All Forum Posts by: Gary Alford

Hey BP,

I was curious on peoples thoughts on Absentee owner list. Not so much if they work or how to get them but how to increase the quality of the list that I create. All the fields are pretty much your basic stuff and I only did the zip-codes that has the most investor transactions. The part that I am questioning is the last market recording date. I went from 1950-2004. So I started it from 10 years back. Is that to far back? Should I be starting from 3 -5 years instead of 10. 

Now I know I am just starting my marketing in the area and not expecting to get a deal this soon ( although I would love to). But wouldn't starting that far back leave out most of the people who most likely inherited the property and newbie landlords who had a bad experience and want out. After 10 years I would think those are most more seasoned landlords. Which is what most of my calls have been. 

Although I am not complaining about my results considering I have not had any motivated people yet but gained 2 new buyers. So really not to shabby. Was curious on peoples take on the years though. 

Thanks in advance for the replies!

Congratulations @Bill S. , those are great results. I see it pays off to pay attention to your numbers and not being afraid to test other markets if need be.

Call or better yet go to the court house. Most if not all of them have computers in there for you to sit there and go through all of the records. Now if you can access this stuff from home for free you really do not want to spend all of your time at the courthouse. However, you do want to go until you can get all of the information you need to understand the records from the people that work in the office. Lots of the time they are more than willing to explain how to understand the records to you. Plus it is a good place to leave your business cards or maybe a small flier. 

Wish I could tell you the exact answer but honestly I forgot it as I do not market to probates anymore. I do remember that it was a way to find out if it was property in the estate and they can tell you there how to do it. I Hope this helps!

Welcome to BP @Juan Aguilera,

I'm glad to hear you have spent a lot of time reading and listening to the podcast. The info here is amazing! I wish I would have read more here at first rather than listening to everything the gurus said to do and I would have been better off. It's like I'm starting all over or something. 

Anyways I am actually looking into the same thing here in my area. Tax delinquents seem to be a great target. I was told that it is called a freedom of information request where I'm at. If you Google search that for your county it should lead you to the right area of their website to get you the process you need to follow to get the info. You will have to pay though and it can be pretty costly from what I'm seeing if you do not understand how to filter it or narrow down the fields you want them to give you. Most of the time you can get the info on cd, electronically or sometimes on paper (but who wants that anymore). I talked to the main purpose at my tax assessor office that handles the delinquent accounts and it took talking to several different people to get a hold of him. 

I was also told that most places stopped supplying list online for that but you can look up individual properties. The only way they said to get this info in most places is through filing a FOI request now.

Here is a good podcast on the subject I listened to recently:

http://www.flip2freedom.com/f2f-118-beating-the-co...

I hope my babbling on helped!

@Shaun Hicks

How are you and your partner planning to find your properties? Are you guys mainly working off of the MLS?

Hey @Melvin Roes welcome to BP, 

It seems to me that your best bet would be to search hard for partner. If they have the cash and experience to run a rehab, you have the deal and will perform the realtor side as well. Have you gone to a REIA in your area? Or go onto meetup and find investor meetups around you. It has to be someone out there. If all else fails you could wholesale it.With those numbers you can make a pretty good assignment fee. Hopefully however, you will find someone on BP in your area that is willing to partner with you or help you out.

Also talk to several lenders most want you to have skin in the game like you said but I have come across 1 or 2 willing to loan 100% depending on the deal. So the worst they can do is say no. It is free to fill out their applications and get quotes. You would be surprised with the little amount you sometimes have to come up with. Good Luck

Yeah I feel you on actually getting a real deal @Jason Douthitt. If you keep going getting that 5% you will likely get one soon or later. Good luck!

Well @Nick B. it is a lot of people getting plenty of deals off of them so I would say that someone is buying into them. I have seen some of those handwritten ones from cable companies and stuff though and I will agree they look crappy. The point is however, to try to make it as real looking as possible so that it is to the point you  can't really tell. The ones I did where I copied my real letter looked perfect. If you held the copied one next to the written you could not tell the difference. If I can not find a font that I am satisfied with I will be doing a little test where I send out one with handwritten fonts, regular typed and straight handwritten and weigh the result against each other. I feel you about the crappy looking ones though. although if z seller really needs to sell and you are the only one that contacted them at the moment I would imagine that they won't care. 

Thanks @Anson Young I will check them out

Whats up BP,

I was trying to figure out where is everyone getting their handwritten fonts. I have found a site that lets me make them from my own handwriting for free and instantly at www.paintfont.com (in case anyone wants to check it out) but all of them are so uneven and they do not look good to me when I print. Mostly because of me writing them in different sizes. 

I use to hand write one then just use the copier on my printer to make more copies. This actually looked great. However, doing this takes for ever having to write in all the addresses myself. I want to just mail merge with my list and produce them much faster but I am not liking the output with the fonts. Where can I find fonts? And how much do they cost?

Also what kind of paper do you use. I was using the regular legal pad paper but it messes up and pulls in to many sheets and all kinds of stuff. Is it better with regular notebook paper.? If so do you think I could get the same results using white notebook paper and a yellow envelop?