Find Abandoned Property Owner
Scalpana’s comment: Apparently she saw a very distressed property in her neighborhood and she’s interested in approaching the owner to see if the owner might sell, but she can’t track down the owner because it’s a vacant, distressed property. It sounds like she actually checked the tax site.
You can go to public records, anybody can – and you can check the public records on the property. You can also check the tax. Often, the tax records are what’s going to show you if the taxes are being paid and also it’s a better resource to get an owner’s name.
How you would go about getting the owner’s contact information? Advisable to just hire a person who’s called a Skip Tracer. So Skip tracers are easy to find, someone who’s talented at kind of doing the detective work and finding this information. They’re generally fairly inexpensive. Usually they’ll work in bulk, so it’s probably going to be more expensive doing it per property. You can actually reach out to a skip tracer requesting for them to check every property in the municipality that my city feels is vacant, or to find me every property that has violations against it. These normally are properties that would be candidates of someone who might want to sell, and you might be the path of least resistance.
Often they just they have a property, it’s sitting there, they don’t really know what to do with it, they haven’t really taken action on it. If you are calling and letting them know that you have an interest in buying it and if they’d like an offer. Again, they are path to least resistance, they are very easy transaction.
You can use a skip tracer to get a whole bunch of names or they would do an individual name, but it’s going to run you a little bit more money equivalent to doing several, but certainly, you won’t be getting the bulk pricing. And then there are also apps you can use. I’m not familiar with those names, but there’s apps to where you can use the GPS navigator. You can actually stand outside of the property and that app possibly will furnish you with lots of information, but they’ll also market to that individual if you like.
This is Joe White, doing my best to answer your real estate investing questions. Good luck!!!
