All Forum Posts by: Cornelius Garland

@Ray Agosto Hello Ray. Unfortunately, most of the free methods don't give you reliable phone numbers. You can try white pages or been verified. But as I previously indicated, those methods are not good. I suggest paying someone on upwork.com to look up numbers for you or using the site findtheseller.com to locate numbers for you. I've gotten ok results on upwork but most of those guys are using free or cheap tools to locate numbers so your hit rate will be low. If you want addresses for free, then I suggest trying familytreenow.com. Surprisingly, the addresses and relative information is accurate for a free tool. However, no phone numbers are included.

@Jay Hinrichs I totally agree regarding the wholesaling guru hype. I learned pretty much everything through experience and BP. I like coming on here and letting the new guys know it's not as easy as they think, and you really have to have a strong work ethic to make it in the business. We went through our share of growing pains and learned from our previous mistakes and successes to grow our business.

I haven't driven by Ashley Ave recently, but I will definitely next week. I LOVE hearing that you're going to make a huge profit on it. That means that my partner and I did our job well. We knew it was going to be a large project, and your team is just about the only ones up to the task. I can't wait to see the completed project. Do you have an estimated completion date for the property? I know you can get 650k for it because Wagner Terrace is hot right now.

@Jay Hinrichs It is very time-consuming. But I found a way to efficiently outsource majority of the work so I don't have to personally do it, thankfully. I do agree with you; it's a ton of work just for the possibility of getting a deal.

Hello @Solomon Oh! Great decision on marketing consistently. Once my company committed to our monthly mail campaigns, we began getting contracts frequently. We had this issue regarding returned mail and it can be overwhelming. You can door knock, but I don't think it's the highest and best use of your time as a business owner. My business partner and I door knocked in one of our farm areas but we found that most of the neighbors had no idea where the people in my subject property went and I had to find other means to locate them. I did do this on one property and got a deal; however, this was after I skip traced the owner and located an address for her son. I showed up to his house and he put me in touch with his mom and we got a contract. I would suggest trying any or a combination of the strategies below. 

Initially, I skip traced every returned letter and repacked the letters in new hand-written envelopes. This was very tedious because I was sending out thousands of pieces every month and getting a couple of hundred returned mail pieces. Due to this, I began prioritizing my returned letters to determine if it was worth the time to resend them. If I saw that a property clearly looked abandoned from Google Maps or bought over 20 years ago, then I would find the owner's correct address and resend the letter. I still do this for some of my lists. However, I prefer to get my virtual assistant to use my skip tracing tools to locate the correct addresses of all my returned letters then just update my excel spreadsheet and wait until the next month to resend those letters out. This way I'm avoiding hand writing all of the letters.

Currently, we don't get a lot of returned letters because we always skip trace out lists before we send our mail out to reduce the return rate. We do this because the information from the court houses is often out-of-date, and it's not necessarily the list provider's fault. Additionally, we found it's really beneficial to call in conjunction with sending mail. Our tools give us access to the numbers of sellers in addition to their correct address so we like hitting them on both angles. It also helps us get to the 5th touch a lot quicker. After your prospect hears from you 5 times, you're more likely to close the deal because your competitors are only touching them a few times.

Some resources you can use to locate correct addresses and phone numbers are findtheseller.com, TLO, Microbilt, or Spokeo. If you plan on prioritizing your list and going after the low hanging fruit, then I would use findtheseller.com. This can get very pricy because they charge like $6 per search; however, it's a quick fix and they have a quick turnaround time. Spokeo is as about good as White Pages, but I would use them for phone numbers rather than correct addresses because they'll likely be wrong. Microbilt was the first tool I used, and it was spotty with numbers but typically gave me correct addresses. It costs about $50 per month and is good if you are doing around 20 searches per month. You'll need to contact them and go through the process of getting an account, which takes roughly 2 weeks. Lastly, if you plan on doing this consistently then I would seriously consider TLO. I've had great experience with it, and it costs roughly $250 monthly for 3600 searches annually. I've found that I get 1 out of 25 numbers are incorrect, which is roughly 90% accuracy rate on a 1000-lead list. You need to go through the process of getting an account, like Microbilt. TLO will take you about a month to get but well worth it if you do plan on making skip tracing returned letters part of your business model. I would just weigh your options and see what fits your needs. I've skip traced tens of thousands of leads so I can answer any specific questions you have. Just ask away!

