You have undoubtedly heard somewhere (television, newspaper, online) that there is a great deal of unclaimed property held by the government. Maybe you even went to a state’s unclaimed property website and looked up and found some nice sums of money that were 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 logical next step is to ask yourself how to collect search engine fees for unclaimed property by letting these people know about your money.
When learning how to charge search 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 and collect without paying you anything.
Sounds pretty bleak, right?
This is where most people give up on learning how to collect finder fees altogether … and this is why there are still some secret sources of unclaimed property that are enriching the few money seekers out there. they know them. These funds are kept off-state level and therefore are not subject to finder fee limits. They are typically created from real estate transactions and are therefore often five figures or more. And 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 the records for these funds (and there are many) 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 collect search engine fees for unclaimed property. It’s a very simple process – search for records, find owners, get signed contracts, process the claim, and get paid.