All Forum Posts by: Cornelius Garland

Anytime @Rick Carr. I understand your frustration and been down that road. At one point, It seemed like every single number I called didn't work. TLO is fairly simple to get. They come to your house and do an inspection, and you should have your account within two weeks of them doing the site inspection. I would just tell them that you're using it to verify that the information on your mailing lists is correct before you send your mail out. They can be sticklers about using it for marketing. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

@Solomon Oh Trust me, I've gotten super excited about properties and thought I was going to make a huge spread, all to find out that there was a huge mortgage taken out on the property or that the owner was dead. So going to the register of deeds is always my first step when I identify a vacant or abandoned property. Also, this will save you a ton of money on title searches. In 2016, my company spent a few grand in title searches for a few properties that fell through; if I would have done my due diligence previously, I would have known before spending the money. I learned the hard way and hope that my suggestions prevent you from making the same mistakes. Please update me, or let me know if you get stuck. I can assist.

@Rick Carr Your cheaper tools will have poor data because they are getting used, and often outdated, data from the credit companies. Intelius is one of those reseller companies. Other companies in the same category are White Pages, Spokeo, and Been Verified. There are other, but those are the main ones I've seen used often. If you plan on keeping skip tracing and cold calling as a strategy in your business model, I highly suggest getting an account from better source, like TLO. The phone numbers are mostly good and I have roughly a 85-95% hit rate when I skip trace my lists. Each of my lists are about 1k leads so only about 40 of those will be bad numbers, which is a good hit rate.

@Jay Hinrichs That's exciting! It won't be on the market for too long.

@Solomon Oh You did way more than most people by taking action so great work on that. Before ordering a skip trace for those properties, I would make sure the owners are still alive. You won't know for sure until you do the full skip trace but you can generally get an idea by checking out a couple of public records. Firstly, I would check your county's tax assessor's site and view when the last deed of record was for the property. If it was before in 1950, then more than likely that owner is deceased. They would have been in their twenties when they bought the home and they'll be pushing 90. That's possible but not a likely scenario. You can also put the owner's name in the register of deeds online to see if they gave a relative power of attorney on their other properties. I've encountered situations where a property owner will include their primary residence in their POA but will leave out the one I want to buy. The owner may be alive in this situation but not capable of making decisions for themselves. These steps may sound like a lot but it literally takes 5 minutes max. Also, when you run the individual's name in the register of deeds, verify that they didn't take a mortgage out on the home or home equity line of credit. They may be upside down on the home, which explains its dilapidated condition.

I've found that most investors don't bother to skip trace returned letters so you're already ahead of them by doing this. Typically, everybody is getting their list from list source or a source that taps county records. So if the data is bad from the county, your letters will get returned. If you do actually take the time to skip trace the correct addresses, then you have a potential gem. You're the only person who knows where that seller is and you're the only one contacting them. That's a huge upper hand on your competition.

On the property I wholesaled to Jay, it took quite a bit of work to get that deal. The owner was a hermit and her husband died 5 years ago. She made an effort not to be found because she didn't want to be bothered. I had to go through atleast 100 phone numbers and drove up to her son's house about  4 hours away from me. It took some work but left with a contract. It's not hard; you just have to be willing to do more than the next guy.

@Ray Agosto Hello Ray. Unfortunately, most of the free methods don't give you reliable phone numbers. You can try white pages or been verified. But as I previously indicated, those methods are not good. I suggest paying someone on upwork.com to look up numbers for you or using the site findtheseller.com to locate numbers for you. I've gotten ok results on upwork but most of those guys are using free or cheap tools to locate numbers so your hit rate will be low. If you want addresses for free, then I suggest trying familytreenow.com. Surprisingly, the addresses and relative information is accurate for a free tool. However, no phone numbers are included.

@Jay Hinrichs I totally agree regarding the wholesaling guru hype. I learned pretty much everything through experience and BP. I like coming on here and letting the new guys know it's not as easy as they think, and you really have to have a strong work ethic to make it in the business. We went through our share of growing pains and learned from our previous mistakes and successes to grow our business.

I haven't driven by Ashley Ave recently, but I will definitely next week. I LOVE hearing that you're going to make a huge profit on it. That means that my partner and I did our job well. We knew it was going to be a large project, and your team is just about the only ones up to the task. I can't wait to see the completed project. Do you have an estimated completion date for the property? I know you can get 650k for it because Wagner Terrace is hot right now.

