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Updated almost 8 years ago, 01/30/2017
I found a hidden treasure need advice on how to extract it
Ok so there's a vacant hotel in a Cleveland suburb. The hotel and the suburb will remain nameless because it will be easily given away to those familiar with the area.
This is an old hotel built in the early 70's it's over 100,000 square foot and has changed handed multiple times in the 2000's and in the past 5 years it has been shut down by our local government because there was a lot of illegal activity going on there.
The reason this is a hidden treasure is because in the early 2000's it went through a complete renovation, and one of those renovations was a complete electrical overhaul, which was contracted out to my uncles company. Now there's only 2 other people besides myself that know what's inside the walls of this hotel: 400k+ worth of scrap copper wire plus. Several hundred thousand dollars in hvac, brand new airconditioners, electrical components as well as 50k in kitchen equipment.
So with all that being said I know the parcel number on this property as well as it was last sold in 2013 but it has remained vacant and absolutely no one has done a single thing to the property the police have sealed it up.
My questions are:
How do I look up the current owner of the property? Can I use it searching the parcel nubmber at the courthouse or something like that?
How can I find out if the property has been condemned, can it still be purchased even though it was shut down by police?
I want to make a lowball offer and completely gut all the scrap in this hotel, the local scrap yard is within blocks of the property so it would be a pheasable feat. With a small crew of guys I can gut the whole building in 30 days. I have designed a strategic plan on how to get the job done(won't go into detail on that just yet).
Now once the building is gutted and scrapped it will essentially be a useless shell, now I only want it for its scrap value, how would I dump it/ get it out of my hands once I've stripped it clean.
Profit = scrap value - (purchase price + gutting costs)
I wouldn't care if I sold it for a dollar after I did the dirty work, could I just turn it over to the city and say I don't want it anymore? I don't think it would be that easy or would it?
Now all this could be for nothing, but like I said I'm one of few people with insider information on the hidden value in this building and I have the means to execute my plan. and I would at least like to know how to lookup the owner of a commercial property, all I have is the parcel number. So I could at least make an offer because it is just sitting there and I don't think it will ever operate as a hotel ever again.