EP NNA 120 – Finding Off-Market Note Deals In Note Conferences Without Traveling

There are many opportunities with what’s going on in the market for us note investors. Interest rates may be increasing, but for note investors, this means more opportunity, more deals, and more distressed assets that we can look at. So how can we find off-market note deals? On this episode of Note Night in America, Scott Carson shares how to find off-market note deals by connecting with lists of attendees at note conferences without the travel or expense of attending. He also shares how to use past tapes and past note sellers by using the county records to find note sellers in today’s market. He also shares how to use county recorder/clerk searches to search for notes and recorded assignments of mortgages to track down new deals. Tune in to this episode and learn more from Scott’s insightful discussion!

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Finding Off-Market Note Deals In Note Conferences Without Traveling

I’m excited to have each and everybody on here. I’m glad that you are joining us for the first time. If you’ve been here before, I’m glad to have you back. For those that are brand new, welcome. We host these calls. I’ve been doing it for the last decade. You can always catch the replays by going to our YouTube channel at WeCloseNotes.tv. If you’ve got to bug out and missed the last part of this, don’t worry. That will take you directly to our YouTube channel and ask you to subscribe to the channel. While you’re there, we’ve got a lot of information. I’m pretty excited. We hit another milestone.

We’ve got a ton of videos on there. We uploaded our 1,500th video to our YouTube channel. We’re pretty excited about that. There are a lot of episodes, interviews, content webinars, and presentations out there. Check it out. You can always find all the past episodes of the show, The Note Closers Show podcast, and our Note Camp Live podcast in the years we have been doing Note Camp.

Here’s an announcement. I also wanted to alert you. Some of you may not know this but if you aren’t connected with me on LinkedIn, do so. We’ve got a newsletter we have been putting out. I’m excited. We exceeded right around 3,000 subscribers. We reached 2,800, which is 10% of our LinkedIn connections. Check it out.

Our newsletter includes a couple of informational videos, a Read of the Week, an episode, some other great content for you to use in your marketing, and some stuff to help you get through what’s going on, the crazy world we live in. Check out the News & Notes Newsletter by following me on LinkedIn. You can always find me by looking for @1ScottCarson on LinkedIn as well.

We do have an upcoming event I want to make you aware of. We had our Note Weekend class for June 2022. Our next major event is our Virtual Note Buying Workshop. This would be the second time we have taught it for 2022. We were going to do it earlier, but with all the people going to the markets, we decided to wait a little bit and do it after the 4th of July because there’s a lot of great information.

If you go to NoteBuyingForDummies.com, you can get signed up for the three-day workshop. It’s three full days of content. I’m going to have probably 3 to 4 guest speakers on there talking about a variety of different things and vendors. There’s a full day on finding deals, a full day on funding deals, and a full day on the flip and how to make money with the different exit strategies that we have.

It’s our biggest bang for the buck when it comes to our workshops there for you. It’s three days. It’s all content, no fluff. Get signed up at NoteBuyingForDummies.com. The replays are included. You don’t have to wait until July, which is the month out for it. You can get signed up for it and get the replay sent to you to start learning.

If you don’t want to pay $495 or $500, which is half the price, you can always sign up for a WCN membership, which is $97 a month. That includes access to everything that we do online there for you, plus spender discounts and some other stuff. If you’re interested in the all-you-can-learn-note-education buffet, go to NoteUmbrella.com and get that for $97 a month. It’s well worth it for you.

Let’s dive into our main subject. Devon asked the question, “Are note investment businesses affected by mortgage-backed securities offered by broker deals when they don’t sell or are sold at a discount?” No. Here’s the thing. When you deal with mortgage-backed security, that’s a different thing. That’s a whole pool of notes that we’re not tapping into. You’re not going to be buying a one-off note that’s in a mortgage-backed security. That’s a different thing. If you are, it’s a stock that you’re buying or a share of a stock that you’re doing. They’re two different things.

When we’re buying notes, we’re buying one-offs or portfolios, but there’s no mortgage-backed security. That’s a different ball game. Every note we buy and have bought over the years is not going to be wrapped up in a mortgage-backed security. You’re not going to be buying a note pool apart from JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, or Wells Fargo. The notes that we’re buying are not going to be involved in that. They’re not effective when mortgage-back securities that don’t sell are sold at a discount. It’s not going to affect us in any way because the notes we buy don’t include those packages.

I highly encourage you to take that class to find out more about how that stuff is structured. You’re here for us to share how we’re finding off-market note deals. I was hesitant to share this originally because this is some great stuff. We’ve got some great stuff. Hopefully, you’ve got a pen and paper to jot down some notes.

Some of you have heard me talk about this before, but you’ll love this recap. Hopefully, if you’re not implementing one of the things we talk about, you add it to your marketing database because here’s the thing, ladies and gentlemen. There are so many opportunities with what’s going on in the market for us as note investors. Note investors are smiling. We’re excited about what’s going on. I’ve got a grin from ear to ear because I’m excited about what the market is going to hold for us in the next 24, 36, or 48 months.

