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Real Estate Pros · September 16, 2026 · 39 min listen

Stop Chasing Foreclosures: How to Find Less Competitive Distressed Property Leads

Show summary

In this episode, Saim Chaudhry, founder of Properant, shares insights into distressed real estate data, how his platform helps investors identify opportunities in California, and the importance of data accuracy and strategic pivots in real estate investing.

Key takeaways

  • Mortgage foreclosure leads get hit nonstop by creditors, lenders, agents, brokers, investors, wholesalers and bird dogs, so Chaudhry recommends layering alternative distress data (vacancy, fire damage, utility liens, tax delinquency) to find less competitive deals.
  • In California, property taxes unpaid for a minimum of five years allow the county to tax-auction the property, and tax foreclosures see less competition than mortgage foreclosures.
  • A tax lien is usually a 'super lien' that wipes out other mortgages at a tax auction sale, but a federal tax lien is an exception and will transfer to the buyer about 99% of the time, so due diligence before bidding is essential.
  • Properant offers 100 free skip traces per user per month, resetting monthly, and pulls phone numbers (landline vs. cell), email addresses, date of birth, and age for owners, including the people behind LLCs.
  • Properant aggregates fragmented county-by-county data (fire department reports, tax auction lists from all 58 California counties, utility liens) into one normalized, daily-updated platform instead of requiring investors to check individual county websites and PDFs.
  • Chaudhry avoids buying at auctions because prices get bid up past what makes sense for investors; he uses auction data mainly to find and contact owners before the auction date, when there is a prime off-market negotiation window.
  • Chaudhry's acquisition script when calling a distressed owner: identify yourself, name the property and the specific distress issue you found (e.g., behind on payments), state you buy houses, ask if they're open to an offer or already have something lined up, then let them talk.
  • In Sacramento County, the median home price was estimated around $450,000 to $550,000 at the time of recording, and Chaudhry advises sticking to 'bread and butter' FHA buyer price points rather than luxury flips for a bigger resale buyer pool.

In this episode

  1. 00:00Can you still flip houses at a discount in California?
  2. 02:21Intro: Saim Chaudhry and Properant
  3. 03:13The genesis of Properant: from spreadsheets to a data platform
  4. 04:50Getting started: key distress data points in the platform
  5. 06:20Deep dive: fire-damaged property data
  6. 08:44Skip tracing built into the app
  7. 09:50What the first call to a distressed owner sounds like
  8. 13:16Why investors need to pivot to alternative distress leads
  9. 15:15Tax liens, utility liens, and federal tax lien risks at auction
  10. 24:16Why Saim avoids auctions and prefers off-market deals
  11. 25:46Buying temperature: investors pivoting to notes, multifamily, commercial

About the guest

Saim Chaudhry is the founder of Properant, a California-focused distressed property data platform he launched about four weeks before this recording after a decade and a half working as a fix-and-flip investor in the Sacramento region. He started working distressed deals around 2012-2013 using spreadsheets, previously tried and failed to build Properant in 2017, and has also worked in multifamily private equity (as the thirteenth vice president of acquisitions at 29th Street Capital, where he sourced their first Sacramento multifamily deal), commercial shopping center sales, and nine months in commercial leasing before returning to single-family fix-and-flip and wholesaling as his focus.

Listen to the audio

“That's why you wanna chase after other lead types, alternative lead types that are more sophisticated, if that makes sense. And that's where you can get that discount instead of going after the same leads that everybody else is going to.”

Saim Chaudhry

“I don't need fifty million records, I need the five hundred that's gonna matter.”

Saim Chaudhry

“If you're not adapting, if you're not evolving, you're dying, right? So everybody and their mama works foreclosure leads.”

Saim Chaudhry
distressed property dataCalifornia real estatetax liens and tax auctionsskip tracingfix and flipwholesalingSacramento marketfire-damaged propertiesvacant land investingmultifamily and commercial pivots

Questions answered in this episode

Is it still possible to find discounted houses to flip in California?

