Has Anyone Used Tax Assessors Mail List
HI,
I am looking for a way to contact all the owners of property in a certain area. The area is divided up into 4000 SF residential lots, with only a few filled. The rest are empty. It is not a developement area, just a rural area that does not have a lot of action on it.
I am going thru the county tax records and getting the mailing address for each of the parcels and then sending a letter, letting them know I am interested in their property.
Has anyone else tried this?
Upon first glance I see that some of the records are probably outdated and the letter will never reach anyone, but I figured it is worth a try even though it is a lot of work.
I have tried it and it may or may not work for you. I found a great deal once doing just that.
GOOD LUCK
unomateo--(CA)-----------------
I think what you are doing makes a lot of sense. I'd recommend that you hit the owners with a solictation about two or three times a year. Over and over again. Then, you might hit an individual owner just when s/he has decided to sell.
You can save yourself a tremendous amount of time and effort if you subscribe to a service that has the tax assessor's records on a CD ROM disc or on the internet. There are three companies that I know that you should investigate:
www. FARES . com
www. dataquick . com
and www. parcelquest . com
(remove the added spaces)
The last is less expensive and has somewhat less information about a property. It should be adequate for your use. You can buy a disc from them for about $215 that has the whole county tax roll on it. You can select properties to pull up dependent upon many different fields, such as the assessor's parcel number or zipcode. Then you can put out the owners' names, tax bill mailing addresses, and perhaps the property id to a database. Then you use the database to print out lables or letters.
If your time is worth money, this may be far cheaper than doing it as you are now.
And you have the data disc sitting around for other uses, such as looking up comparables, other solicitation campaigns, etc.
Good Investing**********Ron Starr***********
[ Edited by RonaldStarr on Date 05/11/2004 ][ Edited by RonaldStarr on Date 05/11/2004 ]
HI,
Thanks for the advice.
I am actually a programmer, so I have been able to get the address from the tax assessor's website fairly quickly. I made a program that you enter the parcel number into and it automatically formats the address of the owner of the parcel and enters the parcel number and the address into a letter that I print and send. It takes about 2 seconds to get a letter created
If anyone needs help with something like this, let me know I can help.
Ron,
Do you award of any company provide this kind of service in Michigan? Thanks.
s48098--(MI)------------\
The first two URLs are for companies that do this nationwide. They provide the service for many of the most populous counties, not the lesser-populated ones.
Check the assessor's office. Ask them if anybody buys their information and resells it. Also check with other investors in your area. Look in the yellow pages of the phone book under "real estate services."
Good Investing*************Ron Starr*********
I contacted Riverside county to get a mailing list. They said it was $55 dollars and then 10 cents per label. They did not know how much it would be to get the list in Excel formal, or any other computer format to do your own mailing lists. Also the only info they would give you is APN, and mail to address.
on ever letter you send, print on the envelope "address correction requested" the post office will send the letter back with the forwarding address if it exists.
thanks for the advice
do you print it on the return address, or above the mail to address?