Christian Osgood and Cody Davis show how to find rental property owners for free using Google Maps, county tax records, OpenCorporates, and targeted searches. They walk through a real duplex in Central Washington, then explain how to locate the LLC officers and dig up phone numbers without paying for skip-tracing services.
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Hey YouTube, it's Cody and Christian, and today's video we are showing you exactly how to contact anybody, including us. We've gotten a lot of questions on this, on how do you get contact info. You find that property, and we're going to share more about how to find this stuff on Google Maps, but what to do next, and that is today's video.
And now one thing that people always get caught up on is what software are you using? How are you finding these? What are you doing? And when we tell them Google Maps, people don't believe us.
It is that simple.
It really is.
And we're going to show you right now on something that Christian started with in Central Washington. We're going to go over to a Google Map. Turns out every property you want to buy, you can find on this map. It is phenomenal.
All right. Now I'm working the keyboard, Cody's working the mouse. So if there's some dysfunction here, I blame Cody and we'll go from there.
Full responsibility. But this is Christian's duplex right here.
First property I bought in Central Washington, second multifamily property I ever purchased. So if you're a starting investor, you just bought your first property or looking for your first, this is honestly exactly where I started on this street in this property. This is a real story. So if I'm here and I'm looking for multifamily properties, every off-market property you'll ever see lives on Google Maps because every property you'll ever see Lives on Google Maps. If I'm looking for multifamily, which property on this map looks like multifamily to you? Cody's giving you a little hint. It's the one with the huge parking lot with a lot of space for cars and a big long roof with a bunch of different addresses. So if we go ahead and click on this property, we're going to see an address.
Oh my goodness, I found it. But now what? Because I can't do a lot with an address, Christian.
So this is an owner who I might want to contact. So now I'm going to look at this as, okay, how do I get in contact with this multifamily family owner? Well, we start with Googling.
We got to figure out who the owner is.
Exactly. So we're going to go and every county in the US has a tax assessor that we— it might look a little different than this, but very, very similar. You can find every parcel at the county tax assessor level. So this is in Grant County, Washington. That's exactly where I'm going to go here. I'm going to click on the building and it tells me right here the owner is Sixplex LLC.
Oh my goodness. Well, what do we do now?
Well, you might be thinking, wait a minute, I don't know the number for Sixplex LLC. That's not a person. Who is this? So you can Google many sites. One that I prefer is OpenCorporates. It's free. It is online. You don't have to pay for this. You're going to start with companies. So I'm looking at the company Sixplex LLC and put in the location.
If you don't, you're going to have a little bit of struggles.
Yes, it is going to be really messy if you don't do it that way.
So we're just going to click, uh, let's do search. Let's see what pops up in real time.
Now OpenCorporates takes a second to open up, so it's going to be pulling through records. Give it a second to load, but what pulls up should be a few different LLCs in the state of Washington, or maybe just our one.
Okay, let's see. So we've got Sixplex LLC, or We're going to click on that and we're going to see who owns it. And we're going to see, okay, we've got a location and we've got an owner. Well, shoot, we know this owner, Scoey Davis, that's me. However, you may not know the person that you're looking at and you can do this with any property, any LLC. You can Google this and not all the information may be accurate. This location is not accurate for me anymore. However, the ownership is. You're going to find who owns the LLC and then we got to figure out, okay, well, how do we get in contact with that person if you don't know them yet?
Mm-hmm. And so first thing you might think of doing is just typing in their name on OpenCorporates. You're already there. So what you're going to do is you're going to check the box next to companies. You're going to go to officers. Officers are the people who run the LLC.
And make sure you put in the state again.
Yes, do not forget that. Everyone named Cody Davis will show up if we look for any officer.
That's a little bit rough. There's a couple of me.
There are a couple.
So this is going to load up. And the goal of this is, okay, we can find every single LLC that they own, every Cody Davis LLC in Washington State. And you're like, oh my goodness, there's a lot of these. Anything that has to do with Moses Lake is me. And then there's some others that are also me. And then there's a couple that are not. But we can click and we can find any LLC that is owned by that person. And if they pop up with a bunch of them, odds are they probably have a bunch of real estate or they have a bunch of companies, but that doesn't really matter for us because so what if they have a lot of stuff? How do we reach them, Christian?
Well, all we need is a number. And as soon as we find a number, we know what they own, what they have, and who they are. So we're going to start with a Google search for Cody Davis.
Let's Google it. Enter. Boom. Well, that is not me.
Unfortunately, Cody has a fairly common name and it's shared by a New England Patriots. He is never going to rank on the top of Google unless we can get bigger than the Patriots.
Well, we're trying.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna type in real estate and we're gonna get more specific.
All right, so we've got consultant, we've got, uh, Instagram. Check that out, by the way. We've got BiggerPockets, also check that out. And right now I'm like, oh my goodness, it's something like OpenCorporates. It looks like OpenCorp data. I'm gonna click on that one. And if we scroll down past all of the unwarranted ads, we found— okay, Cody Davis. Again, that information that's not my location, not my location. That's not my email. That might be accurate. I don't know. Give it a call. But you find a phone number and now you can find a way to reach someone that has all this verified data online. You're like, well, the government isn't going to lie about the real estate that they own. The tax assessor, the IRS doesn't. And you can verify that they have a whole bunch of real estate. You can now just look them up and get their phone number and give them a call. You can do this for anybody without spending money. You don't need to spend money on skip tracing. You can do this in real time without spending money. You just have to figure out how to utilize Google. That's it.
Yeah, we try to keep everything on this channel very, very simple. And I've used a lot of the software out there. I've used skip tracing. I've used the different title companies and pulled their big list of every property, and I've cross-referenced them and done all sorts of things. The simplest way to do it is just do the free stuff.
Hop on Google, it's free, it works. And if you want to reach out to us, now you have another way. You can reach literally anybody doing this. Shoot us a text message. You can find it online. We verified both of ours today.
And if you want to see if you're talking to someone real, for example, if someone said, hey Cody, you don't own any real estate, everything you do is a scam— sorry guys, You can show them this video and show them how to find property and go, this is the stuff that Cody says he owns, and does the government say he owns it? It's as simple as that. You can find people, look up their portfolios, find their LLCs. Um, one other step that you can take to go one farther from this: if you find that list of LLCs on an owner and it's someone like Cody and there's a lot of them, if you want to start finding out what else they own The MLS is a place you'd look for that. You can send the LLCs to a broker. They should be able to search them and pull every property owned by that LLC. So that one piece can be helped if you have a brokerage license, or if you just know a broker, it's a very, very simple search to do in the MLS.
So that's it for today's video. If you have more questions, put a comment down below or text us. I guess you know how to do that now, but you can find anybody you want online. And it all comes from Google Maps. When I say this is all from Google Maps, this is what I mean. It is this simple. You can duplicate this, replicate it any amount of times that you want, but make it happen, and we'll see you guys next time.
