All Forum Posts by: Sean OToole

@Catherine Morel the only list above you are likely to find directly at the county is delinquent taxes. You may be able to get the assessors data and then use that to determine absentee owners by comparing mailing and situs addresses, but that is far more difficult and confusing than using Listsource. The "vacant" lists are based on us postal data, so the county won't have that. Mortgage lates are credit data, and can only be purchased from the credit companies - though I don't recommend them as there are a lot of rules on their use, and if you follow the rules you'll get near zero response. Instead consider foreclosure notices - those you can find at the county recorder, but not as data, you have to look at each document and copy off the pertinent information. Unless your time is worth nothing then a service is going be far cheaper.

@Scott Morris County assessor data can be relatively easy to get yourself, though the county may have a fee, and you may find using a service less expensive. That varies a lot by county. The tougher one is county recorder data. The issue being that the recorder doesn't have "data" they have document images. To get anything useful from those documents (liens, loans, transfers, foreclosures, judgements, etc), you have to hand enter the data off the document into your spreadsheet, database or whatever. Even if you aren't interested in those documents you still need a LOT of recorder data to be able to do things like estimate value, or equity. If you value your time at anything above $0, it is cheaper to buy it from a service, then do it yourself.

So yes, possible to get it yourself. But almost never can you do it cheaper than a service who can spread the cost across thousands of customers.

@John Dreher That is my least favorite thing about Listsource. With no preview of the data you can't see county level differences that make lists work in some areas and not others. The best workaround is to make a list of a few properties you are familiar with, and but it. You can do this by using their map search tool and drawing a shape around even just a single property. When you go to purchase the list add Property Detail Report and AVM Equity fields (and any other fields you are interested in using as criteria). Once you have this, then you can look at the actual data the vendor has on those properties to see what is missing or different then your search criteria, and then adjust your criteria so that your list works in that area. I actually recommend this with creating any list - especially one recommended by someone who lives / works in a different county. Despite all providers working hard to standardize data across counties, it just isn't as standardized as one would hope. By looking at and understanding the data specific to your county you'll build far better lists.

@Devin Martin fundamentally if you want to flip, it means one of three things: 1) buying the property at a discount sufficient that you can flip the property and make a profit, or 2) buying the property at market at making sufficient improvements that you can flip the property and make a profit, or 3) both.

If pursuing the 1st then your goal with Listsource, or any other list provider is to create a list of "motivated" sellers who might want be willing to sell at a sufficient discount. These motivations range a great deal from financial issues (foreclosure, tax default), personal issues (death, bad relationship, hoarding, etc), to property issues (code enforcement, bad tenants, no tenants, etc). Listsource is useful for some of those, for others you'll either need to find other services, or gather the data yourself (pretty easy to get a tax default list in most counties for example, or to read obits in the newspaper).

If pursuing the 2nd with Listsource, or another, then you'd focus on searching for large/double lots (potential expansion or lot split), large homes with too few beds/baths, homes that are too small compared to neighborhood, etc. That last one works really well when there is a large discrepancy between cost to build per sf, and resale per sf.

Combining both strategies can be great too.

I know of one. Can't upload to dialer, but best NOD/NTS data, and phones. PM me.

@Horacio Gutierrez - There are quite a few sites for doing people searches and skip tracing, but I'm only aware of one that combines that with detailed property information. Message me if you'd like details. :-)

Best,
Sean

@Horacio Gutierrez - Listsource does not offer probate leads, though they certainly do not only do absentee either. If you go to their website you can see all the options.

On probate, I assume you are generally looking for distress situations, with death being the particular form of distress that has you interested in? If that is the case, probate leads are really late in the process and probably not what you want. They also only apply to folks who don't have trusts. Most property is transferred after death through either a trust, or joint tenancy - not probate. So if that is what you are looking for, then you probably want obituaries instead. Once you find the persons name in the obituary, use a property information service that offers name search (we and others offer that), to see if they owned property, if there is equity, etc.

Hope that helps.

Sean

Hi @Alan Wischnesky - We haven't tracked them primarily because the volume is so low that it is hard to justify. I just checked the Thurston County Recorder website and there were only 2 Lis Pendens (start of judicial foreclosure process) filed in the entire month of December. My suggestion is that you 1) look them up on the recorders website, 2) find the property in a service like the ones you mentioned, and 3) add it yourself (we allow that, not sure about the others). Then you can have your own list, but still benefit from all the other info those services provide. Hope that helps.

@Leland James - I have a couple of things to add to what Michael said...

1. For foreclosures in your state, look for a provider that not only tracks the notices, but the auction status as well. The reason this is important is so that you don't waste a bunch of time on properties that received a notice, but are no longer in foreclosure. For example notices of trustee sale are often not even available from services for 10-15 days, but the property may be sold in as little as 30. Most services will continue to provide those notices as "preforeclosure" or "auction" properties, for months after the first sale date. Since sales can postpone for months on end some of those notices will still be valid, but you'll end up wasting time. To find a service that tracks trustee sales, you can Google "trustee sale tracking".

2. For deceased owner opportunities, I'd recommend looking at obituary's instead of probate. Between joint tenancy and trusts many properties will never appear in probate, and even if they do the probate filings come much later than obituaries. As you read the obits, you can easily find apps that allow you to enter a persons name and find all the property they own. Google "skip tracing" or "people search" to find providers.

I can only think of one app that provide trustee sale tracking, people search, absentee owners, equity search, vacancy and more for your area. PM for more info if interested.

Yes @Anthony Caiafa, surprisingly banks are still sitting on a lot of inventory. Your state is actually among the worst on that front, at least according to an acquaintance of mine - Keith Jurow (http://www.keithjurow.com/). Both with regard to people in default, who the banks haven't yet put into foreclosure, and with regards to properties the bank has taken back after foreclosure and not yet resold. I don't completely agree with some of his conclusions on what the outcome of those problems will be, but he's done a lot of digging into the data, so might be worth your looking at his research and writings.