A lot of the time, the 'absent owner list' is pulled from other major vendors like https://www.accuzip.com/, and repurposed. That the property is somehow listed as 'absent' really is not the full picture. Generally, there is some sort of intelligence from the USPS that mail is not being delivered, be it from a request from the county/city/owner. But is DOES start with the USPS: mail is not being delivered.
Other people have mentioned pulling water/electricity shutoffs, delinq tax ect.... which are all fine.... What you will find many times in the absent owner is that the 'owner' name is an LLC, or some other vehicle/entity. Prolly not a person that is going to sell at 70% ARV. Who knows.
Save that list.... going forward, get a master parcel list for the county that the properties are in. If you live in a large metro area, just by simply googling combinations of the word string 'Open Data GIS parcel ____' . Put the county name of the properties where the '___' is and it should bring you to a section of the county site for downloads. If not, EVERY county/city has an open data request process, submit a request and demand the file. Better yet, just google the GIS dept # for county, and call them. GIS folks rock, and are super helpful.... they'll prolly just send you the file if you call them. IF that's the case, that you have to call the county.... Send them a Starbucks delivery, make friends.... because you will want to get updates to that list in a timely manner.
Most County GIS parcel files will contain the tax mailing address as well as the physical property address, and of course the Parcel ID.
With the main county parcel list, that is your 'jump-off point' for any future prospecting. You can use it to clean/scrub any other list that you may acquire. Any list that you get in the future, try to 'match' it against the main parcel list ( most counties will release an update parcel list monthly, with updated owner/sales info, so update that county list regularly) in a manner like this bigger pockets is blocking this link so just add ( watch?v=325GKIXPsSI )to the end of a youtube url
by either matching the Parcel ID #'s of the county/new lead list, or looking for a match based on the address fields.
Be forewarned, the county parcel list will generally try to format the PID as a scientific, garbled string that you have to 'click' on to expand to see the whole number. If that's the case with you, or anyone, push the county file into a Power Query window, and reformat the PID as 'text' and continue the process in the linked youtube. More often than not, you are going to have to reformat the PID as 'text' if you are opening the file with Excel, and you will have to do it in the Power Query window to make it 'stick'. But you WANT the match to be off of the PID, if you are able to.... A county has multiple cities, and cities in the same county can have the same street address. PID's are unique identifiers in the main county tax/parcel database, and that's what they use for matching/joining.
The thing is, after that long-winded paragraph above, when you can 'match' the properties against the county list, you can tell from the tax mailing address usually who it is that really owns that property, and form a conclusion if it's worth marketing to. You WILL generally see some discrepancies, as to if they are worth marketing to. Many will be an LLC as the owner though. When you filter the list, to where the owner lives in the same state, you'll see more 'regular' humans owning the property.
I can usually match a list of 20k or so new addresses against a county list in under 5 minutes, from the time I open Excel. It's really easy once you get the steps down, and there are not many steps.
The way that you 'really' want to do all of this is load everything into a PostgreSQL install, load the county into its own table (and the monthly updated county lists) and run the JOINS in PostgreSQL against any new list. Again, this is all very easy to do... Youtube is your best friend for PostgreSQL.
Bonus tip for using PostgreSQL? If you are getting the GIS county parcel file, PostgreSQL has the PostGIS extension, that will allow you to run queries 'spatially' using the lat/long for comps right off the county data (hence, keep getting the monthly updates, so that you can run comps back 6-12 months or more). The GIS county file will usually have an option to download it as a .shapefile or .KML, (get shapefile if you can, but .csv will work fine as well) which is just a breeeze to load into PostGIS=PostgreSQL. QGIS https://qgis.org/en/site/ or Jupyter Notebooks will let you run SQL queries right from the map interface from the tables, and load it into the map too, as well as export the map searches to .csv.
QGIS and postgreSQL+PostGIS? The shiznit. That combination will beat most tools a realtor has in an MLS hands down. Lol, it's generally PostgreSQL or similar powering the database they use. Best part? Everything is FREE, and really powerful for cleaning/chopping/joining data.
Jupyter Notebooks? Run a scrape against the MLS, and check for matches there too for 'active' listings against your list. If the internet listing does not have the PID in view in the listing description, use the lat/long from the listing to run a match against the county file in Postgres... :) most county GIS files will also have an 'address point file' included, that again makes this all stupid easy to run matches from the lat/long.