@Jay Hinrichs It is very time-consuming. But I found a way to efficiently outsource majority of the work so I don't have to personally do it, thankfully. I do agree with you; it's a ton of work just for the possibility of getting a deal.

Hello @Solomon Oh! Great decision on marketing consistently. Once my company committed to our monthly mail campaigns, we began getting contracts frequently. We had this issue regarding returned mail and it can be overwhelming. You can door knock, but I don't think it's the highest and best use of your time as a business owner. My business partner and I door knocked in one of our farm areas but we found that most of the neighbors had no idea where the people in my subject property went and I had to find other means to locate them. I did do this on one property and got a deal; however, this was after I skip traced the owner and located an address for her son. I showed up to his house and he put me in touch with his mom and we got a contract. I would suggest trying any or a combination of the strategies below. 

Initially, I skip traced every returned letter and repacked the letters in new hand-written envelopes. This was very tedious because I was sending out thousands of pieces every month and getting a couple of hundred returned mail pieces. Due to this, I began prioritizing my returned letters to determine if it was worth the time to resend them. If I saw that a property clearly looked abandoned from Google Maps or bought over 20 years ago, then I would find the owner's correct address and resend the letter. I still do this for some of my lists. However, I prefer to get my virtual assistant to use my skip tracing tools to locate the correct addresses of all my returned letters then just update my excel spreadsheet and wait until the next month to resend those letters out. This way I'm avoiding hand writing all of the letters.

Currently, we don't get a lot of returned letters because we always skip trace out lists before we send our mail out to reduce the return rate. We do this because the information from the court houses is often out-of-date, and it's not necessarily the list provider's fault. Additionally, we found it's really beneficial to call in conjunction with sending mail. Our tools give us access to the numbers of sellers in addition to their correct address so we like hitting them on both angles. It also helps us get to the 5th touch a lot quicker. After your prospect hears from you 5 times, you're more likely to close the deal because your competitors are only touching them a few times.

Some resources you can use to locate correct addresses and phone numbers are findtheseller.com, TLO, Microbilt, or Spokeo. If you plan on prioritizing your list and going after the low hanging fruit, then I would use findtheseller.com. This can get very pricy because they charge like $6 per search; however, it's a quick fix and they have a quick turnaround time. Spokeo is as about good as White Pages, but I would use them for phone numbers rather than correct addresses because they'll likely be wrong. Microbilt was the first tool I used, and it was spotty with numbers but typically gave me correct addresses. It costs about $50 per month and is good if you are doing around 20 searches per month. You'll need to contact them and go through the process of getting an account, which takes roughly 2 weeks. Lastly, if you plan on doing this consistently then I would seriously consider TLO. I've had great experience with it, and it costs roughly $250 monthly for 3600 searches annually. I've found that I get 1 out of 25 numbers are incorrect, which is roughly 90% accuracy rate on a 1000-lead list. You need to go through the process of getting an account, like Microbilt. TLO will take you about a month to get but well worth it if you do plan on making skip tracing returned letters part of your business model. I would just weigh your options and see what fits your needs. I've skip traced tens of thousands of leads so I can answer any specific questions you have. Just ask away!

@Brett Elia Of course! I understand your frustration, and I usually only go to my tax assessor's site to verify ownership. Other than that, the contact information is very outdated. It was so bad that when we mailed 1,000 people that got their properties bought at the tax auction, half of them didn't know their homes were sold! I'm unsure who was at fault: the county for not verifying the mailing addresses were up-to-date or the homeowner for not taking the time to update their addresses. Either way, it's a poor situation for the investor or agent looking to get in touch with the homeowner.

@Paul Amegatcher I've had spotty experience using Been Verified. I think I held a subscription for a couple of months before canceling. What's your hit rate out of every 100 leads? How many would you say are bad numbers or addresses? My main issue with a lot of the reseller skip tracing platforms is that you may get a correct number, but you'll also have 10 other possible numbers in the results. Additionally, the first number returned may not be the 100% accurate number. This was my issue Microbilt, which I used a lot early in my career. Sometimes my team ended up calling all 10 numbers just to get in touch with the seller. It was worse if a seller didn't answer because our cold caller would then need to call every single number the next time they tried to call the seller. So having the correct data initially is critical, which is why I'm a proponent of the private databases. We only aim to have 2-3 numbers per contact and our tools allow us to see the accuracy of the phone numbers before we dial. I'll give Been Verified another look because I was using it to chase down heirs and tax delinquent property owners. It may have not been the website's fault because the data simply may not have been there due to the scope of my searches.