How to Build a List to Target House Flippers
I'm going to show you how to find house flippers for free by searching county records. This is a great list not just for real estate agents, but also for wholesalers looking to find cash buyers.
Ariel Herrera 0:00
With real estate transactions falling many agents are questioning is there a better way to find leads for people looking to sell properties? Well in this video, I'm going to show you how to find house flippers for free by searching county records. This is a great list not just for real estate agents, but also for wholesalers looking to find cash buyers. My name is Ariel Herrera, your fellow data scientist with the analytics aerial channel, where we bridge the gap between real estate and technology if you enjoy data driven solutions, and please subscribe as well like this content if you want to see more creative lead lists, so I know to make more of it in the future. Alright, let's get started. In this video, I'm going to show you how you're going to find house flippers, so you can create your own list to market to this is going to be a step by step approach that you'll be able to replicate for your own county. So for the first step, what exactly is a house flipper a house flipper is someone that you've probably seen on HGTV, that they purchase a property, they rehab it, so maybe they're changing out the cabinets the flooring, or painting, they're adding value to the property, then they sell it for a higher price, usually to a first time homebuyer or possibly to another investor, the goal for house flipping is to turn a profit but also to flip the house within a short span of time. A lot of these times the house flippers are using hard money lending, which is a loan that may only extend for six months. So in this case, house flippers are purchasing and selling the property within a usual four to six month timeframe. That's why for this methodology, I want to look at all properties that have sold within two years and see have they sold twice. This may indicate that it is a house flipper and I'm going to show you how to see the property owner as well as how to contact them. This is really great for agents because as an agent, it can be difficult to find people who actually want to sell their homes and this is a very motivated list flippers have to sell and why not you be the agent that sells these properties. For them. The benefit here also is that flippers are routinely selling properties if they have a good system. Therefore, you could be selling multiple properties at a repeatable cadence, which will help you with your own numbers. In addition, this is useful for wholesalers so that they could find cash buyers. Great. So now that you have an understanding of house flipping, the next step is to go to your own Property Appraiser county site. So I reside in the Tampa area. I'm looking at Hillsborough County, which is specific to Tampa. However, if you search on Google, whichever county you're in Property Appraiser, you should come to some sort of online database where you'll be able to search for past sales. So for the first step here, I entered and that I want to see properties within the last two years. So I'm going back to July 1 of 2020. Next, I want to focus in on one particular zip code. So I'm focusing in on 33605, which is in downtown Tampa. Next, I only want to look at single family homes. So I'm selecting that zone, you might be thinking, Well, how did you know the zone for single family properties? Pretty simple.
I went over to Zillow, I searched the zip code that I'm interested in, I selected a property under Home details, I went down to facts and features. And then here I could see information on the lot as well as property information, which includes zoning. So in this case, I know that single family properties are going to be Rs 50. And this could change from zip code to zip code. So make sure that you are aware for single family properties what the zoning is. And if you're looking for, say commercial properties, you can also go to your county and see what the zoning is. So once I click search, I have results here and total of 370 records of properties that were sold within the last two years just at a glance, I could see it there it is a property here that was bought and sold within a short period of time. This is exactly what I want to look for. Now the issue that I had was that when I downloaded this data, I didn't get 370 records back I actually got 340 And I realized that when the data is downloaded, they remove when it's multiple properties, I guess to save space, but this is not the approach that I want. I actually want to see the same property listed several times just each time that it was sold just like it is over here. So I use browse AI in order to web scrape this data. Browse AI is an awesome tool, use a link below if you'd like to use it. It's a no code solution to scrape any webpage and you can make it a repeatable process as well as having it scheduled. All you have to do is spend less than five minutes is just to click through a website as you normally would, it records your actions and automatically creates the scraping bot. So once I set up the web scraper on Browse AI, it's great all 10 of these pages that are located here on the website, I took that data and I put it into Google Sheets. So now I have all 370 property listings, exactly what I was looking for. The next step that I took was that I made a quick pivot table to count how many times a property comes up in my sold database here. So if