All Forum Posts by: Sean OToole

@Frank Bonzai, Costar has multiple products, you likely need to call and talk to someone. Expensive.

Listsource does not offer phone numbers.

What didn't work for you with ProspectNow?

I just did a quick search and found 257 properties zoned apartment, with 16-50 units in the City of Las Vegas. As is typical, most are held in LLC or partnership names, which makes phone numbers very difficult without some additional work to find the name of the principal of that LLC, and then their number. Looking at our data we only had phone numbers for 11 of the 257 for that reason, whereas for single family the match rate is typically 70-80%.

One thing to keep in mind is that any service provider is only going to be as good as the underlying data. A lot of investors looking for multi-family run into problems not because of the service provider, but because the data at the county is poor to start with. That they had 257 properties coded both as apartments, and with units data shows that Vegas is better than most counties in populating this data, but you may still find that is an incomplete list. There are ways around that when it happens - basically compare some apartments that you are familiar with, against the county data, and find criteria that is unique to those properties that you can use to find all of them. For example in one county they didn't record units or beds on apartments, but they did record baths. So I was able to use baths as a proxy for units to find all the apartments of a certain size.

Hope that helps.

@Phil Olinger I don't think it will be a mistake. Happiness is a key ingredient of success and very few investors ever find a deal on social media. It can be helpful in building relationships with vendors, partners, etc, but it is certainly not the only way to do that. That said, I'd encourage you to continue coming here to look for an answer to a question, or share a win. Nextdoor can also be valuable for finding, and getting reliable feedback on local vendors like contractors and landscapers. Both are largely free of the political nastiness and social pressure you'll find on other sites. I think to get ahead, we should all do more of what helps, and less of what doesn't. :-)

@John Corey I think you have a typo. LinkedIn was founded in 2002. AOL didn't even exist until 1985. Only thing close to social media in 1982 was bulletin board systems. I ran a BBS at the time, and frequented many others. Recently tried to remember which ones and found this great list: http://bbslist.textfiles.com/usbbs.html. I don't think I had any idea how many there were at the time.

@Roman Rytov - with regard to the MLS portion of FMLS you are comparing apples and oranges. MLS provides access to properties listed for sale, Listsource provides access to public records data - and specifically the ability to build targeted marketing lists from that data.

That said most MLS's offer something like Corelogic's Realist product for free as part of their service to provide access to public records. Depending on which service your MLS offers the comparison will vary. If it happens to be Realist, it pulls from mostly the same database as Listsource, but Realist has very few criteria to use to get results, and does not include demographics data (like age), etc.

The chances your MLS offers the same access to building lists as Listsource, or other modern solutions, is pretty low. If you want to go look and see which service it offers, folks here might be able to comment in more detail.

@Patrick Fermo, yes, a little. I recently used our software to identify every multi-family property in my market and then reached out to every owner for a 1031 exchange. Did not find a willing seller for a large complex as I hoped, but did find multiple off-market sellers and ultimately bought a smaller multi-family project from one of them and some commercial property. Complex needed some work but all-in the cap rate ended up a couple points better than anything listed.

Thanks @Patrick Fermo. I think most successful RE investors are part sleuth. Whether figuring out how to dig through public records for opportunities, skip tracing missing owners, analyzing chain of title, or researching old documents and maps to find hidden value, I think being part sleuth is what differentiates the best from the rest. :-)

May nailed it when she said it depends on the county, it's almost always a county issue rather than data provider issue.

But that does NOT necessarily mean you can't use the data to find multi-families, it just takes a bit of reverse engineering. To do that, find a few properties (by driving around) that are like the ones you want to target, and note their addresses. Then look those up and see what they have in common. Unfortunately ListSource isn't great for looking up assessors data on individual properties, so you can use their sister service RealQuest, another service, or do it directly at the county. For multi-family pay attention to fields like sq ft (not many 20k sf homes), units (this is often the best), beds/bath, rooms, etc. Usually something will stand out and you can then use that as a criteria in ListSource to find all the other multi-family properties in the area.

@Mike Flora, yes email is an important marketing method. More soon. ;-)

@Mike Flora that is a really great point. "Vacant" just means that nobody is pulling the mail out of the box. We see this a lot with folks expecting that for pennies per record someone drove around and actually checked each property to see if there was anyone there or not. It's just not reasonable. Same for absentee owners, and every other list. The point of these criteria is simply to leverage available data to increase your odds by allowing you to focus on more likely prospects. Properties where people are not picking up their mail are more likely to be an opportunity than ones where the people are picking up their mail. People, like yourself, who understand that, and understand the power of combining criteria tend to do far better in this business. :-)

Crazy this is still so hard in so much of the country. Far easier in AZ, CA, NV, OR and WA today. I can't wait for that to be true nationally later this year.

I think the key is to understand your market, before you start to market. This is at the heart of @Tchaka Owen's comment about it working in some places better than others. He mentioned urban vs. rural, but also think about age, for example. Older retirees are often happy to have someone to talk to, while busy professionals get angry at the interruption. So rather than starting with HOW to market, I strongly suggest you start with WHO you want as customers. Once you figure that out, you can ask WHERE you can best reach them. Is that group on Facebook, are they part of the email generation, messaging, phone, direct mail, door knocking, etc. Always start with the who, and you'll be far more successful on the where and how.