If you’re looking to diversify your investment portfolio, searching for multi family properties for sale is a great way to go.

As an investment, multi family homes are widely available, financially accessible to most investors, and produce some of the highest returns of any asset class.

Several factors make North Carolina an excellent place to invest in multi family properties. The state’s recent population growth is almost double the national average.

The economy is strong and diverse. Rental and occupancy rates are high, real estate is affordable, property values are rising steadily and housing laws are becoming increasingly landlord-friendly.

With a plethora of colleges, universities and career opportunities for young professionals, cities like Charlotte, Durham and Raleigh attract thousands of renters every year.

How to Find Multi Family Homes for Sale in NC

To find multi family homes for sale in North Carolina, you have a number of options.

You can go the traditional route of searching commercial and residential national listings platforms, you can search local and regional listings platforms and FSBO (for sale by owner) listings, or you can search off-market.

Here, we’ll cover several well-known national listings platforms in both commercial and residential sectors as well as a few local and regional listings platforms and some FSBO listings platform options.

But first, let’s look at the reasons why someone (especially brokers) might want to take their search off-market.

Searching Off-Market with Reonomy

Why search off-market?

• Less competition
• No price hikes
• Smaller acquisition fees
• No intermediaries

With Reonomy, not only can you search all of North Carolina off-market, but you can quickly access the contact information of owners with just a few additional clicks.

While the Reonomy Platform is not a listings site, you can use the platform to identify multi family homes (or any other commercial asset type) that are likely to sell in the near future.

You can filter those properties by size, age, asset sub-type, and much more.

By reaching out directly to property owners, brokers can get ahead of the competition and connect with owners in need of a listing agent.

Investors can negotiate deals directly with decision makers, thus saving on broker fees, while avoiding on-market price hikes and any communication gatekeepers.

An off-market search on Reonomy can be done in any U.S. market—including the ability to search North Carolina by City, MSA, County, Zip Code, Neighborhood, and Street Name.

Those with a more hands-off approach or less experience can turn to a variety of listings websites.

Commercial and Residential Real Estate Listings

Multi family homes for sale can be found in both commercial real estate listings and residential real estate listings. Here are some nationwide favorites, plus a few great local listings platforms to boot.

LoopNet Multi Family Homes

LoopNet, owned by Co-Star, has possibly the most commercial listings of any online marketplace and is popular with both tenants and investors.

Their site has a dedicated multi family search feature with a few filters particularly suited to rental owners that you won’t find on many other listings platforms.

CREXi Multi Family Homes

Headquartered in Marina Del Rey, California, CREXi has grown rapidly since it began in 2016. Like LoopNet, their commercial listings include properties both for sale and for lease.

They also offer “Market Intelligence” for almost 50 major metro markets

Ten-X Multi Family Homes

In addition to its commercial property listings, Ten-X offers pre-qualified buyers the ability to purchase property through an online offer process or by live real estate auction.

Investors can search Ten-X specifically for multi family homes for sale in North Carolina with filters including net rentable area, number of units and occupancy rate.

Brevitas Multi Family Homes

Brevitas is another nationwide commercial real estate marketplace.

Their multi family listings allow you to specify whether you’re looking for a duplex/triplex/fourplex, garden low rise, mid high rise, mobile home rv community, senior housing and/or student housing.

Zillow Multi Family Homes

Zillow may be the most popular of all residential real estate listings platforms. It certainly has the most listings, some of which can’t be found anywhere else.

With currently over 50,000 listings for apartments, townhouses and homes for sale in North Carolina, Zillow is an essential place to look for multi family homes for sale in NC.

Trulia Multi Family Homes

Trulia is owned by Zillow, but it has some nice features of its own, including the ability to search by neighborhood, to see local crime rates and to view insights from local homeowners and renters.

Searching Trulia by state brings up listings broken down by county, neighborhood and school district as well as a list of the top twenty real estate markets in the state. Trulia also has a multi family search option.

A quick search for multi family homes for sale in Wilmington, NC shows fifteen multi family properties currently for sale in Wilmington, most of them duplexes.

Charlotte Regional Realtor Association Multi Family Homes

If you’re specifically looking to purchase multi family homes for sale in Charlotte, NC, there’s no better place to start than the Charlotte Regional Realtor Association, which represents more than 10,000 realtors in the Charlotte area and beyond.

Their website has a multi family property type search feature and a very comprehensive property sub type feature.

Raleigh Cary Realty Multi Family Homes

Raleigh Cary Realty serves the area of North Carolina commonly referred to as the Triangle, formed by a triad of cities and universities – Duke University in Durham, The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

To find multi family homes for sale in the Raleigh Area using Raleigh Cary Realty’s listings platform, simply type “multi family” into the search box on the home page.

