I have recently been doing my first round of driving for dollars and come across multiple properties that I was interested in. After looking them up through my local County Assessors website I could find a name on all of them, but no way of contacting the person. Is there other software people use to find numbers or primary residences? Or is there something I am completely missing?
Investor · Houston, TX · Member since 2013 · 21 posts · 3 votes
2y
- You can use the mailing address from the property tax / County Assessor's site to mail them a letter. If the mailing address is the same address as the house and it is vacant, send a postcard to the house and put "Return Service Requested" on the mail to ask for the new forwarding address.
- "Skip Trace" the address to get the owner's public information (from several unknown data sources) There are several companies / applications that do skip tracing. Search BiggerPockets for more info on that.
- Knock on all of the neighbors' doors and ask if they know anything about the house or the owner or how to contact them.
Investor · Houston, TX · Member since 2013 · 21 posts · 3 votes
2y
- You can use the mailing address from the property tax / County Assessor's site to mail them a letter. If the mailing address is the same address as the house and it is vacant, send a postcard to the house and put "Return Service Requested" on the mail to ask for the new forwarding address.
- "Skip Trace" the address to get the owner's public information (from several unknown data sources) There are several companies / applications that do skip tracing. Search BiggerPockets for more info on that.
- Knock on all of the neighbors' doors and ask if they know anything about the house or the owner or how to contact them.
Investor · Lakeland, FL · Member since 2015 · 344 posts · 606 votes
2y
Ashton, congratulations on stepping out on one of the cheapest and most successful way of finding deals. Further, great job looking up the property assessor site to get the info.
Now we gotta find them.
You should have seen the post from Chad, who is right on the money.
See the mailing address on the property assessor’s site. If it is different from the subject property, that is the address to “skiptrace.” if the mailing and subject property are the same, “skip” the subject address.
I fully endorse Chad’s “return service requested,” concept.
I’m just going to give you some additional, free, cheap and more expensive ways to find them.
Free: truepeoplesearch.com is a free search engine that allows you to look up people by name, address, phone and email. And while it’s true that you get what you pay for, tps is actually not that bad. (I always advocate for searching by address as it should give you relatives and assisted to reach out to if you can’t find the owner themselves.)
Cheap: BeenVerified.com, skipgenie.com both of which are probably a step higher on getting phone numbers than tps, BeenVerified will also give you great data on death info, relatives, associates, marriage and divorce info as well as my favorite. Social media info. (I can’t tell you how many times I have gotten ahold of someone through their fb acct.)
Highest level of skiptracing: TLO, idi (I almost have to drop them to the second tier but they aren’t cheap) irb, tracers, Thomas Reuter’s Clear, etc…
These are the top tier people search engines. While these tools are the cream of the crop, they usually need some higher level vetting of you to qualify to receive these.
You can do this yourself by becoming licensed as a process server. (Not very difficult to do, and can be an additional income stream and deal source in and of itself)
Or you can sign on with sites like property onion, property radar, and propstream. The only questions is where they are getting their data from.
last 2 options are to see if you can make friends with someone with the service and pay for individual skips or if you have a realtor, title agent, process server, or attorney on your team, see if you can get them to qualify for you in exchange for you paying for it for both of you or in exchange for a fee or piece of the deals.