All Forum Posts by: Pavel Sakurets

Alright BP I love business discussions and I have what I feel is a good question for you that popped in my head while listening to one of the podcast earlier that I want to get your take on.  How do you pay yourselves? Do most of you have a business account separate from your personal one? If you do, how do you calculate what to pay yourself? 

Do you take a set percentage from every flip? Do you not pay yourself unless needed and just pour it back into another property? If you are a buy/hold investor do you have a percentage from monthly cash-flow you take for yourself then leave the rest in your business?

I might have missed a podcast or article that hit this but I have never heard anyone in real estate hit on their opinion of this. I would guess that after a while if you treat this like any other business you have a set salary and that's what you pay yourself. What do you guys think and what have you guys done? Especially starting out? How did you do it?

Fantastic, will you be writing a book about how to buy vacant houses sight unseen with all the exit strategies built in if you find out you didn't get the deal you thought? Seems that would be a waste of time too.

Depends on your farm area, if I were to drive (like go for a motorcycle ride) I could cover my city in 3 to 4 days, already knowing where to look.

If your method works for you, keep doing it! :)

I also admire your attitude I help others with no fear of competition and it comes back to me.

Does anyone know of a service that could locate empty properties? I do not understand what you are asking, please clarify.

Also after we find a property, how to find the property owner if his/her county's record is the same mailing address as the property's? Almost all counties will have the information online. You can look up the property by it's PIN and the owner of record's address will be on there. However, pins are associated with the lot not the person who actually owns it that is why I say owner of record. A lot of counties do not properly file the paperwork (as is the case in Cook County, IL) and an owner from ten years ago can still be listed on the property.  The best is to look at the records and try to recorder of deeds to see if the property is owned, bank owned, foreclosed etc. From there, you should be able to find out if the property is owned or was lost. If lost, you can find it on any listing site.

If you truly are doing 5 million dollar deals like you said early in the thread, then a couple people working at $10/hr plus expenses should be a minimum bit of overhead for your company.  Most laws are fine with employees doing scouting and such as long as they don't try to handle the solicitation and are just getting wages for scouting.

I don't think you are meaning to offend anyone, but you probably are.  There are plenty of investors here on BP and plenty more that are not on BP that drive neighborhoods daily and do very well buying houses that are either vacant or in disrepair and have an owner wanting to sell.  You do not want to and that is ok, but for some - that IS the best way to find the houses and they do it very well.  I know you are not trying to offend, did I read on another thread that you are Belarusian?  Your directness may offend some.

To your question, I use a software developed by my older brother Kent Clothier and his partner.  I'm not going to list it on here because it is a product that is for sale and I don;t want anyone to think I am promoting it.  It is not a perfect piece of software.  It is however, extremely helpful in using data to narrow down a mailing list for us to use that gives us the highest likelihood of successfully buying more property.

We use it monthly in all three of our markets and it is just one of the sources we use to buy 50+ properties a month.  We do not wholesale these properties - they are all for our company and our clients, so it is important to use data to help identify and narrow a list.  It uses public data such as utility records, public notices, mortgage and lien filings, phone number changes, address changes, etc...  Someone else already mentioned this data.  All of it is useful and when you put it together, you can use it to group a list of houses that have the highest probability of being vacant (at some point in the near past) and multiple other criteria.  We use the data to sort in state and out of state owners, purchasing in certain time periods and whether or not there are existing liens on the properties.  

Point is, the data exists, but it is only data.  It can only get you so close to what you are looking for if you are not willing to drive the neighborhoods and physically find them your self.  Private message me and I will give you the name of the software and you can do your own due diligence and see if it fits what you are looking for. 

Thanks, good man, but you know that list isn't all the current vacant homes and may not be homes that are vacant today, it changes everyday, but some may have been vacant for years, you'll need to go check on them. Good luck... : )

There is not one, but you can use what look like clues to get close.  We mail to lists in Memphis, Dallas and Houston that we call motivated sellers and we zero in on what we believe may be vacant homes.  Beats the hell out of driving around looking for them.  But, it is not 100% accurate on either criteria, but it is very good at taking big data and melting it down to a good, workable list and we buy houses from it every month.  We just use multiple public records and have a computer algorithm that looks at the data and tells us which ones are most likely to be motivated and/or vacant. From there, it is just like any other mailing list.  Hit it often and consistent and let the message sink in.  

If you want an actual vacant homes list from the city government, I think that would be fairly useless for you.  Not sure how often or how accurate they would be, but there are some cities who have enacted laws for these lists to be kept.

As for the address for owners, many users will tell you to use a skip trace service.  IT really depends on how many records you have bad mailing info on the owner.  For us, there is so much other data where the info. is correct that we ignore instances where it is not.  It is not worth the time and effort when there are already so many other properties where we can try and engage the owner without the other effort.

No it doesn't, you may have gotten some vacant homes, you didn't get a list of all vacant homes, impossible and I also think you're pumping your original question as if it was a legit question, it wasn't, if there was a way to find them, I'm pretty sure I'd be aware of it, not like you came upon some idea that has never been thought of before. I've dealt with cities all over the country, they can't identify when a house becomes vacant. If you think you found something, post it up, give a link so we can all see it. If you did, you'll be the hero! :) 

@Pavel Sakurets - did you look at this thread?

http://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/79/topics/9341...