People sometimes are upset about interest rates climbing. I’m like, “It’s going back to normal.” This gives us more opportunities, more deals, and more distressed assets that we can take a look at that are at higher interest rates. In the last couple of years, with very low-interest rates, we were mostly buying notes created years ago. With higher interest rates, maybe we won’t see it for twelve months, but we’re going to see a lot more opportunities in the future. We’re already starting to see that pan out for us as deals are coming in across different areas for us.

Off-Market Note Deals: People are sometimes upset about interest rates climbing, but this gives us more opportunities, more deals, and more distressed assets.

How Are You Finding Deals

The first thing I wanted to do with you here is I want to ask you how you are finding deals. You may say, “I’m not finding any.” My question would be then, “What kind of marketing do you do?” I should ask you that. What kind of marketing or what are you doing to find deals in our world? How are you sourcing potential note deals for your portfolio? Some folks are doing a variety of things. Some folks aren’t doing anything. Some folks are doing and going to different websites and trying to find assets.

The big overwhelming thing that we hear, and we hear this from people that are listing their assets on websites, is that they’re picked over. There are not a lot of deals. They’re overpriced in a lot of cases. They’re stagnant. They’re growing mold and hair on them when sitting there because nobody is looking at them. People will look at a website, but they don’t know necessarily how to evaluate a deal and run the formulas. They get excited but don’t know, or the sellers want too much.

I had one seller who had a bunch of websites. They wouldn’t give me the pricing. They say it’s flexible, but when we offered to send a bid for flexible, they were like, “I wanted this.” Why don’t you put what you want and quit wasting everybody’s time and trying to keep these assets on your platform? That’s the biggest thing. There are a few websites out there. Some haven’t posted anything in a while, but a lot of them are picked over.

There are not a lot of deals. People don’t know what they’re looking at, “What does this mean?” You have to know how to read between the lines and see what’s going on. It also helps if you end up knowing a lot of the sellers, as I do, but not everybody is in that place. Websites are a big thing. They’re going to pass sources, “I used to buy a lot from Granite.” Granite is dried up.

“I used to buy from FCI Exchange.” That’s dried up and gone the way of the dodo bird when it comes to their assets, “I used to buy from Watermark Exchange.” Val has not been very active on Watermark Exchange. The website is still there, but there are not a lot of sources there for you to cherry-pick from, “I get my stuff at conferences.” Here’s why I stopped attending note conferences. It was primarily 90% the same people speaking the same thing.

If you’re a new note investor, you don’t want to pay $1,000 to go to a conference. That includes airfare, hotel bill, food, and being away from your family. If you’re working a job, you have to take time off from your work. Some people juggle that whole work remote thing, which is great, but honestly, when it comes down to it, there weren’t many players there. The guys don’t want to spend time talking to a lot of the one-off investors, no offense.

I like talking to one-off investors, but if I know everybody and I have a bigger bang for my buck on my show, why am I going to spend money to get out of my way to go and be on a panel for ten minutes? It’s not going to happen. Those of you that have been chasing the owner-financed deals are like, “I send it out via direct mail. I’m sending out 50 to 100 letters.” That doesn’t work. That dog doesn’t hunt. There’s a 1% response rate, plus the expensive price of postage and direct mail.

If you’re mailing out to owner-financed originators or people originating, they’re not going to take a big discount for the most part. They don’t want to. They can’t afford to. That’s why they had to owner finance the property, to begin with. If they could have sold it originally, they would have sold it originally. That’s not saying you can’t uncover a rock and find something but let’s face it.

With direct mail, conferences, past sources, and websites, you would be better off praying to God, “Please help me. I know you help those that help themselves.” That’s the big thing that I wanted you to do. God helps those that help themselves. You could sit here and either pray on the one hand or do whatever you need to on the other hand and see what’s going to fill up first.

Here’s the thing. This episode goes out to all those folks out there that say you can’t find deals. It goes out to all the haters. It goes out to all the folks that are small-minded and don’t market. They still think that they’re marketing like it was years ago. That’s the thing that separates those investors that are finding deals from those that are sitting around and waiting.

This is the one thing too that helps separate what we do at We Close Notes. We will show you how to find deals. These are some of the things that we have been going through. You get what I’m saying. You can sit here and keep waiting for something or get off your keister, go out, and take action. God helps those that help themselves. I am here to help you. I’m not God, but I will show you how we have helped ourselves over the last couple of years. I’ve been doing this for a while. It’s just that most people aren’t going to take that little bit of action they need to find something. I’ve been having a lot of success with our one-on-one coaching sessions. One of the things that we teach in our coaching or our classes is how to find deals that nobody else is looking for.

Off-Market Note Deals: You can sit here and keep waiting for something, or you can get your keys, go out, and take action. God helps those that help themselves.

