Absentee owners

[Sheri Henning]

Hi BP,

I have found several houses in my target area that are vacant and seem abandoned. I have used my local tax assessor website to get names but most have the actual property as their address. I have used several tracing sites as well as the white pages online to locate them. I am not having success with locating owners. Can anyone recommend another way of locating them? Thanks in advance for any responses.

[Rick H.]

First, determine what you're looking for: a vacant house with lots of equity. I say this to eliminate those properties that are over-encumbered.

Your task in finding missing people is called skip tracing. Here's a place that you can find a number of companies offering skip trace services:

PI magazine.

Here are the big six (6) reasons people leave behind a vacant property:

1) "Skipped" on bills or other people

2) Drugs and alcohol

3) Incarceration

4) Severe mental & emotional problems

5) Senility

6) Death

By reverse engineering each vacant property opportunity, talking to neighbors and others in the immediate community, you ought to be able to get a lead on which of the above scenario is most likely.

I still get excited at the prospect of finding and acquiring "orphan" houses.

Don't be surprise when people occasionally offer to gift you a house, typically just about the time you are about to give up. Don't give up!