Steven Steps to Finding Motivated Sellers With Maria Giordano

Step 1: Farming the Hidden Market

One of my favorite ways to find any deal is driving for dollars, also called the hidden market. Driving for dollars is when you drive a neighborhood that meets your investing criteria. Typically, these are good, solid neighborhoods, with low crime and good schools. When driving these neighborhoods, you are looking for the following:

Properties that look vacant ! Boarded up — plywood over the windows and doors ! Overgrown weeds and shrubs ! Peeling paint ! Poorly maintained — rundown and dilapidated ! Newspapers or flyer piled up on the front porch or driveway ! Code enforcement, etc. – notices taped or stabled to the house or property

Like anything else, there are certain times of the day that work better for driving neighborhoods than other times. I have found the best times to be when kids are in school and most people have left for work. It is during these times distressed properties tend to stand out even more than at other times.

Once you start driving neighborhoods you will find it to be quite easy to spot these properties. In fact, this is something that you can teach friends and family to help you with.

The next step is to write down the address of every distressed property you see. It takes a very short time to come up with your first ten to twenty-five properties.

Once, you have your list of distressed properties, the next step is to research the owner for each property. In most areas of the country, you can easily bring up your county assessor's website and look for the property owner of record. The best way to look for who the owner is, is to find the tax record for the property.

Usually, the taxes have the owner’s name on them as well as the mailing address of the owner. Many of these distressed properties may not have the same mailing address for the owner as the distressed property’s address. If you are unable to find who the property owner is or the correct mailing address for the owner you may need to talk with the neighbors, leave a note at the property door or do a skip trace for the owner.

Remember: The harder it is to find the property owner, usually the less competition and the more money that can be made from these hidden gems.

NOTE: In the Kansas City Metro, all of the five major counties can be researched online: Cass, Clay, Jackson and Platte in Missouri and Johnson & Wyandotte in Kansas.

Step 2: Build Targeted List with Little to No Money

Like farming a neighborhood, being able to pull the right type of list of motivated sellers is extremely important. There are many different types of lists to pull. Some of the more common types of lists are:

Attorneys (probate, divorce, estate, etc.) ! Realtors ! Absentee owners (owner’s that don’t live at the subject property) ! Out-of-state landlords (also sometimes called out-of-state absentee owners) ! People who own homes free-and-clear (100% equity in their property) ! Foreclosures (Both pre-foreclosure — and foreclosure) ! Properties with liens (can be tax liens, code enforcement liens etc…) ! Homeowners in probate (when the owner has died and left property) ! Eviction notices

It’s not just good enough to run a huge list. Don’t send out 1,000 mailers to just anyone. It’s always better to send out 200 mailers that are targeted and very specific to your market. Even if you pay a few cents more per lead for it, then to run a nonspecific list of 1,000 properties and blanket an area. The non-specific lists are the ones that will be full of unmotivated sellers and a waste of your time and money.

Another low-cost way to get lists is to go to your county courthouse and get a list of probates. Probates leads are people who have died and their personal representative is handling their estate. When you pull these lists from the courthouse, most county records offices will only make you pay for the leads you want and that is the cost of printing the page. This is a very low-cost way to get leads and can be done with divorce notices and evictions too.

Aside from these free to low-cost resources for pulling lists of motivated sellers there are several services across the country that offer list services to send you prescrubbed probate, foreclosure, bankruptcy and other types of list. Most of these services are for a monthly fee and can range anywhere from $79 per month to well over $100 per month. Its up to you to decide if the service is worth the cost and the time it will save you.

Visit RealEStateProfitSystem.com/about to download all 7 Steps or join us here in the MAREI newsletter in September. And be sure to mark your calendar for Tuesday, November 8th, yes, election night when I will be speaking at MAREI. I will also be coming back to KC on Saturday the 12th for a full-day workshop where I will be not only teaching you how to find the deals but how to structure them so you can profit from any deal, even the ones you don't want.