EP 540 – Ten Ways To Find Notes In 2020

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 pennies 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 notes, Scott Carson. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Nook Closure Show. As always, Scott Carson, excited to be here with the day. Hopefully you guys are out rocking and rolling. And if you're listening to this episode, we're in the really the final month of a decade. If you think back to what has happened and transpired in the last 10 years, it's definitely an interesting few years, few days, I guess you could say, with everything happening in the note business in this last decade. If you think back to what we were doing to find sources back a decade ago, it was really just the start of the wild west out there. We were in the middle of a major mortgage meltdown, banks closing, a lot of distressed debt. I mean, at the peak 10 years ago, we had 15 million homeowners underwater. They owed more on their house than it was worth. Foreclosures at all time highs. And now over the last 10 years, it's really changed. Now we're still seeing about 2 million homeowners underwater. One in 10 borrowers out there is at least a month behind on their mortgage payment. We are seeing record default levels and auto debt, student loan, credit card, medical debt, that stuff. While the mortgage debt is really kind of low, come back to a normal amount. I think it's kind of bracing for the impact of when others can't pay their other bills. People are paying their mortgage debt, their mortgage payments, but they're not paying the debt on the other stuff too. So it's kind of a weird balance of sources of things kind of happening in the market out there now. Ten years ago, so much was not around compared to today. I mean, 10 years ago we had LinkedIn and Facebook, obviously we had the Lane guy.com and you had your phone and you're down for dollars. A lot of things did not exist like they do today. And so what I want to do today is discuss 10 different ways to find note deals in the next year, in the new decade, in 2020, because I think it's a different now. I did this webinar also on note night in America. This is gonna be obviously a little shorter version. If you're listening to this, you only Grab a pen and paper and take some notes if you can. Or go check out the video recording at our YouTube channel, WeCloseNotes TV or check out the replay on YouTube if you can. But you know, I'm gonna go through 10 sources of ways that you can find deals and give you even an opportunity to partake in something. If you guys are interested in our listeners out there that follow through on a regular basis. Either way, thank you as always for listening. Thank you for always for being and asking questions and reaching out for more information as well. So that's one of the beautiful things that we love about our audience members. If you guys are listening and taking action and actually doing things, which is what we love and when we have this whole podcast anyway, so. But anyway wanted to dive into these 10 new ways to find notes in 2020 is what the title of it is. And as I said, things have changed quite a bit to the last decade and there's a lot of new places to find deals and a lot of people are still trying to milk the old sources. And I tell people all the time, forget about the old sources, okay? They're overfished, as I say, over people know the low hanging fruit. And so they're overfished and overpriced assets for the most part, it's the bottom of the barrel. And everybody knows about the Condor or Eddie speech colonial or paperstack.com or granite loan Solutions, whatever name they're going by now. You know, direct source for contract for deeds or even notes direct with Tracy Zue. Those deals I think are way overpriced. No offense to any of the sources. I just think they're overpriced because they realize that hey, they can offer a price because most people are inherently lazy. Most people aren't going to go do the work that they need to do to find new sources. So they're going to overbid because I know at some point somebody's going to buy that they're going to leave minimal margins there for you. So really only makes sense to buy from those sources these days. If you're using your own funds, if you're using other people's money, you've got to go out and market and prospect about doing things. And first and foremost, if you're, if you're complaining about a lack of deal flow, the problem is not lack of deal flow. The problem is you. Problem is you aren't doing the things you need to be doing. You need to be out constantly marketing. I mean, if you look at mortgage Brokers, real estate agents, all sorts of other people, the industry, they're going out constantly marketing. I mean, that's why they go to expos, that's why you have vendors that go out looking for new deals. They're not just doing business as normal. And if you've been doing business as normal the last couple years because you had sources that were delivering stuff to you on a regular basis, that made sense. And yes, some people will complain. Oh, about the increased note investors out there. Well, those people that are complaining just are lazy and unfortunately not going out and looking for new sources. And new sources are not that hard to find. Okay? If you're not doing marketing, you're not finding no deals, okay? Now if you're doing some new marketing, that will equate to new deals. If you do the right things, if you're doing things on a regular basis, not doing the same old, same old, okay, you can build a Note business with 100 sources or less. And I mean that the truth. One of the things when I started years ago, over a decade ago now, is I put a challenge on myself in the first year to be direct to 100 asset managers. Well within the manager of first 90 days, I was direct to 100 asset managers. So I had to adjust my balance. But for most people, no business is a side hobby. A side hobby, a side