Saim Chaudhry says yes, opportunities still exist, but investors need good distress data layered together and should chase alternative lead types instead of common ones like lender foreclosures, which get hit by creditors, lenders, agents, brokers, investors, wholesalers, and bird dogs around the clock.

What distressed property data points does Properant track in California?

Properant tracks USPS-confirmed vacant properties, absentee owners, tax delinquency, structure fire reports (including severity, occupancy status, number of people displaced, and fire department response details), utility liens, and a statewide tracker of all 58 county tax auctions updated daily.

What happens if you buy a property at a tax auction in California with a federal tax lien on it?

Chaudhry explains that a tax lien is normally a super lien that wipes out other mortgages when a property sells at a tax auction, but a federal tax lien is an exception that will transfer to the new owner about 99% of the time. He warns investors to do due diligence before bidding at auction because of this risk.

How long can a California property owner go without paying property taxes before the county can foreclose?

Chaudhry states that if property taxes go unpaid for a minimum of five years in California, the county can tax-auction the property, and there is generally less competition on tax foreclosures than on mortgage foreclosures.

Can wholesalers use a platform like Properant, or is it only for fix-and-flip buyers?

Chaudhry says the data works the same way for both. Whether you're the end cash buyer purchasing the property or a wholesaler putting it under contract to assign, it's the same script, same data, and same lead list.

Why does Saim Chaudhry avoid buying at foreclosure or tax auctions?

He says auctions have gotten worse over the past decade and properties get bid up to prices that don't make sense for investors anymore. He uses auction data mainly to identify owners before the auction date so he can negotiate an off-market deal directly with them, rather than competing with hundreds or thousands of bidders at the courthouse steps.

Resources and links

Full transcript

Saim Chaudhry (00:00)

is it realistic in California to purchase houses at a discounted enough to flip it? Yeah, the opportunities are still out there. And that’s where having like really good distress data and layering it and, chasing leads that other people aren’t chasing because if you hit up a foreclosure, like a lender foreclosure, for example, those people are getting bombarded twenty four seven. not only by creditors, by the lender, they’re getting bombarded by agents.

brokers, investors, wholesalers, bird dogs, So that’s why you wanna chase after other lead types, alternative lead types that are more sophisticated, if that makes sense. And that’s where you can get that discount instead of going after the same leads that everybody else is going to.

Dylan Silver (02:11)

Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today we’re joined by Saim Chaudhry, the founder of Properant. Saim, thanks for taking the time today.

Saim Chaudhry (02:20)

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Dylan Silver (02:21)

What types of deals are coming across your desk these days?

Saim Chaudhry (02:25)

A lot of fix and flips locally. I’m here in California in the Sacramento region and I’ve been working on a data platform called Properant over the last year and a half. just finally released it about four weeks ago. And so I’ve been using my own data to kind of uncover distressed properties and it’s been awesome, seeing those lists pop up actual distressed properties that I can recognize, ’cause I know my town by like the back of my hand. So when I type in,

looking for tax delinquent properties and I recognize the owner name like from a few years ago and that property’s still sitting. That’s kind of like an aha moment for me. So yeah.

Dylan Silver (02:56)

I’d like to talk about the genesis of Properant. Was this something that you developed out of necessity for yourself? Did you have or identify a space or a gap in what was available and could see this as a use case for others? How did this whole thing come about?

Saim Chaudhry (03:13)

Sure. So it’s a little bit of both. What I had going back in twenty twelve, twenty thirteen when I first started was I based all of my work off of spreadsheets. And I’m sure we’ve all been there. Spreadsheets, and then I signed up for a bunch of platforms, but the data was so fragmented. I had to have five browser tabs open. I had to use three different platforms to get all the information and all the data that I wanted. Then I would plug it into a spreadsheet. I would have a virtual assistant go by and fill in the fields for the spreadsheet.

