Real Estate Investor · Gainesville · Member since 2009 · 47 posts · 2 votes
I'm trying to find a quick and effective method of finding the contact info of buyers of properties that sold for cash in the last 6 months. I have the list of sold properties, 500+ in all, and now I need to turn that into a mailing list asap. Where can I get reliable info online (preferably) to achieve this? Please advise.
Hey David,
JCC is right. Title should be able to give you the mailing address in addition to the subject property. Because these are cash buyers you can bet that 90%+ are not owner occupants, so your time spent in getting mailing addresses will be well spent. I do not have extensive experience with any of these to recommend one over the other, but here are some skip tracing links:
Actually, I need to verify the real buyer of X property, rather than simply sending a contact letter to whoever lives in the house at present.
I've taken random entries in my homes list and entered the relevant data into the duval county tax appraiser website, and had inconsistent results. Some entries show, some don't.
Using Listsource.com may be acceptable, but I don't have the ability as far as I can see to designate cash only sales as my criteria.
If anyone knows of a reliable way to turn an extensive address list of cash-sold homes into a mailable list of verified cash buyers, I'm all ears.
I don't know if I'm understanding you correctly but, if you are trying to find cash buyers for a particular area over the past 6 months then you could just do a search on the MLS. Then create a spreadsheet to upload or print labels.
I don't have direct access to MLS, but I did have someone do a cash close search for the last 6 months. However, just mailing out to those addresses does NOT guarantee that the people now living in those homes are the owners, obviously. So I need a reliable way to reach the actual property owners, rather than just the property occupant. If anyone knows a reliable online method, let me know.
Your title company can give you the "mailing address" (as opposed to the property address) for the owner of the properties.
Getting a title company to do it for you is fairly easy. Call a title rep, tell them you are doing some marketing and you will try to use them for title upon success. If you do not know a title rep then ask a Realtor who they use.
If you are bent on the online option then you could pay for Dataquicks' GoTitle service.
--or--
Go to your assessors office and look up each property - they will have mailing address also.
Hey David,
JCC is right. Title should be able to give you the mailing address in addition to the subject property. Because these are cash buyers you can bet that 90%+ are not owner occupants, so your time spent in getting mailing addresses will be well spent. I do not have extensive experience with any of these to recommend one over the other, but here are some skip tracing links:
David,
One more thought. You mentioned "someone" doing a cash close search for you. If a title company percieves you to be a full time investor they will likely run the list for you. They used to all run them for free. Many are starting to charge relatively small fees for their searches. As an alternative title will definately provide the list to a mortgage broker you might know and more likely at no cost or at least minimal cost.
This is confounding. Every search website listed above only gives me the information of who currently lives in the property. Or worse, it asks me to pay for that info. I don't need the mailing address of the house I enter. I need the owner of it. Even county property appraiser records are unreliable, as the last owner shown on several searches was typically a bank (despite the fact that the houses in question have been bought by an investor already, as my RE agent told me) or is shown on the appraiser site as belonging to the person that lived there before it was an REO. At this point, I'm beginning to wonder why online public records are even available, sinced they are unreliable, and moreso I'm starting to doubt the competency of the RE agent in having given me an actual list of homes that have really sold. It indeed says 'sold' by each home, but so far, I've had zero success getting ahold of the owner of any of the 512 properties listed. Instead, I've gotten mailing info for each property itself. Which is useless. I guess I'll keep calling title companies until I find one that is willing to help me. If anyone knows a more streamlined method of finding the owner of record for 512 properties, please let me know. The websites listed above charge for info that may not be what I need.
Sometimes the online sites are slow to be updated by the county, and sometimes it is just as fast as if you went to their building in person to check the records. Sounds like you are working an area where they are slower.
Call them and ask somebody how long it takes for the online site to update with the latest recorded property sale; they need to update at some point to send the tax bills out.
I'm fortunate to work an area where the recording and the online availability are at about the same time - within a day typically. So I know it can be done.
Maybe I'm working this from too far back. Does MLS, as Chris Trook suggested, have the ability to actually spit out the cash buyers mailing addresses? This would be light years more efficient than taking a list of homes that sold FOR cash, and trying to find out the mailing address of the cash buyer.
Well first do a search for cash buyers on the MLS then when you find one, click on it. After that, you can pull up a tab for tax info which will list the owner's name and mailing address.
The mailing address is what you want, not the property address. You can then do a reverse lookup using only the address or you can lookup by their name or even business name.
If you keep practicing with the search tools listed above you will get better at it. If all else fails, send a yellow letter to the owner's mailing address.
Basically, if you already know the property address then you should be able to find the owner's name and mailing address on the appraisal or tax web site for your county by doing a search of the property address.
If all else fails, go to the property and knock on the door. Tell them that a neighbor told you they rented from a guy who had several rentals and you want to get in contact with him to see if he has any more.