All Forum Posts by: Sean OToole

Thanks @Rick H. feel free to PM me if I can answer any questions for you.

@Account Closed one of the keys to being successful in any business is to put a value on your time. Once you do that it becomes easy to calculate whether its best to do it yourself, use services like taskrabbit or fiver to do it for you, or use a service that specializes in that field. Many free things are only free if your time is worthless. 

@Account Closed. It is public information and it's readily available either by visiting the county assessor or using a service, like CoreLogic Realquest, or ours. Feel free to PM me for more info.

Hi @Account Closed, while the list and frequency are important, they are not nearly as important as the competition and what you say in the letter. I think you'll find a little research up front will help more than anything. Rather than starting with direct mail, consider starting with door knocking. It's a lot more work, but it has a huge advantage in that you'll learn about your target audience - what motivates them, what turns them off, what languages they speak, etc. For those that are friendly you can also ask them if they get any letters or postcards asking to buy their house. Offer to pay for any that they collect for you - this will give you a lot of insight on your competitors.

Once you feel like you know your audience and your competitors you'll be ready to create kick-*** mailers, that aren't the same as 10 other people and a total waste of your money. Also Listsource is a very expensive option in CA, the same county assessor/recorder data is available from others for a fraction of the cost.

 Thanks @Vishal Gadhia. We will do our best to get their soon. Do note that while our information is great, we don't suggest anyone rely solely on it for title. Some very experienced investors do on simple deals (purchase money firsts and other obvious situations), but most also either validate it themselves or in partnership with a title company. While our data comes directly from the counties, there can still be matching errors, or even errors in the underlying public record. Those are more easily caught by an experienced human then by our algorithms and computer models. With the number of properties we track we can't manually review every one.

@Vishal Gadhia we paused on geographic expansion for a while, but hope to get back to that soon. IL is in our top 10 of next places to head. One question - would your primary interest be foreclosure (where we originally made a name for ourselves), or just general property information - assessor, recorder, debt, equity, lenders, owner occupied, etc?

@Account Closed we definitely get less "press" now that the foreclosure crisis is behind us, but we are still cranking away, and our investor customers buy somewhere around $200M / mo in property using our platform. If you give it a try please feel free to PM me if you need any help.

 We currently serve AZ, CA, NV, OR and WA.  

Black Knight was formally LPS (Lender Processing Services), and before that Fidelity Title. It is once again part of Fidelity. Was personally surprised they would choose the name Black Knight after the black eyes they took in the foreclosure crisis as LPS, but supposedly Bill Foley's went to West Point, and thus the name.

In any case, they offer kind of a mixed bag of services under various brand names, for example you could look at AgentPro247. IMHO, if you want to go the pay-per-lead, pay-per-field route then I personally find the CoreLogic (spinout of First American Title) product known as ListSource to be a better product, with better underlying data.

When it comes to quality services that offer leads based on assessor and recorder data like these companies, response typically has more to do with the specific criteria you select, and the quality of your piece then the provider. You'll usually get more out of fine tuning with one, then switching between them. That said each company will also have some unique capabilities (foreclosure tracking, equity models, demographics data, etc.) in which you will certainly find some differences if you really take the time to look, AND you really focus on leveraging those unique differences to build specialty lists. Unfortunately few investors take the time to do this and really figure out those differences. It would be great for me if more did. :-)

@Marcello Di Gerlando there is a good post on this topic here: http://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/41/topics/103847-title-searching-on-california-foreclosure-auctions. Feel free to PM me for the contact info of the title company I mention in that post. They'll do searches for free if you direct enough business their way. If you prefer to do it yourself, you can usually do much of the work online in most of the larger CA counties using their online indexes. Most, unfortunately, don't offer the ability to view documents except in person, but you can buy the document images from us, datatree, etc. Happy to help with more specific questions if needed.

Oh Kevin, I sure wish we could just "scrape" notices off of websites. If it were that easy we'd be in Missouri and Idaho already. ;-)

We've cataloged every significant foreclosure service in the US, and I'm not aware of anything at all similar in those two states. Your best bet will be to go down to the foreclosure auctions in each state and ask around to find out if there are any local services. Local services typically just provide an excel file with new notices, or something similar - typically they don't match and append assessor records, track auctions, etc but it's a start.

You could also consider using one of the national foreclosure data services - foreclosure.com, foreclosures.com, realtytrac or realquest. That said I find the local services usually to be faster, and of better quality. That was my goal when I started FR - same high quality as the local guys, low price of the national guys, and better software then any of them. :-)