How To Identify A Vacant Property And Find Out Who Owns It.

So you’re looking for the owner of a vacant property………

You’re in luck!  It’s what we do and we’re really good at it.  Not to toot our own horn, but there is an certain amount of skill that comes along with finding an owner or the heirs and relatives of vacant properties.  We’re spend many hours and lots of money learning how to do it effectively, but if you do desire to take on the challenge yourself, we hope we can help you. 

This blog is going to walk you step by step through the process.  We’re going to keep things very basic and our hope is that you’ll be successful in your pursuits. 

The first step, and I assume that you’ve already done this part is to identify a vacant property.  You may be able to tell by the boarded up windows, but you also may be able to tell by overgrown grass, piles of newspapers or fliers stuck in the door.  You may also keep an eye on the obituaries and find that a local home owner has died and you want to find their families so you can buy the property.  Whatever your reason for locating the owner of the vacant property you want to buy, you’ll have to follow a couple basic steps.

First thing you want to do is find out who owns the property.  You can do that by going to the local tax assessors office at your local city hall.  You may also find the information online.  If you know the site of your local tax office, search by the address and locate the owners name.  They may list an off site mailing address and you can try to write a letter to the owner or find their phone # in the white pages.  www.Whitepages.com

If you don’t know the site for your local tax office you may be able to locate their website here. http://publicrecords.netronline.com/

If it’s possible to search by name, make sure you do.  You may get lucky and discover that the owner has more than one vacant property.

In our next blog we’ll be discussing the methods of contacting the owners or family members of the vacant property. 

Remember that perserverence pays off when searching for vacant property owners!  If there is anything we can do to help you in your pursuit of vacant property owners you can contact us at http://www.WeFindOwners.com

How To Deal With Vacant Property Liens, Judgements And Estates

Once you’ve made contact with the owner of a vacant property you will sometimes run into situations that do not arise with traditional property transactions.  There are a variety of various issues and your title company will be able to help you with many of them but we’ll mention them to make this information more complete.

One of the first things that you should know is that most liens and other debts owed against the property are paid by the owner at closing.  However, you can also be creative when it comes to this type of property purchase.  I’ll get into this in a bit, but first I want to talk about the types of debts that might be against the property or the owner.

Tax liens are very common when it comes to vacant properties.  Especially if the property has been sitting for any length of time.  Depending on your county, the sheriffs office may be very aggressive with dealing with this issue and auctioning the properties at sheriff sale.  However, many major metro areas have thousands of vacant properties with taxes that have been owed on them for several years.  Other liens might be nuisence liens, clean and seal liens, gas liens, water liens and more.

Judgments against an owner are another popular item that arise on a title report.  Judgments can be placed against an owner for any number of reasons.  It is important to note the difference between a lien and a judgment.  It’s easily remembered like this….A lien is a debt against a property and a judgment is a debt against a person.  Judgments can be placed for back child support, law suits, parking tickets, unpaid income taxes and many more reasons.

Dual ownership or tenants in common and tenants by entireties deeds.  What this means is that more than one person is on the title to the property and both of the people on the original deed have to sign off on the deed to sell the property.  You may also hear that term “Quit claim deed” used from time to time and in that instance you should understand that someone cannot just sign a quit claim deed and give you the same right of ownership as a fee simple deed.  In the case of a divorce or a partnership when two people own the property and both have the rights to the property you must get both of them to sign the deed for the sale.  If you have a deed where there were percentage rights to the property then your title company may allow a quit claim deed to be used when someone just simply wants to forfeit their equitable rights to the property.  Your title company will know how to handle this situation when it comes up but you should be prepared to find the other person on the deed as well.

Deceased owners and estates.   In the case of a deceased owner or an estate you will have to find the heir with the legal rights to sell the property.  It is a very sensitive issue when it comes to who has the rights to a property so you may want to consult a probate attorney on this one.  However, the main thing to know is this……If a person died and they did not have a will stating to whom the property will be left, then someone must be appointed to handle the estate (Even if it’s just 1 single distressed property).  They will go to the register of wills and file for what are called “Letters of administration” and pay inheritance tax of the value of the property.  It’s important to know that if someone still has receipts from the funeral, they can deduct those as expenses against the inheritence and they will only be taxed on what they actually profit.  If the person did die with a will, you can view the will and find out who has the “Letters Tesimentory” and that will give them the rights to sell the property to you.

Old mortgages.  Sometimes you will get a title report back that has a mortgage on it from many years ago.  These may have been from private loans or from a bank that went out of business.  If you do have a title with an old mortgage it will have to be discharged before it can be cleared from the title.  This can take some time and some work and will be something that the title company can help with.  However, if you want to get things done quickly, our recommendation is to lend a helping hand and gather whatever information you can gather to help the title company.  You’ll get to closing quicker and that’s the main goal.

These are some of the more common issues that come up on the title search of a vacant property.  We’ve settled on hundreds of vacant properties and seen just about every issue that can come up.  If we can help you locate the ex spouse, a relative of a deceased owner or the issuing bank that held the original mortgage needs to be tracked to find out who owns the loan now, we can help you out.  We’ll find the information you’re looking for guaranteed.  To find out more about what we do, visit us at www.WeFindOwners.com

Best of luck with your purchasing of vacant properties.