And then I would look at the columns individually and I would highlight in red for each property all the distressed indicators. And then I would resort this spreadsheet as far as like which ones have three red fields, which one has two red fields. And so that’s kind of how I worked my distressed leads at the time. And so I always knew like back in 2017, I tried to I tried to create Properant for the first time. I hired a development team, had some partnership issues, the product didn’t end up launching.

So I gave it another try this last year and with the advent of AI and having developers that I knew personally, also learning how to program myself over the past few years. I gave it another try and thankfully, got it launched finally. We just we’re fresh, we’re brand new to the market, four weeks in and I went into this thinking to myself, even if the platform doesn’t succeed as a platform, I’m still using it. So I guess it’s a win for me either way at this point. So

Dylan Silver (04:32)

to talk on a granular level, if we can here. I know that we’re not sharing a screen here. So it’s some sometimes difficult to do these things, but if I I’m a user and I’m looking at Properant and I’m trying to identify the best use case for me as a distressed single family investor, where might I start on the platform?

Saim Chaudhry (04:50)

Sure. So the power comes in the distressed flags that we have. And we’re in California only for a reason. It’s because we know the California market. I grew up in California. I’ve worked the California market both on a residential and commercial scale. And so what you want to do as far as when you’re first signing into the platform, you wanna get you wanna get familiar with the different distressed data points that we have. So we have for example, I’ll name off a few a United States Postal Service confirmed vacant.

So the postman has confirmed that this property is vacant and it’s part of their data set. So we transfer that into the app. You have absentee owners, which almost every single platform has. That’s just icing on the cake, as I would say. Then we have very specialized data sets because we’re California only, we’re super obsessed with California distressed data. And since we’re not nationwide like the other platforms, that’s how we can roll up our sleeves and really do a deep dive on California distress data. So I’ll give you an example. Just this week we added a new data set.

It’s properties, real properties in California statewide, year to date that have been affected by a structure fire. So as you know, properties that are boarded up and have had a fire and are abandoned and vacant, those are owners that are probably motivated to sell, right? So you layer that on top with, maybe it’s a tax delinquency, maybe it’s the, you know, USPS vacant, maybe it’s a foreclosure as well. So you want to layer these different layers of distress data on top, run your search.

And instead of getting the fifty million records nationwide, I’m more interested in the five hundred narrowed down list of gold.

Dylan Silver (06:20)

You mentioned several different criteria to identify or filter by. In some of the other platforms, they have some of these. You mentioned, absentee owners, for instance, is one that they might have. The fire damage is interesting because I haven’t heard that before. Can we dig in there? How can folks identify fire damaged properties? Is there lists that they can pull without giving away the gold and explaining exactly how you’re doing it? how are folks otherwise able to identify these properties?

Saim Chaudhry (07:34)

So I can’t speak for anything outside of California because I don’t know outside of California data. That’s why we’re hyper localized for California. But I can tell you what we do is we aggregate fire department reports for a year to date. So like I said, all of this information in the data is fragmented county by county. So what we do is we pull it all together, we normalize it and we put it into our system and attach it to a parcel. So in our filters, as far as just the fire distress data goes, you can search by the severity of the fire.

Was it vacant or occupied at the time? How many people did it displace? and then we also display additional information that might not be so pertinent to actually call picking up the phone and calling the owner, but it does give you a bigger picture, such as how many units responded to that fire, how long they stayed in fighting that fire. So if you see, you know, a minor kitchen fire where they were there for one hour versus a severe fire where they were there for like 13 hours and eleven units responded, if you see that in the property report.

Now you know what you’re dealing with and you’ve done your homework before you pick up the phone and call the owner.

Dylan Silver (08:32)

We let’s say we’ve got the property or several or dozens of properties identified through these types of filtering criteria. Next step we’ve gotta find how we’re gonna reach out to the owner. What does that look like?

Saim Chaudhry (08:44)

Yeah, so we have skip tracing built right into the app and that includes skip tracing the person behind entities, so such as LLCs. we also have the mailing address and a lot of these people are absentee owners when they’re distressed. So that’s another layer that you can put on top as far as data and your searches go. But like I said, we have skip trace baked right into the app.

