13 Ways to Find Note Deals

Foreign this is the no Closer show where you get the latest developments in distressed note investing and learn the secrets of how you can control millions of dollars worth of property for panties on the dollar. Get educated and entertained by someone who has closed thousands of deals and lives to support you in achieving the same. Now here's your host CEO of We Close Nodes, Scott Carson. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Nut Closure show. As always, Scott Carson here got a very special episode I I want to share with you because I've been getting bombarded with people reaching out to me, shoot me emails, ask me questions on social. How are we finding out? Just first of all, are we seeing an increased amount of deals to take a look at and how are we finding these, how we come across these deals? So I thought I'd create episode called you know exactly that 13 ways to find note Deals. And this kind of ties in a lot with our upcoming virtual note buying workshop. If you never attended one of our quarterly workshops, highly recommend you do it because this is really what we discussed the very first day. Now I'm not going to do a complete deep dive into all different ways that we find deals. And there's 13. There might be a few more thrown in there as well. But if this is something you're considering, this would be something you would get a lot of value out of day one because literally we show you the different ways. I'm not one of those guys that likes to teach and just share with you a little bit and then make you get upgraded or sign up for a huge coaching package just to get a little bit more and then upsell. That's not the way it works. I like to share with you exactly the ways that we find note deals. And this is straight from the horse's mouth or, or some cases the horse's ass as people might say. But anyway, it really starts in a couple ways and I'll just start off with the easiest way, all the way to a little bit more complicated way. And the more complicated and the further you go up this ladder, maybe a little bit more work, but you're going to find better deals and less competition. Define these deals because you're doing things that other people aren't doing. All right. Now the first one is always the easiest. You always can go to different note sale platforms and take a look at these are some websites where some people have put together lists, even stuff they own and they've got some other investors out there do it and you know, like our Buddies over at Exchange that loans, they do a really good job with their commercial loans or the stuff that they've they've gotten under contract or consignment from a bank and help move that. You know you may look@auction.com or 10x.com for some other commercial stuff out there. There's also dead X which you have to pay to register first Financial is a big one for a lot of the bigger trades out there for banks. But there are some smaller ones out there you can take a look at. We talk about the smaller ones that give you access to deals right now on our three day class, you know, and easy to look at. They may not have thousands of notes but they're going to have 20, 30, 40, 50, maybe up to 100 that you can take a look at. And while that's the lowest hanging fruit, it's also gonna be the stuff that's picked over the most. I mean there's been other ones that have been around like our buddy Valset here with Watermark Exchange still has it up but doesn't really update it. FCI Exchange was around for years but really was hit and miss on what you could find. So there's a few others out there that you take a look at. Another number two that we have found to be really valuable as a way to find note deals is contacting servicing companies. Because servicing companies represent investors like you mean they invest funds, you know they their clients are usually not only investors but banks, mortgage companies that they're handling the servicing for. And many of them have a sales platform or helping their clients sell their non performing and performance where they're looking to move up their portfolio. And this is a great resource to find portfolios or books off that you can take a look at. I mean just recently in the last two weeks we've had a list of 422, 185, 105, 65, 75 one off notes we get from some more servicing companies out there. A really great resource to find a list of servicing companies is type in servicing companies. You know, mortgage loan servicing companies. The Texas Savings and loan department will allow you to download a list of servicing companies that are licensed to business of Texas and about 260, 270 servicing companies ranging from those that are investors like you and me to service their own portfolio all the way up to the likes of some of the larger companies out there. So services outcomes are great. It's a different aspect of reaching out then you're not going to reach out to the customer service line. You're going to try to contact the business development individual at the servicing companies and say hey I'm a note buyer. Do you have any clients that are looking to move stuff off? I'd like for you guys retain servicing and they would probably rather deal with you if they're going to be able to retain servicing versus deal with somebody else and just losing that portfolio. So servicing companies are great, a little bit more work, but it's well worth it to be at the front of the line. A lot of cases now. Third is probably the most common one is banks. You know when we really cut our teeth from down for dollars and calling banks back 15 plus years ago and still do it to stay by reaching out on a pretty regular basis and we built a pretty good database. The beautiful thing about making a relationship with an asset manager at a bank or somebody in charge of special assets or secondary marketing department is