Posted by Brad Crouch on January 19, 2003 at 15:05:14:
Bill & Dev,
Try a title company. They usually (in my area - California) will give you a list of absentee owners for free . . . if you agree to use their title co. to close any deals that result. And they will continue to provide “farm lists” for 6 months or a year, or however long it takes them to decide that providing these lists to you is not profitable for them. If this should happen, simply move on to a “different” title co., and start over.
Try asking them to filter these lists a bit to target the absentee owners as tightly as possible, ie:
Absentee owners within your own state, who own properties within the zip codes surrounding your own geographic location (cuts down on the driving).
Single family residences and Condos, only.
Lot sizes greater than 1 acre are to be “excluded”.
Houses with greater square footage than 2,500 square feet are to be excluded.
Absentee owners that live within your county and within ALL adjoining counties, are to be excluded (that puts the absentee owners in the same boat as the out of state owners . . . except that the owners who live only two counties away, might be trying to save some money by managing the property themselves, hence, having a higher motivation level).
Delete duplicate names (no sense in sending several letters, several times, to the same person).
This is MY list criteria, and the list should reflect whatever YOU want. The point is to make it “tightly targeted”.
Ask the title company to send you an electronic list (a file attached to an e-mail), in DOS ASCII format, as a comma delimited file. Work out with the title co. what the field names will be of the records in the file they are sending you, and which ones you want/need. Then run a spreadsheet program and create all the field names you have both decided upon. Save the spreadsheet (so you have a “template”) and then import the file into your spreadsheet program, after having deleted the field names at the top of the “electronic file” you have been sent. Don’t really “delete” these field names, just remove them from the file you are importing.
If this list does not give you enough names to satisfy you, simply expand the “zip code” criteria in an ever widening radius from your location, till you have the quanitity of names that you desire.
Hope this helps,
Brad