Finding More Off Market Deals with Sean OToole
Sean, thank you for joining us today.
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate being here.
It’s going to be a great conversation for our listeners. I think very productive for those who want to get out there and hunt down their own deals for our listeners out there who don’t know about you and your business.
Can you tell us about your company and you a bit about yours.
Yeah. So I’m a tech guy, kind of Silicon Valley in the nineties. And after the.com crash ended up flipping real estate, everything from, small residential properties to industrial and commercial and multi-family and everything in between 160 plus deals.
And then put my tech and real estate backgrounds together. And launched a foreclosure radar, which was the west coast. So at least primary foreclosure resources sold the picks and shovels during the foreclosure crisis to realtors and real estate investors and launched just before that all started.
So that was really good timing. And then have since expanded to cover all real estate in the United States as property.
What do you, let’s get into the technology and what property radar provides, for your clients.
Yeah. For anybody in the real estate business or who sells or buys from or lists or whatever, anybody who deals with a home or property owners, commercial land, whatever they have this huge advantage versus other businesses.
In that, there’s a lot of information about every single one of those owners in public records. And this was the big eye-opening thing for me. When I left tech and jumped into real estate, as I found this treasure trove and it created all this opportunity for me. And of course, the whole foreclosure crisis, if you wanted to, Bid at auctions.
If you’re a realtor, you wanted to help somebody with a short sale. If you are a credit repair, everybody who wanted to even city governments that wanted to help folks facing foreclosure all of that data sat in the public record. And so we got really good at going and getting that. And making it usable for the folks that want to work in that space.
As a real estate investor, you can go look at on-market deals. Those are listed for sale, but that’s a very small portion of the total market. And we basically open up and give you access to that off-market opportunity. No, not everybody there wants to sell, but.
Awesome. Now, one of the things that I’ve observed about the public records systems out there is, I’ve dealt with many of these systems over the years.
They’re all different. You have GIS, which tends to be, live maybe a little more standardized, but medalists may have systems very different. I’ve actually personally written programs to scrape data from some of those. Services to get some insights and things. Yeah, exactly. But for, building a company around that, I would imagine it’s very difficult to have anything standardized to pull that information.
Am I wrong?
No, it’s a constant challenge, right? There are 3,142 county or county-equivalents. We started in California cause there are only 50 counties in 52 counties in California. So it’s, a large part of the nation’s nationwide market, but it takes its very few counties to go get data from.
As you move towards the east coast, the counties get smaller and smaller, and it gets harder and harder. So it took us a long time to get national, we’ve been a leader on the west coast for a long time. And so yeah, it’s super challenging and it’s different. Depending on the data.
So like county assessor data is actual data, right? Its bedrooms equals two bathrooms equals three, right? It’s pretty simple. And, but there’s a lot of issues. Like what a single-family residence is in Maricopa County, in Arizona. Has a different coating than what it does in Alameda County, California.
So it is, there’s a lot of work to try to standardize that data and make it usable. So that’s a big part of what we do. Just on the assessor records, then you get into that. The GIS data, which is here’s the boundary that the wine around that property that we can plot onto a map, right?
Or you want to draw a circle on a map of the properties you want to market to. You need GIS data for that again, it’s data at least. So that’s good. The really hard one is the county recorder’s data. And that’s where most of the gold is, right. The foreclosure notices and mortgages and sales, if you want to do comparables and things like that.
There, the county only has five pieces of data, right? So it’s the date document number? The document type, the grand tour, and the grantee. So Grant’s aura would be like buyer or seller or borrower, lender, that kind of thing. And the rest of the information, like what date is the foreclosure sale scheduled for?
How much was the mortgage for all of that? You have to go get the document at me. And look at that document to get the information off of. So we have about a billion of those documents and one common misconception is that there’s some big company out there that does all of that, there is not one company anywhere in the world that has abstracted all billion documents or anywhere close. So it’s one of these incestuous industries where. This company is really good in the Northeast and these guys do this and these guys do this and everybody buys and sells and they’re asked, and then there’s a whole bunch of people that resell the data too.