hustle. You're doing it 10 to 15 hours a week on your part time basis and that's okay. But you still need to market on a regular basis. Don't rely on those names that we talked about before. You have to realize that not every source is going to have deals every month out there. They're just not going to do that for the most part. It's going to ebb and flow. Especially as we go, you go more and more direct. Somebody only sell once a quarter, somebody only sell once a year. That's why we talk about really there being a magic happening. When you've got 100 sources that are sending you stuff. Some will send it to you monthly, some will send it quarterly, some will do once a year. But the more that you prospect, the sweeter the deals are going to be. By sweeter, more direct to the bank. You're gonna have less ugly assets because they know the relationship with the borrower. They're not gonna be sitting around vacant for a long time. There's something that they're moving and they're motivated to get off their books versus something that's been sitting around for a while where somebody bought in bulk. Thousand assets in the bottom 250 they're trying to move, but they've already made their profits and going from there. If you have big goals in 2020, you'll need big sources. That's why we say 100 sources. I talk to people all the time, okay, Students, investors. And I asked like, I'll give you an example, I asked investor okay, with the 75 deals that you've closed this year, how many sources did you have? And he's like, well, 22 of the 75 came from one source. The others have all come from one off or two offs from these prospecting with investors or other buyers or other sellers. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with buying one deal here, one deal there, one deal there. It happens. I mean that's a. We've done a lot of that over the last decade buying like a 10 assets from one investor and we never bought anything else from them again. Not that there was a bad relationship, it's just that they didn't have anything else that they were open to move at the time. So that's the thing to keep in mind. You'll need big rig sources. But the thing is we're getting into, you're going to want, if you stick with this and still follow up and do some of the things that we teach, you'll be the only person or the only company that seller reaches out to on a regular basis because you've gone and done some amazing things. So number 10 on our list from 10 to 1 new sources in 2020. It's an old source, one of the oldest sources out there that we've had. But it's really started to make a impact increase across the country. And that's number we're talking about short sales. Okay. Short sales are on the rise again across the country. We may not see many of them here in Austin, Texas, but we do see them in Texas. We've seen an increase in the DFW markets. In the Houston markets especially, that number is starting to creep above 200 plus short sale listings on a regular basis. Distressed sales, you're going to see this on a regular basis. People have gotten into houses and they owe more on their house than it's worth when they can afford it. So you're going to start seeing those in some of the new build areas where people are budget mindset. And the beautiful thing about short sales, not that you want to see beauty in that aspect of borrowers being in trouble, the borrowers are motivated and ready to walk with zero Money they want to get out of it, they want to get sold, they want to get moved on and that's great. Now we're not saying you go out and make offers on 20 short sale listings. That's not what we're talking about. Many of the short sales may already have a cash buyer in place who's ready to close as long as the bank is willing to take a loss. Now that's where you come in as a note investor. The beautiful thing about a short sale is there's a lot of stuff that you get with the short sale that you don't get in a traditional distressed note sale. Okay. Like a lot of times you're not gonna interior access on a spreadsheet of assets. But with a short sale it's got a listed agent, a listing agent on the mls and they often will have interior views or interior access for you to take a look at so you can see what it kind of looks like. Okay. Now what we like to do is we've reached out to short sale agents. We'll get to that in a second here. But we like to try to purchase the notes on those listed properties with potential cash offerings. Place by buying the note at a discount below the listing price. Okay. We then turn around and then approve the short sale. So if we say borrows 200, bank is willing to negotiate to 175, we can buy that note at 150. Hey, we'll settle and make a $25,000 profit. We can. Okay. And that's where short sales are great. It's a little faster timeframe than a year to foreclose. It could be 30, 60, 90 days where you basically buy the note, take over the asset, approve the short sale, buyer closes and you move on. Okay. We've done this multiple times. We approve short sales on a regular basis. What we do when our borrowers want to sell as a short sale. But thing to keep in mind, everybody is this takes some work. You're not going to reach out to Chase, bank of America, stuff like that. So you've got to be particular about what you do. We have one property here in Austin, the bank borrowed 220. It may have been worth 100. It'd been on the market for two years, needed some work. We were able to buy the note at 75 grand. There was a cash offering that we ended up netting cash offer at 150 that was approved. We ended up netting right. 