Once you hit that skip trace button, it will give you all the phone numbers. It’ll tell you if it’s a landline, if it’s a cell phone. It’ll bring up email addresses and then also the date of birth and the age of the person that you’re about to call. So we have all that. And then also, Dylan, we are currently offering a hundred free skip traces per user per month. So if you, let’s say, use forty the first month, the next month it re-tops back up to a hundred. So you have a hundred free skip traces per month as a subscriber.

Dylan Silver (09:28)

I wanna ask you about the conversations, because oftentimes people can have great data, right? But you have to be able to utilize the data. you’re in California, we’ll stick to California in the market that you’re familiar with. If I’ve got a fire damaged property that I’m interested in as an investor, what might that conversation or that initial conversation look like?

Saim Chaudhry (09:50)

Yeah, so that’s another thing. Fire damage properties is a sensitive topic, just like foreclosures might be. these are people that are losing their homes. it might have been a their primary residence, so it is a sensitive topic. you wanna look at the fire report, you wanna see like when did this fire happen, how many people did it displace, where are they living now? If it was absentee owner and this was an investment property, it might not be as emotional. So basically having all that information right in front of you will prepare you for how you wanna approach the owner. So I would just pick up the phone.

let’s just say it’s a foreclosure, right? This is my usual script. Hi, my name is Saim. I’m calling about your property on Applebee Way. I saw it was behind on some payments. I buy and sell houses. I was wondering if you’re open to an offer or if you have something lined up right now. And then I would just let them talk. And that’s kind of how I approach sellers.

Dylan Silver (10:34)

people talk at length about their acquisitions strategy. And as you’re talking about how Properant can help facilitate this process, I’m also thinking about how people may have to have different conversations and different angles and different ways to build rapport and to have follow up with folks because if someone has a fire damage property, of course that’s gonna be different than a probate property or simply a property that’s behind for

some other reason, have you found that when there is physical damage to the property, that folks are more or less likely to act quickly?

Saim Chaudhry (11:11)

It really depends on where the owner is in their cycle of holding that property. I like to layer things where it’s both physical and financial happening. That gives more of a sense of urgency. especially when there’s like an auction date and everybody’s familiar with mortgage foreclosures, but there’s also tax foreclosures, right? So if you don’t pay your property taxes for a minimum of five years in California, the county can actually tax auction your property.

So there’s a lot less competition. It’s still very competitive, but a lot less competition than mortgage foreclosures. and for that reason, because I’ve worked with tax auctions before, we decided to also create a statewide tracker. So we, we track all 58 county tax auctions. You can click view inside the app and it’ll bring up every single property that’s heading to auction. It’s updated daily. So as property owners might redeem their property or the property might sell and taxes might get paid off. You’re not working a stale list. So that’s another thing that we offer is.

Because the data, like I said in the beginning, is so fragmented. Right now, like before Properant, you would have to go to every single county’s website. you would have to refresh the page, you would have to keep an eye on their announcements, because they announce random times throughout the year when they’re gonna hold a tax auction. Then you have to download PDFs or, lists on bidding websites and sometimes they don’t have addresses, they just, they just have APNs. And so we’ve aggregated all that data and just put it in one platform for the users.

Dylan Silver (12:31)

When folks are finding success, whether it’s through a platform like Properant or if it’s through their own acquisition strategies and follow-up, one of the things that I’ve noticed is that sometimes you do have to make pivots. I think this is a hallmark of an effective real estate operator. With your system, I’m thinking out loud here, if you’re realizing that there’s a specific, high density competition in this one area, let’s say auction data.

you can make a pivot and look at some other forms of distress, right? Do you find that in your investing career, as well as in those of the people around you, your sphere, so to speak, that people are and have had to make pivots recently in their business in order to stay competitive?