So, it gets messy, right? It gets hard to find what the best sources are. What’s the most timely source is the data accuracy. One of the things that we’ve prided ourselves on is going out and trying to piece together the best bits of.
Although that document, I’m reading those documents transcribing, or however you put it, at least historically that would all have to be done manually.
Are you seeing any changes with like image processing software? Shoot, we got, Google, anytime you enter one of those ridiculous, captures where you have to pick out the traffic lights and stuff, you’re training their car, different from what you’re working on, but I got to figure the image recognition software, probably getting close to where you need to be.
Finding More Off Market Deals with Sean OToole
So one of the problems with it being such kind of a fractured thing is that there isn’t a large investment going into doing that anywhere, in particular, some of the big guys, the first Americans CoreLogic sweater. I have put a fair bit of time and energy into it and it made some progress there.
But I would say the majority of those documents are still being abstracted is what we call it by hand and largely in the Philippines and in India.
Wow. Sounds painful. I guess at least people are getting paid for it.
And there’s enough of us to buy it. And there’s enough of a like I said, an incestuous market that, it all gets paid for and it’s got lots of uses from insurance to title, to credit, too, making it available to investors who want to go find off-market deals.
So there’s enough different use cases and enough money overall that it gets paid for. And it has.
Yeah. So speaking of off-market deals, that is the, I hate to say it a buzz term, the buzz phrase, everybody’s looking for that elusive off-market deal. I feel like I’ve had so many quote off-market deals sent to me by brokers, which by definition are on market.
What do you think, especially, from your experience with property radar and your experience doing, your own real estate investing, what do you think are the most relevant, data points that folks need to at least start going out and marketing, finding their own off-market
deals.
So I think most people in this business and for good reason because it makes money easier would just say oh, the vacant list or the tax delinquent list or the absentee owner list. I think one of the things that is a little different about us is I would probably say none of those if you want to be successful.
And here’s the thing, is that any one of those lists that becomes popular in pretty much every market, all of those people start getting mail and they all start getting the same mail and they all start getting the same phone calls. Everybody uses the same script. And. So it was really clear to me really early on, because I did a bunch of deals.
I sent a bunch of direct mail that. What really actually mattered was having the right message for the right person. And differentiating yourself from the other guy that’s sending to the vacant list, using the standard postcard. Putting yourself a little bit more into the head of that person.
So I’ll just absentee owner list is one of the most popular lists. I’ll just pick on that one just to give you some examples. So instead of sending to the absentee owner list, What have you sent to the absentee owner list of absentee owners who are over 80 years old?
Oh,
that’s good. So now you’ve got a landlord who’s over 80.
Who’s probably starting to think about disposing of things, right? Cleaning stuff up even maybe over 70 or over 65, maybe at 65, because they’re starting to retire. Maybe they’re going to sell that retirement home as part of their retirement plans. Maybe not, maybe that’s part an important part of their income by 80, Would you say the same thing to that person as a 35-year-old, who’s executing the, buy rent re or buy rehab red refinance, borough strategy, right?
Those are very different people. You need to say different things too if you want to try to buy that property. The bird guy probably isn’t a seller. That’s where if you think about what you’re mailing, Hey, you can mail fewer pieces and with a better message, you’ll get a much better response rate.
You may only get a response at all, right? Because if you’ve got 15 people in your market, mailing, absentee owners, all with the same thing, and you’re the one that connects. You’re going to get a call. None of those others. Another example just thinking about things differently let’s take vacant and absentee owners.
So a lot of people will do the vacant list. So if you do vacant and it happens to be absentee. The right owner let’s let the owner’s address. That’s vacant. There’s no sign of distress necessarily. It just means it’s the tenant. Isn’t picking up the mail. It could mean his tenant. He doesn’t have a tenant so that, or she, I shouldn’t be saying he or she, but you know what, though, if the owner’s mailing address was vacant, How many cells that list. And so that’s where we just look at things differently. We’re like vacant to us as far more interesting on the owner’s mailing address than it is on the site address. So we offer both.
And so now you can go, okay. That’s interesting. Here’s a landlord who literally isn’t picking up mail at the address where he’s having his tax bill sent. There’s definitely something going on.