Search results can be filtered by price, age, number of stories, number of garage spaces and more.

The Coastline Real Estate Team Multi Family Homes

Another great local listings platform is brought to you by The Coastline Real Estate Team. For investors looking for multi family homes for sale, Wilmington, NC offers a wonderful variety of options.

The Coastline Real Estate Team provides up-to-date listings information for the entire Wilmington area and offers a multi family search option with over a thousand listings, at last count.

For Sale by Owner Listings

If you’re interested in potentially cutting costs and time to close, dealing directly with the primary decision maker (the owner) can be beneficial.

Several of the commercial and residential listings platforms that we covered above include FSBO listings, but there are other places to look for multi family homes for sale by owner in North Carolina as well.

Craigslist Multi Family Homes

Craigslist, a classified ads website with a section specifically devoted to housing, has local sites for:

• Asheville
• Boone
• Charlotte
• Eastern NC
• Fayetteville
• Greensboro
• Hickory/Lenoir
• Jacksonville
• Outer Banks
• Raleigh/Durham
• Wilmington
• Winston-Salem

To search for multi family homes for sale in North Carolina on Craigslist, you’ll need to choose a specific location to search and click on “real estate for sale” in the housing section. From there you can either choose from the housing type menu or enter multi family into the search box.

Here are the Craigslist results for a search for multi family homes for sale in Charlotte, NC.

Buildings By Owner Multi Family Homes

Buildings By Owner is a platform dedicated to commercial FSBO listings across the United States and Canada.

Their home page allows you to enter a location and immediately choose the property type you would like to search, from multi family to office, industrial, agricultural and more.

Find My Roof

Located in Suwanee, Georgia, Find My Roof is a free nationwide listings platform including rentals, real estate and FSBO listings. Their search feature allows you to search for multi family properties for sale by owner in all of North Carolina at once.

It also provides a “Property Features” keyword search box.

Example Searches Using LoopNet and Zillow

Now that you’ve seen several examples of listings platforms and what they have to offer, we’ll cover a few specific search examples for multi family homes for sale in popular North Carolina markets.

We’ll use what many would consider the two most popular listings platforms—Zillow and LoopNet (which some consider the Zillow of commercial real estate). We’ll weigh those against an off-market search on Reonomy.

Wilmington Multi Family Search with LoopNet

To search LoopNet for multi family properties in Wilmington, NC, select “multifamily” from the “search all types for sale” drop down menu. Then enter Wilmington, NC in the “enter a location” box and click the red search button.

Your search results will be displayed. If you’d like, you can further narrow down your search by total price, price per square foot, price per unit, building size, number of units, property age and more.

Raleigh Duplex Search with Zillow

Now say you’re looking for a duplex for sale in Raleigh, NC using Zillow. On the Zillow home page, enter “Raleigh, NC” in the search box.

On the search results page, click “more” and enter “duplex” in the keywords box. Click the apply button.

You can now see all Zillow listings for duplexes for sale in Raleigh, NC.

You can follow this same process to search Zillow for triplexes and fourplexes. Finding apartment buildings, condos and townhomes for sale on Zillow is even easier. Instead of using the keyword search, just check the correct option from the Home Type drop down menu.

Charlotte Multi Family Search with Reonomy

Below, we run a quick search for multi family homes in Charlotte likely to sell, while also getting the contact information for the owners of those assets.

As with any platform, you start by entering a location. Search by state, MSA, city, county, zip code, neighborhood, or street name. Here, we search within the MSA of Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, NC-SC.

With more than 200,000 commercial properties in the MSA, you can hone on more specifically using filters for asset type and building and lot specifics.

Filter by Asset Type and Sub-Type:

Filter by Building and Lot Characteristics:

Above, we search for all multi family properties that have 30-40 units, and still left with over 70 assets.

You can also use these tabs to search for specific types of multi family homes, for multi family homes only in Opportunity Zones, by building and lot area, acreage, zoning, and more.

Now, to identify properties likely to sell, you can add filters within the Sales tab of the platform. Here, we add a filter to only see properties that haven’t sold within the last 10 years.

That leaves us with more than 30 assets in the Charlotte MSA that are classified as multi family, have somewhere from 30-40 units, and have not been sold in the last 10 years.

When you apply all of these filters, your list of results will look like this:

By clicking an address, you’ll be taken to an in-depth page of research cards on the property at-hand—one being the Ownership card, where you can see the reported owner and the contact information for associated individuals.

Just like that, you can be reaching out to the owner(s).

You can also export the contact information on many properties in bulk, view comps to accurately valuate assets, and see the portfolios of owners to build an illustrious pitch, or perhaps reign in more than one property.

In some cases, a combination of these platforms may be your best option—depending on your budget, and level of involvement. All of these platforms can be helpful, however, in discovering your ideal multi family home in NC.