60 grand, 45 day period, which is a pretty good profit margin when you buying it 75, selling it at 69 and start to finish deals done in less than 90 days. Okay, now what you want to do is you want to contact local short sale agents. Local agents, they're doing this on a regular basis. Okay. And just call them up, tell them what you do. It's going to be hit or miss. Alright, if you've got access to mls, great. Jump on there and do a list. Pull yourself for short sales or third party approval required. Most of the multiple listing services in the country now have a button or classification for short sale distressed asset. Or you can do keyword search like third party approval or bank approval required out there as well. And then what you do is just contact the current bank on title or when you go to click on. Oftentimes on the mls there'll be a button that links into the county records on a listing that show you who the current bank is. Now if you recognize the bank, great. It's a bigger bank, you know, bank of America, Chase City Bank. You may not want to waste your time. It's a small regional bank. That's where the most valuable is going to come into. And the thing is, you're not actually using that address as your final deal. You're trying to take that down. That's what you have to realize. You're using this short sale and if you do get it approved, great, that's gravy. But you're using this address. As they warm a lead into the asset manager of the bank. I'm calling about 9016 Colin Field Drive. It's supposed to go to foreclosure in two months. It's a listed short sale. I want to talk about buying Minnow. Whole deal is 9616 Colin Field is not the address you're excited about. You're excited about what else they might have on their books. Because oftentimes, especially depending on where it's located, the bank may not take a discount. Especially if they're all the way either getting close to the foreclosure auction or it's been a tedious process. Sometimes you're going to sell, sometimes you won't. It's just a numbers game, but that's the beautiful thing. Uses a warm lead to the asset manager and then asks, okay, are there any other notes that you'd be willing to sell? They don't have to be in Austin, they don't have to be in Texas. And that's where you get the list of NPN's looking to move. Who handles that at the bank? Other areas and then you have a pipeline there that you can rinse and repeat on a regular basis. That also gives you the opportunity that you're seeing a list from this bank of potential short sales of reaching out to the listing agents on those properties, if they are listed in the MLS and trying to find out if they're cash offers in place, that they are true offers that they're getting ready to close on. And then you can really sandwich yourself in it and turn a nice profit margin between what you bought the note for and what the final short sale number is. Okay, short sales have been great. As I said before, something in rinse and repeat takes a little bit of stuff on the front end. But it's just like anything else. The nice thing is having a warm lead with a address versus just saying, hey, what else do you have on your notes you aren't looking to sell? Okay, number nine, this is something we made a lot of money with a decade ago and this was condos in safe harbor states. Now what I mean by that, well, Florida, Colorado, Nevada are safe harbor states where the condo associations, obviously when a loan's not being paid, borrowers not paying their condo association fees. Condos often rack up big bills. Now if you're buying the note on a condo and you foreclose, you're only required to pay a certain percentage of the condo association fees. Like In Florida it's one year of HOA fees or 1% of the original sales price. In Colorado it's like six months. I think in Nevada it's one year. You want to double check state by state level. Now the nice thing is that's a substantial discount compared to when he was buying it. The asset is an reo. Okay, now what I like to do is when I get a condo in Florida, let's say it's a unit on a spreadsheet or something I've looked at in the past is I'll go back and to the county records and just A, either type in the address without the the unit number and see the owners and see if the condo association pops as an owner. Or B, I'll just type the management company and if I can or the, the HOA names the county impresite they owned up other things so they may own condos at more than one location, more than one address. Especially the larger complexes will may have 2, 3, 4, 5 addresses given how big it is. So that's what's a really nice thing. Now I'm looking to ones that they've foreclosed, subject to the first lien and taking that property back. Now when I do see that, I contact the condo association, the management say, hey, I see that you're taking this condo back subject to the first lien. You want to double check, make sure there's not. They, they're a junior lien foreclosing on the asset, which leaves the first lien in place, provided they have not done a quiet title action. Look at that in a section. But basically they've taken these condos back, they've put people in it, getting rent paid on it and they're collecting the management fees out of the rent in order to stay liquid. A lot of condos went bankrupt a decade ago when all these condos went vacant and they couldn't pay the management and upgrade fees and the special assessments. But when you find a condo association that's taken one, two or three of these units back, they're often willing to sell the units for a percentage of either a what is owed or a percentage below what the actual asset is worth. Now like I said, they're often rendered in good condition. You want to use that information, say okay, who was the first lien holder? Because usually the HOA is already done, like I said, foreclosed, subject to the first lien. So they've already gotten the borrow out, they've got their own people in there. So this is a great thing to reach out to the bank to see who the bank is and if they're willing to sell the note at substantial discount. Now if it's a Bank of America, Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, you may not buy that note. You just want to look and see if they filed any legal, filed to foreclose or filed anything like that. If they haven't, then you can buy