All Forum Posts by: Alvin Grier

@Todd Plambeck do you make a campaign out of these leads, or do you just mail them once or twice?  

With probate and other leads (like absentees) you can keep mailing 'till the property sells or something, but with this type of lead source, it seems to be a little more challenging to know when to stop.

@Todd Plambeck I submitted an FOIA request for residential properties where the water's shut off; to say the list is huge is an understatement.

Did you do any additional discovery to sort through the list, or did you just proceed to assume everything on that list is vacant?

@Todd Plambeck when you got lists like this from the water department, did they require you to do an FOIA request?  

I've been thinking about adding vacant property leads to our marketing campaigns.

One of my concerns, is that it seems like you'd need to keep buying these frequently, as a house that's vacant this month could very well be occupied this time next month.

With that said...

1. Have you had any success with vacant property leads?

2. What's the best source for vacant property leads, in your opinion?

3. If you've used these leads before, do you have any tips to offer for getting the most out of them?

Anyone know of a way to obtain a list of all residential properties that exist in a specific city or zip code?

I was thinking about submitting a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the local municipality, but thought I'd ask in case there was some other (hopefully free or inexpensive) method that someone else might know about.

I was also considering contacting a list provider, but I was looking for a free option if one might exist, being that there isn't any filtering criteria in this instance.

Thanks Bill.  That sounds pretty congruent with my experiences as well up to this point :-)

We've become increasingly more focused on the lender/funding portion of our business.

After all, funding is just as important to our business as finding properties is.

Anyways, the more you understand your customer, the better you can serve them, so I thought this would be a great place to better understand the mindsets of active private lenders.

Thus my question:

Why did YOU decide to become a private lender?  What problem did (or does) it resolve for you?  

For example...

Did you want to make money in real estate, but didn't want to be "hands-on?"

Do the profits help you give your retirement a "jolt?"

Thanks in advance for your insight.

@Chris L. in so many words, he said it's best to just start marketing to the PR when the case opens, because you never know when the probate proceedings are going to give them the go-ahead to start liquidating the assets.

He said that the point where PR's get the go-ahead to liquidate the assets in an estate varies from case-to-case, so trying to time when the right time is to start marketing to a PR is extremely hard to do.

I think some counties around here will tell you when the "next event" will be, but I don't feel like going that far in-depth with the analysis.

I also learned that regardless of whether or not there's a will involved, the probate court needs to give them the go-ahead for to liquidate before the person that inherits the property from the will receives it, so reading the will (if there's one in the file) is kind of a moot point.

In Conclusion

The only thing I'm going to change/add to my routine from my conversation with the lawyer earlier, is to continuously pull the files of estates we've already marketed to in the past that are still "open" to see if they've been updated with an inventory...

If they have been, we'll read the inventory to see if there's a property in the estate; if there is, we'll continue marketing to the PR...

If not, we'll remove them from the list, and use this routine to keep our list as "clean" as possible.

Nevermind guy, my attorney finally called back and answered my questions :-)

FYI, I'm trying to make our probate marketing efforts more financially efficient, which is the basis for this thread.

I gather my own leads at the county.

My questions:

Quite often the inventory for the estate isn't filed and placed into the case files until 6 or 8 months (if not more) after the case is filed at the county, so...

Question #1 - Is there a way to identify when the best time is to start mailing the PR (Executor) of the probate case (if at all)?

For a while, we were mailing to PR's right after the case opened, trying to "get in early" on starting the conversation with the PR about the property.

Question #2 - But after thinking about it more, it dawned on me that that may not be smart, because if there's real estate in the estate that's going through probate, the PR can't sell the property until the probate case is closed, right?

Being early is one thing, but if they can't sell 'till the case is closed, mailing/calling over the course of 6-8 months (in some instances) before they can actually sell can be somewhat of a waste.

I've seen instances where the property that was in the name of the Decedent is sold before or shortly after the probate case was opened.

Question #3 - Does this mean that the property that belonged to the Decedent doesn't always have to be included in the probate case?

I've tried to get a little smarter, so I recently decided to start waiting to contact the PR until the estate inventory form gets filed (so I can verify that the property owned by the Decedent is even involved in the probate case).

But if I decide to wait, I began to think that I could be missing out on a chance to get dibs on the property, since the PR is likely still influential on what happens to the property (even if it's not included in the estate that's going through probate).

Question #4 - Would you agree or disagree with that line of thinking?

Question #5 - If the Will designates the party that gets the property upon the death of the Decedent, does that prevent the property from being included in the probate proceedings?

In other words, could that property be sold before the probate case is closed, if the descendant (that inherited the property via the will) chose to do so?

I've been wondering if I need to start reading the will that's in the file to get a clue if there's property involved in the estate or not.

Sorry for the length of this post.  Just trying to get a clearer understanding of how this all works.  

Thanks for your time and help.