More Filters” button on the top right.
4) From here, select the radio button for “Sold” and choose the drop down to select how far back you want to go. Then hit “Apply Filters”
5) On the next screen, you can zoom in on your sold listings and click on whichever house interest you. When you click on it the icon located on the map for your property, on the right side pane, it will show you what it actually sold for as well as give you more details by choosing the “view details” button.
6) The view details will show you how much the house sold for as well as the date. This one sold just last month.
And if you scroll down, it will also show you the property history and other cool facts that can help you when analyzing your next investment property.
And that is how easy it is to pull your own comparisons. I highly recommend using redfin when analyzing your next investment property. Whether you will be purchasing for a rental or even just for flipping, this is a great tool to add to your arsenal. If you are interested in other cool tools and ways to analyze rental properties check out these awesome posts:
How To Find Crime Statistics On Rental Properties
How To Determine Market Rent on Out-of-State Rentals?
Pretty cool huh? If you know of any other ways/tools/tips on how to do proper research when analyzing investment properties, please feel free to include them in the comments below. Thanks and happy investing! I can’t wait to begin the hunt for my next rental property.
**NOTE** Please note that it appears that Redfin is not available in every city. For those of you who will not be able to use Redfin, its back to the drawing board unfortunately. I have never been able to find any other site that has up to date sold data for free like this other then Redfin. Your best bet is back to using a realtor for the data.
Have you looked into Zillow? I believe they have similar features, though I’m not sure how current the information is. Thoughts?
Hi Kurt. Definitely looked at zillow and it’s very outdated. Not current at all and would not recommend. Redfin is the only one I can find with up to date data.
Actually the only thing I would recommend zillow for is to view active rent listings in your area and use that data to help determine market rent for your rental property. That is what I use zillow for.
Something new I learned – great tool. Thanks for the tip!
Texas is a state where this is not possible for example. Texas is a non-discolusre state and any “sold” listing within any of these tools is simply an estimate and is not based on any public record. I agree that this is a great tool IF your target area is not in a non-disclosure state.
Good info Tony. Was not aware of that thanks for comment.
Thank you for sharing such useful post
This is awesome, thanks. We are actually in the middle of a sale and were wondering about this.
Thank you! This is very helpful!
For Texas, I would suggest Fast CMA, (FastCMA.co). It is not free, but much cheaper than its competitors, and it uses real-time MLS data to always give accurate comps.
I’m a little late to the party, here…just discovered the post because of a lack of comps for rural listing. It would be really great if FSBO closing data somehow made its way into a database like the MLS. I know there are several homes that sold in the neighborhood where my listing is located, but I have no visibility into those records…and even if buyers/sellers were willing to tell me the sale price, I don’t have the right to divulge that information to an appraiser when we get an offer. It’s a real challenge to do a quality CMA when there is no recent data to base it on. If we price it where I feel the market would respond with a decent offer, there is a risk that the buyer’s lender appraisal will kill the deal.
Hi Don! So here in Indy it doesnt matter if the transaction doesnt go through the MLS, the transaction is still recorded in the county records with the price and you can search to see what it sold for via the tax assessor records. It doesnt update the like the MLS but it does show up. Appraisers here also look at that so they always know the full picture.
Unfortunately the sold price is no longer available on redfin and they remove all pics when it’s sold. Very sad.