Saim Chaudhry (13:16)

Absolutely. If you’re not adapting, if you’re not evolving, you’re dying, right? So everybody and their mama works foreclosure leads, right? For mortgage foreclosures. that’s why I pride myself in sticking to California only statewide and offering that instead of going nationwide and blasting out like I said in the beginning, I don’t need fifty million records, I need the five hundred that’s gonna matter. So yeah, you do have to pivot. You have to look for other distressed lead types, you have to uncover other types of

distressed leads and data that your competitors aren’t working, that’s kind of hidden. So for example, let me layer the vacant filter confirmed by the USPS with utility liens. you can do that in the app. Utility liens haven’t been paid. They’re usually like three hundred bucks, four hundred bucks, but if they compound and they haven’t been paid over a couple of years, now you know that there’s something going on with that property, not only financially, but possibly physically as well. Maybe there’s squatters, maybe it’s boarded up, there’s a reason those utility liens have not been paid.

Dylan Silver (14:51)

Ask you about how this idea of layering works in practice, right? You mentioned a USPS confirmed vacant and then a utility lien. If someone is not paying those liens for a specific period of time, is there a set period in California where they can get foreclosed on? Is it five years? Is it sooner than that? Is it, up to the utility company? What does that look like?

Saim Chaudhry (15:15)

There is a statute of limitations and it also depends on the type of lien. So for example, if you have a tax lien, you haven’t paid your taxes, the county can foreclose right away. And tax liens are super liens. So it doesn’t matter what foreclosures you have. If you purchase a property at a tax auction, sorry, then that lien, that tax lien wipes out all the other the lender mortgages, right?

there is one specific lien that stays. So here’s another example of being careful at go by when you go to auctions, you gotta do your research, you gotta do your due diligence. If there’s a federal tax lien on that property, that tax lien ninety-nine percent of the time is going to transfer when you purchase that property at a tax auction. So if you go to a tax auction and you’re bidding and you’re thinking, cool, I’m gonna bid, I’m gonna get this deed, this is a super lien.

You gotta be careful, you gotta do your due diligence, you gotta do your research because you might inherit some of those liens, especially a federal tax lien.

Dylan Silver (16:04)

A federal tax lien. Wow. So that’s like someone’s personal taxes that they’re not paying. The lien is on the home now. You inherit that. Yeah. That can be an issue. I want to ask you a pivoting here, acquisitions cost for these distressed properties. I’m a fish out of water when it comes to California. I can imagine things are pricier than in other markets. What can folks expect if they’re looking for quote unquote a an entry level distressed single family home?

in a more cost effective market of California, what can they reasonably expect to acquire that home for?

Saim Chaudhry (16:36)

So our philosophy, especially when I first started flipping, I learned this early on from my mentors, is stick to the bread and butter. you can do like the higher price, luxury home flips, but your buyer pool is gonna be a lot smaller. So you wanna go into neighborhoods where you’re gonna have that FHA home buyer because that you’re gonna have a way bigger audience to resell that property to. Right now in Sacramento County, I would say probably the median home price is probably around four fifty to five fifty at this point. Things have gone really high as far as home prices have.

And as interest rates are really high, but the market’s still doing well. It’s still a seller’s market and people are still buying. So

Dylan Silver (17:11)

I if I’m thinking in my Texas realtor hat, I can of course look at, some markets where you can get homes relatively cost effectively, especially if there’s signs of distress. It may be livable but borderline. I if folks are looking for that type of acquisitions opportunity, let’s say in Sacramento, what might that look like from a an acquisition’s cost? Can you find deals, at eighty and ninety thousand dollars that are

livable if someone is needing to move quickly or realistically you’re going to be looking at two hundred thousand

Saim Chaudhry (17:41)

Are you asking as a fix and flipper, is it realistic in California to purchase houses at a discounted enough to flip it? Yeah, the opportunities are still out there. And that’s where having like really good distress data and layering it and, chasing leads that other people aren’t chasing because if you hit up a foreclosure, like a lender foreclosure, for example, those people are getting bombarded twenty four seven. not only by creditors, by the lender, they’re getting bombarded by agents.

brokers, investors, wholesalers, bird dogs, So that’s why you wanna chase after other lead types, alternative lead types that are more sophisticated, if that makes sense. And that’s where you can get that discount instead of going after the same leads that everybody else is going to.

