Rental Property Investor · San Francisco · Member since 2017 · 39 posts · 8 votes
Besides "networking" and "knowing your market by talking to everyone in it", I am interested in efficient processes for speeding up one's search.
I get a lot of letters in the mail, texts, and phone calls from wholesalers and others trying to buy one of my properties. I know they found my info by checking county assessor offices, but is this the best way to find out who owns a property? It seems tedious when hunting for deals to:
1. Go to a local assessor's office / county's website, 2. Click around until you find the "Property Search" section (since every county has a different website/database), 3. Enter the address you're interested in, 4. Click around until you find the name of the owner (if not hidden behind some LLC), 5. Try to find them online if some PII (e.g. phone number) is not listed, 6. Reach out to the owner with an offer.
It seems painfully slow and inefficient for wholesalers and others looking for off-market deals to do this. If you were hunting for deals like this in a few select counties/markets, how would you optimize this process?
Prop stream? It's a data base that you can subscribe to and use. I think they offer like 5 free searches. I have read others that will do the skip tracing for you for like .40 cents a search. Sound alike you might need to figure out a funnel system to generate leads for off market properties. I know bigger pockets and David green has had a few great resent pod casts on this. Some where between June and August of this past year there was a few. I think Rob abasolo did one with another guest just on his funnel system he set up to find off market deals.
good luck let us know what direction you go in. Super interested in your success.
That's why we focus mainly on on-market opportunities, because people are not always seeing the opportunity for what it truly can be (and we're seeing some pretty impressively low offers be accepted in this market).
But finding off-market deals is usually a grind, which is why people are typically willing to pay wholesalers their assignment fee.
I haven't heard of a better way than what you described that's actually reliable and consistent.