Finding Motivated Apartment Sellers

[Alvin Grier]

I was listening to a real estate podcast the other day, and they mentioned a method of finding potential "motivated" apartment sellers that I hadn't heard of before;

The guy said to buy a list of people that bought their multi-family property 10 years or more ago.

That makes sense, but I have two questions about that approach:

1. How do I figure out how far back to go? 20 years? 30?

2. Is there a way to figure out if the people still own the property or not? I'd hate to spend money on a campaign, only to find out that 80% of the people on the list don't own the property any more.

I guess I could run a check on each property in the list against local tax records, but that would take forever, depending on how big the list is.

Just wanted to get some insight from you guys on this one. Thanks in advance for your feedback!