Locating Owners of Distressed Property

[Jake C.]

Hi All,

Curious to hear what the latest best practices are for locating owners of distressed property. Once you find a property in distress, it's fairly straightforward to pull up a deed and find the names of the named owners, but where do you go from there? What is the most effective way to find the most up to date contact info? 

Also, many times the named owner has died and we must now find the next of kin. How do you go about that best?

Until now, we have been running skip trace searches on any property we're serious about, but is that really the best way? We've had about a 30% success rate in establishing contact with the decision maker, but I'd really like to bring that success rate up. 

Thank you!