Dylan Silver (18:21)

this idea of a of a more sophisticated lead, a different lead type. In some capacity, it can be more challenging because there’s no playbook to go off of. You don’t have someone necessarily that you could learn from right away. But in another sense, it’s new to everybody, right? That seller probably doesn’t have as many people reaching out to them about that specific issue or that specific house because it is new. When talking with other investors, how do they approach some of these maybe more niche

distress situations? Do they have it with the same, type of conversations that they would other forms of distress? Are these somewhat more, you could say, I don’t want to use unscripted because none of this should be scripted, but something that they’re having to figure out as that they as they go.

Saim Chaudhry (19:02)

That’s the beauty of it. And you can simplify it all the way down to that’s the seller and I’m the buyer, the potential buyer. So that script that I gave you when I pick up the phone and say, Hi, my name is Saim. I’m here to buy your house. Here’s what’s wrong with the property. They already know what’s wrong with the property, but you’re just reiterating that. So they know that you’ve done your homework and you’re offering them a solution. so just to simplify it at the end of the day, they need to sell, you want to buy. And that’s pretty much it. And you just go from that and let them talk.

Dylan Silver (19:27)

I want ask you about follow-up. Whenever folks talk about like foreclosure, for instance, okay, there’s an auction date set, I’ve got to get this home before the auction, their backs against the wall, but also I’ve only got so much time and I’m competing with so many people who are doing something similar, some variation of that. But when you have physical distress, there might not be that definitive date set in someone’s mind where they might need to sell. So is there sometimes longer?

Timelines? Is this a longer follow-up process at times? And what does that follow-up look like?

Saim Chaudhry (20:01)

Yeah, I mean it’s all it’s all case by case basis. Even though it’s only, let’s say it’s only physically distressed, not financially distressed. Let’s say their back’s not against the wall. You wanna remind them that there’s still a financial aspect to this. That property’s a liability. If somebody gets hurt, if squatters come in, they get hurt, especially in California, you can be held liable. code enforcement liens will stack up. It’s going to attract vagrants, it’s gonna attract squatters, your property value is gonna continue to depreciate.

And then also you’re not doing your neighbors a very good job. how would you feel living next to a boarded up house for six months? Some of the flips that I’ve picked up in the past, I’ll tell you a funny story. Back in, I think about almost a decade ago, time flies. We picked up a house, me and my business partner at that time, and there were and that lead I got from I had a contact at Code Enforcement. Really great guy. he didn’t want to get paid any bird dog fees. He was ethically and morally on the up and up.

but he recognized that we were purchasing these code enforcement properties and fixing them and putting a brand new home buyers in there. So we were doing the community a service as well. So he would bring us leads every now and then. He would tell he would tip us off and say, here’s another one. This one property in particular, there was homeless people, squatters, vagrants. The neighborhood was completely done with these people, right? And with this situation of having a empty, vacant, boarded up house in their neighborhood. It was a beautiful neighborhood, by the way. But

There’s squatters and homeless people, they’re playing darts. They’re throwing darts with their needles in the front and the backyard and they’re throwing it at the fence that divides this property with the neighbor, and the neighbor has kids, they they’re riding their bicycles out. So it’s a dangerous situation, So it’s so once we came in, we fixed the property, the neighbor the neighbors were really grateful, and so was the

Buyers, the brand new family, first time homebuyers. And it was just a win for everybody, including the seller, including us and the neighbors and the first time homebuyers. So

Dylan Silver (21:49)

