A Remedy for Targeting Truly Distressed Late Homeowners

Targeting truly distressed late homeowners (that haven’t been bombarded 100 times already) is one of the most difficult things to do for 4 reasons:

1.  The information on a late homeowner is reported by the lender only and to the credit bureaus only (sometimes only one credit bureau).

2.  Late status can be as simple as a bout of forgetfulness or a miss-mailed mortgage payment.

3.  The current late status will vary from lender to lender in how they report lates (some will wait 15 days and some 30, some will also wait 2 months before reporting 30 days).

4.  The later the homeowner, the more likely they are already speaking with others or the more likely they have a sale date pending on their home.

It is because of these 4 reasons that most people have a problem finding a truly distressed homeowner that hasn’t ‘heard it all’ already… 

In our 10+ years of data mining experience, we have found only 2 sources of truly accurate 30, 60, 90,120+ late homeowner data otherwise known as pre foreclosure leads. 

One source is the Equifax Credit Bureau database which contains over 25 different criteria to pull from for mortgage and credit related criteria. 

For example, you can pull homeowners 60-90 days late with 0-10% equity to offer a short sale or you could pull homeowners that are 30-90 days late with 10% or more equity and offer them a loan modification.  This is a ‘pure credit bureau file’ which means that the database itself only has credit filters and has not been combined with another source (courthouse data for example).

The other source for this data is the Experian/TransUnion ‘hybrid’ file as we call it in the industry.  This file has over 30 filters to choose from and has some unique attributes such as age, debt utilization, and other non-credit attributes such as lender name, rate type, home sale date, etc…  This file is equally as effective as the Equifax data for all intensive purposes and can be customized in the same manner as above for both short sale and loan modification companies.

Both of these files can be filtered to include or exclude Hispanic surname and DNC phones. 

In reality, these are the only 2 known sources of real late homeowner data.  We have looked at lender reported and modeled data and they are just not accurate enough to support a direct mail or telemarketing campaign.

Thanks again for reading and stay tuned for more credit bureau data and marketing database news from real data brokers that want you to succeed.

By:  Aaron Smith, Black Book Data CEO

 http://www.blackbookdata.com/bbd/leads/mortgage/pre-foreclosure-leads/