You have undoubtedly heard somewhere (television, newspaper, online) that there is a large amount of unclaimed property 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 owed to people. If you search your state right now, you will probably find at least a few people who are owed a few thousand dollars. The next logical step is to ask yourself how to collect search engine fees for unclaimed property, when informing these people about your money.
When learning how to charge search engine fees, the first thing to do is read your state’s unclaimed property code and find out what the limit is on what a person can charge as a search fee. In most states it is around 10%. You will then need to try to locate the owner of the funds. Often times, they no longer live at the address that the state has on file and that is why they do not receive notifications of their unclaimed funds.
Finally, once you find them, you will need to try to get them to sign a contract agreeing to pay you your 10%, before revealing where you found the money record. Unfortunately, since most states have an unclaimed property website, if these folks are smart, before they sign anything with you, they will search the website themselves and collect without paying you anything.
Sounds pretty sad, right?
This is where most people give up on learning how to collect finder fees altogether … and this is why there remain a few secret sources of unclaimed property that are making the few money seekers who are wealthy. they know about them. These funds are kept off-state level and are therefore not subject to finder fee limits. They are typically created from real estate transactions and are therefore often five figures or more. Best of all, they are never displayed 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 is fairly easy to hire them, process your claim, and receive a 30-50% payment per transaction. This is by far the best and easiest way to charge finders fees for unclaimed properties. It’s a very simple process – search for records, find owners, get signed contracts, process the claim, and get paid.