How Real Estate Investors Find Off-Market Deals Before Probate Using Data

Morry Eghbal (00:00)
So we financed 1,500 houses over the next 15 to 20 years, up to 2010. That’s a lot of properties. At the peak of it, 1999, I had 45 people fixing my houses, five crews, two trash out crews, one paint crews. This was just imagine how much data I had to process in my head.

the area I work literally within 60 mile radius, I know every intersection, how much a property is worth. You just tell me bedroom, bathroom, a square foot is the condition from the outside and I could bid on the auction. This is how, mean, I basically lived data. That’s how I made my money, even though, because you only make money when you don’t lose money.

Michelle Tack (00:22)
Mm-hmm.

Hi, I’m Michelle Tack. I am the leader of Real Estate Pros podcast and welcome all of our subscribers and others that are tuning in today. I’m really psyched to have Morry Eghbal if I pronounced that right, Morry, as our guest today. And when I was talking to Morry to prepare for podcast today, one of the things I was really super…

Morry Eghbal (02:28)
you

Yes.

Michelle Tack (02:42)
psyched about was the level of data and operational integrity that can be gained by what Morry has ⁓ developed in terms of operational efficiency. And it’s all about the data. It’s all about the data from a variety of

sorts. So with that, Morry can you, for those listeners who may not be aware of, you know, what you are, you know, from this, from your arena, I think our listeners would love to understand what you are doing and familiar with what you are doing, make them aware of what we’re doing, what you’re doing, and what your main focus these days are and what ⁓ markets you’re operating in. Please.

Morry Eghbal (03:28)
Okay, let me just give you

a quick background. I got into real estate in 1989. I worked as a remix agent, had my own office at one time for three or four years. Then I sent a letter to an absentee owner to sell his property. I did such a great job that the individual said, look, I used to finance, I financed a lot of investors and even small banks who would lend money to private parties. I would love to finance your deals.

because I know you work very hard, you’re a smart guy. Let me finance you.

So we financed 1,500 houses over the next 15 to 20 years, up to 2010. That’s a lot of properties. At the peak of it, 1999, I had 45 people fixing my houses, five crews, two trash out crews, one paint crews. This was just imagine how much data I had to process in my head.

the area I work literally within 60 mile radius, I know every intersection, how much a property is worth. You just tell me bedroom, bathroom, a square foot is the condition from the outside and I could bid on the auction. This is how, mean, I basically lived data. That’s how I made my money, even though, because you only make money when you don’t lose money. See, it’s not how many good deals you get, it’s how many bad ones you don’t get.

Michelle Tack (04:24)
Mm-hmm.

Morry Eghbal (05:39)
So then 2010, market was very saturated. We were doing a lot of probate deals. We came up with the idea of what if we can find the property before they go to probate? This is 2010, 16 years ago. No such data was available. We spent one year of trying to figure out how we can find somebody’s obituary, find their property. Hopefully we can buy the property before they even file for probate or help them to

sell the property in probate. A year later, a year later, I came up with an Excel file of about 3,000 properties in LA County that we would contact them out of copy and paste of obituaries. Crazy, started from there, you see? And then we realized that after a year, I looked at the data, I said, okay, I wonder what percentage of these people sold. To my amazement,

20 % of those records were sold from the time we started the year before. That told me there is significance in data because if you take a thousand houses side by side, average turnover is about one to 2 % a year, maybe three, but 20 % was about six times higher. That means you could spend less money, six times less money and get the same result than mass market.

At that time, no such platform was available to do these massive searches, you know? And so I worked with many data providers because we needed the real estate data, we had the personal data, but now we had to match them with accuracy with the real estate data. Put all that behind, it took years to develop all that. The site was successor’s data. Originally, big mistake, I called it obituary data. What a mistake that was.

Believe me, I got

Michelle Tack (07:27)
Yeah.

Morry Eghbal (07:27)
calls from people who were ready to shoot me. So then I turned the table around. I said, well, this is successor’s data. This is about the next person in charge, successor. And so that’s the story of successor data. Quickly I realized ⁓ people want also, then I launched a site, excited to sell this data, to bring it to market. Now I could do it for California, then be expanded to become nationwide. It took couple of years.

Then we added other sets of data, probate case filing, dialers, skip tracing, and then assessor’s data. All of this thing took 14 years to develop. Then six years ago, all of a sudden we had all these different websites out there, right? This site, that site. We decided, no, we wanna bring everything to one place, but bringing everything to one place is not easy. Thank God for Amazon. Amazon made it possible.

