Recently, I met a local investor online at one of the REI web sites I frequent. The person seems very knowledgeable with REI, and I felt he would be a great person to not only learn from, but to flip deals to that I don't want. In reading both his direct emails to me and posts on the message board, I got the feeling he has done many deals in his career. He said his strategies are to buy Sub2 and sell via owner-carry financing, which is EXACTLY what I want to do.
The other day, I was looking at our county's courthouse records and an idea hit me. I thought "why don't I look up the entire history of all courthouse records with this person's name to see how many and what type of deals he has done." When I did a search of all records - not just real estate - from 1983 to the present under this person's name, I got only two records: the first one is where he submitted an assumed name (DBA) and the second was a personal residence. I tried his name and DBA for both grantor and grantee, but same thing - the ONLY real estate records that came back involved his lone personal residence.
My first thought was that maybe he hides the transactions in a land trust, but I remembered in one of our conversations that he specifically said he doesn't use land trusts. I guess two other alternatives would be that (1) he has never done any transactions in the county in which he lives (doubtful), and/or (2) he owns a corporation (that was created outside this county) that buys the properties (very possible).
I really believe he is a genuine RE investor from the way he talks, but I'll tread softly until I know how much real-life (and not book-smarts) he has regarding RE investing.
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I wouldn't say this is unusual. Here in Phoenix, if you search the public records for Robert Kiyosaki or his wife, you'll get very few hits. Many use this to claim he is lying and is not a real estate investor. Similarly, if you search for my name, you'll only find a couple things - and nothing at all regarding the house I just flipped. That's because I bought and sold the property via my business and it is the business' name that shows up on the documents. Now you might think that a search of public records would show up my name as being the owner of the business. Nope. That's stored in a different database. You'll need to search the state's corporation commission's database for that. Bottom line is, if he's a real REI, he's taken steps to protect himself legally - which means he's made it hard for people to find him using the methods you used.
Thanks all!
Shaun, you are probably correct. I was (erroneously) under the assumption the business creation record would be stored in the county records, but it is in fact stored in the state records. Therefore, it wouldn't show in the county database. As I said before, he definately sounds like he knows what he's talking about in regards to REI, so he's probably got an entity in which he buys/sells properties through.
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