they're going to have stuff on a regular basis. And once you make contact with the right person, it's a beautiful thing. It's an email blast, it's a, it's a drip marketing campaign, it's a phone call. Hey, what do you have in your books that you're looking to get rid of? You know what I mean? And they may have one, they may have a quarter. Some banks sell on a quarterly basis, some sell monthly, just varies. There's a ton of banks out there. Okay. And by banks I mean FDIC chartered banks that are phenomenal out there. Some big, some small. You're not gonna chase the top five, 10%. You're also not going to want to chase those that have less than five branches, but that's somewhere in the middle. That regional size, that multi city bank, they're going to usually be a little bit more aggressive in their lending and henceforth runs it a little bit aggressive with their non performing stuff that they need to be off the books to get cash in to get it went out. So banks is another thing that leads us to number four, mortgage bankers or mortgage companies that are not bank related. You have a lot of companies that have sprung up for the last few years as lending has been really well that aren't a bank but they're originating them. They're basically banked by Wall street or wealthy individuals who are lending that money out in a regular basis and then selling those portfolios or you know, packaging those loans to get itself to Wall Street. They've often got some buybacks they've got to do if the borrower hasn't paid so mortgage bankers is different than a mortgage company. A mortgage banker is usually have a warehouse line or they're going to have a portfolio that may end up having to service if they've had to take stuff back because stuff didn't get cleaned up or signatures didn't get signed or something wrong, wrong with the, the borrower's collateral files or their, you know, their qualification package. Maybe their FICO dropped, maybe they missed a payment the first six months of the buyback. But mortgage bankers will have stuff, often they'll have a portfolio, stuff like this. And like I said, it's a little bit more work to find these companies. But some of these companies that we buy from, we've been buying for years, may not always have something every month, but we're usually at the top of their list because we just follow up with them with a drip marketing campaign. The same thing reaching out somebody in secondary marketing at a mortgage company or their warehouse line department if they've got any scratch and dent stuff on their books and stuff. Number five is pretty simple. It's kind of obvious. Other note investors like you and me, you'll be surprised. We often will buy some really good notes from other investors that have bought non performing notes. Got it. Re performing and they're looking to sell off the performing asset or they're looking to sell off their non performing stuff that they couldn't get performing because a they didn't want to spend the time and investment in getting reperforming. Or maybe they bought a portfolio and they had to buy some stuff that they didn't necessarily like. You know. No, investors often have their buy box, their sweet spot, you know, and then we, you know, as you're buying in bulk, you often get stuff that doesn't fall in the sweet spot. So you often want to get that stuff sold off. So that's not eating up your profits with servicing costs and other things. So other note investors are a great resource. You just gotta follow up. You never know what they're gonna have. And one of the most important things throughout this is just building your marketing campaign. You'll hear me talk about drip marketing. What does that mean? Well, that means you're sending an email blast touching base with those people once a month at least. Okay. Number six is a resource that we've been using for 15 years. It kind of slowed down a little bit from 2021 to now, but they've made a rebound. That's Lane Guide. Their founder, Richard Lane has been in the industry for 40 years. He passed away in early part of 2021 and the company was a little bit of upwards. They got things back going, but they're back. This is a great lead source so you can actually look for asset managers and do a quick asset manager search to download 700 to a thousand different asset managers at big lending institutions across across the company country, mortgage companies as well. So this has been a real great resource for finding emails and phone numbers of the right departments and then also the special asset departments for some of the larger banks that we have bought stuff in the past. So language, there's a cost language, about 150 bucks a year. Well worth it especially now that they're back on track. Our friend Brett Palumbo started a service called distresspro.com. he recently sold that service off to a couple guys. Distress Pro will look at the FDIC quarterly reports that banks file and help you kind of target and come up with a percentage or a hot list of banks that may be looking to sell. So while Distress Pro may not be a source itself, it is a great resource and training if you're going to be targeting banks. And what I like about what Distress Pro does is it does or bank prospector, whatever it's called, you know, it does link in with a lot of the banks and the right contact person, LinkedIn. So stress pros are really great tool. A lot of information, a lot of good stuff with it. Just be focused, you don't go down a rabbit hole, don't make any phone calls or reach out to asset managers. Number seven, I'm sorry, number we're at number eight now actually is one of my favorite lists I started off of. Before I had list this was foreclosure lists. Your foreclosure list that you get in each county each month or each quarter depending on where you're buying stuff. It's a great list showing you exactly the distress