In the next few minutes you are going to learn a couple of quick tips on finding the owners of vacant and abandoned houses.
One of the fastest ways to find great wholesale real estate deals in your city is to find the neighborhoods which are typically priced below the median price of a home and are working class rental neighborhoods.

Get out there on a Saturday morning, start driving the streets, take a notepad and a pen and start writing down the addresses of houses that look like they are vacant, abandoned, boarded up, distressed, have fire damage or you name it. If it is ugly and when you see a house that is beat-up or run down, write the address down.

Signs Of Wholesale Real Estate And Bargain Houses

Here are some of the tell tale signs of distress. One sign is tall grass in the front yard. Or, if you live in a snowy state and drive through a neighborhood after a snowstorm, here is what you might see. If most of the houses in the neighborhood have tracks in the driveway, but you see a house that does not, it is a great indication that nobody lives in the house.

The obvious ones are boarded up windows, broken windows and even disconnected gas meters. There are a lot of signs that a house is either not lived in, abandoned or vacant for some reason. These are the best addresses to write down.

Contact The Owners Of The Wholesale Real Estate

Once you have your list of property addresses, check out your local county assessor or county clerk & recorder website. In order to find the website for your local county clerk or assessor, go to Google and search for your county name plus clerk & recorder or tax assessor. Locate the real estate or property records section and search for the address.

On every tax record, there is a mailing address for the owner and then there is the property address of the house you wrote down. Sometimes they are the same and sometimes they are different. If the mailing address and the property address match, then the owner lives in the house. If the addresses are different, then the owner does not live at the property, so the property may be a rental or just abandoned. What you are looking for is the owner of the property.

In my ten years of experience, the best deals are properties where the mailing address and the property address are different and the owner lives out of state. Think about this, you find a vacant and abandoned house and the owner lives out of state, they may not even know that their tenants have moved out and abandoned the property. They may not even know what is going on.

Here is what you are going to do next. Once you get the name of the owner and their address, you are going to go online and look up their phone number. To do this, you will take their name and their address, go to anywho.com, whitepages.com, 411.com and look up the owner information. Start building your list of all the owners of these abandoned, vacant houses.

Pick Up The Phone And Call

The next step is to pick up the phone and call the owner. Make the connection with the owners and start the dialogue. It is more important to focus on finding out the motivation for selling than it is to focus on the details of the house. Build rapport and be pleasant. You are trying to help them solve a problem. If that means you end up buying their house, then that is great. If it only means that you were kind enough to inform them that their house has been abandoned, well that is ok too.

The more rapport you build today with as many out of state owners of distressed houses as you can, the more likely you are to buy a wholesale real estate deal very soon.