Good public records websites for leads

[Michael Bell]

Greetings!

My wife and I are searching for a 5-25 unit property in the Carolinas. A couple of months ago we purchased a list from Listsource and sent mailers to NC (SC does not allow lists on the site for some reason). Long story short, we got more activity than we expected and made some decent contacts. We even got first dibs on a non-conforming 5 plex in Asheville, NC before it hit the market. Ultimately, we passed on it because it was in an historical neighborhood which required approval from the local historical society before major alterations could be made to the property and the numbers just did not make sense. Additionally, there were some unpermitted changes made already. It just didn’t fit our criteria, but we built a good rapport with the listing broker.

We also got another hit from the mailers with an estate attorney who agreed to send us any leads he came across. All-in-all, no deals done, but I consider it pretty decent for a first run on a direct mail campaign. We will continue to use Listsource, but we want to expand our net using other sources to hopefully increase our odds.

My question is does anyone know any other good public records websites other than Listsource that we can find workable leads? I keep hearing about public records sites, that have phone numbers for cold calling, but have yet to come across any. Any guidance that you could provide is greatly appreciated.

[Greg Scully]

I use Reonomy and have been happy with it.  It's not free, but if you're serious about getting a deal it will pay for itself quickly.  It does not pull foreclosures our anything like that. It's for building out a prospecting list based on specific criteria:  market, unit size, build date, debt etc.

I tried to build my own list using tax assessors sites, that's a slow process.