Distressed Owner Marketing Leads

[Jeff Montanya]

I'm wanting to set up a marketing campaign to target distressed property owners. At this point I've been combing the county records for pre-foreclosures and putting this info into spreadsheets. This has been extremely inefficient and time consuming. Searching pre-foreclosures only gives me part of the data I'm looking to acquire. I'm also interested in bankruptcy, absentee owners, divorce, owners looking to sell off their rentals, probate etc. Is there a service that sells a list of this data? If so how you do you know their list contains legit info? What are the most important questions to always ask any property owner who calls back? Any suggestion on good language to include in the marketing letters or postcards is also appreciated.

[Ray Lai]

@Jeff Montanya

Depends on your market, if you're in a competitive market I do *not* recommend doing what others have already done, which is buy those types of lists that you want from a site like listsource. It's low-hanging fruit that everyone already has done and multiple people mail to those lists. If you are in a boony market though, you can by all means do that  and save yourself some time and energy.

Just remember, the more effort you put in to identify unique properties and mail to them consistently, the more time it would take for someone to copy it as well. The 'easy' route is usually done by most wholesalers first thing, especially in competitive areas.

Are you doing your campaign in house or outsourcing? What's your bigger bottleneck time or money?