That is an interesting sign. Now, one of the things that I wonder there is, if they have the property owned in, 1, 2, 3 main street, LLC, but that’s, mailing to their house or whatever, it’s not getting picked up, but it’s still going to 1, 2, 3 main street.
I’ll see, they still know why it’s common to this. They can still see that from a mile away. Can you go even deeper and say, All right. We know who, the owner of the record is for 1, 2, 3 main street, LLC. And we’re just going to address it to, Tim or Sally at that whatever address that seems a bit more powerful to at least get opened.
That’s step one, get open.
You get companies on the commercial side really that focus on those single-purpose LLCs. Reonomy prospect now both, decent companies with good stuff that offer that service. They charge a lot for it though, and, they’re just hidden dun and Bradstreet or whatever.
And the problem is there are databases where you go get the names of the LLC dun and Bradstreet’s in the business of providing businesses. Most single-purpose LLC is don’t need business credit. So they’re not really in dun and Bradstreet. You’re not going to get a hit. You’re not going to get a return.
It works great if you’re working on large commercial properties and it’s a professional LLC management company, and then they may get a hit. But on those really true single purpose LLC is it’s not very good. So we have an article it’s in our blog that talks about how to do that. It’s still more of a manual process.
But, we’re third, the cost and you do it yourself.
Hey, I’ve done that. Manually myself with open corporates.com is what I use, but it still took a lot of time because there’s 401 through three main streets, LLC. So you have to know what state it’s in and then figure out which one’s still active and which ones probably it.
So it takes a lot of time and judgment. Hopefully, you can hire somebody in the Philippines to handle that or
something, but handle that.
Okay. What’s the, as far as getting differentiated and then there’s that next step of getting them to take some action, right? We need a call to action. We need to get in touch with them.
They have our letter, what do you think is the best way to get that next step? Should we ask for a text message and email or give me a call. What are your thoughts about that?
Yeah, so again my competitors out there are all pitching easy buttons and, our customers are the largest buyers in the United States.
So we have customers that are buying well over a thousand homes a year. And our better customers are, Almost all of our customers are doing more than 10 deals a year. So, unfortunately, I’m never going to be the easy button guy. That’s just pitching you on, send me $99 and all, get you, get you a deal that you’ll make a hundred grand.
That’s not us at all. So that’s, I think that’s just an important caveat.
That’s
also not real. So let’s also bear that in
mind. So we’re not in the business of extracting money from dummies, right? This is one way to say it, we’re in the business, actually getting deals done and getting deals done is hard.
And I hate to say that because that’s going to turn some people off, go, I don’t want to work. I just want a hundred grand. Or I just want a monthly rental income and I totally get that. So what I’m going to talk about is what the guys who are actually doing deals do, and what’s most important there to understand is that impressions build trust.
It doesn’t matter how much of a jerk you are. What kind of a terrible person are you. We can think of plenty of people that have household name recognition and even have a lot of people believe in them and trust them that are not the greatest people in the world. Oh,
All opportunity comes from change.
sure. I’m not going to name any right.
But politicians never won. So anyway,
And at the end of the day, what that’s about his impressions. So for, so the real thing that we see works right at the end of the day, it’s very unlikely. You’re going to send one postcard and get a call and do a deal, the very best folks out there that are doing the most deals are doing a combination of things.
They’re sending postcards. They’re sending more than one, right there. Get building impressions. They’re taking that mailing address and the person’s name and skip tracing. You could say upended phones and emails, and using that create custom audiences to display ads to those folks. And that builds impressions.
They’re making calls. And they’re calling the ones that look like the best prospects, and that’s making impressions, they’re sending emails and that’s making impressions. They’re doing voicemail drop and have, be careful here, different rules, but generally, there’s nothing in again, don’t take this as legal advice, but the TCPA and some of these things are about selling, not so much about buying.
So at least a lot of our customers feel. They can make phone calls without even looking at a, do not call. If they’re calling about buying your house, not selling or listing your house, no legal advice there. Go talk to your own
legal advice on this show for the record. So you’re good.
