All Forum Posts by: Pablo Avila

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(code violations), Police Incidents, Police Arrests - (ensure it's sorted by most recent updated (There might be outdated data sets which no longer get updated so those won't be relevant).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 :)

Quote from @MD Nahid:

What are Malito addresses and how do I find them in my county appraisal data district?

 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. 

I've been able to determine good cash buyers by doing the following.

1. Get your county appraisal data district data (Google: Your county appraisal district)- Some of these are in .csv which are fairly easy to open with Excel. If you come across some bigger ones, you can break the .csv file or open it with applications such as ultraedit.

2. There's 4 columns I typically look at which are Mailto Address, Owner, and Deed Date (Purchased date), and zip code.

3. Do a count on Mailto Address and Owner which will show you the individuals/llcs/corps that own the most houses. Now break this down by zip code (Those zip codes that you're currently doing business in), and look at those that purchased in the last 2 years (Or more recently). You'll start seeing recent purchases of companies/individuals based on your zipcode needs. These are your buyers list. 

4. I typically also pull a list of all public real estate agent records which contain contact information (First name, last name, company name, phone, and email address). I then match the address to the Mailto Address I pointed out earlier. I've found a high amount of real estate agents also working for companies that are purchasing these properties (Most likely investors who want early access to properties and/or MLS).

5. This is how I find their contact info and establish initial relationships as I know exactly what zip codes/cities they're currently purchasing in based on recent purchased data.

And there you go, now you have a solid list of buyers!

If the real-estate agent data isn't helpful, then just follow your standard investigative skills to find a contact information which should be easy as well.

I continue seeing folks asking for niche lists, etc, to determine motivated sellers. I'll make a series of posts on how I find these. Using your city's 311 service you can "Virtually D4D" to find off market deals that might not be in commercial real-estate software such as batch leads and/or prop stream. Look at your city's 311 service, it's public data and will have hundreds of reports such as abandoned lots, homeless activity, high grass, etc..

Majority of the time this is what cities utilize to determine code violations/enforcement, so if you request that list, you'll be ahead. Additionally, these are updated daily and typically have the "incident opened date" which you can easily sort by.

1. Find the website (Google 311 service request your city name)

2. Locate the full data list (This will be raw data, you will need to open it with excel or a text editor (Notepad ++ works great).

3. Format the data (Depending on the city, this might already be categorized such as Vacant/Overgrown Property, or it might have a full description. If it does have a description 
Here's some of the keywords you can look for: ABANDONDED,unoccupied,homeless,squatting, uninhabitable,disconnected,destroyed,water leaks, ,damage,rodent,utilities,,moved out,not secure,maintain property,Encampment.

4. Determine the full address and now tie this information together to your county appraisal data which should have the owner name/mail address. Once you tie these determine the parcel # and identify if there's any tax delinquencies, or whatever other indicators you typically use to increase the likelihood of a motivated seller (i.e. tax liens, evictions, etc..)

5. Take action and call them

This is a great way to find vacant properties as neighbors or people that have an intimate knowledge of those neighborhoods are the ones that report these properties which tend to be eyesores for their communities.

You can go to your clerks district office and request a list of probates, alternatively you can pull your counties' appraisal district data and look for parcel information in which the "mail to name" contains "Estate of", these are typically probates, from there you can do a bit of research online to find potential relatives. 

Quote from @Faye Hill:

What is a good lead source please! Little cost to no money?

Thanks 

Most of these lists you can get for free as it's mainly public accessible data (or free to request from your county). 
Here's some tips for niche list acquisition and ideas: Debt Claims, Divorce, Evictions, Felony Convictions ,Foreclosures, Probate, Small Claims, Tax Delinquencies, Tax Exemptions, Vacant Properties, code violations.

Here's some of the sources that you can utilize if you'd like to get ahead of those using the same data solutions (i.e.. listsource/propstream).
-County appraisal data - Absentee owned, Probate
-County District clerk (Criminal/civil data) - Divorce, Tax delinquency, Foreclosure, Felony convictions
-Justice of peace courts (Lookup your Precinct) - Debt claims, Evictions, Small claims, etc..
- Public real Estate Agent records - Many real estate agents are actually buyers (you can pull up their company info and match it with appraisal district data and identify cash buyers to build your cash list).
-Regrid[.]com is a great place to pull USPS vacant lists.
- Public City Works - Code violation data, Water shutoff (although there's been privacy changes with this),
- 311 Service requests data - Great to identify bad land lords, vacant properties, etc.
-Other Public sites such as nextdoor[.]com & Facebook - People will tell you what's going on in their neighborhoods (complaints about homeless camps, breaking into houses, etc.)

DM me if you have additional questions!

Most of the information you're looking for is already in Youtube for free, in addition to legitimate forums such as biggerpockets. Look at Facebook Groups related to Wholesaling, some of them have many members who are very active and can quickly answer any questions related to contracts, ARV calculation, etc..

My advise would be to focus on specific criteria's, absentee owners are a good place for conversion, and this changes very frequently. In my Market (Harris county), there's about 140 absentee owners every 7 days and up to 1k in a given month. Depending on where you get your list, you may be the first one that reaches out to these individuals. Follow ups are really important too! Keep these lists and reach out again (5-6 months).

Propstream is a good and inexpensive way to get started, specially their MLS comparison so you can quickly learn to estimate ARV in comparison to recent properties that have sold within the last 6month-1year. They have a 7-day free trial as well, so take advantage of it (But don't use their skip tracing service as it's low tier quality data).

I run a data company based out of TX, and pull this information on a daily basis. Let me know if you need any advise, or assistance!
We can provide with Absentee owners, Debt Claims, Divorce, Evictions, Felony Convictions ,Foreclosures, Probate, Small Claims, Tax Delinquencies, Tax Exemptions, Vacant Properties, code violations.

I've used Prostream in the past, I used to like their MLS comparisons. You can try it out for their 7-free day trial and pull up to 10k records based on your criteria. As some people mentioned, some of their data might not be up-to-date. In my market (Harris county, TX), there's about 140+ new absentee owners in a 7 day period, and up to 1k new absentee owners every month. These records show up on Propstream weeks later, so unless you pull them in a timely manner, there's a high chance that many of their users already called those individuals.

I run a data company based out of TX, and pull this information on a daily basis. Let me know if you need any advise, or assistance! 
We can provide with Absentee owners, Debt Claims, Divorce, Evictions, Felony Convictions ,Foreclosures, Probate, Small Claims, Tax Delinquencies, Tax Exemptions, Vacant Properties, code violations.