Probate Leads Worcester County

[Joey DeFilippo]

Hi All,

Just wanted to post my experience trying to obtain probate leads at the Worcester Family and Probate Court in Worcester this morning.

First off, I tried http://www.masscourts.org/ to obtain the information before deciding to muscle my way into 225 Main St - what a demographic!

When I got to the probate area on the 2nd floor, the computers were down and they told me I needed to go to the "G" floor. The person at the counter didn't know and got his manager who was not much help. He said there were no "lists" of all probate filing available and that you had to go through each file individually - yikes! I kept asking him questions about other ways to obtain, etc. He just kind of made the gov't employee excuse of well there's no way we could provide that kind of information. I also asked a few attorney's that were there, but they weren't sure how to get a list.

There was a computer (that worked there) and it was slightly different than http://www.masscourts.org/ but I was still not able to get a "list" of leads to send mailers to.

Any thoughts, experiences, or success getting probate leads at the Worcester court?

Thanks,

Joey

[Account Closed]

@Joey DeFilippo

@Shaun Reilly

Just came across your post and thought I'd be able to provide insight since I've been working probates for about a year now in our area. Joey, as you've discovered, probates are a real pain in the *ss for us in MA. They only went online on 1/13 but as you've mentioned, you can only access minimal information...not enough needed to mail. The only way, I've found, to get all of the information needed is to pull individual files. The problem is that there isn't a filter to determine if real property is attached to the file. You basically have to pull all estates and sort through to figure out if there is real property attached. And, the system to pull files that our court houses have in place is pretty bad. For each file you want to pull, you have to fill out individual cards with information pertaining to the file. Then someone has to pull the file for you. 30 days equates to about 200 files, so it's very time consuming and the court house workers will hate you.

In addition, it takes the court houses in MA several weeks to scan all docs before they release the file to the public. Because of that, the files are only obtainable about 4 weeks after the filing date. I've found that many times, houses are already listed on the MLS.

I've gone to 3 different county court houses and 2 of those make it practically impossible to pull the quantity that we'd need to pull. For example, Middlesex County only allows you to pull 10 files a day! The other has been ok to work with but just told me last week that they are going to have to limit the amount of files that I pull.

I've spoke with the court house clerks at length about different ways to obtain the information. I know it's possible because there are a couple national probate lead providers that access probates in our area. But I know for a fact that they're not going into the court houses to pull these leads because the clerks told me that nobody pulls as many files as I do...not even close.

I have been very discouraged by the process since others throughout the country have had great success with probates. I wish I could provide better information but it seems that until they fully go online, it's not really a viable lead source in our area.