When we talk about being able to benefit community and cr and creating community or improving community, sometimes this gets lost. And I’ve been hearing more and more real estate investors such as yourself talk about, being able to have a positive impact on the community around them, which of course, when you’re looking at being a real estate investor, that may not be, the number one most important thing, but oftentimes that does ultimately drive profitability. Like it helps increase your sphere, like your contact.

that you had that was working for the code enforcement, clearly left a good impression on him. He wanted to see these areas get better. Now you have deals and so on and so forth. And I can imagine that those neighbors as well were happy. But this gets me thinking, there’s a lot of areas I’m sure people can think about it in their city that they’re in, even outside of California, where you see boarded up homes, where you where you see fire damaged homes, or properties that are sitting vacant, or an infill lot that that’s that is

Nothing is going on with. In California specifically, where Properant is active, will folks be able to find all of those infill opportunities? Or sometimes are these properties quote unquote invisible? Like i it’s only gonna show up if you’re driving for dollars.

Saim Chaudhry (22:59)

Absolutely. So that’s one of the great things about Properant is we aren’t just focused on residential, for the fix and flipper. you can be a commercial broker looking for deals for distressed commercial properties. You can be a land flipper, It doesn’t matter the type of property because we cover the entire state and we cover every single parcel. And you can layer what those same distressed filters that you can layer for single family homes, you can layer those also for vacant land. obviously not the vacant USPS filter.

But you already know that property is vacant. Let’s just let’s do one of the big ones I see for vacant infill lots is tax delinquency. they’re not paying the taxes. So you can do tax delinquent and not even just auction. It’s not scheduled for auction, but it’s just tax delinquent. And you’ll get a pretty big list with that, then you can narrow it down even further. Let’s say it’s a out of state owner, like they don’t have such an emotional attachment to that property. Maybe they bought it twenty years ago. you can filter by all that. So yeah, it doesn’t matter the type of property, you can apply all those filters to any type of property.

Dylan Silver (23:57)

Separate question here. You mentioned the auction. When folks are going to these auctions, whether that’s for a tax delinquency for land or for a single family home, or they’re behind on the mortgage, etc. How much competition is there? Are all of these, multiple bids potentially and lots of eyes on it, or are there some auctions where there may be one bidder or no bidders?

Saim Chaudhry (24:16)

I I’m gonna be honest, I haven’t been to an auction in a long time and for good reason. I strongly believe that auctions nowadays, especially in the past ten years, have gotten even worse. They get bid up to a price that doesn’t even make sense anymore as an investor. That’s why I only chase off market deals. And the reason we have that data, like the auction data, is mainly to get a hold of the owner before it goes to auction. That’s the prime window of opportunity. You wanna figure out a deal, work out a deal off market with those owners before it goes to auction.

Once it’s gone to auction, now you have hundreds, if not thousands, of eyes looking at it at the courthouse steps. And so that’s where you don’t wanna, be competing. so I’d rather compete over the phone with a couple of people that might have found the property, if they have at all, but I’d rather take advantage of that window of opportunity than going to a foreclosure or a tax auction itself.

Dylan Silver (25:05)

I wanna ask you about wholesalers. I mentioned in the green room when we were talking before the show that I cut my teeth as a wholesaler. Can wholesalers get use out of Properant and potentially get properties under contract to assign to investors? Is that a possible use case here?

Saim Chaudhry (25:21)

Absolutely. The data is the same for fix and flippers versus wholesalers. If you’re the actual end buyer or if you’re putting properties under contract as a wholesaler, I would say it’s the exact same stuff. Whether you’re calling to actually purchase it or you’re putting it under contract to assign it later, it’s the same script, it’s the same data, it’s the same list that you’re gonna work. So I would say a hundred percent for wholesalers and for people that are actually purchasing the property, cash buyers.