off of the note, buy that position from the HOA at a substantial discount or percentage of what's owed and take the condo over as a cash flowing asset and you have a renter in place. Now you've got a, a cash flow deal going in, not paying on the 1st. I would just a safe harbor or quiet title action. Sorry, not safe harbor, quiet title action for ownership of the asset. This has worked out in our favor quite a bit. Worst case, hey, we've got a rental for 12, 24 months because it can take a while to do that, especially if you can drag it out respectively. But this can be a really great way to find some deals and expect to see a lot more of this in the higher priced assets in Florida as the condo market is already turning south. Condos are the first to go and they're first to come back because often they get sold off for disco. Okay, now you can buy, you can purchase a list of homeowner associations and condo associations in Florida often will probably a list of names, list of addresses, email addresses. Sometimes we bought the list and did an email blast out and had the attorneys contact us. Like I said before, you can check the condo associations on the appraisal districts, see if they own condo. You've got to have the name of the condo association so it makes it difficult in some cases you can't. If you do find one like we did a search just recently in Orange county in Orlando a few weeks ago and we found four deals immediately that we reached out to were in negotiations back and forth. So that's really exciting on our end by doing this. Okay. As I say, it'll either be an asset acquisition, a note purchase or cash flow play, which is a long term play. But that's okay. It's a great way to find deals that nobody else is looking for. Alright. It's substantial discounts is what we're looking for. And we like. We've done this multiple times in Orlando. We've done this multiple times in Homestead, Florida, Miami, done this a couple times in Cape Coral. Tampa Bay area where we see the condo market booming. That's where places are targeting on a regular basis. Okay. If you don't like Florida, then check out Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a similar thing as well. You could also do something very similar with timeshares if you're a big timeshare cash flow Frank hand check that out as well. All right. Number eight is the servicing company's business development side of things. Now I've talked about this briefly before. Every servicing company has business development people. Sometimes it's the onboarding. It depends on how big the servicing company is. A normal servicers that service smaller investors often will have the same onboarding person. It may be the same person that owns the servicing company goes out. But I would contact servicing companies and ask to speak to business development people because those are the people that are in charge of going on getting a business, new business. They're going to know too their clients are looking to move assets off. Maybe they are just a performing investor, they got some non performing assets they want to move off their books. They will often reach out to the business development guys or gals to do that. And the thing you got to realize, the servicing companies representing mortgage companies and note investors just like you and me out there, some Big companies, some smaller companies, you know, they may have. I'll give you an example. Like there's companies that only want you to have at least 100 assets or more before they'll deal with you. Well, if they've got investors that have fallen below 100 assets, might be an opportunity for you to pick up a portfolio and transfer it off or add it to them. Now the big thing, like I said, they know who is looking to sell. They do want to retain the servicing. They don't want to give you a lead on somebody who's going to pull business away from them because they're getting paid a percentage monthly on the servicing cost. So they want to retain servicing. So if you're talking to them, it's important to bring that up. Hey, we would like you guys to retain servicing if possible. This is especially effective. You're calling performing or non judicial servicers and there's more servicers that just focus on non judicial states. They don't want to deal with judicial states. They don't want to handle the longer foreclosure processes. This is effective because there's a lot of those out. Okay, you can jump on LinkedIn and leverage LinkedIn by just typing in servicing loan servicing companies and pulling up a list of those and reaching out to them one at a time and reaching for the business development size. Okay, you can also be taking our workshop. You can also jump on the Texas savings and mortgage lending website here in the Lone Star State and download a list of companies that are licensed to do business here in Texas. And among that list you'll find 268 servicers, not all here in Texas. Big chunk of most of them are actually outside of Texas, but they're lending or servicing loans here in Texas and they want you to be licensed. Okay. Number seven is a big thing I think is going to lead the way. Here is the non prime lenders. Number seven, subprime lenders are back. Okay, follow me if you want to live. But non prime lenders are lending in all 50 states. We've known about this before. They're doing 100% financing or bankruptcy or foreclosures. You know, they'll lend just a day out of that kind of stuff. So you can jump on Scotsman Guide. You can also just do a search for non prime lenders as well and see what's available. When you reach out to the Scotsman Guide or these banks, reach out and contact the secondary marketing desk. We talked about this before. They will often provide a list of loans that may Be scratch and dent s and D they call them or people that are 30 to 90 days in defaults or 90 plus defaults. Now you may also want to see if they've had any buybacks that they're looking to move. These are the loans