I'm going to be going over seven different ways to find the owners of vacant properties, as well
as the best practices for actually finding these vacant properties because sometimes those can be
the most profitable real estate investing deals out there. So the very first way is an app called
DealMachine. And you can download it, there's a small fee associated with it, but it's very easy
to use. And I actually have a full tutorial video below on how to use it. And I'll show you a clip
just so you can get a good idea of how it works. But basically, anytime you're driving around
and you see a property that looks like it's in distress or looks like it's vacant, you basically
just go up to the house, you can do it from your car, take a photo of the actual house, input the
address, and then DealMachine will automatically start marketing to them based on your criteria.
So you can choose different settings. Maybe you market to them, once a month,
maybe it's once every few months. I'd probably recommend, maybe once every 45 days or so. And
what DealMachine will do is once you input the address, it will automatically do a skip tracing,
so you can find out maybe the owner lives at the house. Maybe they live halfway across the country,
but you can get their contact information and then automatically start marketing to them.
And this strategy is great because obviously, it doesn't take up a lot of your time. You can just
do this in your day-to-day activities. However, I would say, just to set your expectations,
you can't expect to market to five or six vacant properties if you find them and all of a sudden
start getting all these leads. You really need to build up a huge database of potentially
vacant properties and then market to them consistently, over the course of a year or two.
And then you'll start to see a lot of results. The next way to find the owners of vacant
properties and this is probably the most common way is to use a skip tracing service.
And there's plenty of skip tracing services out there. I'm sure they're all pretty good.
You can read the reviews online. My preference is to use REISkip from Max Maxwell. And from my
understanding, I think he was a former bounty hunter or something like that,
or he was a bill collector. So he basically had to track people down and then basically
started his own service based around that. So the way skip tracing works is you might have
a couple of addresses, maybe it's just one or two, or maybe you purchase a list of potentially
motivated sellers and you really want to find out more of their contact information, emails,
phone numbers, additional mailing addresses, things like that. And that's what skip tracing
is good for. And no skip tracing service is going to be a hundred percent accurate. However,
what I like about REISkip is that it's very easy to use, very inexpensive. A lot of the
top investors use it. And I actually did a full tutorial video on that as well.
The next way to find these deals is actually some cities and some counties will actually compile
a list of vacant and blighted properties. Now, every city and county is going to be different.
But for example, in Washington, D.C. I'll show you the list right here. They actually keep a pretty
up-to-date list of all the vacant and blighted properties. And some of these vacant properties,
it might have been investors that purchased them recently and are fixing them up. However,
the way the vacant and blighted properties work in different cities is that usually if
the city sees a property, maybe it's a city inspector or a different housing official,
sees a property that looks like it's in disrepair or vacant, broken windows, that type of thing.
They will classify it as a vacant property and put it into basically a different type of tax bracket
if you want to call it that. And they'll basically increase the taxes, the property taxes every
single year because it's not being taken care of. So that's basically supposed to incentivize the
owner to get their stuff together and fix up the house, get someone living in there, whether it's
themselves or a renter. But what you can do is you can find these lists and then go back to the
skip tracing and find out who these owners are. And the best thing about these lists, of course,
is that you don't have to drive around the city looking for the vacant or blighted properties.
Somebody's already basically made this list for you. You just need to find out who the owners are
and start contacting them. So before we go to the next one, if you're looking for a
real estate mentor or looking to work together in some capacity, check out the links below and
definitely reach out to me and we can have a quick chat and see if it makes sense to work together.
The fourth way to find the owners of vacant properties is really just talking to the
neighbors. And then obviously, this is not like a completely scalable model where you can talk to
thousands and thousands of neighbors. However, I know so many different real estate investors
that have gotten amazing deals just from talking to the neighbors and they'll tell you, "Oh yeah,
this property was inherited and it's been vacant for two or three months, and this is who you
should contact." Or maybe they'll say, "Oh yeah, that's Larry's house. Larry lives over there.
Here's his phone number, go contact him." So there's all these different scenarios. And if
you start talking to neighbors, sometimes they might even want to sell their house.
So there's a lot of potential with that. The next way to find these owners of vacant
properties is just to have door hangers in your car that says, we buy houses with your
phone number, email address, different ways. Some people like to contact people in different ways,
so I always like to have like three forms of communication. Some people are old school and
they only want to call you. Other people want to send you an email. Other people want to send you
a text message. So with these door hangers, you can print them out. If you see a vacant property,
just run-up to the door and put it on there and go onto the next house.