Three Touch Approach To Finding Deals

Let’s dive into some of the content. Are we finding deals? How are we finding deals? These are the top 3, 4, or 5 ways that we’re finding deals a day. You can either hang around while we go through a couple of them or you can log off, enjoy your evening, and watch the NHL playoffs game three for the Stanley Cup. In the banking context, we have preached this from the get-go. Banks will sell you notes. You need to know how to talk to them and get to the right department.

We’re doing that in a three-touch approach. We built a large email database over the years from dialing for dollars, but we follow up. We first send out an email blast from a list that we have pulled over different websites. We then go and find those same people on LinkedIn and connect with them there. Finally, we pick up the phone and dial for dollars.

If you’ve ever been to one of our calling banks masterclasses or heard me call asset managers for an afternoon, you know that it can be done, that people will return phone calls, or that it takes time. This is the most labor-intensive side of it. It’s not sending any postcards. There are no direct mail costs. Everything we’re talking about is going to be your time and marketing prowess. Everything we’re going to go through, for the most part, is going to be free. You need to have a CRM tool to send out via an email blast. The free version on LinkedIn works.

You have to make some phone calls on your cell phone to get ahold of the right people, but for the most part, that’s less than $100 a month, depending on how big your list is. Most of you probably are not going to reach banks directly. You work too much. You’re 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM when you figure in commuting and getting up and stuff. You don’t have time to dial for dollars. By the time you do get the energy after you’ve had dinner and spent some time with your loved ones, the banks are closed. What do you do? You can always do what we do. We like to go to previous tapes.

I keep every tape. A tape is every spreadsheet. It’s a list. It’s an Excel spreadsheet of assets. Every time we get a list in or somebody sends me a list, we immediately pull it up to see if I’ve seen it before. Larry got a tape in at 1,200 notes. He was getting excited about it. I said, “This came out six months from SM Service.” He’s like, “Shooters,” but he can leverage that tape, see who bought what tapes or what assets he likes, reach out to them, and see if they maybe have more, or reach out to the original source of that and see what else they have if they have more tapes up.

You could also go to the county records. We have done this couple of times on the show. It has been a while since we talked about this. You could do this in every county because this is the deed record. You could jump on and do an assignment search or a deed record search contract for deeds if you know a name of a company. There are a couple of names you could search for in any major county.

You could do an assignment of mortgage search for the last twelve months or any period and see who has bought notes or sold notes because every assignment of mortgage has an assignee and an assignor. There are two sources. One is a seller. One is a buyer. That leads to sources. They’re buying one note that probably has other assets. You now have contact information to be able to find two sources at once there. That’s a good source. We use that a lot.

Use that to get a source to send me some stuff. For example, I was working to share with you website listings, “What do you mean by website listing, Scott?” If you go to a website and you see an asset listed, if it gives you the address, find out who the buyer is and the owner of that note. If it’s a contract for deed, see who the property owner is of that contract for deed.

When we were taught, we looked at one contract for deed that was performing and found this company that had 135 in one city in Indianapolis. My students have already reached out to them. They have offices in Indianapolis and San Antonio. They have some assets they will be sending over, but I was excited about that. I was like, “That’s a good thing.”

I don’t want to go to conferences. I’ve turned down speaking at conferences when they’re like, “We want you as part of a panel.” I’m like, “How long is the panel, 30 minutes? How many people run it?” I don’t want to fly across the country and take time away for me to hang out for seven and a half minutes of speaking time. It would be great to network with people, but I can Zoom and talk to people. I’m not going to spend the money on that.

There are conferences out there that share their registration or who are going, but they’re not giving you the name. They don’t give you the person’s name, but they give you their job title and their company LLC or the bank’s name. That’s pretty damn good enough to track down somebody. We’re talking about how you can leverage LinkedIn to connect with those people. There’s no cost to do this, just your time. You can do this at any time. It’s the whole 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM side hustle.

Most importantly, in our world, if you’re a new note investor, you can save that money. This can be at least $1,000 or $2,000, and put that into your marketing when it comes to your note business. Are there any questions about these five major areas? Number one is banking contacts. You’re probably not going to spend time doing that. You’re like, “I’m probably not going to call banks.”

Be honest with me. I like honesty. I’m not going to blow smoke up your ass, but it’s still a very fruitful thing to do because every month, we send out and get lists that we can cherry-pick. It’s part of that drip marketing campaign. It’s the cost of having a CRM and making sure that we’re connecting. Ameris Bank reached back out to me. I’ve been mailing them for six months. I had another banks reach out to me.

On a regular basis, I go, “I get your emails. I follow you on LinkedIn.” Nobody is going to admit to that. Somebody is like, “I don’t even know how to call banks. I don’t know what to say to scripts. I don’t know if I’ll say yes or no. I’m brand new.” That’s okay. Let’s talk about the next couple of things. We’re not going to go to website listings. We will do that two as one, previous tapes and website listings, but we will talk a little bit about conference registration, county records, and some websites. We will go through three things.