notes that are in trouble with the bank, showing who the bank of the lender is and then also giving you a list showing you who the foreclosing attorney or the trustee is. Now while depending on what state you're in, like I'm in Texas here. I don't use the foreclosure list to target the addresses on there specifically, but I use those addresses as hot leads into the right department at the bank to get their future list or their nationwide list of non performing notes if they're across multiple states or if they're just here in Texas. Hey, what else do you have across the rest of the Lone Star State that we can take a look at. And this will cost you anywhere, you know, 3545 up to maybe 100 bucks depending on the county. We like foreclosure listing service for Texas. This is the FLS online list or the Roddy list that's been called for years. You could use foreclosure.com county records research is big on the west coast, Arizona, Nevada as well. Out there check with your local county. Your local state may have a provider that is unique to your your area. But foreclosure list is a great resource to see if there's anything non performing. They're coming down the pipeline at the next foreclosure date. Some states publish like Florida is most of the foreclosure list online. So the great way to check it out see the bank is over the next 30, 60, 90 days and start calling some of those smaller regional banks or I don't say borrowers but those lenders who've lent money to people or institutions or llc. You know, when Covid finished up we had a lot of hard money loans that were going to foreclosure and so it gave us a big list of hard money lenders that we could reach out to to potentially buy stuff. But foreclosure list well worth the investment. You're going to need to clean that list up. Like I said, it may have from a small bank to all the way up to big. But we've used foreclosure list to find IRA investors from private investors that are foreclosing to really some great deals too that have led to us getting on the list for some other banks. So foreclosures don't, don't overlook it. It's well worth doing it right. And you ain't got to spend all the money and sending out postcards or letters like most other investors are doing. Number nine is conferences. And I, I wouldn't say just like note investing conferences. Those are great to attend every once in a while but you're probably going to find better stuff by going to actually like your states or areas. Mortgage Banking association special servicing conferences. There's an event that takes place called IMN.org puts on every year called the Special Assets Department. They've had you know, several hundred people attend their last couple years and they're really good about sharing past attendees as far as the company and the job title. So we leverage that list to find Those people on LinkedIn and reach out to them to their websites to find emails or right to find their contact. But it's really working pretty well to find some deals. So leverage conferences, the attendees, the vendors, who's there, there may be some funds there or institutions that are selling their debt off or looking to sell some stuff off. And definitely if you're going to pay to go, great, attend it, show up. But in a lot of cases, look where it's at. You may not need to pay to get a ticket. You may be able just to use the website to find out who's attending and reach out to somebody from there. So that's a great resource for finding deals. 10. You can look for owner finance sellers. I throw this in here because a lot of people that are looking for owner finance deals, that's what they've been taught. Hey, let's if you're chasing owner finance deals, go out and go to the county recorder's office and pull a list of people that have originated a mortgage and send out letters, 50 to 100 letters. I'm not a fan of that because it's. You're basically going to get a seller that may have 1, 2 notes at the most. And it's something you got to do on a regular basis. And most times your owner finance sellers don't want to take a big discount. So while that's still a a target that you can get notes from and we've bought some owner finance notes or we've brokered them to a few of our brokers who we make a brokering fee inside or we look at buying some of these if they're, you know, everybody's motivated or has a different motivation when they're looking to sell. But one of the best ways that we find owner finance notes is not to send out letters of postcards but literally post on different social media channels. LinkedIn, hey, that we're buying notes and it leads to, leads to us getting some offers in or bids in that we can take a look at on a weekly basis. This works just by just sharing. Hey, we buy notes. Number 11 is, I guess you could say the holy grail hedge funds. And there are quite a few different hedge funds that invest in debt. They've bought portfolio of debt. They bought portfolio, you know, on lump sums, million, 2 million, 5 million in distressed loan portfolios. And they're working to work them out with the bars and those that they don't get back on track for cash flow. They're usually after 90 days looking to sell it off either individually or many bulk to investors like you and me. You can do a quick hedge fund search on Google and find A whole variety of names but then you got to filter down to who's actually investing in distressed debt versus who's buying real estate. So there's a few that we deal with. Those select few we share for our students and especially our one on one students by helping them get to the top of the line. So if you're looking for stuff that's a great thing to learn at our three day workshop. Number 12 is a resource but really helps you identify what banks are hurt the most for the next 90 days or this past quarter and those that have distressed debt coming down the pipeline