Turning a year and a half of notebook entries on vacant houses into something usable
A common bird-dogging situation: someone spots vacant houses through their day job, in this case job sites, and keeps informal notes over time without any system behind it. Say the notebook has 60-plus entries: street name and house number, sometimes a date, sometimes a detail like plywood on a back window or a tarp that's been there two winters. What's usually missing from a list built this way is owner names, whether any of the properties have sold since the note was taken, current occupancy, and any sense of which entries are actually worth pursuing. Notes older than a year in particular need re-verification, since some of those houses will have already sold and been renovated. The two practical questions worth answering first: whether an 18-month-old note on a vacant house still has value or the whole list needs a fresh pass, and how to find the current owner. County assessor sites often show an owner name and mailing address, but that reflects whenever the last deed was recorded, not necessarily who owns it today, so it needs to be checked against more current records, whether that's a free public search or a paid skip-tracing service. The practical move for someone in this position is usually to triage: spend limited time re-verifying which properties on the list are still genuinely vacant, prioritizing the entries with the strongest signs of abandonment, rather than treating the whole list as equally worth chasing.
