I am on my second real estate investment book and plan on searching for a property very soon.

I searched a bit on the forum, but have not found much.

You could go to the courthouse and do a title search to find out ownership, original purchase price, outstanding liens, etc.

Do a forum search and you should find your answers.

You're talking about multimillion dollar insurance companies that do title searches all day long.

Real comps, title searches, etc.My concern is in the amount of time it takes to find a good property.

Do a search for Los Angeles REI to get more details.

So I thought since I got such a great response from my absentee mailer experiment (66% on 50 letters) I would try mailing people about buying via wholesaling.I went through the assesors website and just searched "LLC" and "INC" under owner name, and kept all the addresses in my contacts of people holding two or more SFHs or duplexes.

HelloThere also data sources that you can get that give you recent sales.Propertyshark.com (15 free reports daily) and Realquest.com(I like this one) The both carry fees, but the information they give is worth it and cuts down my comp search time considerably.

They give you zoning information, a complete financial history on the property including all sales,refinancing and transfers, tax data, and the product I use the most, is the comparable search.