We always get asked for niche lists, etc, to determine motivated sellers. We’ll make a series of posts on how we determine motivation factors for the purposes of wholesaling real-estate.

Getting Started

Using your city’s 311 service you can “Virtually D4D” to find off market deals that might not be in commercial real-estate software such as batch leads and/or propstream. Look at your city’s 311 service, it’s public data and will have hundreds of reports such as abandoned lots, homeless activity, high grass, etc..

Majority of the time this is what cities utilize to determine code violations/enforcement, so if you request that list, you’ll be ahead. Additionally, these are updated daily and typically have the “incident opened date” which you can easily sort by.

1. Find the website (Google 311 service request your city name) – For example for Houston, TX this information may be found here
2. Locate the full data list (This will be raw data, you will need to open it with excel or a text editor (Notepad ++ works great).
3. Format the data (Depending on the city, this might already be categorized such as Vacant/Overgrown Property, or it might have a full description. If it does have a description
   
   Here’s some of the keywords you can look for: ABANDONDED, unoccupied, homeless, squatting, prostitution,uninhabitable,disconnected,,destroyed, water leaks, damage, rodent, utilities, moved out, not secure,maintain property, encampment.
4. Determine the full address and now tie this information together to your county appraisal data which should have the owner name/mail address.
5. Once you tie these determine the parcel # and identify if there’s any tax delinquencies, or any other indicators you typically use to increase the likelihood of a motivated seller (i.e. tax liens, evictions, etc..)
6. Contact the property owner and make an offer!

This is a great way to find vacant properties as neighbors or people that have an intimate knowledge of those neighborhoods are the ones that report these properties which tend to be eyesores for their communities.

Conclusion

We will continue adding new posts on finding data leads for your next deal!