And to add onto that strategy a little bit. And this is definitely more in the gray area
and you probably shouldn't do this. If you're a licensed agent, you can probably get in trouble
for doing this. But some people will actually put we buy houses signs in the front yard of
someone that has a vacant looking property. So that's very aggressive. You may or may not get
into issues with that, but it will usually get somebody's attention because sometimes
these vacant property owners, maybe they check on it like once a month on the house, maybe
they don't check on it at all. Maybe a neighbor sees your sign. So that could be a potentially,
maybe a little bit of a controversial way to get the person to call you, but could still work.
The next way to find these vacant properties is what's called using a bird dog. And a bird dog
could just be anybody. Could be like a landscaper, it could be, someone that's in high school
and just needs a part-time job. But you could basically pay them per lead that they send you.
You can't really pay them per deal unless they're a licensed agent. But if they're driving around
in different communities and things like that, and looking for some extra money. You could say, "Hey,
I'll pay you $1." Whatever makes sense. You'd have to figure out what makes the most sense,
per vacant address that you send me. And you would basically want them to send obviously
the address and maybe a photo of the house. And then you can add this to your vacant property
database. And maybe you skip trace these people. But if you have a whole team of bird dogs out
there, sending you potential leads that could add up. I mean, what if you got like a hundred per
week, you could really start to build a big list of qualified, motivated prospects. Because
the thing about marketing, you could send your marketing to everyone in the entire neighborhood,
but obviously 95% of those people are probably not going to be interested in selling to an investor.
However, if you target your marketing only at properties that look like
they're in distress, you're going to be significantly better off that way.
The next way and this is probably the way that you could build a significant database of vacant
properties is to do a Virtual Driving for Dollars. And if you're familiar with Driving for Dollars,
that's basically, you just drive around looking for vacant properties and then taking down the
address and skip tracing them and marketing to them. And like I mentioned, those ways work,
but it's probably not the best use of your time to spend hours and hours driving around. If
you're just doing it like on your day-to-day activities and then you see a vacant house,
that's one thing. However, with Virtual Driving for Dollars, that's basically where you would
pay a virtual assistant, maybe four or five bucks an hour to go on Google Maps and just go
through the neighborhood, just drive through the neighborhood and looking for vacant properties.
And then they would write down the address and basically send you a list at the end of the day.
And there are plenty of virtual assistants you can find on Upwork or different places. Or maybe
for five bucks an hour you just tell them, "Hey, I'm looking for properties like this.
All you need to do is get the address." Maybe you want the photo as well. And then if you
have somebody doing that for you, eight hours a day in specific targeted neighborhoods that
you're looking for, you're going to have a pretty qualified list of potentially motivated prospects.
Then you would still have to obviously skip trace them and then start contacting them. Whether it's
direct mail, phone calls, text, email. That's a pretty good way to get some motivated sellers.
The next way to track down these owners is actually just whitepages.com. I remember I
was at a property in Washington, D.C. and there was a vacant property right next to
basically a million-dollar house. And we were trying to obviously find the owner,
but we were just there, right on the spot. So we didn't have like a ton of
time. And I literally just Googled the address. Whitepages.com came up with the owner's contact
information. I texted them and they weren't interested in selling at the time. However,
it was a pretty fast response and a pretty easy lookup and they're like, "No, keep us in mind.
But for right now, we're good." So that's a free way to really track down some of these owners.
And the key with all this marketing to vacant property owners, you really want to have a big
database, like I mentioned, and just continually market to them. You want to have a minimum of
a hundred people. It's not going to work if you just have three or four owners that you're going
after to purchase their property. And in a lot of markets, think about your marketing over the
course of a year. And a lot of markets, especially Washington, D.C. you can make six figures on one
deal. So if you just get one deal over the course of an entire year, that could easily replace your
job's income. So keep that in mind, you shouldn't be discouraged if you send out five letters and
you don't get any responses. A lot of times with direct mail, your response rate might only be 1
or 2%. Whereas texting and email and phone calls, that's going to be a higher percentage rate. You
always have to check your area's regulations, but there's a lot of ways to contact people.
If you're interested in getting a real estate mentor or working together in some capacity,
definitely check out the links below and reach out to me and we can have a quick chat and see
if it makes sense to work together. Thanks a lot. And I'll see you in the next one. Bye.