Be careful paying unlicensed people to find properties for you unless you want to loose your license

[Pavel Sakurets]

I posted before asking BP community if anybody knew where to get a list of abandoned/vacant properties. Since I didn't get a clear answer from anyone (except driving for $ and possibly listsource, which I'm waiting to get a call from) which I consider (low skilled work, sorry didn't mean to offend anyone), I decided to hire several guys from CL and pay them $500 fee for each property that they find as vacant that leads to the purchase of that property plus $12/hr plus gas.

But it sounded a little sketchy to me to see if it was legal  to do that or not, because I'm a licensed RE broker. So I called MN brokers' support line and spoke to an attorney yesterday who told me that it was a violation and I could loose my license.

 I doubted him and called MN Department of Commerce and could not get a clear answer from a general RE support, thus I  was transferred to RE Investigator that I met 4 years ago (I was invited to meet him once, even though nothing has happened last time: one competitor reported me as a person doing RE without the license under a different Co name. It was not pleasant, I was not fined or given a warning, but the amount of time to collect all the RE transactions that we did was enormous and prove to the investigator that we did everything legally was such a waste of time.) Thus every time when I'm in doubt, I call 2 RE attorneys from broker's hot line and then if I don't get a good answer, I call the department of commerce.

My question, has anyone experienced this before? Does anybody know what is the right way to find abandon properties? What is the legal way to pay people to drive the neighborhoods and compensate them for finding properties and not getting issues with the department of commerce?

I'm looking for an answer from RE attorney or a licensed brokers/agents or people who had licenses before. Sorry the rest of you guys, maybe you are violating the law and don't know it.