Tim Bell finding properties 2

Alright, the next item on our list, contact code enforcement. Now code enforcement, code compliance officers, those are people that are tasked with making sure that people take care of their houses in your community. Okay? Almost every community in America has code enforcement or code compliance officers that make sure that people take care of their house. They don't. For example, there are upkeep codes in almost every community where you can't let your grass grow three feet high, or you can't have 12 junk cars that don't operate in the front yard, or you can't have the siding falling off the house, or you can't have a blue tarp over the roof where there's a hole in the roof. The upkeep ordinances just don't allow that in most communities in America. So what you can do is you can contact the code enforcement department and get their list of people that they have cited for code violations. Now I'm going to show you this website right here. This is the city of Charlotte, North Carolina. Now I know you probably don't live in Charlotte, but I want you to see the example here. Bless their hearts. The good folks of Charlotte, North Carolina publish all the code violators addresses on their website for the whole world to see. Why do they do that? Peer pressure. They want to embarrass people into fixing up their houses. Now I will tell you that not every website is just like this. Not every city website is like this. Some are very friendly and easy to use. Some are not very user friendly. Again, you can go in and you can take a look. So we go in here under city departments and again it's a little bit of a detective search to try to find the right area to find the code enforcement people. So we're going to go into the city departments and divisions and we're going to go right down here in Charlotte to the housing and neighborhood services and click on that. If we click on that you can see that one of the departments is code enforcement. Woo hoo. That's what we want. Okay, we, we click on code enforcement and then we can go to the code enforcement homepage. And on the code enforcement homepage you can see that there is right here on the side here you can view the code enforcement cases for the city of Charlotte, North Carolina. Oh my goodness, they make it so easy to find this information. Okay, again you can scroll down on this page. If we can get it to load here you can scroll down on this page and you can see all the various different houses that have code violations in accordance with the city of Charlotte, North Carolina. And bless their hearts, look what they did. They even have a tab on here where you can export it to Excel and build your own spreadsheet. Notice there are more than 10 pages of code compliance violations in the city of Charlotte, North Carolina. Oh, my goodness, yes. Okay, this is a list. This is a list of problem properties. See, the thing you have to remember is code enforcement. They know about all the troubled properties in your marketplace. They know all the properties that are trashed, all the properties that are having problems. Here's the thing. Normal people take good care of their house. So if someone is allowing their house to deteriorate on the outside, it typically means they have a problem. They may have a physical problem in that there are two. They're too sick or too unable to mow the lawn. They might have a financial problem. Maybe they can't afford to replace the roof and patch that hole where the blue tarp is. Or they could have an emotional problem. Maybe their dog died or their spouse died and now they're sad and they can't bring themselves to take care of their house. Or maybe they have a mental problem of some kind. Again, when someone's house isn't cared for, it means they have a problem, which is a red flag for us as an investor to go out and see if we can help them with that problem. In many cases, buying their house may be a good solution. Selling us their house and us buying their house may be a good solution for their problem. So that's really what we're looking for. Now, not all communities publish this information on their website as free and easy. You may have to go down to the code enforcement office and talk to people there. You may have to meet with the code enforcement officer. If, for example, you're driving around and you see a truck like this, then you're going to want to follow them. Okay? Follow them around. As soon as they pull over, stop and talk with them. Introduce yourself. Tell them you're a real estate investor. Tell them you're looking for property for properties that have problems, and ask them if they will provide the code enforcement list for you. They typically will if you ask them. Okay. According to the Freedom of Information act of 1976, if any government entity has information that is considered not classified information or national security information, if you request it, they must, by federal law, give it to you. Okay? So again, talk with the code enforcement folks, and they will often give you that list of the code violations. That way you can drive directly out to those houses. You don't have to drive around looking for them. They have the list. Go. Take advantage of the list.