in the next quarter. This is the Bauer Financial list. Bauer Financial is a third party resource that evaluates the quarterly filings of every FDIC chartered bank. And then you can actually purchase the list to see what percentage of their portfolios in default, how many branches they have, what percentage of the portfolio is in dollar amount versus asset amount. It's a really great service. Once a quarter you're going to pay three to four hundred bucks depending on how customized you want the list to be. But it is a great resource to find banks and whether it's residential, commercial, they even got a multi family listing for those out there looking for apartments. So it's a great resource to use. I think last time we pulled it, there's about 1600 lending institutions out there that have five branches or more. And that's one of the things that we do. We eliminated that the list of banks below five branches just didn't make losses. Doesn't not mean they don't have assets. They're just a little bit more picky about the discount and they're not gonna be as aggressive so they're not gonna take it big as a discount. Okay, that was number 12, number 13. It's something that I've been doing for 15 years and anybody can do this and this is going to your county recorder's office or your county clerk and doing an assignment search or tracking assignment of mortgages. Now one of my favorite things to do is when I get listen or people send me a list from people or I guess you could say my competition out there that are selling a portfolio list. I like just to go track the go to the county and pull an asset or two and see who they bought it from. Because one form that is recorded in a note sale is an assignment that transfers from whoever originated the note to whoever they sold it to and whoever they sold it to if they sold it again. You can literally get two basically contacts and even the name of the individual that you need to reach out to oftentimes it was able to sign off on that note sale. And we've been able to find some great resources from tracking assignments. Now you gotta be careful sometimes. I mean there's a lot of assignments filed to different counties that may and a lot of them use for debt in a variety of things for highways or public transportation or things like that. So be careful where you look at. But we look at two counties really, one in Orange County, Florida because I do, I'm a big fan of Florida debt and God's waiting room. And then I also look in Harris County, Texas, which is Houston, which is the largest county in the country and also one of the most active ones here in Texas. And do a search every year and you'll find somewhere around, I don't know, 14 to 21,000 assignments. And you need to narrow that down. Can't do a search for the whole thing for the fulls here. But basically I do it month by month at the county recorder's office and then I look for LLCs, I look for smaller firms, banks who are selling them and disposing of stuff. And that gives me a hot list to reach out to or to take it the next step by jumping on link guide or reaching out directly to the individual that signed off and say hey, I see that you're with the Caliber mortgage, you know, or New Century or whoever you might be with and saw that you sold some notes off. Are you, do you have any more in your portfolio? Looking rid of this is going to probably take the most amount of work number 13. But it leads to you finding a lot of great resources. I like even going back to if I know that a fund has gone out of business and there's been some bigger funds, I can see by researching their name in some of the bigger counties that I know there's more distress stuff like looking in Indiana or Michigan or Ohio or Florida and doing search for that hedge fund name. I can often find people that they've sold those notes to a couple years ago. And that leads to a whole hot list of note investors like you and me or note buyers and note sellers as well. So. So these are just some of the things that we cover. Like I said in our three day virtual note buying workshop, it's well worth the price of mission. We show you how to pull a list of literally thousands of asset managers and names the first day. And as many people say, it is the most eye opening discovery that hey, there are plenty of deals to go around, you just got to know where to look. So if you've been sold a bag of crap that's saying, oh you're too small, nobody's going to deal with you. Look, banks will sell you if you know what to say, how to say it and what to say. And when you reach out to these different sources, there's things you got to say, things you don't want to say, there's specific lingo, wording, and we cover that all in our one day in our three day class. So host it once a quarter. Check it out@notebuyingfordummies.com I'm running a variety of different specials. Usually the specials are figured in so click on the sign up page and the discounts usually taking place. But normally it's 997 that includes you and a partner, you a spouse or business owner. You get the replays the previous workshop, a 200 page manual with all the different forms, contracts, scripts, emails that we send out on a regular basis, contracts, all that good stuff. And it's just the first day we over the next two episodes I'll be sharing how we've find and raise funding and then also talk about the different exit strategy as well. But just want to give you a bit of an insight into that. And this is the number one thing that people always ask how do you find notes? So hopefully you enjoyed the 13 ways that we find note deals. Now it's all just to you to either take action or learn how to do it the right way by joining us on a three day workshop. So go out, take some action. Hopefully we'll see at the next virtual note buying workshop and turn you from a note buying dummy into a note buying smarty.