Information Management Network

Are we ready to dive in? Are we ready to get rocking and rolling? Are you excited? Are you hopefully taking some notes to find some deals? If anything, you should find a source or two. I’m sharing it with you. I’m going to go through the websites and some things to show you some things out there. Let’s do this. We’re going to go to IMN. Many of you may be familiar with IMN.org or Information Management Network. They do a lot of these events across the country.

IMN has these different conferences. Bank Special Assets is coming up on July 19th and 20th, 2022. This is out in the West. This is going to be out in California. If we click on the second annual Bank Special Assets Credit Officer’s forum in Dana Point, California, they give you the current attendees. This is what I’m talking about. This is right at your fingertips. You’re probably not going to deal with AIG. It’s a big insurance company.

What I like to do is look at your titles. AIG is the company name. There’s the title of who’s showing up. Special Assets Manager, Axos Bank. I wonder who that might be. Let’s do Axos Bank, VP, Special Assets Manager. Let’s copy that, go to LinkedIn, and hit the search button up here. There’s the Vice President at Axos Bank. What we want to do is keep scrolling down here. You will end up seeing somebody. There’s Mark Horinbein from San Diego, California. That’s near Dana Point. He’s the Vice President.

Let’s take out VP because everybody is a VP in a bank. You’re looking at the Chief Credit Administrator to Axos Bank, Zackorey Ashbrook, out of San Diego. There’s the Vice President of Special Assets Manager. Look at Michelle Barisdale from Del Mar, California, right down the street. I’m already connected to her. I wonder why that is. I’m going to message Michelle. “Michelle, will you be attending the IMN conference in July? If so, I would love to schedule a call with you. Do you have any non – performing notes on your books that you are looking to get rid of this quarter or the next, residential or commercial? I look forward to speaking.” Am I going to IMN? No, but I will act like I am to get the conversation.

She’s like, “Let’s meet.” If I could set up 3, 4, or 5 meetings, it would make sense for me to fly out to Dana Point and hang out there. There’s another one, Charles Thompson. He’s the AVP Loss Mitigation and Default at Axos. You get what I’m saying here. This is one of the simplest things that you can do when going through there. That’s one contact. Look at Axos Bank’s EVP and Chief Credit Officer. Let’s go down here. Look at the Banc of California Special Assets Manager. Let’s see who pops up there. There are four of them that are going to be there. This is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Thank you, IMN, for giving me your hit list of who I should talk to. You see how easy that is. You can do that from your phone, your couch, or the pool. Look at Jeffrey Rice, Vice President-Special Assets Managers at Banc of California, and Michael Baranowski. I’m going to hit connect. They’re at Porter Ranch, California. Let’s do this and add a note, “Terri, will you be attending the IMN conference in July? I will love to talk about your NPNs if you have some you are looking to move this quarter or the next.”

I will copy that. I’m going to send it. I’m going to go to Michael over here and do the same thing. I’m going to add a note as I connect with him. Michael started there because he has a post down here. That’s great. We’re going to come down here and say, “Congratulations.” That’s an easy way to go over here and connect with other special asset managers. You’re going to see some big dogs here, like Bank of America.

It’s probably not a good deal with them but look at CalPrivate Bank, Portfolio Manager of Special Assets. You could spend an evening here and knock out some great stuff. This is one of the things that I first did. I remember sitting on the couch years ago doing this, copy-paste. I’ve talked to Hanmi Bank‘s Vice President of Special Assets several times. You’re going to have some stuff in Luther Savings Bank. There’s MidFirst and MidCap.

This is an opportunity for you to take a look here. If you go back to the current attendees, look at Past Events and Attendee Network. You see some companies here. This is from the East. There’s an Amerant Bank Special Assets Manager. There’s Axos again. You get what I’m saying. I’ve talked to Centennial Bank and City National Bank before. That’s one of the easiest things that you can do. There’s a Lone Star National Bank Regional Credit Officer.

I’m looking at some other names. There’s Patriot, the People’s Bank VP, PNC, and Rhenium Capital. I know those guys from Rhenium, personally. That’s one great thing. This is their special asset. That’s the Bank Special Assets. They’re big dogs. Let’s go to the one that they hosted. They hosted a non-performing note conference. Let’s go to All Conferences. Let’s look for NPL Notes & Default Servicing. This is coming up in Santa Monica. Let’s click on that and look at Past Attendees.

This is where you’re going to find a lot of individual note investors like you and me, not the bigger banks with huge billion-dollar portfolios, but you will find people that have assets available. You will find AHP Servicing, Allegiant Capital, Allied Note Investors, and AlphaNotes. I know those guys. At Amerinote Xchange, you will find some other stuff on there, like Aspen Capital. I know those guys at Aspen Funds. Bayview Loan Servicing has some stuff. There’s Bequest Funds.