How To Contact Vacant Property Owners

Now that you’ve located the owner of the vacant property that you’re looking to purchase, you’ll have to get in contact with the owner.  If you have done a proper investigation then contacting the owner should be a relatively easy task.  We are going to offer a few suggestions about how to go about contacting the owner. 

Method # 1 One very popular method to use is a letter to the owner.  Our suggestion is to find as many of the owners of the family as possible so that you can write several letters and send them to everyone you can find.  This is especially true if you know that the owner is deceased.  However, even if the owner is alive, you’ll increase your chances of making contact if you go out of your way to write letters to several people.  Here’s why……..

Many people who abandon properties are in debt and receive many letters from debt collectors and probably even other people who want to buy their property.  Yet if you get lots of letters that you don’t want to receive then after a while you’ll stop opening the mail.  I can remember going to one house of a man that I wanted to contact and I saw my letter to him, unopened, on the floor in a pile of other mail in a room full of junk.  If I had just contacted him, he would have never gotten back to me.  Luckily, by sending a letter to his daughter, she did open the letter and called her dad who in turn called me and we bought the property.  So send out as many letters as you can and you’ll have better results.

Letters…Rule # 1 Always Hand Write The Address On The Envelope.  You will increase the amount of letters that get opened by 90%.  It creates a sense of curiousity and people wonder who it’s from.

Rule # 2 Send more than 1 letter and send to as many people as possible.  To save time, you can print out a form letter and just hand write in the name of the person you need to contact and the address of the property they own.

Method # 2.  Oversized postcards.  The reason we say oversized postcards is because they stand out in a pile of mail.  If you have never used the site before, we recommend www.VistaPrint.com for your postcards.  They have high quality cards and you can design them with your logo if you have one or easily customize the card to suit your needs. 

Method # 3.  Phone calls.  It’s very important to seperate yourself from the pack of other investors who are likely contacting the owners as well.  Especially if it’s a property in a popular investment area.  I know that many people have a huge fear of the phone, but once you make a call or two you’ll lose your fear.  Remember, people are mostly willing to help you if you are kind and appreciative and humble.  Remember, be sly as a fox and sweet as a lamb. 

Method # 4 Personally visiting the house.  This is very underutilized in the real estate industry.  People forget that we are in the people business.  So our recommendation is that once you have tried the other methods of contact, you should go to the house where the person lives.  If they are not home, you should leave them a hand written note letting them know you stopped by.  If they are there, it’s a perfect time to introduce yourself and build a relationship.  It’s a very powerful method and one that is often overlooked.

I hope that you will be able to successfully contact the owners of the properties you want to buy by utilizing this information. 

In our next blog, we’ll be talking about some of the issues that come along with vacant property acquisitions.  If we can help you out in any way just let us know at http://www.WeFindOwners.com

How To Locate A Vacant Property Owner

Now that you’ve found out who owns the property that you’re looking for, you’ll have to make contact with them somehow.  We always suggest a phone call because you can build a relationship with the owner and you don’t have to rely on them calling you back from a letter.

You will have to actually locate the person who owns the property before you can contact them.  You may get lucky and the owner may still be at the off site mailing address.  However, in our experience we’ve found that most don’t.  When we first started in our business, we sent out hundreds of letters and most of them came back return to sender because we didn’t realize that the owners didn’t keep their information up to date.  But, the more we thought about it, the more we realized that when an owner owes back taxes on the property it’s not likely that they want to be found.

You can certainly speak to the neighbors and find out what they know.  But that is very time consuming and you’ll have to go to the neighbors houses when they’re home.  You’ll also have to gain their trust and some people just aren’t willing to give you any information.  They may also not know anything about the owners whereabouts, so that leaves you to do some online investigating.

I’ve compiled a list of sites where you can go to do some people finding of your own.  These sites will give you some up to date information on people.  The more information you have, the better your chances of finding the information you’re looking for.  We would also suggest trying to find the relatives of the owner and contacting them too.  These searches can get expensive if you don’t know what you’re doing.  Plan to spend about $25.00 for a basic search and sometimes over $100 for a comprehensive report.  There’s no guarantee and you’ll pay for every search even if it turns up no valuable information.  But you may have some great information which will get you right to the owner.

Here is the list of sites we recommend using.

•  www.Address.com
•  www.Anywho.com
•  www.AOL Whitepages
•  www.Infospace.com
•  www.Intelius.com
•  www.PeopleFinders.com
•  www.People.Yahoo.com
•  www.Privateeye.com
•  www.Superpages.com
•  www.Switchboard.com
•  www.Ussearch.com
•  www.Whitepages.com
•  www.Worldpages.com
•  www.Zabasearch.com

I’m sure there are more sites, but this should be a good start.  Of course you can also hire a skip tracing service.  We are one of those types of services and many investors have found our services an incredibly valuable resource.  We actually guarantee our service and never charge up front fees.  If we can help you locate the people you are looking for, please contact us at our website at www.WeFindOwners.com

In our next blog we will eb talking about the different methods you can use to contact the owners.

Remember when gathering information about a person, you’ll want to be as sly as a fox and as sweet as a lamb.  People will be skeptical of your motives so be kind and appreciative of their talking to you.

Talk to you next time!