Do property liens and judgments make good motivated seller leads?

Across 249 counties, 437,621 homeowners had a lien filed against their house in our count. Within 12 months of the filing, 18,241 of them sold off-market. A house picked at random in the same counties sold off-market at about 1.4 of every 100 over 12 months. The lien owners sold at about 4.2.

Across 70 counties, 82,704 owners had a court judgment filed against them personally. Within 12 months, 1,478 sold off-market: about 1.8 of every 100, against about 1.6 for a random house.

Both get sold to you as "lien lists." They aren't the same list, and if you mail them the same way, you're paying full postage on the weak one.

A lien on the house vs a judgment against the owner

A property lien is filed against the house itself, for money tied to it. A contractor who wasn't paid for the roof. An HOA owed dues. A city owed for water, demolition or code fines. The house is the collateral, and the problem usually shows on the property.

A judgment is a court ruling against the owner as a person: a credit card, a medical bill, a lawsuit. The creditor can record it so it attaches to whatever real estate that person owns, but the debt has nothing to do with the house. Plenty of people carry a judgment for years and never think about selling, so your letter lands on someone with a debt and no reason to move.

That difference shows up cleanly in the sales.

Property liens sold everywhere we looked

In all 249 counties we could measure, owners with a lien filed against the property sold off-market more often than a random house within 12 months. In most of them it wasn't close.

Source: GoForClose count of off-market, arm's-length deeds in county records, counted from each lien's filing date.

Look at the size column next to the rate. Los Angeles County recorded more than 93,000 property liens in the window, and fewer than 1 of every 100 of those owners sold off-market within a year. When a county files that many liens, a lot of them are routine, and the list is mostly noise. Dallas filed about 2,400 and roughly 10 of every 100 sold. A small lien list is often the better one.

By state, Kentucky (about 10.1 of every 100 within 12 months), Oklahoma (9.5), Washington (8.2), Ohio (7.9), Michigan and Texas (7.1 each) ran strongest. California was the weakest, at about 1.7 of every 100 across 26 counties, though it still beat a random house in every one.

A lien list sells all year

Some lists have a sharp clock. Expired listings sold most in the first three months after the listing died, in 476 of 492 counties. Liens don't work that way.

Pooled across every county we measured, about 27 of every 100 of the year's lien sales came in months 1 to 3, 27 in months 4 to 6, 28 in months 7 to 9 and 18 in months 10 to 12. A lien is a slow squeeze. The owner can carry it for a while, until the next bill, the next notice, or the sale of the house is the easiest way to clear it.

Wayne County shows the squeeze clearly. Only about 1.1 of every 100 lien owners had sold off-market by month 3. By month 9 it was 7.1. If you'd mailed that list once, right after the filing, and moved on, you'd have missed most of it.

So mail a lien list on a schedule for the full year after the filing, not in one drop. Here's how the timing compares across lists.

Judgments: mostly skip them

Judgments against the owner sold off-market below a random house in 31 of the 70 counties we could measure. Cook County was the best big-county exception, at about 4.8 of every 100 within 12 months against 1.1. In Los Angeles County it was about 0.3 against 0.4. In Clark County, NV, about 1.0 against 1.8.

A judgment tells you an owner owes someone money. It doesn't tell you the house is the problem, or that anyone is about to force a sale. On its own it's a weak list, and the skip trace and postage cost the same as on a good one.

Where a judgment helps is as a second record. An owner with a judgment and a lien on the house, or a judgment and back taxes, has more than one creditor and a dated reason to act. That's what stacking is for.

Check your county's lien list first

Lien lists vary more by county than almost anything else you can mail, mostly because counties record different kinds of liens, and some record far more of them. Before you buy one, see how liens sold in your county, how big your list would be, and when in the year your sales would come.