It’s the same thing. There’s a president and a Senior VP. There’s Castle Rock. It’s the same thing. I don’t need to worry about realtors. There’s Debtwire ABS. It might be a good thing to follow a managing editor. You can keep going down. You will see LLCs and FCI Lender Services. That’s Cody Faller right there of Faller Financial. There’s Fusion Notes. These are past attendees. If you copy-paste this over, there are over 550 connections there. Is that worth your time? Yes or no? Watermark Capital Exchange is Val Sotir.

If you’re working 60 hours like my boy Scott Meredith, you’re not going to do this from Monday through Friday. You will do this a little bit after hours or chilling. This may be fun for you because if you copy-paste it from LinkedIn, you’re probably going to find a lesson. If you copy-paste it over and do a search online, you will find a website and connect with people.

If you think about this, are most of the people that are going to these events one-off investors? They have 1 or 2 notes they bought. They owner financed one note. That’s all that they did. They’re usually very serious about spending some money on stuff. This gives you an opportunity to rub elbows. I reached out to one person. I’m not going to give their name out. They came back and said, “We have stuff, but we are not selling until after the quarters. We will start selling after the 4th of July.” I was like, “I’ll contact you on the sixth.” He started laughing. He goes, “That would be great. We will be hung over on the fifth.”

This is one thing. I guarantee that nobody else is showing you this. If anybody else is showing you this, it’s because they got it from me. They went, “I’m going to look smart.” Nobody showed me this. We had to find this. When I started looking to see, I was like, “This is a great opportunity.” It’s looking not for a needle in a haystack. You’re looking for that gold pipe in a package of pickup sticks. Pickup sticks are a whole lot better than a hay bale. There are plenty of opportunities here.

County Records

“Do you have to see what they have?” It may not be something you’re looking for, “Can you make a connection?” You can make a warm list. This is one of those sources that we like to use. Go to the previous contact list. Was that valuable? Your money is worth this even though it didn’t cost you anything. Let’s go back here a little bit. That’s conference registrations. Let’s do the county records.

Somebody give me a county or a major city across the country that’s not in California. Orange County, Florida, is one of my favorites. Monroe County, New York. Denton, Texas, is up your neck of the woods. Let’s look at all of them. St. Charles County, Missouri. Let’s do this. We’re going to go with Scott Meredith first with Orange County.

The average medium price of a home in Orange County is about $350,000, if I remember correctly. It’s higher. If you were to pick an Indianapolis or a Rust Belt state, we could look at that stuff. We might look at Travis County, Texas. We’re not buying a lot of notes in Travis County, but we will take a look at Travis County or Harris County. Those are a couple of things.

Go to NETROnline.com. This is a free website. If you’re a student of mine, you know that we use this quite a bit to jump on the county records. We go here and get public records online because we’re looking for real estate. You get public records online. Most counties will allow you to search by name or by D type. It pulls up a map here. We’re going to hit Florida.

This is going to work not because we do the search in one county means. It may work in different parts of the country. It should work in other parts of the country as well by giving you potential sources that are investing in other parts of the country. Orange County is one of my favorite counties to look at. I track Orange County and Harris County. What I do by tracking is once a year, I pull a list of the previous years’ assignments of mortgage because when a note is bought and sold, a true first lien or a second lien is bought and sold off to other people. An assignment is recorded in the county to transfer ownership.

I’m going to look at the Orange County comptroller’s or recorder’s office. I’m going to go to the data online. They averaged somewhere between 14,000 and 16,000 mortgages originated and sold and stuff like that. You can’t do it for the full year. You have to break it up every three months. I’m not going to do it immediately for 2020 or 2021. I’m going to go back to 2020. Let’s do it for the first month, 01-31-2020.

Be careful to check your county records. Each county record is a little bit different in how they allow you to search for the document type. I want to look for specific document types. I’m not looking for a name. I’m going to look for an assignment search. I’m going to do a month of assignments, hit search, and let it do its magic. In the first month of 2020, there were 1,700 assignments filed in Orange County. You can see 1,734.

Off-Market Note Deals: You have to check your county records carefully. Each county record differs.

I’m going to look down here. You can see Charles Schwab Bank, Beech Charles Mortgage Registration Service. Let’s click on View Image for the heck of it. This should pull up the assignment of the mortgage. Here, he signs its rights and interest to a certain mortgage date. It’s mainly executed by Charles Beech and Francis O’Neil, husband and wife. Charles Schwab Bank sold this note to Quicken Loans Inc. This originated on November 8th, 2019. They sold this on January 2nd, 2020. They closed on this first in November and sold it two months later.

What does this tell me? This tells you that Charles Schwab Bank will sell notes. They originated it and sold it off to Quicken Loans. I like to take it one step further and see who was the person in charge of signing. There’s the notary, Elijah Robertson. You have a name. If you go to Charles Schwab Bank, you can track down Elijah Robertson. That’s the first one. You’ve got a name and a contact.

