All Forum Posts by: Pablo Avila

We used to request this list as well in the past; however, some cities will no longer give you verbose information as in give you the specific home address. You may have to request for the persons' full name, and then join that information to the county appraisal data to tie it with the property address. 

Here's a list we compiled a while back with some cities/contact # to obtain the water shutoff list 
Google sheets document - Water Shutoff list

Mike, 

Most of the investors I've worked with prefer batch leads as they seem to have 15-25% error rate which is probably some of the best. Propstream and other solutions such as Mojo have lower tiered data and therefore the cost is less. 

Could you DM with your email, We're getting into the skip-tracing space, would love to help. 

Looks like most people now are going from multi-family to Land, specifically Vacant Land. From experience, here's what I'd suggest you look for. 
You can easily pull these types of lists from your county appraisal district or 3rd party services. 

Property Types:
Vacant Land
Agricultural
Commercial

Broken down into Specific Property Types:
Mobile home lot
Agricultural (NEC)
Residential Acreage
Residential Lot
Multifamily Acreage
Multifamily Lot
Agricultural Land
Industrial Acreage
Industrial Lot
Commercial Acreage

I'd look for properties that have been owned for at least 10+ years, and large acreage (this depends on you, I'd say more than 40+). I'd also look for places that are about an hour away from Major cities (for example in Texas: Brazoria, Galveston, Bexar, Fort Bend, etc.), there's plenty of land. 

Additionally, something that no one ever mentions is that many of these parcels have a 0 address, such as "0 Road", so many commercial real-estate software may not have these which is a competitive advantage that you'll have. 

I'd exclude:
-Trustee-owned properties
-Corporate-Owned Properties

Sources: I own a real-estate data company :) 

Happy to connect, we help our customers with lead generation. We're a real-estate-state data company based out of Houston. 

I had success looking at vacant properties (Virtually driving for dollars), looking at publicly available data that no one else is looking for and specially not available in commercial software's. Google 311 or service requests for your city or state. These are calls/emails/complains that the average person calls to their local municipality in which are all publicly available. Simply download them and filter based on your criteria. 

After this, follow your standard playbook of skiptracing and reach out to them.  

To further add to finding buyers and not waste your time with "so called buyers" who are all over Facebook and these type of forums. 

My approach used to be to pull the real-estate agent lists and then do a bit of Excel magic to determine who's actually an investor.
To further explain, many of the real-estate folks that have an active or expired license are actually investors. To use Texas as an example (www.trec.texas.gov), you have access to the list of these individuals which include contact information (Name, email, phone, etc.). I would then match their address to the appraisal district data (which is also available for most counties) and sort by deed/sale dates looking back for the last year, and I would focus on zipcodes. I would then see a trend of these individuals buying numerous amount of properties in specific zipcodes and would determine that these were all buyers. After this I would contact them to introduce myself and see what they were looking for. 

I have a data background so this was fairly easy for me to put together (created databases for this), but I'm sure you can do the same with Excel.
I hope that helps!

I've had good success in the past and have actually helped out family members get a hold of home owners to purchase their home as a fix/flip. We all have various methods of finding motivated sellers and based on your past comments I understand yours is SEO-based which is a great; however, I believe many folks will get some value from this thread and that's the point of sharing! Good day! 

Here's another post adding value to this community: Leveraging your city's open data to find vacancies.

I'll start by pointing you how to get these leads yourself. To give you an idea, sometimes pulling these manually can get you ahead of those who utilize commercial solutions propstream/listsource. 

Open Data is data made available and typically updated daily/hourly which might include Police incidents, Inspection data, and other incidents that will have plenty of information to indicate if a property is vacant, if there's any code violations, and other indicators that may help you find motivated sellers). These data sets are typically available in .csv or excel format so they should be easily consumable. Let's get started!

1. Google for your city county data "Dallas Open data"
2. Search for relevant data sets Service requests (code violations), Police Incidents, Police Arrests - (ensure it's sorted by most recent updated (There might be outdated data sets which no longer get updated so those won't be relevant).
3. Download relevant data such as the following and filter by my suggested categories: 

- 311 Department - Filter by Office of Homeless Solutions or Environmental Quality, Court & Detention Services, Specifically searching for (Homeless Encampment, Illegal dumping).
- Police Incidents - Search for Type of incident (ABANDONED PROPERTY, COMMUNITY/PUBLIC - UNINHABITED, BURGLARY OF HABITATION -NO FORCED ENTRY, Abandoned/Condemned Structure). There's also information about death-related incidents which I won't go into details (i.e. Natural death, Murder).

4. Luckily this information includes the address in question along with the date of the incident, you might be the first person with access to this data, and therefore the first to market to these properties.

My suggestion would be to join your county appraisal district data to further identify the properties of interest along with other relevant data such as tax delinquencies, and/or other motivating factors.

Lastly, leave any questions or comments below! And don't be lazy, some of you won't do proper due diligence in finding your own information :)

 What county are you looking for ?

We've had good success with batchskiptracing. Just remember that these companies have various data tiers, some of the quality will be lower than others so I would try different ones for your campaigns and see what works best. Propstream skip tracing data is sub-par, and there's other cheaper services that also don't yield great results.