It’s the folks who are crushing it, who have a regular pipeline who are doing a lot of deals.
Are the ones that are making multiple impressions and have a good message that matches, what that particular audience, it’s like I tell realtors all the time, look, you’re farming, you’ve got a subdivision. That’s your market. And you find. Is everybody in that subdivision the same?
They have some things in common because they chose that subdivision, but some have equity, some don’t right. Some have lived there for 20 years. Some have lived there six months just lots of different. Some have kids, some don’t right. Some have young kids, some have older kids, and very few.
Public records companies pull in that demographic information and those other things that allow you to really tailor your message. And it’s that kind of differentiation that the guys that are doing 10 plus deals a year are starting to do, and certainly, the ones doing a hundred plus a thousand plus deals a year have to do interesting.
One of the things I wonder is I talk with some of these guys who will say, do a lot of wholesale deals where they’re sending a lot of letters or, some of these guys who say I spend $15,000 a month on my mailers. What percentage of those guys would you say guys and gals, would you say are doing it the smart way versus more of a spray and pray?
And the spray and pray are still at least moderately profitable for them. Whereas. Potentially more profitable or a pro likely more profitable to do it, the smart way with all this additional data and that ain’t going to
houses how good they are. It’s, two to 10 X better returns, right? On how systematic and how good they are versus spending and pay spray and pray at the end of the day at volume, does.
It’s just, it’s a law of large numbers, right? So spray and pray at volume spending 15 grand a month, it will work. You will get deals. You will probably still have an ROI, right? Just basic absentee owner list base and faking lists the really basic list and just send the same thing. You will still get lucky every once in a while.
And but you’re wasting a lot of money.
It’s still cheap enough to send letters, is what that comes down.
Yeah. Yeah. And, it’s every door direct mail versus targeted direct mail, right? Like to some degree, right? Like you’re going to have a better ROI. You’re going to have more predictable results as you improve that message and the rest.
And the other thing is you are. The spray and pray method. You’re a little more at risk of business disruption, right? Because somebody who comes in and starts doing a better job, more targeted in your area is going to be more likely to get those calls and start taking away business. You would have gotten it before.
So early on in the market. You’re the first one to pick up some new list type and start mailing to it, spray and pray works fine. If you’re early, you can do that. And then the more, mature, the market gets around something, the more differentiated you have to become to continue to extract.
So a lot of the spray and pray guys, spend a lot of time jumping from the list to list and whatever the new hot thing is. And so that’s that path. Whereas they could continue to extract more by getting refining within, in that market with better messaging. So it works. Yeah, you can definitely do it.
But it’s not really more expensive to do the more targeted. It takes a little more thought. It takes a little bit more, effort But with a two to 10 X better return its time.
Yeah. It’s maybe more effort in the, it sounds like more effort on the front end setting up the systems and the procedures, but you want to return on that effort on the backend.
And hopefully, that part comes in just better-qualified leads coming your way. And you’re not chasing down people who aren’t interested or got wrong, got a postcard when maybe they shouldn’t have because they weren’t a prospect in the first place. Something that I thought was really interesting that you mentioned a little bit earlier was if you will, the more multimedia options, the phone number versus like email and kind of targeting them, targeting them in different ways there, the phone number is obvious or, there are a few ways you can do that.
You’ve probably all gotten text messages about you, you don’t want to buy your place or voicemails or any of that. The email, what are you seeing? There are folks really adopting that and I guess, how can we, how can. Target that list. What are our options online?
Yeah. Certainly, companies like us will append email as well to match rates, to not, to be as good as phone and, most of that data comes from what’s called co-registration.
And the easy way to say that is, if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product and nobody reads privacy policies, but that’s the that’s basically it like you’re giving somebody your email address for the chance to enter a survey. They’re making money on you by selling your email address.
That’s, and that’s called that business is called co-registration. So then others gather that, that data and attach it to these homeowners, making it available. It, it may not be, usually when you’re signing up for those things, you’re more likely to use your Gmail or your Hotmail account than your, work address.
