Hi Justin, I work with a real estate investment company in Cleveland, and I've manipulated public records data to get a list of owner names and addresses for properties.

The reason is that actual balances are not public records data, so your only other alternatives to getting it from the owner are to call their lender and pretend to be them (illegal), or get access to their credit report (likely illegal too unless you get borrowers permission and at that point you might as well just ask for their statements).With that out of the way, the question then becomes how can you best guess at their balance.

We wish that it was the actual current balance, but that is credit data, not public records data, so we don't have access to it.

Because every county is different, I always recommend doing a little "backtesting" with any public records data.

This is important when troubleshooting lists, as you can a) look at samples from your list to see if they are really what you want, and b) look at samples that were not included in your list, and see why they weren't included.Public records data is very messy, and varies from county to county, and even by year built, or other odder variations.

For sales comps the biggest advantage of public records is that they will include non-MLS transactions.Everyone should keep in mind that value estimates like ours or the Zillow Zestimate (known in the industry as automated valuation models, or AVM's) are based on public records data and therefore don't take into account things like curb appeal, view, home condition, landscaping, etc.

Like Rick said, for those lists I think folks are better off gathering the data locally themselves, and then using a public records data tool to save time getting the rest of the data (value, equity, owner-occupied, title history, comps, etc) and managing their list.

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.

But other benefits include easy access to MLS/public records data, ability to schedule your own showings, write your own offers, other commissions from personal network, enhanced networking from other agents/broker.

I know this is all public records data, however I just can't find where to get it.