Amazon’s cloud power saved us. Today we don’t take the site down to update 160 million records. Look, if you’re an agent, your MLS, our site, Zilu and Redfin gets updated the same day with the same data. It’s only one source for data. Then from this data, we created other subcategories of data. Just like somebody who will buy a property and wholesale it, we buy this much data and then

we break it down to small pieces and we wholesale it to you. That’s what we do. We give you the data like Ocean. You want 100,000 records? Piece of cake. You can go and get 100,000 records. Why not download the whole city? You can do all of that.

Michelle Tack (09:01)
That’s very interesting. you operate, what markets do you operate? Do you operate across the United States or can you help me with that a little bit? Okay. And.

Morry Eghbal (09:07)
Yes, nationwide, nationwide. We update

foreclosures, assessor data, and successor data nationwide.

Michelle Tack (09:14)
Wow, that’s pretty impressive. What was impressive to me when we talked earlier is the length of time that you’ve been in real estate, as you mentioned, you’ve done this from the…

grab boots up, which is incredible. We talk about, everybody can be an expert in two minutes by looking in GBT AI. Well, that’s not really true, right? I mean, there’s data there that’s hallucinating, that’s not correct. But what you’ve done, which is really cool, is that you have spent all this time in real estate, understood where the data was. Some of it was offline, some of it online, and you began to integrate that

Morry Eghbal (09:30)
Yes.

Michelle Tack (09:58)
together and to be able to ⁓ make sure that it was of value. You knew the pieces of that data that’s valuable. When you look at it, it just, is it mainly the successor data or what data do you focus on? Or can you go into that a little bit more?

Morry Eghbal (10:17)
Yes,

so successor data has to do with somebody passed away on own real estate. A long time ago when we were trying to match the properties, we could only look through the state the individual lived in. Somebody lived in California, we could only search the properties they own in California. But as the time grew, as we could get more cloud power, then we ran the search nationwide. Somebody could live as a Marine in ⁓ San Diego.

And then the individual want to go to Ohio, keep the house in San Diego, goes to Ohio. And then he goes to Alaska, buys another property over there. And then 30 years later, 40 years later, somebody passed away. We are able to identify the properties that he owned nationwide. And we post that information because it’s significant. To give you an idea, we gather about 10,000 obituaries a day.

Michelle Tack (11:01)
Wow, that’s pretty good. Yeah, it’s very significant for you.

Morry Eghbal (11:10)
Out of 10,000 become away with 1,400 properties. Out of 12 people who pass away, two of them own an extra property. So these are all significant.

Michelle Tack (11:54)
Absolutely. That is, you know, what you’re doing is very complex. But you are avail, all that institutional knowledge and integrating it together, it would take a month of Sundays if that for someone to be able to acquire that data. So that’s, that’s impressive. You know, there’s always, you know, things that help move the machine smoothly in a business. Can you talk to what those things are?

for you how you’re able to make that repetitive day-to-day success.

Morry Eghbal (12:29)
Yes,

yes. For example, Fridays we post the new records for successor data. Most investors, when that data comes out, they print a letter, that day they put it in the mail. Crazy. The individual passes away on Thursday, we post the properties they own on Friday, the next day, because at the funeral, they’re talking about money. You’re not calling contact into somebody to say, I’m sorry about your loss. That’s not even the question.

Michelle Tack (12:51)
Yep.

Morry Eghbal (12:56)
I bought a property the day before the funeral. I sent a letter to a guy for a property in Barstow. I got a call. The individual said my dad passed away. Me and my brother are cojo tenants with him. My mom passed away 10 years ago. I came here because the funeral is tomorrow. I went through the mail. There’s a stack of mail. And I got your letter. We want to sell the property. What do want to offer? I gave him an offer.

Michelle Tack (12:56)
you

Morry Eghbal (13:21)
He said, look, I’m gonna talk to my brother, we are the only two, at the funeral. The day after the funeral on Saturday, we agreed on a price. I bought the property. I paid 100,000 bucks for a property that has been tenant occupied for past four years now. The tenant pays, I’ve been there only twice. And the guy got what he wanted. He said, had it not been because of your leather, I would have contacted an agent. But you see, it’s important.

There’s a reason we post some records every week, some daily, because of the urgency of the situation.

