What's the most efficient way of determining who died recently in Arizona?

Question

I have been buying tax liens certificates in Arizona for several years, with the hope of acquiring one good property every couple of years at a very good price, with no success so far.

For relatively large counties that list over 10,000 liens two weeks before the auction, by the time I have narrowed down the list, I have at most a couple of days left before the bidding deadline.

I suspect I would have more success if, let's say among the 100 properties I am considering, there was a way of determining which owners died recently. I did a Google search, but the methods I found were designed to find out whether some specific John Doe has died, and it seems like it would take more time than I have before the bidding deadline to determine who, among a list of 100 homeowners (or former, now dead, homeowners) is dead, and who is alive.

What's the most efficient way of determining who died recently in Arizona? Something that, if I had a 100 names, I could, within a couple of days, determine which one, two or three of them died recently. The method doesn't have to be fool proof. Let's say that, among the 100, 5 had actually died. If the method you suggest will help me figure out that ONE of the 5 had died recently, that would be great. The method doesn't have to lead to all 5.

Also, I don't want to rely on notices to administer the estate of so and so to determine who is dead. For those situations, there will be an estate administrator who is motivated to get close to market value for the house. I am interested in those who die without close relatives getting involved in selling the assets through probate.

David M. · Answer

@Abdenour Achab

First, I'm sorry.  Like I said, this doesn't make sense to me.  Obviously, what I thought you were saying, is not what you were saying as you've pointed out.  I just don't understand you.

IF I understand you correctly, you just want to know who has died.  Death records are public I believe.  So, you would get a script written to scrape the various databases having death records for your desired area(s).

Will Sifert · Answer

I follow what you are asking. You are hoping to find someone who died, ideally with no heirs or no direct heirs (kids, spouse, etc.)   As your odds of the tax lien not redeeming go up drastically. If you search with the county where probate has been opened then those heirs are going to end up redeeming the property.  Obits don't always mean there is someone around that will redeem.  If they have kids, high chance they know about the property but not always. If it was their primary residence, yes they going to know about it. If it was vacant out of the area land, they may not know about it. But you still need to notice them and they can redeem it at that time. Obits without any kids or living kids listed would be a good start. What you are mainly looking for is the old guy who died, had no family and apparently no friends that cared enough to even publish an obit for him.  Someone has to come get the body and dispose of it. Something has to be recorded at the county level. I am not aware of any data bases that offer this specific information.

Abdenour Achab · Answer

Yes @David M. AZDHS.gov does provide death records!! ... For people who died over 50 years ago :-(I did the quick Google search. Here is what seems to be the most comprehensive site: https://www.deathindexes.com/a...The Obituaries link (http://obits.arizonagravestone...) works easy enough. You input a name, and it returns a list of dead people with that name. But I suspect searching through obituaries presents the same drawback as searching through probate records. If a dead person has family around who care enough to publish and obituary, he or she has heirs around who would redeem the lien.Imagine some single guy who came from Europe, settled and bought a house in Arizona, cut contact with his family back home, died of old age, and the sheriff's office recovered and burried his body. Most likely no probate, no obituary, no cemetary ceremonial, no nothing. Just a dead body four feet under, and an empty house sitting idle waiting for me to acquire it. That's my kind of dead person. NOT a grand father with five kids, five step kids, 25 grand kids and 75 step grand kids. Some types of searches (probates, obituaries) would lead to the grand father (NOT my kind of dead of person), and miss the European loner (my kind of dead person).

David M. · Answer

@Abdenour Achab

Sorry, like i said not my area.  but, deaths are supposed to be recorded and public record.  Maybe you have to search the county level.  Call some funeral homes or something to figure out how the local system works.  Or maybe I'm just plain wrong.

David M. · Answer

@Abdenour Achab

LIke I said, I don't really know since I don't really do this.  I wouldn't be able to find the heirs from a death list --- usually why one chases after probate.

I would search around, perhaps call some of the County offices and figure where the data resides.  Not sure if on County or State level.  Its just what I thought that death records are public, but who knows if they are digital yet in AZ much less have API access.

even a quick search, the first link is AZ's dept of Health Services:  https://www.azdhs.gov/licensin...  so I'm sure you can figure this out if you have to the time research it.

Good luck.

Abdenour Achab · Answer

@David M.

Exactly. Out of a list I will already have created (100, 2,000, or whatever other large number), I just want to find out who died.

Thanks for the tip about the databases of the dead. I personally don't know of any though. I found out about the Social Security Administration database, available online, but it stopped publically reporting the dead a long time ago. As in over ten years ago (I don't exactly remember when - but what they report is useless to me).