@Brett Elia Of course! I understand your frustration, and I usually only go to my tax assessor's site to verify ownership. Other than that, the contact information is very outdated. It was so bad that when we mailed 1,000 people that got their properties bought at the tax auction, half of them didn't know their homes were sold! I'm unsure who was at fault: the county for not verifying the mailing addresses were up-to-date or the homeowner for not taking the time to update their addresses. Either way, it's a poor situation for the investor or agent looking to get in touch with the homeowner.

@Paul Amegatcher I've had spotty experience using Been Verified. I think I held a subscription for a couple of months before canceling. What's your hit rate out of every 100 leads? How many would you say are bad numbers or addresses? My main issue with a lot of the reseller skip tracing platforms is that you may get a correct number, but you'll also have 10 other possible numbers in the results. Additionally, the first number returned may not be the 100% accurate number. This was my issue Microbilt, which I used a lot early in my career. Sometimes my team ended up calling all 10 numbers just to get in touch with the seller. It was worse if a seller didn't answer because our cold caller would then need to call every single number the next time they tried to call the seller. So having the correct data initially is critical, which is why I'm a proponent of the private databases. We only aim to have 2-3 numbers per contact and our tools allow us to see the accuracy of the phone numbers before we dial. I'll give Been Verified another look because I was using it to chase down heirs and tax delinquent property owners. It may have not been the website's fault because the data simply may not have been there due to the scope of my searches.

@Brett Elia I'm not an agent so I'm unsure if phone numbers are available on the MLS. The only other individuals who would have it is the previous listing agent, and I doubt you want to contact them to get it. Plus, this is not the best use of your time. What I suggest is that you narrow down your list based on motivation factors, such as the age of owner, length of residency, or absentee owners. Once you have your refined list of homeowners, I would go to findtheseller.com to get the phone numbers for them. It can be pricy, which is why I suggested that you refine your list first so you're only focusing on the "low-hanging fruit". My company just looks up the phone numbers for all of our lists and cold calls the sellers instead of sending out mail. Way better bang for our buck, and you don't have to worry about those pesky returned letters. I always hate checking my PO box and seeing hundreds of returned yellow letters. It's like throwing money down the sink. Hope this helped!

@Levi Vincent In addition to the great suggestions mentioned by the users before me, I would also make sure the property is worth pursuing. You mentioned that it isn't worth flipping; were you interested in using it as a rental? If so, I would check out rentometer.com to see what the average rent is near it. I'm asking because there may have been investors in the past that looked at the property and passed on the deal because it just doesn't have any potential. Before going down the trail and trying to purchase the home, I would just make sure the numbers work and you have a viable exit strategy. I would check to see if there were any retail or investor-buyers within a half mile radius of it. If you go on Zillow or the MLS and notice that there haven't been any sales within the past 12 months, this is a huge red flag and indicator that you should pass on the home. I've had situations before where a property looked like a great deal (i.e., boarded up and abandoned), but there wasn't any market demand for it. This is especially the case in rural areas, and I tend to exclude these locations from my marketing altogether.

Very Respectfully,
Cornelius Garland

@Gustavo Munoz Castro I was looking for the same solution when I was starting out years back. I wanted to be able to import an excel spreadsheet into a database with thousands of owner names & mailing addresses and get back phone numbers. I wish a service provided this, but there isn't one. Mainly because you can have potentially dozens of results for 1 inquiry. For instance, if you are looking up "John Smith" at "123 Main St" and the system doesn't recognize a "John Smith" listed at that location, the system may come back with all "John Smiths" within 25 miles of "123 Main St". Each lead requires manual examination by a human in order to verify the data is accurate. Additionally, I wouldn't trust a system that claims to do bulk queries without being able to manually analyze the data. A common scenario you'll encounter is the system mixing up "Jr.s" and "Sr.s". In this case, the user will still need to go these inquiries and manually locate which result is correct. Your best bet is to try and get a TLO account, like myself, or an Experian account, like John, and roll up your sleeves and manually skip trace your leads. We skip trace every list in our database and have roughly 10k leads with phone numbers and updated addresses from doing this. It takes some time, but it's better than wasting thousands of dollars in returned mail pieces. We run campaigns for several investors and send off roughly 30k mail pieces annually so it's worth doing the work up front. You just need to figure out what solution works best for your company. I hope this provided some guidance.

@Account Closed I just messaged you.