that they've sold off their warehouse lines but had to buy it back because of the borrower defaulting in the first six to 12 months. Now those are some opportunities you'll find stuff if you just get. This is a numbers game reaching out. But a lot of times these sellers, these lenders have one person in their organization that's responsible for this stuff, the sale desk. So you may get a mixed bag of some things, you know, follow up. Now if you're looking for stuff here in Texas, it may be easier just for them to foreclose and take the asset back if they're doing it in multiple states. The bigger the subprime lender is and the bigger the footprint and the more opportunities that you'll have available. Okay. Worst case, if you see that they're lending a specific area specifically in specific counties, jump on and see who they're selling the loans to and then reach out to that lender as a possible source. Okay. Contact the banks and the institutions that they're selling to if they've had any buyback. Because let's face non prime lenders, especially first year, the first quarter when appraisals come out, especially the appraisal numbers have changed where borrowers their tax values are based from just a lot to a lot with improvements that can lead to non, non performing status pretty relatively quickly. Okay. Number six is new home builders. Especially when you type in and start looking and start, you'll see more and more of these. We already see this popular in Texas and other states too that travel to where they advertising no money down home programs, first time buyer programs or $500 down. You know, there's a lot of time of builders or first time home buyers that are targeting in their advertising. Okay. Now the thing is in a Google search in less than 5 minutes I found builder communities that were doing no money down home programs in 20 plus states out there. Okay, no down payment new home programs in 20 states and some really good states. Okay. They'll often have in house financing companies, they may have a mortgage bank behind them that they're selling the stuff off to and relatively quickly churn and burn. But when you have a default or the market turns, new communities see the biggest defaults. When markets turn, it's just that a common Thing we see that here in Austin, you see it all across the country. So keep that in mind. Opportunity to come in for two things. Not only just to maybe buy the note from the bank, but if you're targeting specific areas, you start to see a lot of defaults. You may want to market those areas as potential deals. You can take over subject to and do owner financing and wrap around mortgages or turn into rentals and things like that. A play we did years ago and added on quite a few potential subject to deals that worked out really well. But like I said, less than 5 minutes on Google I found three builders especially here, doing stuff here in Texas, other states, LGI Homes, Starlight Homes and of course Kendall Homes that were finding stuff in Houston, Dallas, all across the country that could be potential sources for me. So I'm tracking those communities and seeing what's happening with those things. Okay. By tracking, I'm setting an alert in 90 days to go back and check out where they're building and I already have their addresses because they will literally tell you where they're building at. Seen the default rates in specific area. Okay, number five seems like an old thing, but this is all about follow up, follow up, follow up with your old lists. I mean we have old lists of old assets, NPNs we didn't buy or that we have bought reach out to the sellers. I mean I've literally kept every tape I've ever received and labeled it when I got it and who it came from. And so that gives you an opportunity to follow back up. I've kept every NDA non disclosure agreement I've ever signed with a bank. I have a file folder on my desktop, my desktop on my computer of who I bought, signed it with. Well, those make for great referrals for me to reach back out to. Hey, what do you have? What do you have? What do you have? Okay, what do you have? You still have anything? You still in business? You know what's going on? It's a great time to reach out to people in early part of the year just to touch base with them. I also will check the county records on list to see who they've sold to. You could go in. If I saw an asset that say Condor had for sale, I could go in and see who they sold it to by checking the county records, the county clerk for the assignment of mortgages. Or I could see going to different counties that I know they've had stuff off of and look, say okay, who did they sell to? I got the address from an Old spreadsheet. Let's see who that eventually sold to that become a potential source for you as well. Okay. Not only with Condor, but who Condor sold to. Now I've got two sources that I can reach to on a regular basis. Okay, Number four is one that might crack you up a little bit, but the conference is an expo list. All right. Some of the conferences out there advertise who is attending the their expos and those become great sources for deal flow. You don't have to worry about traveling to a place save the thousand bucks or two thousand bucks it's going to cost for a ticket and airfare and hotel bill and food. Many times they'll advertise by saying the company and the job title is like the Special Asset Manager for One Oak Funding or Special Asset Managers for ABC Funding. Okay, great, let me just go Google that or use LinkedIn to jump in and find a name and phone number. Okay, LinkedIn, great way to leverage that. I'll give an example. IMN, which has about 20 different events a year, Information Management Network shares their company names and titles. They don't give you the exact name of the person, but they do Special asset manager, servicing, whatever. They'll give you the exact name and title the people attending. And so for the last couple years we've used the VA virtual