So whatever it is, what it is, but it’s pretty inexpensive to Sandy. And deliverability is hard actually getting it into the person’s inbox though is really hard. And you can’t, MailChimp will quickly ban you. If you just download 10,000 email addresses from us and load them into MailChimp and start sending, they’re going to go. We’re gonna get enough. There is a little, I don’t know what I’m saying to go break MailChimp’s rules. But one thing that we do see is that I’ll just use foreclosures as an example, right? If you come after folks that are in foreclosure with the message of Hey, you’re in foreclosure.
You need to do something. You should sell me your house. Like that spam, the button is going to get hit a million times. If you send something to them, that’s Hey, I wanted to let you know I’m local in your area. I want you to know that we’re seeing an uptick in foreclosures, and. Yeah, we are actually seeing some, a small uptick in foreclosures. It’s still low. And if you know anyone not, if you know anyone, because you’re basically presuming they’re not in foreclosure, that’s suffering through this. I have a lot of empathy for this. I’ve helped people, whatever those people don’t get, the spam button clicked on them.
Can you imagine? Cause it’s coming from a place of help and assistance and information, there’s been 20 foreclosures just in your neighborhood, whatever. Like that stuff I want to keep getting especially if I’m in foreclosure, I want to know that this person isn’t accusing me of being in foreclosure.
They’re just reaching out and other locals and oh, there’s their name and phone number. And they seem genuine. I’m not going to click spam on that. It was useful to me. Most he people get banned or blocked from spam it’s because they’ve got their message wrong.
That’s a lot more personable to that.
Yeah, that, that approach now I’m glad you mentioned. Yeah. I want to have a few of those in this case.
It again, if you’ve done a good job targeting, you have a small list and it’s an honest, genuine letter to each, note to each person and it’s real, you tend not to get the spam button.
Nice. I’m glad you mentioned the current foreclosure trends. I want to at least touch on that. You’re tied into the data. We heard so much, either earlier this year, really early on in the pandemic about how there’s going to be a huge foreclosure wave, it sounds like that’s not what you’re seeing.
Maybe it’s a little early, but I doubt it.
We are seeing a bounce up for sure. And we’re probably going to start seeing headlines, like a hundred percent increase in foreclosures, but you’ve got to remember a hundred percent of zero is still zero, right? So be very careful as you’re listening to foreclosure headlines, especially from people trying to sell you stuff, w we’re seeing lots of becoming an REO agent, a foreclosure is going through the roof 200% in the last month and, okay. It went from 20 to 60 okay, that’s 200%, whatever. Be wary of percentages because we were at such a low number that we can have big percentage increases.
And we are starting in places to see some big percentage increases. And we are starting to see some more foreclosure sales and it’s very local, one of my customers, friends, called me the other day, he bought four properties at a foreclosure auction in one day he hasn’t bought four and four months.
He’s it’s back, it’s going right. And I go look at the numbers and there’s definitely more, but it’s not like he’s going to buy for tomorrow and for the next day at four, the next day. We are seeing some increases. Yeah. Have to understand that it’s, we’re in a completely different regulatory framework today than we were in 2008.
We will not have another 2008 crisis. We’ve had a lot of foreclosures, there’s the five D’s of foreclosures, right? Death, disease, divorce, drugs, denial that is this base rate of foreclosures. And normally those would have happened. Over the last 18 months. And they haven’t because we just artificially stopped all of them.
We didn’t say, most of the rules are like if it’s a COVID-related thing, but how the heck is the bank gonna figure that out and not face a lawsuit afterward? They just said, eh, And unless they really had okay, everybody’s dad, there’s no kids we’re going to sell the property.
That’s basically all that’s been going through or land or things like that. We’re now back to where. Okay. All those other five things that aren’t COVID-related are starting to go through. Cause they just, there are, nobody’s going to rescue that. Nobody’s going to start making the payments for isn’t going to matter.
So we’re going to see a little bump here for sure. And I think when that Bob happens will vary a little bit by state. It’ll vary a little bit by lender. So it won’t all come at once, but I think over the next 12 months, we’ll see increased foreclosure activity. Still going to be really.
