I was planning on doing some direct mail marketing to probate estate properties soon. I was going to crosscheck the obituaries with the county property records for homeowners that have a target property that meets my criteria.
My question is would you mail to the property of the deceased owner for a few weeks right after they passed away or would you wait a little while before mailing? Also, would you still put the deceased owner’s name on the mail even though you know they passed away or would you put something more general like “Current Owner” or “Current Resident”?
I believe you want to mail directly to the PR (Personal Representative) that was appointed by the court or the Executor, which is still the PR, but was selected by the deceased in a will.
These names and addresses can be gotten from your big local paper in the Classified’s under Legal notices where you’d also find foreclosures etc…usually in the very front of the Classified.
Remember that a PR can either be living in the propoerty, in the same town, or even out of state. It’s really a matter of who was appointed to settle the Estate.
But going to the County Clerks office/Probate Division and doing some homework on this is a good idea as well.
As stated above, you want to send all letters to the PR, executor and the heirs. This info will be avaialble at your county probate office. If you pull the file it will tell you who all those people are with current mailing info. The PR or executor make the decisions based on the will but the heirs can move him along or give suggestions.
It takes time to look all this up. You can look up individual files from notices you see in the local newspaper, or just go to your county probate office and pull 10-20 files. It will tell you in the file if they owned real estate and how much it may be worth. Don’t target people who don’t list any real estate, it would be a waste in my opinion.