All Forum Posts by: Chris Magma

I have a huge buyers list. I have over 22,000 buyers in a couple counties surrounding mine. I gathered my list by aggregating county databases and using APIs. My buyers buy in different asset classes of all types like condos, lots, land, RES etc. My favorite thing to do to see if they are real buyers is display their recent year portfolio of properties and their funding source on a map like the one below. This let me know if they use cash or not so I know how I need to talk to the seller. Having a huge buyers list is a great idea because I find buyers in the area before I even lock the deal up. It takes less than 3 calls to move a property.

@John McAllister it depends on the county and state. They are all the same but are different at the same time. Some are online and some are not. Some are very large and requires database to store them and others you can just open with Microsoft Excel. It just depends. I've pretty much seen it all at this point.

@Barry Pekin that's expensive and @Joshua Dorkin that's too much of a hassle. Just ask for the entire database of properties from your county and filter that information and everything is free other than comps. I use APIs for that so it's basically free right now. @John McAllister if you are running into disconnected lines hit them with a mail piece. Everyone gets touched if you end up on one of my list.

@Jourdan Johnson hit me up in my inbox

@Jourdan Johnson I would suggest learning how to do it yourself. I don't pay a cent for property information other than contact information which is .15 cents each. I usually get entire counties and put what I'm looking for on maps like this. 

If you need a buyer I would either (long route) go to your local county records office and pull every property in the county and filter it for duplicates and call or send mail this will get you your buyers and sellers honestly or (short route) go to a couple title companies and asked for a list of properties that had all cash purchases this will give you some local buyers. I've never done the later. I'm a techie so I do the long route but the easier option is the short route from what I hear. 

If you are having a hard time finishing the entire process. Bring deals or valuable information to local real estate investors in the area and if they are cool enough they will walk you through the process. If you don't want to do that then take risk you will always fall forward. Keep building your confidence and you will make it happen. 

A lot of people think Listsource is the all be all place to go. But the lawsuit list, demolished houses list and bankruptcy list and just 3 of them that I will list here. These list are all not easy accessible in some places. There are about 19 or so different list that range from city, county and the state. It takes some savviness to get those distress list and a lot of investors don't want to spend the time getting all of them. We like to label them cold, warm and hot depending on the situation. If they appear on more than a couple distress list at the same time they are automatically considered hot for us.

Hope this helps!

It just depends on what you feel comfortable doing. I can only give you advice. If the seller is willing the sell then they will sell.

What's the format of the list (png, csv, flat...), how big is the list(100 records, 2.1 million records etc...).

How do you plan to market to this list? (mail, calls, door knocking etc...). 

Like @Monica Lewis said. Everyone is different.

Like @Tj Hines said you can pay those ridiculous prices for no reason or you can go to your county and get it yourself like I do in so many counties. 

@Hafiz Hamid this would be a very long post if I told you how I do it across multiple counties. I do it manually if it's available sometimes or I do it via API. Just depends on the county and MLS. My preferred method is the downloadable way because I use cities in that county to grab extra information.