People who have read Dolf de Roos should be familiar with his 100:10:3:01 rule. I think it's a great benchmark to work from if your serious about making money in real estate - The rule is easy to follow, it states that if you look at 100 properties place offers on the 10 best and arrange finance on 3 you may end up buying 1. My interpretation of this is that looking at 100 properties is going to give you enough market data to be able to pick the 10 very best ones to make offers on 10, your offers should be testing enough that only a few make it through negotiation. If you get 10 offers accepted then your not playing hard enough so you need to kick sellers a little harder and a little lower, you can always go higher but it's pretty tough to go lower on an offer. Now the rule of 3 is about getting finance on the 3 successfull contracts and proceeding past the finance clause to settle on the best deal. So from looking at at least 100 properties there is pretty much no reason why you would not have found yourself a very hot real estate deal. In fact you should have made money on the purchase.