Minuscule compared to, the crisis, but that regulatory framework thing, we’re not going to see dumping. It’s we’re not going to see foreclosures impact house prices in any wide-scale way. So I think that’s it. It’s pretty safe to say it’s a non. For the guys who are active at the trustee sales, they’re finally going to see a lot of, a little meat on the bone again.
But it’s not going to be the Royal feast. That 2008 was,
that’s definitely good to hear. I think one of the things folks don’t realize is that. And since the sense, the great recession banks realized how much money they really lost by selling those properties for basically nothing to investors in the wake of the great recession.
So they’ve, they have different processes now for handling foreclosures so that there’s not going to be those properties dumped on the market for nothing. They’re the ones that they do foreclose on. They’re going to at least take a little better care of maybe sell closer to fair market value as opposed to pennies on the dollar.
This is what we saw, over a decade
ago. Yeah. The only thing I would add there, I totally agree with everything you just said, but we do need to keep it in mind. Th the banks were required by their regulators to get bad assets off their books as fast as possible. So they literally, 30, 60, 90 days, a late notice of default notice a trustee sale or, or LIS Pendens and file the judicial.
Like they just, they were on a track. And I don’t know if you remember. Mark to model versus mark to market and all that, a debate and the rest, like then they were having liquidity problems because they had to mark these things to market. And then we allow them to mark the model, like the regulatory framework really.
It caused a huge, decline in prices. Clearly, the banks and their lobbying of Congress and Congress doesn’t get enough beat up enough about this, the Glass Steagall and Gramm-Leach-Bliley those things set up the foreclosure crisis, and the bank lending practices set up that crisis, the regulatory framework.
Causing prices to drop so dramatically, which then snowballed the crisis. So it had multiple players of which banks were only one.
Wow. I’m glad that it sounds like we have a better outlook right now. Right now. We’re going to take a quick break for our spots. All right, Sean, I’ve got three questions. I ask every guest on the show.
Are you ready?
Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t, I haven’t come up with answers yet, but I’ll do it on the fly. I’m sure. You’re
good. I’m sure. You’re good. First one. What is the best investment you ever made other than in your education?
Yeah, other than in my, the next obvious one, is in my business it’s still in myself, so we’ll skip the in my in myself thing and in my own business It is, I think your own residence is a good investment so long as you plan to stay 10 years or longer like that.
It’s really funny as I built a really nice house and it seemed really stupid and just an ego-driven thing. And but I was smart about it and I picked a really good market in a place that I thought would really appreciate and all that. And so not only have I enjoyed the place I live, but it’s tripled in value and it’s actually one of my best-performing investments and it won’t be an investment until I sell it, which I don’t really like to think about my house as an investment.
I like to think about it as a place to live, that’s good. This office building that I’m sitting in, I bought during the crisis, so when you do see those, the blood in the water obviously there’s an opportunity there. I bought it when I bought it, it was a 12 cap and a 30% cash on cash return.
Wow. After putting 500 grand into it too, fix it up and stabilize it and all the rest, it was, it’s a, almost a 20 cap and a 60% cash on cash return, which obviously means that there was no debt for very long. There do happen along those, one of the things that you don’t think about when you’re doing like those 15,000 mailers, even the spray and pray approach is every once in a while, that incredible deal comes along.
So when I flipped the 160 properties, it wasn’t one out of five. It wasn’t one out of 10, but it was probably one out of 25. Where you just hit an absolute home run. And that’s one of the benefits of being out there and just doing deals and because sooner or later, the really good ones come to you.
So being out there being engaged, doing those deals to be in the right place for the really good deals, I think is so doing those deals is actually an investment in getting great.
I love that, especially when I hear folks talk about the market’s hot, I’m going to sit out or at the market’s uncertain, I’m going to sit out well, it’s fine.
If you decide not to invest in these things that’s totally your decision. But if you want to get reengaged, keep an eye, keep looking at things, make offers, even if they don’t get accepted, stay involved. So you can look for those, say so-so deals as you said so that you can get to the really good deals.
Cause if. Stay completely disengaged on the sidelines. Un-involved you’re not going to be ready when the good deal comes along. You’re not going to even be at the party when it happens.
