You’ve been driving around looking at properties for hours. You’re tired and ready to end your driving for dollars route when you see it: the perfect investment opportunity. It’s in a decent neighborhood, but the grass is grown up, the porch is falling in, and the paint on the shutters is chipping, revealing the dark brown wood underneath. If there’s a deal in this neighborhood, this has got to be it.
You get out of your car and carefully make your way up the littered driveway to the foot of the porch. Slowly, you mount the steps and take a deep breath before knocking on the door. Unfortunately, there’s no answer and you’re left wondering what you can do to get this gloriously dilapidated house under contract.
Lucky for you, knocking on the door isn’t the only way to locate the homeowner. So whether you’ve run into a dead end while driving for dollars or your real estate lead generation software has let you down, this guide will show you how to get in contact with the person who holds the keys to your next paycheck!
Finding out who owns a property
Once you discover a promising real estate opportunity, getting in touch with the owner can be trickier than you might expect. In an ideal world, they’ll open the door if you knock on it or call you as soon as they receive your mailer. However, this isn’t always the case.
Sometimes you’ll be greeted by a renter who has no idea why you’re visiting and isn’t interested in passing along their landlord’s information. Other times you won’t receive an answer at all. In those cases, you’ll need to do some research and find an alternative way of making contact.
Surprisingly, this is much simpler than you might expect. Property ownership is a matter of public information, so all you have to do is conduct a public records search using the address of the property.
You can usually conduct this search through the county’s public records office or their website. Counties usually have several public records branches, so depending on the county, you may have to specifically use the county tax assessor’s website for real estate related inquiries.
The downside to this method is that it’s a slow, manual process. You’ll end up searching for each property on your list individually, so if you have a lengthy list, it’s going to slow your workflow to a crawl. It also won’t help you if the property you’re interested in is owned by an LLC.
Another option is to network with local real estate agents. A good realtor will have a strong network in their market and may be able to help you get in touch with the owner of the property you’re targeting. This is also a great way to generate leads, and we recommend having great relationships with as many realtors as you can. Of course, this process may require a lot of work compared to what you get out of it.
That’s why many investors simply work directly with a title company to perform a title search. If you’re fairly certain about a deal and you want to take action on it, then a title search will do more than help you find the owner. It will also give you an overview of the property’s history and show you whether or not the property has any liens on it.
Unfortunately, a title search may help you identify the owner, but it won’t always give you a reliable way to contact them. If you’re wondering how to find the owner of a property, it may also prove less fruitful than expected because the information on a title isn’t always as reliable as you might expect. Sometimes, addresses and lot names aren’t the same, meaning your title search may not return any results at all.
Using real estate lead generation software
If you’re looking for the entire package: simplicity, quickness, thoroughness, and accuracy, then a real estate lead generation platform is the best answer. The right platform will aggregate all the public records you need, including property taxes, property deeds, and other key information from a variety of data sources. This way, you won’t have to spend time scouring the county recorder’s website just for a single piece of information. All the data you need will be in one place. You’ll even be able to see past the corporate veil and discover the true owners of LLC-owned properties.
In short, this option combines all the benefits of each of the methods discussed earlier without any of the downsides. Using the right platform to search for a homeowner is as simple as selecting the property you’re targeting and looking at who the owner is. Then you can take your search a step further with a process known as skip tracing.
Skip tracing is the act of uncovering ways to get in touch with a person. In the modern real estate industry, it refers to using a data service to retrieve contact information including phone numbers, email addresses, and personal mailing addresses.
If you use a platform like BatchLeads to skip trace owners, you’ll even get phone numbers and email addresses for the primary owner and their spouse (if applicable), phone line information, reachability insights, and warnings that will tell you if the number is on the Federal DNC or is tied to a known litigator.
The best part about using this kind of platform is that it will speed up your workflow significantly. Instead of searching for properties manually, you can easily create lists filled with thousands of properties and retrieve contact information in minutes. Then you can export it, import it directly into your dialer, or scan for motivating factors all in one place.
Getting reliable real estate data
As you can see, there are many ways to find out who owns a property. But if you’ve been involved in real estate for any length of time, you know that just because you can find information, that doesn’t make it reliable.
The internet is filled with property data that’s either outdated or simply wrong. In fact, some studies have estimated that only 10-15% of the real estate information you find online is accurate. When you’re investing in real estate, time is essential, and using a platform that constantly feeds you incorrect information, disconnected numbers, and unreliable owner data can cost you deals and make your workflow much more frustrating.
In the video below, we explain how dirty data can hurt your search for property owners instead of helping it.
Unreliable data can make finding property owners much more difficult.
To find quality data for your property owner searches, you should choose a reputable data platform. You should also look for a platform that improves and optimizes data internally instead of simply reselling it from a third-party source.
For example, BatchLeads’ data is pulled from a variety of sources, optimized and tested internally, and then tested externally with a user feedback loop. This way, investors using BatchLeads can always trust that the property and ownership information they see is accurate. Investors using BatchLeads can confidently market to property owners, because the data they’re using has proven to be accurate time and time again.
Conclusion
When it comes to how to find the owner of a property, there’s one method that stands out from the rest. Picking the right real estate lead generation software will save you a significant amount of time when you’re ready to track down property owners and start negotiating.
As a real estate investor, the most important thing you can do is pick a solution that provides data you can trust. If you’re constantly calling disconnected or wrong numbers and asking for people who haven’t lived at a property in 10 years, you’re going to have a hard time closing deals and making money.