assistant, sending that email over or exporting a list from their website. So whatever it says, hey, go find out who this person is on LinkedIn and then now we can connect with them directly. Secondary Mortgage Bankers association and the Western Mortgage Bankers association share the names and company information for the people attending. So you can set up, make appointments, you can get all this information without having to pay or just register that you're interested and then basically ban. This stuff can come to you in email. You're going to log on the website, take a look at it too. But like I said, easy and cheap to hire a VA. 4 bucks an hour to scrub the list and pull the contact information. But save money on event tickets and travel. And of course, if the event is in your backyard or place that you don't mind driving to or going to, that's great. This is still a great way to set up meetings with people that you don't have to be at. Hey, I'm going to be at the hotel. I'm not attending an event, but let's meet for coffee or drink and just set up a tab at the local, the nearest bar inside the conference or expo center. Okay. I think this works well, allows for you to be Able to leverage your time, still get a lot of stuff done without having to go out. And don't be wrong. Nothing wrong with pressing the flesh. You've mean a lot of stuff there. But I don't think it's valuable to do this. Especially if you're getting started and you're doing this on a part time basis. You don't have time to take off from your job or away from your family. This is a great way to leverage and kill two birds technically with one stone. Freeing is another thing that we've not talked about before. But using the name whole loan sales, okay, this is leveraging LinkedIn to contact Special asset managers, but also. So just type in special assets or secondary marketing typing Whole loan sales, okay. If you do that in LinkedIn, it'll pop up roughly about 32,000 individuals on LinkedIn that have that in their online LinkedIn profiles. Okay. These people will handle larger trades and note sales. These institutions, they will also handle one offs of smaller stuff. But they should have portfolios for you to review on a monthly or quarterly basis, at least for the most part. All right, contact them with a contact tab on there. Make a connection. You may have to use an InMail to send message to them. It's worth it. It may be worth you upgrading your LinkedIn profile for a month. They increase that number and be able to do that. I think it's important to include a short message in a short video to boost your responses and say hey, exactly what you're looking for. Because if you send a hundred, they may not look at LinkedIn on a pretty often basis. They do it 10 only at 10% responses. Take the time, record a short 2 minute video or less of exactly what you're looking for. Make it look professional. You know, I've done a video with my background of weclosenotes.com or the note close shows hey, exactly what we're looking for. We'd love to talk with them. And it's actually boosted our responses. Number two is a list that you can purchase out there. It's called the Bauer Financial list. Bauer Financial is a financial rating agency for banks and credit unions. It kind of tracks the default rates, the risks, the ratios. It's a beautiful list. Bauer B A U E R that you can order and customize on how you want it. Like I like to order it for all the banks. Just a purely banks, not credit unions, but banks that have five or more branches in the country. It's a pretty good sized list and it gives me the CEO, the Bank's phone number. Their website will not give me email addresses. But it's pretty easy to reach out to somebody if you've got a direct name and a website and phone number there. To do that. It tells me Bower list gives me a list of the ratios, shows me their whole portfolio and where it's broken up to residential, commercial, multifamily, default rates, reserves, things like that. So it's a really viable tool to have a list that you look at number of branches. Obviously the bigger the branches the better. But like I said, it gives you contact names and phone numbers, no email addresses. You need to spend a little bit time going through your list. When I ordered my list just Recently, I had 2031 banks with five or more branches. Like I said, whether you're interested in residential, commercial, multifamily, this works well for you as well. List to be pulled. My list that I just pulled will cost you 300 bucks or more depending on the poll. Okay, so something keep in mind $300 or more if you pull the condo association list from the different list. That'll cost you a lot more than 300 bucks because it depends because there are a lot more condo association contacts depending on the county you pull and who you want on those lists as well. But anyway, the number one source we think here. Drum Rol. We're a fan. We've been doing this for the last two years now. And it's really worked out really well pulling assignments literally going into the county clerk's online offices that you can do the Netra online and looking to see what's been recorded as assignments. Now with every note deal there's an assignment of mortgage gets recorded at the county clerk the transfer and ownership. Now the beauty is there's two parties to that. If I bought a note going to be an assignment from say just say Condor bought it from Condor. It's going to give Condor's name and my name. If I sell that note to somebody else, it's going to have my name and that party hunt back in. So I'm a big fan of jumping on county clerk or the county recorder's offices. Each county has either or they call it and doing just a search for assignments. Now not every county in America will let you track by document type. This is important. So I want you to look by the APN number. So I want to know the address or the borrower's name. That's a little bit difficult sometimes. If I can find the