How to Find and Flip Estate Sale Properties

Mike: Welcome back to the flipnerd.com REI Classroom, where experts from across the real estate investing industry teach you quick lessons to take your business to the next level. And now, let’s meet today’s expert host.
Jason: Hi there, everyone, it’s Jason Lucchesi with jasonlucchesi.com. I’m your host today for the REI Classroom, and we’re going to be discussing how to find and flip estate sale properties.
Mike: This REI Classroom real estate lesson is sponsored by theinvestormachine.com, FlipNerd’s private investor coaching program, and your blueprint to investing success.
Jason: Now, for those of you that aren’t familiar with estate sale properties, it’s when somebody unfortunately passes away, and they leave their estate up for sale. So essentially it could almost be labeled as a probate. Sometimes it is labeled as probate. Estate sales are slightly different. It’s where it’s already gone out of probate, and maybe the executor of the estate has already taken over the estate and wants to sell the property.
Now, I will tell you this, you can find the information for these individuals through the County Recorder’s Office. You could find them through probate initially. Once it gets out of the estate then it becomes a little bit of a challenge once it gets out of probate. Now, I will tell you this, it’s very easy to find their contact information by just simply going down to the County Recorder’s Office and getting that information.
Now, I will tell you some states have gone online, which is awesome, you don’t have to drive out any more, and have to deal with the awesome government employees. So the cool thing is, that you guys can do, is just go there, grab that information for . . . I grab the executor of the estate and all of the people that are heirs. I grab all of their contact information.
Then, what I do from there is I use a skip tracing service. You could either use a skip tracing service like TLO, or I like to use Spokeo, and Spokeo is spokeo.com, and that will allow you to pick up the information of those individuals. It’ll get you the address, it will get you the phone number, and possibly an email address. But you’ll at least have some contact information for them that way, and if you can’t find their information by calling them or by shooting them some sort of a direct mail, you could also find them on LinkedIn or Facebook. You know I like using LinkedIn and Facebook quite a bit.
You could also reach out to attorneys, the attorneys that deal with individuals that just had a loved one pass away. It does go through probate, so the executor of the estate does have to deal with an attorney. And the best thing that you could do is you could reach out to attorneys to see if they have any executors that are looking to liquidate their estates.
So that’s another great way for you to be reaching out to folks to see if they are looking to do anything. And plus it’s coming from a referral. So if you know the attorney personally, you’re getting an endorsement from this individual, and it’s going to help you out dramatically with being able to have a strong tie-in when you’re wanting to talk to the executor of the estate, plus you’re more than likely to be talking to the heirs as well.
Now, another great way for you to do this is, is on the multiple listing service, the MLS. There’s a feature already enabled on the MLS for finding estate sale properties. All you need to do is have a real estate agent, or if you’re like me, I’m a non-licensed real estate agent’s assistant and I have access to the MLS.
You could simply get that by having a real estate agent help you with that. And we could be going over that potentially on another future REI Classroom here, but for now for this sake, I just want to make sure that we get through and cover this information, so that you can start implementing it immediately.
So on the MLS, you could find estate sale properties, and you could go on there, search for the areas that you wanted to buy in, and you could go on there and find out exactly what’s going on.
Now, I recommend, when you are finding estate sale properties either on the MLS or through County Recorder’s Office, that you do your due diligence to see if it’s even a property that you’re more than likely going to want. So what that’s going to entail is just do a quick due diligence, and then after that, make sure you call the actual listing agent if your agent isn’t the one that’s the listing agent. Because it’s going to help you find out a lot of information.
Say, for instance, the property is listed for 100,000. We know it’s only worth maybe 105, so we want to see if we could potentially get it at a much lower substantial price. So the best thing to do is reach out, contact the listing agent, see what type of information you could get besides just making an offer, throwing your offer up against a wet wall, seeing if it’s going to stick. That’s not the best way to approach it, so I would just make sure you reach out to the agent, find out exactly what’s going on, and see if you could potentially put in an offer.
That’s the best approach that I would give in trying to get together some estate sale properties. You are going to be able to find multiple estate sale properties on a monthly basis, so it is going to be very, very consistent.
So with that being said, this particular episode of the REI Classroom is how to find and flip estate sale properties. If you would like more information on this topic, make sure you visit my website at jasonlucchesi.com. And I will talk to you on future episodes. Take care. Go flip a house today. Take care.
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