Locating a prior owner

[Sam Leon]

Anyone has any advice on how best to locate contact information for a previous owner?

Tried Google and couple of "find people" sites and nothing turned up, no facebook or social networking profiles, and whatever found still showed property address which is now bank owned for over 6 months as current address.

I would like to talk to him to get the inside scoop of what went on. The property was foreclosed on and he owned it since 2000, did a bunch of illegal additions which I now need to clean up in order to get the 350k lien mitigated.

There is just a whole bunch of stuff I don't "get". Like why is there an AAV for the sink? There is a stack protruding through the roof on that wall right there, what is going on behind the wall? Why he built a 85' long fence 3.75' inside of the property line and yield that much space to the neighbor? He built a gazebo in the back within the setback, city wants it gone. He put in a toilet inside the gazebo, an air conditioner, and ran a 3" sewer drain from the gazebo 35' east, 60' south, then 47' west to a deep pit where he used a sump pump to connect to the existing drain which is higher in elevation, why the loop? What was in the way when he dug? Why he put in a coral rock lined pond that is 60 feet long?

I have more, but a number of things really didn't make sense and I want to know about latent issues sooner rather than later.

Just had no luck finding the guy.

Do you all had good luck talking to people who's home was foreclosed on are they generally helpful or they hang up on you?

A number of years ago I bought a place that had a weight sensor. In other words it is a 2'X3' rectangle in the slab that you cover with a rug but if someone activated it by stepping on it a silent alarm will sound, I had no idea how its wired, and it also came with a safe the size of a stove and no one knew the combination. I managed to track down the owner, called and he told me he was in the waiting room waiting on his wife's being operated on, an open heart surgery. Ouch.