Michelle Tack (13:51)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Absolutely. So that obviously is getting you ahead of the curve, but it’s consistent, right? But what we were talking about before, it’s not sexy, but most people aren’t doing it. They want this immediate, for those that may be dabbling in real estate versus those that are actually want to do this long term, there’s consistency of these blocks that have to be done. And you’re a good example of that. If we turn now to no

Morry Eghbal (14:00)
Yes, yes, yes, yes, right, right.

Yes. Yes.

Michelle Tack (14:23)
This is perfect. ⁓ know, even Elon Musk or whoever, know, Amazon has issues. Can you talk about and maybe share with ⁓

the folks listening, where you had a challenge recently, not 10 years ago, but within the last year, what have you, and you were able to deal with sideways or whatever it was, or something happened maybe in the quality of the data that you’re providing, I don’t know what it is, and that you were able to pivot and right size the situation. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Morry Eghbal (15:00)
Yes, ⁓ there is a lot of talk you hear on the internet of people. When you see a 22-year-old guy is trying to sell you a course for 30,000 bucks, who hasn’t done 20 deals or five deals, then you question the whole situation. But a mature investor knows it’s a cycle when there is most deals, the least number of people work it.

When there is least deals available because of market cycle, the most number of people work it. Today, we didn’t have this challenge that was 15, 20 years ago. There’s a lot of money available, a lot of money available. Everybody wanna finance the flip, all that. But getting the right margin is a key. You see, so investors come to realize, before I pay 30,000 bucks to a wholesaler, why don’t I spend couple of thousand bucks, try to secure my own deal?

And it happened. Now, I never tell anybody, don’t pay the wholesaler $20,000 if you made $40,000. But what I’m saying is that your business has to have many different compartments, sections that brings you the deal. You can make everything out of one niche. That’s the reason we offer all these niches. And on top of it, we say, if you have your own data, we help you. For example, you want to the code, what is it?

data from the county size that has to do with code violations, you can pull some of that data, we give you a tool that you can put the data together. You can literally bring two pieces of the puzzle, like two bones, and we will help you to build a person out of them with all the other pieces of the data. And that’s basically is the mastery today. The competition that I would consider be a competition for somebody,

is the somebody who is persistent and consistent. That’s the name of the game. We didn’t change the menu for all this time because we always, why I was new is working. I just had to make it better and better and better and better. And we still work at it. Believe it or not, since 2019, I have two full-time programmers working on one site five, six days a week for all these years on one site to program it. Because it’s that.

Michelle Tack (16:48)
Yes.

Morry Eghbal (17:12)
much work behind the scenes but we do it with passion because and we build it out of feedback from you.

Michelle Tack (17:15)
Absolutely.

Yeah, and that is, as I shared with you previously before getting into the real estate area, which has been my passion since a long time.

you know, there are things in technology that won’t work. ⁓ And, you you thought they would work, they don’t work, what have you. Can you talk about a time where, you know, it was on your end, Morry, where things were not perfect, but you were able to right-size and continue to ⁓ keep that client and have them continue to work with you on other deals thereafter?

Morry Eghbal (18:33)
Yes, ⁓ first of all, we don’t have a contract. We have seasonal customers, clients who use the data. They buy two three properties. Then they need to run out of money. They go and they come back, all that. But ⁓ we keep it simple. This is not complicated. Our site is simple. Everything is simple. When you learn, for example, successor data or probate or assessor data, they all function the same way.

We give it the ability to do a lot of stuff yourself and then we give it a third party who does it. For example, with all these people who got ticked off by all this paper click, paper click, paper click, now you can watch a video for two minutes on iPhone and you get 50,000 people, I wanna buy your house, I wanna buy your house. That is saturated. But when you’re dealing with a 85 year old grandma who has got husband passed away after 60 years and she missed a sale,

she is not there to try to do a pay-per-click, it still is a personal contact, you see? And that’s what is important. You will get your deals by being there the genuine way, offer a good service, be honest to people, don’t try to make everything out of one deal. Spread it out, spread it out. Little bit less profit, the other person walks away happier, and you do fine. That’s been our philosophy for all these years.

Michelle Tack (19:32)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

That’s awesome. When you talk about that, know, have you built a social media or network environment that has allowed you to create more?

leads for yourself and it’s okay if you don’t. just was wondering, know, sort of your outside of your business, but attached to it, obviously it’s inside the business, but you know, whether it’s speaking events or, you know, what have you, can talk to that a little bit about how you extend your network?

Morry Eghbal (20:18)
Sure, sure.