Could you tell me the names of such databases and/or links to them? And, if they are not available online, how to get to them? If such databases have an API access, all the better, as, like you suggeted, I could write a script that can narrow down the list by making API calls to the database. But an API is not necessary. I can do it manually if needed.

By the way, by "recently", I mean the last couple of years, not the last couple of days. And my area of interest is Arizona in general. Of course, if there are multiple databases in Arizona, I am willing to check all of the ones that might include people from whatever county I happen to be trying to buy liens in.

Abdenour Achab · Answer

@David M.

I never said nor implied that. Could you copy/paste anything I said that either say that or implied that?

Tax liens on desirable properties whose owner(s) have died is EXACTLY what I am trying to buy.

What I did say is that I don't want to find out who died by looking through notices to administer estates. Also, while I didn't explicitely say it, I don't want to find out who died by looking through probate records.

Probate is not filed on everyone who dies and has assets. Or at least I believe so (maybe I am mistaken). Let's say probate is filed on 90% of people who died while owning a house, and not filed on 10% of the people who died while owning a house. I want a method that can quickly narrow down a list (of 100, 2000, or whatever other big number) of names of owners or records from a big list of names, most of whom are a live, to a much shorter list of names, a bigger percentage of whom are dead, when compared to the original long list.

I don't mind if the list includes BOTH dead people on whom a probate is filed and people on whom a probate is not filed. But I don't want list in which a probate has been filed on ALL people in the list.

In other words, starting from a few needles in a huge hay stack, I want a smaller hay stack that contains most of the needles. But I don't want a smaller hay stack with no needles in it, which I is exactly what I would get if I narrowed down the list using probate records.

David M. · Answer

@Abdenour Achab

Honestly, it doesn't make sense.

First, you say that you don't want to have a tax lien on a desirable property but whose owner has died...  Then, you say that you wan to find the liens for which the owners have died...

Is the defining factor probate?  You want people that died but doesn't have somebody / close relative to file probate?

Anyway, to your 2nd to last para, yes you can do it.  Its the same thing most serious investors do to go through data.  You pay somebody or service to write one of those "web scraping" scripts to scrub the public data for you.  Then, you just keep running that script.  I guess I'm not sure what public database you would use to find all the deaths other than probate.

I suppose at this point I'm not so helpful...  I'm not a serious enough investor to get these scripts or write them myself.  It sounds like the same stuff as cross checking sheriff listings with public records to see what is the total lien filings.  That and many other systems are doing that for lien generation.  We had whole threads on BP talking about which paid websites (vs having your own custom scripts) give better leads for this sort of thing.  Alas, I never paid much attention.  But somebody has to remember if this is really what you are looking for...  Sorry.

Abdenour Achab · Answer

> Are you saying going through the probate filings won't work for you?Correct. My working assumption is that if I buy a tax lien in Arizona on a desirable house whose dead owner had a probate filed, at the expiration of the redemption period, my lawyer will find the heirs, notify them of a pending foreclosure action, and they will redeem the house by paying off the lien. In Arizona, parties who have an interest in a house can redeem up the point of the finalization of the foreclosure action, even if the three year redemption period had already expired.

> I don't think there is a way to determine if a decedent has "close" (which is a pretty difficult term to figure out) relatives.I don't actually need to determine that.

Here is the idea. Let's say I have a spreadsheet of 2,000 liens, with property addresses and the names of the owners of record (dead or alive). If there was an online service where I could upload that spreadsheet, and that would return to me a list of 20 dead people listed by the county as the property owners, that would be great for me. I would then bid on those 20 liens, get 10 of them. My working assumption is that ONE of those 10 has no close relatives. I do NOT need to know in advance which of the ten that one is. Sometime down the line, 9 of those liens would be redeemed, and I will end up with one house, and I would be extatic.

The problem I am having now is that I don't know of a service that would take that spreadsheet of 2,000 combos of property addresses and names of owners of records, and, for a reasonable fee, return me a list 20 names of dead people among those 2,000.

If you have been thinking about starting an online business but haven't found a good idea yet, the above service, if it doesn't already exist, maybe one worth pursuing.

David M. · Answer

@Abdenour Achab

Not sure if I understand your question.  Are you saying going through the probate filings won't work for you?

You said you wanto know who died recently (in the past few days), but NOT somebody with close relatives going through probate.  Maybe I'm too nieve on this, but unless other arrangements are made by the deceased (before they died), the real property will have to go through probate.  Either way, I don't think there is a way to determine if a decedent has "close" (which is a pretty difficult term to figure out) relatives.

What's the most efficient way of determining who died recently in Arizona?

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