All means it’s happening right now. It’s we always hear from folks I’m leaving California.
Cause I’m in California. I’m leaving California. There’s it was too expensive. There are no deals there. And yet having the data and looking at the deals that happened. And we, it’s really easy to go in and look and see who’s flipped deals on all regularly looked through the flips and man, there are deals happening all the time where people are hitting home runs, not just doubles or triples, but fricking home runs and in California.
And it’s all these people running off to. From California, if you’re in Texas or Florida do that. But if you’re in California to run off and do Florida, when there’s a deal that happened down your street, that is more than more cash in that one deal than 20 deals in Florida. Right?
What are you doing?
Great question. We have the best investment. Now. I go to the other side of that coin, the worst investment. What is the worst investment you ever made?
Oh, Yeah. Fortunately, no really big ones. I think that the most important, valuable thing you have to invest in your ear time.
And I’ve gotten a lot pickier about where I invest my time and maybe keep it simple. We’ll keep it. We’ll keep it. Real estate, I would say getting talked into deals that I didn’t have any personal knowledge in. Somebody bringing me a deal that I didn’t know.
One of the things I do personally is. I like to know something. If I’m investing in multifamily, I like to know something about multifamily. I don’t need to be an expert, but I dive in and I learned at least enough about it that I know the right questions to ask. My worst one was learning that lesson where.
I jumped into a multi-family deal without really understanding multifamily. And it was still a positive return, but it was a painful experience. And multi-family is not my gig personally. I have a lot of friends who love multifamily and kill it in multi-family. And our experts, but it’s that one’s not my gig.
So I bought an apartment building and it was two years of my life. I would like to have it back.
Tough lesson learned. I’m glad it was profitable, but I bet it was a lot of heartache along the way, or it sounds like it was my favorite question here at the end of the show is what is the most important lesson you’ve learned in business and investing
all opportunity comes from.
Interesting like personal inward change or the outward change in the market that we need to,
any change, right? Everything that happens to you that you think is terrible. It is an opportunity. So the great financial crisis was an opportunity. Everything that wars are opportunities like everything bad, good, and different, all changed the internet, obviously huge change, huge opportunity.
But only for those that embrace it. For those that didn’t think it was going to be a big thing. They got crushed like blockbuster doesn’t exist. So you have to look and say, If you have a mindset that is all change is opportunity. Then change will never bother you again in your life.
And you will have so much more success and happiness because of so much of the pandemic, huge opportunities for lots of people. Huge. I’m not saying there wasn’t a lot worse. But if you change your mindset about those things, right? A lot of stuff comes out of it. That’s positive as well as negative. And if you’re on the positive side, you’re going to be a lot more successful in life.
If you’re on the negative side, hanging hand-wringing about it.
I love that. And I’ve noticed that the most successful, the wealthiest people who I know. All have that mentality. Everybody in this space has that mentality or something very close to it. And I appreciate that you brought that to us today and put that out.
There are a couple of great quotes we’re going to have to grab in there and turn into Instagram posts and all that great stuff. Sean, thank you for joining us today. Thank you for everything you’re doing out there in the market. If folks want to reach out, they want to track you down. If they want to learn more about your company or, get more information about.
Finding off-market deals from your blog or anything like that, where can they? tothanIt allDothanYeah, so property radar.com is the company. We also have foreclosure radar.com if you’re only interested in foreclosures and I’m on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, I’m not a super active social person, but you can find me there and you can reach me there if you have a question super easy.
And we also have a community. propertyradar.com and so pretty easy too. I am Sean at the property. radar.com is my email. So then that easy to find.
Perfect. Thank you once again for joining us today. It’s everybody out there. Thank you for tuning in. If you’re enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and review on the apple podcast. Five stars. If you don’t mind, I appreciate that. It’s so much that helps other people learn about the show because that helps us rank higher in the apple podcast ecosystem. And I’m always honest with you guys that gives me a nice little warm and fuzzy feeling because I get to see that you’re engaging with the content.