Maybe he’s no longer there, but you see what was sold. This looks like it was a newly originated note. Let’s go to the next one in the search, Westgate Lakes LLC. Westgate Lake is to HOA. HOA is a HUD loan. Bank of America is the grantor. We’re looking for a smaller bank or an LLC like Trump 906 LLC. Let’s look at the assignment of leases, rents, and profits. It’s a limited liability company in Coral Gables, Florida. For $375,000, they transferred this and all of its stuff on a note in a mortgage. This is a commercial loan.

Catherine Arevalo is the assignor of this mortgage to Trump 906 LLC at 255 Alhambra Circle. You’ve got the address for Trump there. You also have the address for Catherine Arevalo. Medical Marijuana Card Orlando might be it. That’s a unique name. You get what I’m saying. There’s another name. Let’s look down for an LLC. Here’s Lakeview Loan Servicing.

Let’s view the images and the corporate assignment of the mortgage. There’s Mission Capital Advisors. The mortgage serves as a representative of Banco Popular North America. Banco Popular sold it to Lakeview Loan Servicing. If we go up to page one, the assistant secretary that personally appeared is Ashley N. Rouse. Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems is a nominee for Banco Popular. Ashley Rouse works for MERS in place of Banco Popular. Banco Popular has been out of business.

You got the address and Ashley Rouse as a potential source from Hampton Roads, Virginia. There’s LoanCare. That was litigation. She’s a document execution specialist from James Madison University. She’s no longer in the business. She’s looking for work. We’re not going to do transaction management. That’s not going to be the same, but we found a source on that. That’s exciting. If you’re looking for stuff in your area, that’s one thing. I would go back at least two years as I did there to search. That loan may still be performing. It may be non-performing. We don’t know what’s going on with it.

Let’s go to Dallas County, Texas. We’re going to look for the Dallas clerk. They say, “By Subscription Only.” It might give you a free thing or make sense to pay for it as a guest. Let’s look for Colonial Funding and see if Eddie Speed has anything in Dallas County that he bought or signed. There’s Colonial Savings, Colonial Financial Services, and Colonial National Mortgage. There’s a Colonial Funding assignment of lien. There’s a Colonial Bank assignment of lien.

There’s a transfer of lien. Colonial Funding Group in South Lake, Texas, is Eddie. The transferee is an insurance company. There’s the holder’s mailing address and the transferee’s mailing address. It was $75,000. There’s the maker. The payee is Michael Lunnin. The UPB note is described in the following. It’s a property, a condo. Eddie bought this note in 2002. It even has his signature on there, West W. Eddie Speed, President of Colonial Funding Group, and then Catherine Lei, who’s a notary.

If you want to see what people are selling, that might be worth it if you know the county that’s looking in. If you see a list that somebody is putting out and they own the list, you can go to see who they bought it from. On the website, there was a property in High Point, North Carolina. Let’s see if I still have this in Guilford County. This North Carolina county is a rural thing. Tracy Z listed this on a website. It’s 2400 Wilke Street on one of the listing websites.

I went to the county with a contract for deed. I typed in the address. It popped up that Equity Trust Custodian for the benefit of Tracy Z IRA. That’s her IRA number. There’s the mailing address for Equity Trust. It shows the special warranty deed. You would be looking at a contract for deed as different than a first lien. It is a lien, but in a contract for deed, the person is owner financing the property to somebody. They’re still retaining the ownership rights.

Every state is a little bit different. Some states treat it like a mortgage. Other states treat it like it’s a lease, so you can evict the person faster. I can see that this note has been sold a couple of times. She bought this back in 2020. She listed the note for sale, but here’s the great little thing about contract deeds. They put a special warranty. You can see what Tracy bought the contract deed for. I’m not going to say what she’s selling it for.

This is generic. They didn’t fill it all the way. She tried to foreclose. This is missing some stuff that got filed to the county, but you see that for a valuable consideration of $30,065, she bought this note from the Dexter Group Trust or Wilmington Savings Fund Society. Dexter Group Trust bought it from SG Capital Partners who bought it four years before that from Harbour Portfolio. Here’s the story when it comes to contracts for deeds.

Originally, Rhonda Howie was the property owner. She bought this house back in 2007. In 2011 when all the crap was hitting the fan, it got foreclosed on because she had a Federal loan. Fannie Mae foreclosed and took it back as an REO. Harbour Portfolio bought this little low-valued REO in 2012 as they did for thousands of other ones across the country.

Harbour Portfolio created a contract for deed, put somebody in it with $1,000, and financed the balance at 9.9% of interest over 30 years, but the contract for deed stays in Harbour’s name. What did Harbour do? They sold it to SG Capital Partners and the Dexter Group Trust. Do we think SG Capital Partners might have some notes available for sale? We do. We would first go here to this special warranty deed and see who signed on behalf of SG Group.