Most of the, if you go on AI, chat, ask about probate case filing, and it will tell you lead cruncher, it’ll tell you successor data, it’ll tell you probate list. I learned a long time ago how to post blogs. That was 15 years ago when we could post blogs and it would show up. And then so many other companies came on, and so many stuff, then Google all of a sudden changed the algorithm for everybody. But… ⁓

But we are found because when you create a search, you find us, that is building a lot of locations. We have probably, I can only tell you, at least a thousand videos out there, at least four or five thousand posts that are out there that brings the traffic. So I had to learn to create all of that. You just don’t launch a site and expect everybody to come in. And then behind the scene, we are working on a project that one day, I’m hoping,

If we can pass through the test, all that, we can put it out there when somebody says, wanna sell my house, then it will say, here’s four or five investors who can buy it cash, legitimately and organically is possible, but it is a lot of work, a lot of work. And so that’s what is going on. Are we out there? Yes. Am I out there posting podcasts every single day? No. Because we have enough customers that sustains us. Thank God for that.

Michelle Tack (21:34)
That’s awesome.

Understood.

Morry Eghbal (21:49)
and we are generous to give Bansheev a doubt.

Michelle Tack (21:51)
Understood. Last question before we wrap. What’s the next big goal for you in the business?

Morry Eghbal (21:57)
Yes,

you know, I look forward for the day that we can talk to, ⁓ just like we’re talking, sit in front of the screen and say, OK, I want you to do A, B, C, D, E, F, G for me and give me the results. And we are pushing Amazon for that. Believe me, we’re like the guinea pig for them because we keep telling them we want more, we want more. That is the type of AI that we want automation.

Michelle Tack (22:18)
Yep.

Yeah.

Morry Eghbal (22:24)
It

isn’t the AI who’s gonna call 45,000 people for you and then mess up everything that is out there for you. You see, that’s basically, that’s my vision as we move forward because you can just say I want to, it’d be like perfect assistant online who has access to all of your data, everything, and you can say do this, do that, do this, do that, get me this file ready. Get that list ready, skip trace this one.

Michelle Tack (22:49)
Mm-hmm.

Morry Eghbal (22:51)
That’s the ultimate for us. I think we’ll see that in the next two or three years.

Michelle Tack (22:53)
Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I don’t disagree. And I think really, you and I talked to this in our preparation session, is that AI is out there, but can it do certain operational things? Sure. But the level of introspection and the level of operational

efficiency is in your head and in your software. And that’s really hard to replicate. ⁓ And maybe we’ll get there in the next couple years. Maybe we’ll find out that, you know, there’s still a lot of hallucinating of, you know, AI and we don’t know yet. It’s a very interesting time to live and see what happens. I want to thank you for ⁓

Morry Eghbal (23:27)
Yes.

Michelle Tack (23:41)
being with us today, but before we leave, what I wanna make sure is those people enjoying the podcast and see value of it, that you provide your contact information as, so they can, you know, give you a buzz.

Morry Eghbal (23:56)
⁓ If you go online and search for probate lease, inheritance records, all that, it’s going to bring you to a site called Successors Data, probate lease, and then all of those will link to one site called Lead Cruncher, L-E-A-D-C-R-U-N-C-H-E-R. Go to Lead Cruncher and just to test our ability to give you an analysis on a property for free all day long, 24 hours, put a property address and then try to see what it will tell you on the radar.

what is it worth in one mile, one and a half mile, two mile, everything that I did here, I had to pay a programmer, sit in a basement to code that for about six months. That’s exactly what, I actually went and met the guy. He said, you know, I’m in a basement, it’s cold out there, and this is winter, it snows, and this is what I do. I have to sit here, and we did that. We took that piece, we put them on the home page, like Zilo will tell you what the property is worth, but.

Michelle Tack (24:35)
Ha ha ha.

Morry Eghbal (24:54)
⁓ Now, you can always call us at 909-315-5330. Our number is on the homepage. Or you can email [email protected] or successorsdata or probateleaf. I’ll get your email. You’re not gonna get a VA, ⁓ somebody who barely speak, knows anything about real estate, ⁓ answer your questions. If we have to leave a message, I’ll call you back.

Michelle Tack (25:17)
Got it.

That’s awesome, Morry. Thank you very much. For the folks that are on this podcast, we hope you got value from it. If you did, we have other hundreds of podcasts available. Please ensure that you subscribe. Thanks again, Morry.

Morry Eghbal (25:35)
Thank you.