And you’re escaping and the wall street casino, along with us. If you know anyone who could use a little bit more passive wealth in their lives, please share the show with them and bring them into the tribe. Don’t for, excuse me, don’t forget to subscribe yourself that way. You’ll get every new episode straight to your mobile device.
Every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. That’s when we’re here. That’s when we’re helping you escape the wall street casino. Once again, I’m your host Taylor load. Appreciate you joining us today. I hope you have a great rest of your day and we’ll talk to you on the next one. Bye-bye.
Off Market Deals
About our Guest
Sean OToole
After a successful technology career in Silicon Valley, Sean OToole purchased and flipped over 150 residential and commercial properties. He exited the market in 2006, right before the credit bubble burst.
Combining his technology and real estate experience, Sean launched ForeclosureRadar in 2007. ForeclosureRadar was quickly recognized as the nation’s best foreclosure information source, growing to help tens of thousands of real estate professionals prosper in an otherwise devastating market.
In 2013, Sean launched PropertyRadar, expanding beyond foreclosures to create a property data and owner information platform that powers thousands of investor, real estate professional, home service and other property-centric businesses. More than just a data company, PropertyRadar levels the playing field by giving small businesses the same opportunities found in public records that big businesses have long enjoyed.
Episode Show Notes
After a successful technology career in Silicon Valley, Sean O’Toole purchased and flipped over 150 residential and commercial properties. He exited the market in 2006, right before the credit bubble burst. Combining his technology and real estate experience, Sean launched ForeclosureRadar in 2007. ForeclosureRadar was quickly recognized as the nation’s best foreclosure information source, growing to help tens of thousands of real estate professionals prosper in an otherwise devastating market. In 2013, Sean launched PropertyRadar, expanding beyond foreclosures to create a property data and owner information platform that powers thousands of investors, real estate professionals, home service and other property-centric businesses. More than just a data company, PropertyRadar levels the playing field by giving small businesses the same opportunities found in public records that big businesses have long enjoyed.
[00:01 – 05:38] Opening Segment
- Get to know Sean O’Toole
- A 90s Silicon Valley Tech Guy
- What PropertyRadar is all about
[05:39 – 24:06] Finding More Off Market Deals
- Public Records Systems and Building a Company
- Sean talks about handling and acquiring different types of data
- Image Processing Software and Incestuous Markets
- Relevant Data Points You Have to Know to Find Off Market Deals
- The Absentee Owner List and The Vacant List
- The Best Way to Get that Next Step
- Make Multiple Impressions
- Those who do it the right way and those who spray and pray
[24:07 – 33:28] Making Sure Your Off Market Deal Contacts Come Through
- Going the Multimedia Online Way
- What is Co-Registration?
- How An Honest Genuine Letter Goes a Long Way
- The Five D’s of Foreclosures
- What about the bank?
[33:29 – 45:48] Closing Segment
- Quick break for our sponsors
- Groundfloor offers short-term, high-yield real estate debt investments to the general public. Check www.passivewealthstrategy.com/groundfloor/ to get started.
- What is the best investment you’ve ever made other than your education?
- His own residence
- Sean’s worst investment
- Deals that he did not have personal knowledge about, like a multifamily deal
- What is the most important lesson that you’ve learned in business and investing?
- “All opportunity comes from change.”
- Connect with my guest. See the links below.
Tweetable Quotes:
“What really actually mattered was having the right message for the right person.” – Sean O’Toole
“Impressions build trust.” – Sean O’Toole
“The most important valuable thing you have to invest is your time.” – Sean O’Toole
————
Connect with Sean O’Toole through Twitter and LinkedIn. Visit their website https://www.propertyradar.com/. Be a part of PropertyRadar Community.
Invest passively in multiple commercial real estate assets such as apartments, self storage, medical facilities, hotels and more through https://www.passivewealthstrategy.com/crowdstreet/
Participate directly in real estate investment loans on a fractional basis. Go to www.passivewealthstrategy.com/groundfloor/ and get ready to invest on your own terms.
Join our Passive Investor Club for access to passive commercial real estate investment opportunities.
LEAVE A REVIEW + help someone who wants to explode their business growth by sharing this episode or click here to listen to our previous episodes
