A buy box is your acquisition criteria written down. Its whole job is to filter — to let through the deals you would genuinely buy and stop the ones you would not. Most of the ones we receive fail at one end or the other.
The two ways a buy box fails
The first failure is being too broad. "Anything in Chicago under $300k" matches almost everything we source. You get every notification, most of them irrelevant, and within a fortnight you stop opening them. A filter that never filters is noise.
The second is being too narrow. "Three-bed brick bungalow, Chatham only, under $120k, vacant, cosmetic rehab" describes a real property, but perhaps two a year. You will hear from us rarely and conclude we have no inventory.
The useful middle is a box that describes a *type* of deal rather than a specific house.
Start with what you can actually finance
Price range is the constraint most people get wrong, because they state what they would like to spend rather than what they can close on. If your capital and your lender realistically support a $180,000 purchase with $60,000 of rehab, your box should say so.
Be honest about the top of the range too. An investor who says "up to $400k" but has never closed above $200k gets sent deals they then cannot act on, and the mismatch wastes both sides' time.
Name markets, not the whole metro
"Chicagoland" is not a market. Pick the neighborhoods and suburbs where you already understand the resale or rental comps, because that knowledge is what lets you move fast when something appears.
Two or three markets you know well beat ten you have only read about. If you are unsure where to start, our market pages describe the housing stock and which strategies tend to suit each one.
Be specific about condition
Rehab level is the criterion that most changes whether a deal fits. A buyer set up for full gut work and a buyer who wants cosmetic-only are not competing for the same properties, and sending either one the other's deals is useless.
Say which you are. If you genuinely take anything, say that too — it widens what reaches you considerably.
Say whether you take occupied property
This single question filters a large share of inventory, particularly on the South Side where multifamily frequently trades with tenants in place.
An occupied building is not a worse deal, but it is a different one: the tenancy transfers, and Chicago's Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance applies from the day you close. If you are not set up to inherit tenants, say no and stop receiving them.
Revisit it every few months
Your criteria change as your capital, crew and appetite change. A box written when you had one contractor and $80,000 is the wrong box a year later.
You can edit yours any time from the buyer portal, and widening it retroactively unlocks matching properties that were already published.