Some of you are like, “How the heck do you know this stuff?” I’ve done thousands of transactions. I’m a previous mortgage broker. You see the same thing here. They didn’t even fill out the parcel identifier. Whoever did this didn’t do a very good job. SG Capital Partners bought it. They’re out of Stamford, Connecticut, 8400 Wilkes. David Campbell was the attorney for SG Capital Partners LLC.

Let’s look for SG Capital Partners LLC in Stamford, Connecticut, and see what pops up. What popped up was a website and a Contact Us page. Give them a phone call or drop them a message. I will reach out and contact somebody back. They will have some stuff, but if you don’t follow up with people, they’re not going to follow up with you. What did I do? I reached out to them. I have on my calendar the follow-up next month unless I get a contact. I’ve already gotten a contact back from one person. I searched for them on LinkedIn.

Off-Market Note Deals: If you don’t follow up with people, they’re not going to follow up with you.

This is one of the great ways of using not only the county records but also previous sellers. If you find a note for sale or go into your previous tapes, do a little tracking. Let’s take it another step forward. Let’s look at Monroe County in New York for the heck of it. We will do some searches up there. New York might be a bit tricky. We would probably have to search the county recorder’s office. They’re probably not going to allow you to do a name search. They might. They might not. Every county is a little bit different in its privacy laws.

Maryland and Virginia are very hush-hush because of the government. California and Arizona are hush-hush. In Texas, we’re not so hush-hush. Let’s go to Monroe County, look at the Monroe clerk, and log in as a guest. Let’s see if Harbour Portfolio has ever sold a note there. Let’s do an assignment on mortgage and hit search. There’s nothing about Harbour. Let’s take all document types out and do a search again. Maybe it will pop up. They will have something in Monroe County.

We have some luck. Inverse Asset Fund has bought a note from Harbour Portfolio at 34 Hoff Street, Rochester. I remember that note very well. I paid $15,000 for it. Would Inverse Asset Fund have more notes available? Maybe they would. Who knows? You see Fannie Mae and Commonwealth Capital. They bought that note on January 24th, 2018. I remember that. We sold that. We did a simultaneous close. We had two of those.

There’s NORCAP 1 and Halo Group Inc. It’s Power of Attorney. Let’s look at 746 Woodbine Avenue, Rochester. Let’s look at the document and see if we can find a contact for NORCAP. Erika Knigge handles online. She does all the stuff for Harbour. She still doesn’t mind. NORCAP care of Portoli Investments, South Jordan, Utah. NORCAP 1 LLC is out of Nebraska. You’ve got two addresses here. It’s Dan and Candace Norville. I know those guys. Contact them. They’re in El Segundo.

You see how easy it is if you track who bought what. If you went to Indianapolis and did a search for Harbour Portfolio, you would find a bunch. If you went to Columbus, Cleveland, or Chicago, you would find a ton of stuff there from who Harbour sold to. That’s a matter of tracking them. Are all those guys and gals still in business? No, especially if you went back years ago. Some of those things have been transferred a couple of times, but here’s the point I’m trying to make here. All you need to find as far as deal flow is at your fingertips.

This Is Still A Relationship Business

How many resources did we find? It’s all about carrying on a conversation. This is still the note business. This is still a relationship business. Do you have anything? Are you looking to move something this quarter? It’s all about the follow-up, “Can I touch base with you? How should I contact you, once a month or once a quarter? I want to be fresh in your mind when you have something. If you have anything now, that’s great. I want to be fresh in your mind because the best deals come from the follow-up.”

Off-Market Note Deals: It’s all about carrying on a conversation. This note business is still a relationship business.

Eighty percent of sales are made after the fifth contact. If you’re contacting one way and sending out contact on LinkedIn and email, that’s three. It’s a matter of you following up with a phone call or another email and reaching out to them. That’s what I have. I’ve delivered well for you. I showed you the previous tapes. You could pull up who Colonial was funding, an address from a tape, a website, and county records and do an AOM or a deed search by a website listing or tracking sellers. It’s the same thing.

Tracy Z had one on a website that I searched for by that address. We found who she bought it from, who they bought it from, and then who they bought it from. There are 3 to 4 different potential sources. There’s a conference registration there. There’s no reason that you should not be closing more deals or making more offers. It’s a matter of you delegating the time to market on a regular basis. Each and every one of you can take an hour, half an hour, or 45 minutes and do that. Reach out and do a little research on how you’re going to hire a VA to scrub some lists for you and pull in counties.

It may be a little extreme to do one from 2021. Years ago, I pulled every assignment of mortgage in Orange County. I also pulled every assignment of mortgage filed in Harris County. There were 17,000 in Harris and 14,000 in Orange County. Those singled down to 7,000 unique entities and then 6,000 unique entities. A lot of them are the government. A lot of them are other things that I’m not going to deal with, but out of that, there were still roughly over 1,000 LLCs to reach out to.

