About a year ago I ran into a guy that would go into his county’s Tax Assessors site and search Parcel by Parcel looking for Non-Owner Occupants.  Then he would setup a route and drive directly to these properties.  This may have saved him a little gas but was very time consuming.  So I got to thinking, what if we could automate this search.  I went home and did some experimenting with “Auto-it” (a program I just happened to be using at my J-O-B).  In no time I had figured out a script that would go parcel by parcel and compare the Owner’s name/address to the parcel address.  If they did not match it was marked as Non-Owner Occupant and stored in a database.  I ended up optimizing this script enough that it would run the whole county overnight and have loaded my database with all of the pertinent information for the Non-Owner Occupants.  This list will be much larger than you can imagine.

First thing to do with this list is to contact the Owners of multiple properties and find out if they are interested in your services.  Next find those with just a property or two and setup a route to view these properties.  So its time to start driving for dollars while being a little more targeted.  Don’t forget to continue to watch for additional vacant houses (tax records are not always up to date).  Now you should have a nice long list to start calling on or to take to your investors.  If you are a bit more patient you can also send them a postcard.  They may keep it for when they are ready to sell or pass it along to a friend that is ready to sell.

In this instance I used Autoit, which runs on the screen and does not allow you to do other things while it is working.  This is why I set it up to run overnight.  I have seen programs written it Perl that retrieve email addresses from web sites while working in the background, and they seem to be faster.  Unfortunately I have not worked with Perl, but now have a reason to start learning it.  If you have questions on getting either method to work feel free to email me and I will do my best to help or point you in the right direction.  There are also several Rent-A-Coder sites out there where you can get an experienced programmer to write it for you.  If you are experienced enough with scripts to write this on your own let me know and I will send you one of my current scripts.  Since every county has its own website you will probably need to tweak your script to work in another county.