Dylan Silver (25:46)

On that note, I want to ask you about, buying temperature and what it’s like be being out there and talking to investors, not just in your sphere, but understanding what the thought is for single family investors in particular in California. Are investors looking for opportunities, to invest in distressed properties, or have there been a lot of investors who’ve been burnt over the last couple of years and are therefore maybe sitting on the sidelines or really looking for that, you know, new

Saim Chaudhry (26:13)

I’ve seen a lot of people in my own sphere that have pivoted to other things, such as, I know single family fix and flippers that have pivoted to let’s say non performing notes or multifamily or commercial. I myself have pivoted multiple times, but I always come back to single family home fix and flips and wholesaling. It’s just kind of my bread and butter. but I don’t regret pivoting because

It made me a more well rounded investor and I understand a lot more about the industry from working non performing notes, from being in private equity working multifamily deals, from doing commercial leasing with a commercial brokerage, et cetera. It’s made me a more well-rounded investor and I feel like I’m able to put all that data and all that knowledge into Properant because I can solve some pain points that I personally had working all these angles. And if I had those problems, then I’m a hundred percent certain that other people are also coming across those pain points and those problems.

Dylan Silver (27:03)

Biggest takeaway from working in the commercial space.

Saim Chaudhry (27:06)

That’s a good question. Nothing pops up at the top of my head, but I will tell you to be forewarned, commercial is a whole different animal. And it really depends. I mean, commercial is that’s just one very general broad category. I mean, you have commercial leasing, you have office space, you have medical clinics, you have medical offices, you have retail, it’s I would say pick one and just focus on it. If I could tell myself something ten years ago, like I said, I don’t regret working all these angles, but if I could

go back ten years and tell myself something, I would say pick one thing and just master it first and just be a master at it. Same thing for commercial. If you’re getting commercial, don’t bounce around and have shiny object syndrome. Just pick one pick one lane and be a hundred percent dedicated to it and spend years committing yourself to that and mastering it.

Dylan Silver (27:48)

Was your experience in the commercial space, like retail, office, medical, industrial, or something else?

Saim Chaudhry (27:53)

So I started off at 29th Street Capital back in two thousand seventeen, which was a nationwide multifamily private equity. And I was their thirteenth vice president of operations or of acquisition, sorry. And I spearheaded their entry into the Sacramento market. So their this was their thirteenth market that they penetrated. And I was able to actually I kind of pat myself on the back for this. I was able to get the very their very first multifamily acquisition in Sacramento before I even formally got hired.

So I that’s one of my biggest accomplishments in my life, I would say. and then I got picked up by them and so multifamily is where I started and then I’ve sold shopping centers locally and then I’ve also my latest thing was I did commercial leasing, which I spent about nine months in, which I enjoyed, but it just it wasn’t for me. Like I said, I always come back to my bread and butter, which is distressed single family homes. But like I said, you can apply those filters and that distressed data to the same

To any property. Last night I was running searches on my app just to kind of see what pops up. And I searched structure fires for apartments out of state owners and Sacramento and tax delinquent or with utility liens. And it popped up a beautiful list of like 112 properties in just Sacramento County. And so whether you’re making a list for single family homes or for multifamily or for commercial properties or medical offices, whatever, you can the entry point should always be the same, which is

Use that distressed data to your advantage, whether it’s the single family home or whether it’s a commercial property. It’s at the end of the day, just simplify it in your head. It’s a it’s a seller that has either their back to the wall or they’re motivated for some reason and you’re a potential buyer or you’re a broker looking for a listing or whatever the case may be.

Dylan Silver (29:31)

We are coming up on time here, Saim. Anything you’d like to mention directly to our audience?

Saim Chaudhry (29:36)

Check out properant.com. It’s spelled P-R-O-P-E-R-A-N-T dot com. we’ve got a lot of exciting things coming up. we’re gonna have a mobile app very soon and some great features. We’re constantly adding data. Our data is up to date, very updated every single day. And we’re very excited to see an influx of in just the last four weeks, thousands of traffic visits and organic word of mouth referrals and stuff. So I’m really excited to see where this takes us and where this goes.

Dylan Silver (30:02)

Saim, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for your time.

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