It’s a matter of marketing too, and doing a quick search online to see if they’re there for you. You don’t need that many. You need a few sources that can send you stuff on a regular basis. The reason I wanted to bring this up for you, and I found it so valuable for it, is people say, “There are no deals out there.” There are deals out there. That’s a touch of what we teach on how to find deals when it comes to our three-day workshop. It’s a whole day on finding deals. Imagine the ways that you are going to find more notes out there if you show up for our Virtual Note Buying Workshop.

I would love to have you be a part of that or be signed up for a WCN membership at $97 a month. It’s pretty easy. Take advantage of that. If you want to get signed up for our WCN membership, it’s NoteUmbrella.com. It’s $97 a month. You have to keep it for six months if you’re going through a class, but other than that, it is the biggest bang for the buck. It’s well worth the price of admission for you.

Melanie asked a question, “I’m new. I’m wondering if you need to be location-specific when building a notes business. In doing these strategies, do I want to search for people anywhere in the US overall? Do I want to zero in on certain market location areas?” I’m in Austin, Texas. Melanie, where is home for you? There are some markets that are worth investing in your area.

You’re in the Salt Lake City, Utah area. You’re not going to see a lot of distress. Salt Lake City is one of the most competitive and overpriced markets out there. You don’t see a lot of distress in Salt Lake City. You can go to other places. There’s better bang for the buck in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, the Carolinas, and Missouri. I’m in Austin, Texas. Austin and Salt Lake City have a lot of the same characteristics. Overpriced would be one of them, but I’ve been buying outside of Texas for years. We will buy in Dallas, Texas.

Off-Market Note Deals: If you do not see a lot of distress, you can go to other places. Salt Lake City is one of the most competitive and overpriced markets.

I always tell people, “Pick 3 to 5 states and then focus on the bigger cities in those areas.” You do the search we just did in those bigger counties. Find some buyers. There are only a few places I avoid for the most part. I don’t buy a lot in New York State or New Jersey. I don’t buy anything in Kentucky, but for the most part, if you find a tape and it makes sense, whether it’s non-performing, and the price makes sense, or it’s a performing note, you buy it, and the yields make sense, that’s a longer question with an even longer answer for you, Melanie.

I encourage you that if you want to schedule some time on my schedule, and we can talk more about that, do so. You can always go to TalkWithScottCarson.com. You don’t want to be looking anywhere. Look at 3 to 5 states. If you’ve got friends or family in other states, that makes sense. I’ll give you a great example. I’ll use Scott Meredith here. He’s in Dallas, Texas. Texas is pretty competitive. If he sees anything in Texas, that’s great, but he’s looking at Orlando, Florida, and a couple of other states.

Indianapolis is another market. That’s Indiana, which has not only Indianapolis. It’s got South Bend, Anderson, Bloomington, and West Lafayette. When you’ve got major universities, those are some of the great things. Melanie, feel free to schedule a phone call at TalkWithScottCarson.com. We can talk more about it later. If you’re in an area that has distressed assets, take a look at your area first. Do this little search in your backyard first, and then do a search if you see some names pop up on a regular basis.

We were buying a lot from Harbour Portfolio. We started searching to see who they sold to, and then we started reaching out to who they sold to, “Do you have any other notes in your portfolio?” We would start seeing a lot of the same names popping up in some of the major Rust Belt states. They probably have more than one note in their portfolio. Every note investor I know is a buyer, a seller, or a funding source.

Guys and gals, we are here to help serve you in any way that we can to help you take your note business to the next level over the next 24, 36, or 48 months. There are plenty of opportunities. I wanted to reiterate that with you. There may be people that don’t have anything. I’ve got some of those too. I don’t have anything. That’s fine, but I’ll stay in touch with you.

Thanks, everybody, for jumping on. I’m sorry we didn’t get all the counties. If I didn’t go through your county, it’s usually because it’s pretty easy to search through them for the most part, even those that want a subscription. Go ahead and click on it. Many times, the subscription is they give you free access or free guest access, like Columbus with Hamilton County in Ohio or something else. Once you log out, they won’t let you log back in for another 24 hours.

Wayne County in Detroit does charge to search for the deeds search on the recorder’s office, but it’s a small price. If you’re going to be investing in Detroit and Wayne County, it’s worth going ahead and getting that because you’re going to be on there as well. You might as well find out who’s buying and selling in your neck of the woods. You never know when 1 lead will lead to 800 deals or more.

Larry can vouch for us. 1 asset led to 6. It led to a pool of seconds. It led to other deals for him as well. Use the search and make the connection. Note investors are always looking for buyers, sellers, and funding sources. Do yourself a favor and be a buyer, everybody. Go out and take advantage. Thank you for being on this and reading. I’m glad to have you here.

We will see you. It’s hard to believe 2022 is halfway over. We’re going to do something fun for being at the halfway point of 2022. Take advantage. If you have not done something, now is your opportunity. Take what you’ve learned here and put it to work. Start making this connection and start talking to people. I would love to see you at the top.

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