There are lot of different ways to do this. I will go over a simple proven method in this blog. You can experiment and let us know what works best for you.

First, what is driving for dollars?  The term diving for dollars came from driving around the area you want to invest in. Another term would be farming the area you are investing in. I prefer to call it driving for dollars.

Things that you will need to do the job.
1.    A mapsco or key map book of your area you can go to http://www.mapsco.com
2.    Note book yellow high lighter
3.    A friend or partner preferable
4.    Digital Camera
5.    Business cards

Ok now that we have all of our material we can get started. You need to pick out 8 to 10 blocks that you want to work in.  Mark it out on your map and choose a starting point. Now take your note book and on the right side and draw a line down the paper about an inch before the side of the paper. In this area you will put a (V for vacant D for distressed R for rental and F for fore sale buy owner) we will get into what all this is for later. Now the reason I like to bring a partner or friend is to write all the info down while you drive and you don’t have to break your neck looking at both sides of the street. The camera is to take a pic of the front of the house to put in to your file so when you  get a hold of the home owner you can look at the pic to give you a better visual of what your talking about.  Business cards are to leave at the vacant properties the owners do come around from time to time.

Now start driving down the street. Make sure you high light all the streets you drive down so you don’t end up back tracking. You are looking for properties that are vacant. How do you tell if they are vacant, if there’s tall grass, gas meter missing , a lot of mail in the mail box , news papers pilled up in the drive way , electric meter missing. These are just a few of the things you can look for. At this point you can take a picture of the front and put your business card in the door. Write the address down and put a V next to it. You might also knock on the two houses next to the house and see if they now were the owner is. You could tell them the first person that can give me the info on the owners and it leads to me buying the property you will give them 250.00 dollars. You are also looking for distressed properties these are properties that have a lot of junk in the yard maybe gutters hanging off property that isn’t taken care of. These properties could be motivated sellers.  You could send them a post card or letter. Which I’ll be going over in another blog.  The properties that have a rental sign in the yards are a hidden gold mind that people over look.. These are sellers and buyers, call the land lords, and ask them if they are in the market to buy or sell. This can help you build your buyers list which we will cover in another blog.  Last but not least the FSBO these properties can be used in a couple ways, you can ask if they will do owner finance in which you could take the property over through owner finance. Or you can match a buyer and seller together and charge a marketing fee.

Make sure you highlight your area you have driven and put your V D R F in the edge of the page to determine which property is what.

Good Luck,

Sean Marmoy
MOKSRealEstate.com

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.

Driving for Dollars – This is probably the most popular method.  This simply means that you find a target neighborhood and drive street by street looking for vacant houses.  While driving look for missing utility meters, tall grass, no curtains, excess newspapers in the yard, undisturbed leaves/snow, anything that shouts no one has been here.  While time consuming you will most likely find sellers that can easily be motivated.

Networking – Simply talk to everyone you run into whether it be a cashier, waitress or the guy next to you at the pump and make sure you leave them with a business card.  Business cards are very inexpensive, so give them out like candy.  You should never stop networking.  You may not see immediate results here, but you never know when a simple conversation will lead to a potential deal.

Ads and Signs – Whether you place an ad in the local paper, a free listing site on the Internet or on a bandit sign keep it simple.  A simple “We Buy Houses” works that’s why so many people use it.

After you have your list of vacant properties it is time to start locating the owners.  The easiest place to start is the county tax assessor’s web site.  This site usually contains lots of useful information about the property (i.e. # of bedrooms and bathrooms, lot size, zoning, current tax information).  Since a lot of counties are not completely up to date this is just a starting place.  We have a county near where I live that until recently their site said upfront that the data was 2 years old.  Another place to check is with neighbors.  Some locators will even offer cash if the neighbor has the owners contact information and it leads to a deal.

 Remember, this is a numbers game.  The more time you spend and the more houses you look at will result in more deals.  Don’t be discouraged if you don’t find a great deal the first week or even month.  The more you get your name and number out there, the more deals will start finding you.