Finding & Funding Great Deals: Review (2026)

Every investor eventually discovers that the hard part is not analysing deals or financing them. It is finding one worth analysing. Anson Young's book is about that problem specifically, which makes it more useful than its modest profile suggests.

Snapshot	Details
Author	Anson Young
Publisher	BiggerPockets Publishing
First published	2017
Subject	Deal sourcing, primarily off-market
Best for	Investors whose pipeline is empty

The channels, and their honest costs

Young's real contribution is treating deal sourcing as a set of channels with different economics rather than as a single skill. For each he gives the mechanics, the cost, and — unusually — the conversion rate you should actually expect.

Direct mail. The most detailed section. Building a list from public records, filtering it, the sequence of mailings, and the response rates that make the arithmetic work. Young is clear that this is a volume business with a low hit rate and that a single mailing is a waste of money.

Driving for dollars. Identifying distressed property physically and researching ownership afterwards. Cheap, slow, and genuinely effective in the right neighbourhoods.

MLS, used properly. Not everything off-market is better. Long days-on-market, price reductions, expired and withdrawn listings, and poorly marketed properties are all findable in the public data most investors dismiss.

Auctions and foreclosures. Covered with appropriate warnings — cash requirements, limited inspection, title risk.

Wholesalers and agents. Building the relationships that bring deals to you rather than the reverse.

Networking and probate. The relationship-driven channels that scale badly and convert well.

Motivation over property

The book's better conceptual point is that you are not looking for distressed property, you are looking for distressed or motivated owners. A perfectly maintained house owned by someone in the middle of a divorce, an estate, a relocation or a landlord's exhaustion is a far better target than a wrecked house owned by someone with no reason to sell.

That reframing changes how you build a list, and it is the thing most beginners have backwards.

The funding half

Shorter and thinner than the finding half. Hard money, private money, partnerships and creative structures each get a treatment adequate for orientation and inadequate for execution. If funding is your actual constraint, The Book on Investing with No (and Low) Money Down and Raising Private Capital are the fuller treatments. Current hard money pricing is nothing like the book's — use the hard money loan calculator.

Where 2017 shows

The competition changed. Direct mail response rates have fallen as the channel became saturated; in many markets homeowners receive several such letters a week. The mechanics still work; the economics are worse and the volume required is higher.

Text and cold calling took over. Much of what direct mail did in 2017 is now done by SMS and calling, both of which are subject to telephone consumer protection rules and state-level restrictions that the book does not address at all. Do not adopt an outreach channel from a 2017 book without checking the current legal position.

Data got commoditised. List-building services, skip tracing and lead platforms have professionalised what the book describes as a manual process. Faster, and more expensive, and everyone has it.

Institutional buyers arrived in the small residential space at scale, competing for exactly the properties this book teaches you to find.

The distressed supply is thinner. Foreclosure volume is a fraction of what the post-crisis years produced.

Who should read it

• Investors who can analyse and finance but have no pipeline.
• Anyone about to spend money on direct mail, who should know the response rates first.
• Investors who think off-market is inherently better and need the MLS chapters to correct that.

Who should skip it

• If you buy on the MLS through an agent and are happy. The off-market machinery is a lot of work you may not need.
• If funding is the constraint. Half this book is not for you; buy the funding-specific title.
• If you want the current playbook. The channels are right and the tactics have moved on; treat it as a framework and get current tactics elsewhere.

What to read next

• The Book on Negotiating Real Estate — what to do once a motivated seller answers.
• Due diligence checklist — what to do once one says yes.
• The Millionaire Real Estate Agent — for the funnel arithmetic that tells you how much sourcing volume you actually need.

Final take

The best available book on where deals come from, and the one most investors skip because sourcing is the least interesting part of the job. Read it for the channel economics and the motivated-owner reframing. Update the tactics — particularly anything involving calling or texting, where the legal landscape has changed — and expect worse conversion than the book's numbers imply.

This review is part of the best real estate investing books library — 40+ titles ranked by the decision in front of you.