Residential REO search with the Freedom of Information Act

[Account Closed]

I am not sure if this has been brought to the board before, though I have been successful with a new strategy I have used for searching for REOs and I would like to share it.

Instead of looking for lis pendens in the news paper, looking up county records online one by one.... I actually got an entire list of the vacant and foreclosed buildings with dates last noted as vacant, and some bank information.

What I did was, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the the Clerk of the town I have found myself working alot these days, requesting: "a list of all vacant and foreclosed properties in the Village." I got a very detailed list in about 1.5 weeks and I had my intern spend the afternoon looking up banking info. From there you can act as you will towards the bank as if you found their info a different way. The good thing about this is often there are foreclosed buildings from a longtime ago but have not been listed for sale. In these circumstances, a list like this has been useful to find not as easily found properties. SOme places have a person who specifically goes and looks and takes care of vacant homes.

I met a guy at one of my newly purchased places and while I had met his boss at the City Hall (not Chicago, but a Burb), this guy actually went from vacant house to vacant house to remove sticks from the lawn and make it look decent. He notes the buildings' status, and I think he might actually mow lawns but I am not sure. He asked me to remove the no trespassing signs the bank put up, since its now no longer bank owned, he can actually tell someone that cares that its unsightly. I didn't fully acquiesce to his request, however - the bank has some really stick labels on a window - and like a sign in the window is really going to avert any trespassers. Actually this guy is the one who told me to FIA the request for all vacant and foreclosed homes in the town. While I had used the FIA before, it was not for this specific purpose.

I am wondering if anyone has also successfully used this technique, and whether you have found the Freedom of Information Act useful for other purposes?

I have found the FIA useful in working with the Chicago buildings dept. They don't seem to take a lot of things seriously, but FIA's have a decent turn around time (sometimes - at least a couple times my FIA requests have not received responses). To my dismay, my FIA info request on whether I had an FBI file came back negative.