My county files about 40 NODs a month and I've never once acted on any of them

Question

I pull the Notice of Default filings from the county recorder every month, have been doing it for about eight months now. Skagit County, Washington. Forty-ish per month on average, sometimes fewer. I have not converted a single one into a closed deal or a fee. I want to be clear about that before anything else.

The filings are public, the address is right there, and I can usually find the owner's name on the assessor site in about four minutes. That part is not hard. What I have not figured out is the contact step. I mailed twelve letters over a three-month stretch, handwritten, not printed. Two responses, both asking me to stop contacting them. I knocked on one door in February and the owner was polite but had already listed with an agent the week before.

So I have a clean list every month and no results. What I am trying to work out is whether the problem is timing, which is probably yes, or whether NOD-stage owners in this area are just already getting buried in mail from every other person who pulls the same public record. Probably both.

I am not bird dogging full time. I have LP positions in four deals and this is more of a side experiment. But I have put maybe sixty hours into this over eight months and $140 in postage and have nothing to show for it. Would genuinely like to know what the contact method looks like for someone who has actually closed off a distressed-owner lead.

gio_marchetti5 · Answer

What week of the default period are you hitting them with the letter?

meilinzhou · Answer

The letter thing probably isn't the medium problem, it's the message problem. In 2021 I was mailing NOD lists in Snohomish County and I had the same dead silence until I stopped writing anything that sounded like I wanted something from them. The letters that got responses were the ones where I led with a specific number, not an offer, just a number. Something like "based on the assessor records your place is around 1,400 square feet on a 6,200 square foot lot, I can close without financing in 18 days if the situation calls for it." That specificity changed the response rate meaningfully. Not dramatically, but from nothing to occasional.

The one that cost me was a Marysville owner I reached by phone after tracking down a number through a skip trace service I was paying $49 a month for. She called back, we talked twice, I got excited and told my capital partner we probably had something. She went with a local agent who listed it short, it sold for $312,000, and I had mentally penciled in a $4,200 finder fee. Zero. What I should have learned and didn't apply fast enough is that NOD-stage in a county like Skagit or Snohomish means the window is maybe three to four weeks before someone else has already talked to them four times. Sixty hours over eight months is not a pace problem. It's that the response needs to happen within days of the filing, not weeks.

My county files about 40 NODs a month and I've never once acted on any of them

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