At Adaptive, we take a very quantitative approach to brokering income property deals for our clients.
I’ve personally trained all of our agents to focus first on the achievable yield on the downpayment and only after that on other, more qualitative factors.
While this doesn’t guarantee that every deal will be a homerun, it does have the the benefit of screening out obviously stupid deals. You could make a good real estate investing career in LA by buying reasonable deals each time you have enough money and avoiding any horrible mistakes.
The downside is that, because all of them look at deals the way that I do, I sometimes find myself losing out to my own clients on deals! The reason is that some of them have lower return requirements than I have for my funds. And, the lower the return you’re willing to accept, the higher the price you’re willing to pay, and the more deals you’ll win.
While losing out to a client occasionally annoys me, it’s an incredibly good sign for our brokerage. It means that our agents are pitching strong deals to our clients and our clients are clever enough to recognize a good thing when they see it.