How to Find and Reach Building Owners Before Your Competition Does

Every broker in your market wants the same thing: direct access to building owners who are ready — or nearly ready — to transact. The problem isn't that the information doesn't exist. It's that most brokers don't know how to find it efficiently, and fewer still know how to reach owners in a way that actually gets a response.

This guide covers the full stack: where to find ownership data, how to identify the real decision-maker behind an LLC, and how to reach out in a way that generates conversations before your competition even knows the opportunity exists.

Why Going Direct to Owners Matters

Off-market deals are the most profitable opportunities in commercial real estate — for both sides. Owners avoid paying a buyer's broker on the sell side. Buyers avoid competitive bidding. And the broker who surfaces the deal controls it from the start.

The only way to consistently generate off-market deal flow is to have direct relationships with building owners. That means not waiting for them to list, not relying on other brokers to bring you deals, and not competing on CoStar listings where every other buyer in the market has access to the same information.

Direct outreach to building owners is how you create inventory, not just react to it.

Where to Find Building Owner Data

Ownership data is more accessible than most brokers realize. The key is knowing where to look and how to cross-reference sources to get to an actual person — not just an entity name.

County Assessor and Tax Records

Every parcel has a publicly recorded owner of record. County assessor websites let you search by address, parcel number, or owner name. This is your starting point — free, comprehensive, and updated with every deed transfer. The limitation: owners often hold property in LLCs, trusts, or other entities, so you get an entity name, not a person.

CoStar and Commercial MLS Platforms

CoStar aggregates ownership data alongside property details, giving you owner name, contact information (where available), and transaction history in one place. It's the most widely used tool for a reason — but it's also what every other broker in your market is using. If you're only fishing in CoStar, you're fishing in a crowded pond.

Secretary of State Business Entity Searches

When a property is owned by an LLC, search the state's Secretary of State business registry to find the registered agent and, in many states, the principals or members. This is often how you get from "XYZ Holdings LLC" to the actual owner's name.

FOIA Requests and Permit Records

Building permit applications often list the owner or developer's contact information. In many jurisdictions, these are public record and searchable online. For larger commercial assets, permits can also tell you about recent capital expenditure — a useful conversation starter.

Specialized Data Platforms

Tools like Reonomy, CompStak, and PropertyShark aggregate public records and layer in contact data, transaction history, and ownership entity intelligence. They're particularly useful for identifying ownership clusters — investors who own multiple properties in a market and are more likely to be active transactors.

Getting from LLC to Decision-Maker

Finding the entity is step one. Finding the human is step two — and it's where most brokers give up. Here's the process that actually works:

1. Pull the entity from county records — get the LLC or trust name
2. Search the Secretary of State registry — look for registered agent, principals, or articles of organization
3. Cross-reference on LinkedIn — search the entity name or principal name to find a professional profile
4. Verify with email enrichment tools — once you have a name and company, tools like Hunter.io or Apollo can surface a verified email address
5. Confirm ownership intent — before reaching out, check transaction history. Has this owner sold assets before? Are they an active investor or a legacy holder who's never sold? This shapes your outreach angle.

This process takes 10–15 minutes per property when you know what you're doing. For a target list of 100 properties, that's a few focused hours of research — front-loaded work that pays off for months.

Crafting Outreach That Resonates with Owners

Building owners get approached by brokers constantly. Most outreach fails because it's generic, transactional, or arrives at the wrong time. The outreach that works has three things: specificity, relevance, and low friction.

Lead with What You Know About Their Asset

Reference the property by address or name. Mention something specific — the submarket it's in, recent lease activity nearby, a recent sale comp that affects their NOI or cap rate valuation. Show that this isn't a blast email. Even a single specific detail changes the tone from "form letter" to "someone who knows my market."

Offer Value Before Asking for Anything

The best first emails don't pitch a listing. They share something useful: a recent transaction that affects the owner's property value, tenant demand activity in their building's submarket, or a quick market update for their asset class. This positions you as a resource, not a solicitor.

Time Your Outreach Strategically

Certain triggers make owners more likely to transact — and more receptive to broker outreach:

• Approaching loan maturity dates (often 5–10 years from original financing)
• Large tenant lease expirations in the next 12–24 months
• Recent property tax assessments that change the economics
• Nearby comparable sales that reset market values
• Long hold periods (10+ years) where equity has accumulated significantly

When your outreach is timed to one of these triggers, you're not cold — you're timely.

Building a Contact Cadence That Keeps You Top of Mind

Most owners aren't ready to transact the first time you reach out. That doesn't mean the relationship is dead — it means you need a system to stay present until the timing is right.

The brokers who consistently win off-market deals aren't necessarily the best at a single outreach — they're the most consistent over time. A quarterly market update, a quick note when a comparable property sells, or a heads-up about a tenant actively seeking space in their building's submarket keeps you in the conversation without being pushy.

The goal is to be the first call an owner makes when they decide to move — because you've been the broker who's been showing up for the past 18 months.

Scaling Your Owner Outreach Without Losing Personalization

The manual approach — researching each property, writing individual emails, following up by hand — works at small scale. But if you're covering a large territory or managing multiple asset classes, it's not sustainable.

The solution isn't to send generic blasts. It's to build a system that personalizes at scale: dynamic email templates that pull in property-specific details, automated follow-up sequences that space out over weeks, and tracking that tells you exactly who opened, clicked, and replied.

MogulAim was built specifically for this workflow — helping CRE brokers find building owners, craft personalized outreach at scale, and run automated follow-up sequences that keep them in front of prospects until the deal is ready to happen. If finding and reaching building owners is central to your business development, it's worth seeing what a purpose-built tool can do for your pipeline.