You’ve undoubtedly heard somewhere – television, the newspaper, online – that there is a whole lot of unclaimed property out there being held by the government. Maybe you even went to a state’s unclaimed property website and looked around and found some nice sums of money that were owed to people. If you poke around in your state right now, you’ll probably find at least a few people who are owed a few thousand dollars. The next logical step is to wonder how to collect finders fees for unclaimed property, by letting these people know about their money.
When learning how to collect finders fees, the first thing you need to do is to read up in your state’s unclaimed property code, and find out what the limit is for what a person can charge as a finder fee. In most states it is around 10%. Next, you’ll need to try to locate the owner of the funds. Often, they no longer live at the address the state has on file, and that’s why they aren’t getting notifications of their unclaimed funds.
Finally, once you find them, you’ll need to try to get them to sign a contract agreeing to pay you your 10%, before you divulge where you found the record of the money. Unfortunately, since most states have an unclaimed property website, if these people are smart, before they sign anything with you, they’ll go search the website themselves and collect without paying you anything.
Sounds pretty bleak, right?
This is where most people give up on learning how to collect finders fees altogether… and that’s why there are a few secret sources of unclaimed property still left out there that are making the few money finders that know about them rich. These funds are held outside the state level, and thus aren’t subject to finder’s fee limits. They are generally created from real estate transactions, and thus are often in the five figures, or higher. And best of all, they are never shown on the state’s unclaimed property websites, and their owners are almost always unaware of their existence.
If you can locate records of these funds (and there are a lot of them), and locate their owners, it’s fairly easy to get them under contract, process their claim, and get paid 30-50% per transaction. This is by far the best and easiest way to collect finders fees for unclaimed property. It’s a very simple process: find records, find owners, get signed contracts, process the claim, and get paid.
