Finding Vacant properties with 311 Service requests

[Pablo Avila]

I continue seeing folks asking for niche lists, etc, to determine motivated sellers. I'll make a series of posts on how I find these. Using your city's 311 service you can "Virtually D4D" to find off market deals that might not be in commercial real-estate software such as batch leads and/or prop stream. Look at your city's 311 service, it's public data and will have hundreds of reports such as abandoned lots, homeless activity, high grass, etc..

Majority of the time this is what cities utilize to determine code violations/enforcement, so if you request that list, you'll be ahead. Additionally, these are updated daily and typically have the "incident opened date" which you can easily sort by.

1. Find the website (Google 311 service request your city name)

2. Locate the full data list (This will be raw data, you will need to open it with excel or a text editor (Notepad ++ works great).

3. Format the data (Depending on the city, this might already be categorized such as Vacant/Overgrown Property, or it might have a full description. If it does have a description 
Here's some of the keywords you can look for: ABANDONDED,unoccupied,homeless,squatting, uninhabitable,disconnected,destroyed,water leaks, ,damage,rodent,utilities,,moved out,not secure,maintain property,Encampment.

4. Determine the full address and now tie this information together to your county appraisal data which should have the owner name/mail address. Once you tie these determine the parcel # and identify if there's any tax delinquencies, or whatever other indicators you typically use to increase the likelihood of a motivated seller (i.e. tax liens, evictions, etc..)

5. Take action and call them

This is a great way to find vacant properties as neighbors or people that have an intimate knowledge of those neighborhoods are the ones that report these properties which tend to be eyesores for their communities.

[Jerry Holt]

Great advice @Pablo Avila. I've been pulling code violations from city datasets for years in many parts of the country. I've always said why waste gas driving for dollars when the city code enforcement department is already doing the work for you.