we go over to the pivot table, I filtered on all properties that have been sold twice during this timeframe. And here are a list of properties. But now the question is, how do I confirm that it was a flipper? And how do I actually get their contact information, I'm going to select one of these street addresses. So I'm going to copy it here, and then paste it in Google on Google, you're going to see different options for free to view the property details. This includes Zillow, realtor, Trulia, Redfin, etc. I choose realtor, since it gives you the view to see photos for when the property was sold. So this property was built in 1923. And when it recently sold, if we look at the photos, we could tell that it was a rehab, it looks like they posted this without completely finishing the backsplash. However, we could see at the rest of it looks like a brand new job, the way you could tell if it's a flippers heads usually the same products that they use between their flips. So the same type of cabinets, which White has been installed for some time, same type of flooring as well. So now the next step here is looking to see when the property was sold. So we could see here, this property was sold back in August of 2021, and then resold again in March of 2022. Now we could go look for the property owner within the pivot table that I created. There's also folio, this represents the ID of the property address. So if we go back to our Property Appraiser site, they have a basic search function, and we could type in folio, then click Search. Here we see it this property was owned by Tampa Bay, r e i LLC. So right away, we know that it wasn't because it's an LLC, we can quickly recognize that it wasn't owner occupied, and that someone wanted to sell quickly if in six months, this was an investor. And if we wanted to get more information on this semester, we would just need to look up the LLC within our own state. Now in the case of Florida, you could look up LLC is on Sun biz.org, you can enter in the LLC under entity name. Click search now, and you'll be able to look to see who owns this company. In this case, the registered owner is another LLC. So I'm going to copy this and plug this back into my search. So it's an LLC that owns an LLC. But if we click the link here, we can see this is owned by someone named Andrew Stephens. And if we want to actually contact Andrew, we could see what His address is we could send him a mailer. Or we could reach out to him directly via phone, we could find his phone number and a variety of steps like using batch data programmatically, or we could just do a search on fast people search and get his mobile number. Additionally, if we're interested to see what is the volume that this company is doing in flips, we could do so in the advanced search. If we type in the company name, we can look them up under owner and hit Search. Here we can see that this company has had a series of properties that they've bought and likely sold as flips. This allows us to get more context, before we call the company owner, we could let them know we're aware of which properties that they've recently flipped, what properties we have recently sold of in the same area, and how we could be a benefit to partner going forward. In summary, the steps that I took to find flippers was searching for sold properties within my county within a specific timeframe. So in this case, it was for two years. I also filter it on single family properties. And I did that through Sony. The second step that I took was to do a quick pivot table in Google Sheets to see how many times a property was sold within that two year timeframe. The third step was to filter on any properties that had sold at least twice fourth, once I found those properties that sold at least twice, I went to the Property Appraiser site and looked up the owners in conjunction. I also looked up the property on realtor.com so that I can confirm through photos that it was an actual flip. Once I was able to confirm that it was a flip and I had the property owner name. I then searched the property owner within sunbathers some This allows us to define who the actual person is that owns the LLC. If I would like to contact the property owner, I could search for their contact information on fast people search get their mobile number as well as their mailing address. But before I contact them, I want to have a good understanding of what they're currently doing in the market. This is why the last step here was to search the property owner in advanced search and see all the properties that are currently under the LLC. And when they sold here, we could see that there's seven properties that this current LLC owns, we could then make the connection with the company owner and tell them hey, I saw that you've recently purchased and flipped on Pearl Ave. And I actually sold a house recently over there, let's partner together. I hope this has been super useful for you to understand how you could start building creative lists and make yourself stand out from the competition. The next step that I would probably take here is just automating this whole process by using API's and using Browse API if you want to see more solutions just like this and please make sure to let me know in the comments below, like this video, and if you haven't already, please subscribe as well. If you have any data related questions, then please join the private Facebook group tech in real estate will you'll be connected with other data driven peers as well. Thanks so much for watching.