Tim Bell finding properties 1

So let's talk about the 50 Ways to Find properties. Now, one of the methods here, the first method on our list is drive your target area at least three hours a week looking for vacant, rundown, ugly properties. Look up the owner and contact them. Now, one of the supplements that I've supplied for you, it talks about how to find the owner of a vacant house. Okay, so let's go through and take a look at that and see what that looks like. Basically, there's a bunch of different ways that you can use to find the owner of a vacant house. The first one is to go and look up the property on the county records and see who the county records thinks is the owner. You can go on various different sites. The one I like is netronline. Netronline is an aggregator of county records websites in every marketplace in America. And, and they can show you what the access is to county records in your market on that site. Again, netronline.com there are other places, data, quick, tax, net, USA, BRB, pub, etc. Various different places. You got to find out who the owner of that vacant house is. Second step would be to start looking them up. Once you find their name, look them up on various different websites. Spokeo, ZabaSearch, various other places, whitepages.com. now, once you found the owner's name, then you want to look them up online. See if you can find them on a place like spokeo or zabasearch or whitepages.com Again, remember, the Internet is like the blob that ate Manhattan. It's constantly changing, it's constantly evolving. And as a consequence, what works to find people online today may not work tomorrow. So again, try to keep up on how people are finding people on the Internet when you watch these videos. Okay, now the second one there. Once you found out who the owner's name is, then one of the things you can do is you can contact the neighbors. Two on the left, two on the right, five across the street, knock on their door, ask them, introduce yourself, and ask them if they know how to get in touch with the owner. Here's how the conversation might go. Knock, knock, knock. Oh, hi. My name is Tim. I'm a real estate investor. I'm buying properties in the area. My partners and I buy properties, fix them up, and move nice new families in. We're making Cleveland a better place to live, one house at a time. You'd be in favor of that, wouldn't you, neighbor? You'd like to have a nice new neighbor, wouldn't You? Yes, we would. We're sick and tired. Look at that eyesore across the street. Terrific. If you can simply help me to find the owner, then I will attempt to buy the property. We'll get it all fixed up. We'll sell the property to a nice new family who will come and improve your neighborhood. Won't that be great? Yeah, that sounds terrific. Now, sometimes they'll know how to find him, sometimes they won't. Sometimes they'll say something like, well, I didn't really know them very well, but Craig down the street, he's three doors down. He used to play basketball with them on Saturday afternoons over at the park. He'll probably know how to get in touch with them. Great. Go down and knock on Craig's door. Okay, so again, two on the left, two on the right, five across the street. Knock on the door, ask them if they know how to find the seller. If anyone is going to know how to find that owner of that property, it's going to be those nine people. Okay, now the next one here, mail a letter to the property. Okay? On the letter you're going to basically say, and again, you have this information, you're going to say that you're a real estate investor and you're going to give them your phone number and everything you want to buy the house and things like that. On the outside of the envelope, this is actually the most important part of this whole letter. The outside of the envelope says the address. And of course you're going to put your return address up in the corner there. And then underneath that return address, you're going to put please forward an address, correction requested. And then you're going to put a first class stamp on it. If you do those things, then by federal law, the postal service must either forward it to them if they've left a forwarding address or return it to you undeliverable. Either way, you find out. Okay? All right, the next one on our list, place a banit sign on the property. Okay? Now notice this bandit sign says call me about this house. It doesn't say we buy houses. It doesn't say house for sale. All it says is call me about this house. And then it has a telephone number on it. Now, when you put this sign in someone's front yard, remember the house is vacant. There's no one there to stop you. If you were to look in the trunk of my car, you would find a stack of these signs because it's an easy way to find the owner of a vacant house. Okay, so what you do is you pull over, you see the vacant house, you stop, you stick the sign in the front yard and you drive away. Yep, it's that easy. Now, you're going to get a call from one of three people from that sign. Here's how the first call sounds. Ring, ring. Hello, this is Tim. Yeah, I just drove by that house over on Elm Street. Looks like Old Fred finally got around to selling that old beat up house, huh? Now that's not the owner. That's a nosy neighbor. Yes, so what do you do? What do you say? Well, you know what, Mr. Nosy neighborhood, I appreciate your calling, but obviously I'm not Old Fred. And that said, I'm looking for Old Fred. I'm a real estate investor. I want to talk with him about buying his house. My partners and I buy properties, fix them up, sell them to nice new families. We're making neighborhoods like yours better. One house at a time. You'd be in favor of that, wouldn't you, neighbor? Yes, I would. Great. Do you know how to get ahold of Old Fred? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Now, the second call you're going to get from that sign sounds like this. Ring, ring. Hello, this is Tim. Yeah, I'm calling about that house over on Sycamore Street. How much you want for it? Okay, that's not the seller. Who is that? That's a buyer. Right? That's a buyer that may want to buy the house. So here's how you respond. You know what? I appreciate your calling, but to be honest with you, I don't have all the information on that property yet. Yeah, that's the understatement of the century. I haven't even talked to the owner yet. I don't have all the information on the property, but I anticipate in the next few weeks here I will. Would you like me to call you back? They always say yes. Now you're building your buyers list and you could have a buyer for that property. That'd be awesome. Now the third call is the one you really put the sign in the property for. That is from the owner, the seller of the property. Now, when they call you, it's a three step process. Step number one, apologize for putting up the sign. Step number two, thank them for calling you. Step number three, ask them if they want to sell their house. I will tell you that on these calls, you, you're going to get one of two attitudes of the seller or the owner. One of the attitudes is confusion. You know, I saw this sign on my property. And I'm not sure why you put it on there. That's confusion. The other attitude you're going to get is anger. Okay? It might sound like, what are you doing putting a sign in front of my house? That's not your house, that's my house. What are you doing? Either way, whether they're confused or angry, you're always going to handle it the same way. Thank them. Apologize for putting up the sign, thank them for calling and then ask if they want to sell their house. Here's how that dialogue might sound. Ring, ring. Hello, this is Tim. Yeah, I just drove by my house over on Oak street and you put a sign in front of my property. I want to know what the heck you're doing putting a sign in front of my property. That's not your house. That's my house. Mr. Seller, I am so sorry. Please forgive me for putting up that sign. You know, I've been trying to find you. I've talked with your neighbors, I've been looking around for you and I couldn't find you. But so in desperation, I stuck that sign in your front yard. Please forgive me. The reason I put the sign in your front yard is very simple. I wanted you to call me and you did. Thank you so much for calling me. The reason I want to talk with you is very simple. I'm a real estate investor. I'm buying properties in the area. I'm paying cash. I want to buy your house. Do you want to sell it? That's how the dialogue goes. By the way, a little safety tip. Try to get it all out in one breath if you can before they interrupt you. Okay? All right. So that was works. This is a tremendous way to find that seller of that property. Now the last item on our list here is what's called a skip trace. Now there are many sites that will do skip traces. The one I like is called findtheseller.com. let me pull it up here on the computer for you. FindtheSeller.com. i like FindtheSeller.com because it's owned by another real estate investor. Okay. He focuses on and specializes in vacant properties and he got frustrated over the years and paying up to $200 to a private investigator to find the seller of a vacant house. And so in his frustration being an entrepreneur, he created this website, findtheseller.com such that people can go on there and he will do skip traces online information based skip traces for them. Now you can see right here that if you scroll down on this site on the left there you can see Premium skip trace, $9.97. So for about what you spent on lunch today, you can get the. You can find out information on the owner and get that information on the owner so that you can contact them. Okay, so again, this is how you find the owner of a vacant house. Make sure you take a look at that. That will be helpful for you.