The Absentee Owner Goldmine

In several articles I talk about many low and no cost methods to build a buyers list of investors that you can wholesale your real estate investor deals to. Sometimes, it is worth it to spend a little money to build a much higher quality list of investors. That is the topic for this article.

Sure, building a buyers list of 300 people in a month is great, but how many of them are truly serious buyers? If you are primarily using e-mail as your media for communicating with them and you have a great e-mail service to get those e-mails out quickly--regardless of the number on your list--then having a big list is not much work and is a great base. But, what if instead of having 300 people that are interested in deals, you had a list of 30 people that have bought a deal as an investor in the last 3 months? Wouldn't that be a small, but higher quality list?

Well, that's the beauty of what I call the "Absentee Owner Goldmine".

There is a way to easily get a list of all the people in your market that have purchased a property in the last 3 months (or any time period you define) where they are having the tax bill for the property sent to an address other than the property address. This list is called the absentee owner list.

What does that mean exactly? Well, most people that are living in the house as an owner occupant have their tax bill for the property sent to the address of the house. The people that tend not to have the tax bill sent to the property are the people that are not living in the property themselves. Folks not living in the property are usually investors. So, what you are getting is a mailing list of investors when you get a list of absentee owners.

Why is this list so valuable to you and me when we are building our wholesale buyers list? Investors tend to buy more than one investment property and have a high probability of being interested in deals you find as a wholesaler. So, this list is a list of people that likely invested before recently and are likely to invest again.

So, how do we dig in and extract the gold from this mine? I prefer to do it by mailing a post card to them with a particular deal that tells them to contact me if they are interested in.

Then, once they contact me, I get their permission to put them on my investor buyers list. I make sure I have their e-mail for e-mail blasts, phone for calling or voice broadcasts, fax for fax blasts and updated address in case the address I have was not the best one.

Once I have their permission and their e-mail, phone number and fax number I can send out deal notifications to them at a much more cost effective rate than having to do a postal mailing to a larger list. The people that have responded become your highly qualified investor list that you can share your deals with.

Until my next post,

James