assignment. That's the big thing out there now Even a lot of those that let you search for assignments, the information they give you is not clean. And that it doesn't make it sense. It won't allow you to like export that information. Copy and pasting. It's not clean. It's merged files, merged cells. It's really hard, trust me, because I've done this in most of the major counties for my 12 favorite states out there. Okay. Some counties won't even list assignments. And as a document you can search for. Now, this is really effective in finding new buyers and sellers of notes because you don't know who's assigned to or what entities are out there. Okay. Now, you can sometimes pay title companies to pull this data for you. It can take a little bit time. They may not know exactly what they're looking for because they may have different access than you. But often I would jump on first and see what's available because sometimes accounting is a lot. You download like 200 names or 200 searches or 100 at a time. So sometimes it's 25. So it can be a really tedious thing when there's thousands of assignments following each county and most of each county, most of the major ones every year. Okay. As I said, it's often a large list and unformatted. So sometimes you spend some time clearing it up. Not easy to use or download. I'll give you an example. Let me give some of the numbers behind some stuff that we've pulled in the last couple weeks. So I pulled data for the last 12 months, from November 2018 to the end of November, full 12 months, Harris County, I pulled. It was actually easier than expected, 37,000 assignments. Although it took me hours. It took me several hours of editing the spreadsheet to separate it, to clean it up. But total of 37,191 assignments filed in Harris county in the last 12 months. Orange County, California, there's 23,551 assignments. That's great. But it was a very hard list. Once I looked at the number and tried to export it, it was not feasible at all. It was very, very hard. Now, flipping the coast to the other Orange county in Florida, there were 20,536 assignments. This used to be a cleaner list. It was easier to export. It's harder now. They tweaked up the website, so it's not near as easy to export. Last year, I'll give you an example. Two years ago, there was 14,000 assignments filed in Orange county or Orlando. That narrowed down to like 9,500 unique names and entities. We've used that list to find some great sources out there. Bexar county in San Antonio, Texas, 12,700 assignments. It's not the easiest thing to pull. What they show you cuts off often the parties names. So it doesn't give you the full names because they have a limited sale reach on there. So it's not the cleanest thing. You have to kind of go back individually one at a time and read the actual documents. Franklin county in Columbus, Ohio had 7,300 assignments. Not the easiest thing to pull either. But why Harris county in Houston, Texas? Scott, isn't Texas a fast foreclosure state? Aren't you going to have a hard time buying notes that are at a discount? And the answer to that is yes, you will. But Houston, hey, Texas, Lone Star State's a very attractive state for other lenders to lend in or to do lending. And they're selling those notes off to a variety of investors, not just institutions, but also investors like you and me. Plus we have a lot of large growth in construction in the past several years in Houston. But we've also had increased default rates with the hurricanes which has been a good growth and then also some people getting hurt with the hurricanes hitting Houston and the flooding that goes on there in Houston. So I don't live there. Not a big fan. The armpit of Texas, but it's still a desirable place for lenders. I believe we're poised for see a lot of large defaults with new home sales there in Houston on the outskirts. Not just Harris county, but in the outside communities, Rasmus county and some of the other big ones, Pearland, Katy and some of those areas around there as well. Harris county leads Texas and short sale listings a couple hundred and that number has been increasing every month the last six months. So we're already starting to see that take place there. Texas fast foreclosure laws, which is nice, equals the bank's desirable to lend here, which means a lot of opportunities. It's also the largest populated county in Texas at 4.7 million population. The next largest would be Dallas county at 2.8 million. So it's the largest populated county of Texas. But the beautiful thing is it was easier to pull the data than other counties. That's what made it so desirable for me. Weekend working on this, I was able to pull the full 37,000 assignments. Okay, so I think there's a big pot of gold. And what I've pulled 37,191 assignments. How did that break down? Well, there's grantee grantors on each side. There was a total of 74,662 grantors. Between those 37,000. That narrowed down once I filtered it down to just under 13,500 unique entities. There's 45,000 grantees and that narrowed down to 5,365 unique names. All right. And when you take those grantors and grantees, some people were on both sides of the transaction. It equaled 17,558 unique entities. People who have bought or sold and assigned or assigned a mortgage in Harris county in the last 12 months. That's a huge amount of opportunity. Now let's break it down in that when I did a quick search out of that 17,000 was 205 self directed IRA investors that had their name and they were the variety of different entities, self directed IRA companies. There was 871 of these entities had banks in their name. Where you just look for bank. It popped up. There are a lot of lending institutions, people that are originating loans and then selling stuff off. There was also a ton, about over a fourth of the list were made up of LLCs and investors. What I mean by investors so and so LLC so and so. Trust me, okay, it wasn't a traditional bank or finance company or institution. So