Most veteran real estate investors will tell you: The harder it is to find a property, the better the deal will be.
Why? One reason, people – lack of competition.
Been on the MLS lately? How’s your deal flow from realtors? Yeah, me too…
The days of foreclosures and good deals on every block are gone (for now). Sure there are still some good deals out there, but you have to work to find them.
You need to be quicker than your competition. Every hurdle you meet and overcome, is a hurdle that potentially stopped some other investor.
The Deals are in the Lists
Because there are not as many easy deals out there, many investors have turned to direct mail. You know… finding a list of potentially motivated sellers, writing a note or formal letter to them, and hoping they respond with good news of them wanting to sell their properties.
Some examples of situations involving motivated sellers include:
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Foreclosures
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Divorces
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Probate
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Tax Liens
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Vacant Buildings
You get the idea, right? You probably have some ideas for your own lists. Many times you can buy these lists from the Internet. But they can be expensive.
One source for finding these lists is your local county or city government offices. They have to keep all the records on properties, court cases, construction permits and pretty much everything that goes on with real estate. And they have this great habit of making the data public – for free – well, other than the taxes you pay of course.
Government and Technology – Like Oil and Water
But the government is not all that interested in helping you become rich as a real estate investor. They are not going to put these lists in a nice spreadsheet format. They don’t care about inserting the names into your mailings so you can bring in tons of good deals. Bummer, right?
Many times they will give you a paper copy of their list. Or they will send you the list as a PDF. Not much you can do with that though... you need Excel or some other spreadsheet.
Want to retype the names and addresses? Me neither. I just found a list of vacant buildings all over my local city and it had 500 names on it – as a PDF. Screw typing that out!
We at Real Estate Mogul believe in taking the difficult and making it easy. Since the government won’t take a PDF and convert it, we put our problem-solving hats on and did some digging – and found a website that would. Yay us and yay cool website!
OCR can be your BFF
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. Many scanners use it to extract information out of a document when the document is scanned into a digital format such as a PDF. Now there is also a website that will use this technology to pull information from your PDF documents and put it into an excel format.
The website is called OnlineOCR.net; make it be your friend. Why? Because all you have to do is upload your file, fill out a ‘captcha’ number (to make sure you are human), select what type of file to convert to (Word, Excel, etc.) and hit ‘Recognize.’ The website will do the rest. Here is a cool, quick video showing how it’s done.
The service is free to start and if you set up an account, you get 25 free pages. After that, it’s only about $5 for each additional 50 pages of documents. That’s only 10 cents per page! Try to buy a list for that cheap from an online service. Remember that a page may have 30-50 or more names on it.
As an example, I went down to my county offices and found a 12-page list of about 500 names of owners of vacant buildings in the area. Here is what the PDF looked like:
After I plugged it into the website, I downloaded an Excel file that looked like this:
As you can see, the list won’t be perfect and ready to go in ‘Mail Merge’ mode, but it is a far cry from typing the names in yourself.
There is a free version of this software, which you can use without registering, but it will only convert the first page of your document. That isn’t too helpful when you have a list like the one above with 12 pages.
Now Go Get Those Deals
Some of your competition will take a look at these lists and think it is too much work to mail to them – I know you are different.
As we try to break down these barriers to finding the good deals for you, you will be able to take action quickly and grab the deal before someone else can get their hands on it. Good luck with your hunt!
Brainstorm – Think about all the people who might be motivated to sell. Could these people be put on a list that you could mail to?
Research Where to Find the Lists – There are many online brokers, other investors, title agencies and government offices that are ready to help you find deals – with varying fees assessed.
Dig Deep to Find the Deals – Do the things that other people won’t do. Network with strangers, send out direct mail, drive through neighborhoods – whatever it takes to find the good deals. One deal can completely recoup your costs and make you much more. Go find it!
Use Technology to Make the Difficult More Simple – Once you figure out how to find the deals, figure out ways to make it simpler to find the deals next time. OCR, like what this website offers, is a great example of how to make it easier.
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.