Finding property owners for a list of addresses after driving for dollars

Question

Once a stack of addresses has been collected from spotting distressed properties, the ownership lookup is usually the next bottleneck. Zillow's estimate pages don't show owner information, and most county sites split the record between a parcel search that wants a parcel number nobody has yet and a separate recorder site. The workable free route is usually the county assessor's site, which typically allows an address search rather than requiring a parcel number, and returns the owner name and mailing address once the parcel comes up. The recorder's office is only needed for a deed history or lien check, not for basic ownership. Paid skip tracing earns its cost mainly at volume or for owners whose mailing address differs from the property address, since the free county route only returns what's on record. For a stack of 60, working the assessor site first and reserving paid skip tracing for what it can't resolve is the more efficient split.

Rena Guide · Accepted Answer

The free county route is workable and it's where almost everyone starts. Two corrections to what you've been told, though.

Assessor records and recorder records do different jobs. The assessor holds the tax roll: parcel number, owner of record, tax mailing address, assessed value, and usually a rough building description. That's the file you want for outreach, and the tax mailing address is the single most useful field on it, because when it differs from the property address you're likely looking at an absentee or inherited situation. The recorder holds documents, deeds, mortgages, liens, and that's where you look later when you're checking whether the person you're talking to can actually sell.

On @ryanmck27's point about sale prices: that depends entirely on your state. Roughly a dozen states are non-disclosure, meaning sale prices aren't part of the public record at all, so the parcel page will show ownership and assessment and no price history. Ownership is public everywhere. Price is not.

Many county GIS maps do let you click a parcel and get the number, which solves your search problem. If yours doesn't, the assessor office will usually answer the phone and tell you how their own site works.

Skip tracing sits after this step, not instead of it. You feed it a name and address to get phone numbers, so you need the county record first. And expect the tax roll to lag. Owner of record can be months behind an actual transfer, and a house that just sold to another investor will still show the old owner. Cross-check before you mail 60 cards.

ryanmck27 · Answer

The assessor site is the answer, you just need the address-to-parcel step. Most of them have a hidden address search under something like "property lookup" or the GIS map, where you click the parcel and it gives you the number. Once you have the parcel you get owner, mailing address, and every past sale price, so you can also see what they paid. Skip tracing is only for phone numbers.

ehernandez74 · Answer

@rena-guide the non-disclosure point explains something that's been bothering me for weeks. I kept assuming my county's site was just bad.

dmitri_248 · Answer

Worth knowing the deed type when the recorder search comes back. A quitclaim into a trust or a transfer-on-death instrument says a lot about who the actual negotiation will be with, and in the inherited cases it may be several people who don't speak to each other.

karen_whitfield · Answer

Sixty addresses is small enough to do by hand in two evenings. I'd do that before paying for anything, if only so you learn what the fields mean when a vendor later summarizes them for you.

devon_pierce · Answer

@karen_whitfield That approach holds up but the timeline tends to run longer than people expect. Working through 90 addresses that way typically takes closer to five evenings than two. Some parcels are split, some have a legal description that doesn't match the street address, and in a batch like that it's common for roughly a fifth to come back with an LLC as owner, which then needs a separate lookup on the secretary of state site.

luis_carrera · Answer

The LLC layer is where this kind of search often stalls out completely. Registered agent as a law firm downtown, member names not listed in the state's records, is a dead end on its own, and lists like this routinely end up with a stack of addresses sitting in a spreadsheet doing nothing.

nataliehsu · Answer

Can you not just mail the LLC at its registered address? Someone opens that mail eventually.

devon_pierce · Answer

@nataliehsu that approach can work, but the response rate on mail sent to a registered agent's office tends to be poor, since that mail is often forwarded elsewhere or simply discarded. @luis_carrera, worth noting that some states list members or managers in an entity's annual report even when the original formation documents kept that information private. Checking the annual report rather than only the original filing can surface ownership information that would otherwise stay hidden.

luis_carrera · Answer

The annual report is worth checking before writing off a dead end. Many stalled owner searches aren't actually dead, they just stopped at the wrong record, which is either good news or another round of evenings on the county site.

nataliehsu · Answer

Fair. So an LLC-owned distressed house is worth less as a lead than an individually owned one, purely because of research cost? That reframes how I'd sort a list.

Finding property owners for a list of addresses after driving for dollars

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