that's a lot of opportunity, a lot of potential sources. Maybe not for huge lists. Maybe you might find some of the big lists. I saw some banks in there. I saw a lot of banks outside of Texas on that list. So made for a lot of opportunity there for you. Oh, and then also when you look for trusts, Third Street Trust Company for an individual asset. There were 1755 trusts that were labeled on this. It's a big list. You also had a chunk of cities, municipalities and school districts that aren't going to be valuable on that list. But overall between those amount you had roughly 8,000 9,000 entities on there that could be valuable sources for your note business. So people ask me when I was talking about this cause I talked a little bit on note night in America last week. Is there availability for people to get those lists? And yes there is. We've actually put together a basic training program that we're working through on these to help you as investors out there, as note investors. Note students be able to use these 10 sources for 2020. So we created 10 ways for to find note deals in 2020 online training course program. It's 12 different video trainings on using these strategies one at a time. How to Approach, you know, we've got checklist scripts, step by step guides on how to reach out to them, what to say. You're gonna find unlimited email and phone support if you have questions about the list or questions about what you're focused on. And then we're also putting together a private basecamp group just for those that are signed up for the training. Okay. But it's a study at your own pace. The video training, it's really, really a great thing that we've put together to really help those that are serious about making 2020 a very positive and deal high deal flow year for you guys. Now, other things, some of the other bonuses, we're going to throw it in. We've talked about throwing in. We will be throwing in the complete Harris county assignment list, which is roughly about a $1,999 value, is what I've seen for these many sources. And that's the thing is the list that we pulled. We're gonna give it to you. The list that we've cleaned up or narrowed it down, that 1700 or 17,000 names, that's part of it. We're gonna send you the most recent Bauer Financial list of banks with five plus branches. That's over a $300 value. If you were to order that, we're gonna be a complete list of Florida Condo association names. Over a $900 value is what it cost. Okay. The names. And then the president of the president of the associations is there, 42, with their contact and the address and stuff like that. So that's a huge list, a huge value add to you for you right there between those three. That's over a $3,100 value for you. Beautiful thing on that, guys, is those lists aren't gonna be available for everybody. Also, as we update the Harris county list, we will make it available. What I mean by that. Well, as we add contacts, as we pull contact information, we'll be updating the list in the basecamp group for those that are part of it now. Yes, I am working the list myself. So as we pull with our vas, as we scrub and find contact information, as we do some mail merges to find contact information, we're gonna update that list. Why? Because I don't expect everybody to sign up for that thing. I expect to be just a few people that want to really do some great stuff, and I have no problem sharing that with it. Okay. Normal price for something like this, obviously out in the market would be around a thousand bucks. But we're not Gonna do that for you. I want you guys to take action and do something. So we have a very special price offering of this being at 599. All right, 599 for you to take advantage of this. It's an awesome thing for you. We either call it a late Black Friday or a Cyber Monday sale or whatever you want to call it, but 599 is what we're offering up for that. And that's the price until we get the list completed. When we get the list completed from Harris county, it's going to be a lot more than 599. But you can go to Bit Lee, Tenways2020 or shoot me an email scottclosenotes.com we'll make sure and send you the link over for that. But we really believe that if you want to do something big in 2020, you've got to do things differently than what you've done the last couple of years. That means doing different things and going out and hunting in some new hunting grounds for you, fishing in some new fishing holes. And we want to help you find those deals, find those hunting grounds, find the sources. Because let's face it, there's more than enough deals to go around still to this day. Some people complain about there not being deals. It's just that they're not marketing. And if you look at the huge amount of originations and new loans and refinances taking place and still having a 2 2.5% default rate on what we can tell, that still leads to hundreds of thousands of notes available for investors like you and me. Take advantage of and purchase and really, as I say, make America great again, one defaulted bar at a time. So I hope you enjoyed that, guys. Once again, those are 10 ways that we're using to find new deals in the new year. We want you to take advantage of that. If that's something you want to do, great. Reach out to me. I'm glad to email you the link for that and be rock and rolling before the new year rise or as the new year gets rock and rolling for you to take advantage of that. So once again, email scottclosenotes.com and I'm glad to send you a link over get signed up for that. But like I said, it's a 5, 99 special. Doing a special pricing right now until the new year hits for you guys out there. So take advantage of it. Go do something even if you don't do with us. Take some one of those or two of those 10 ways and apply it to your business. I guarantee you'll find deals if you just work through them and go from there. So take advantage of guys. Go do something and we'll see you off the top, everybody. Bye, Sa.