The Expert Podcast

So can a person do their own asset search on another party? Can you do a do-it-yourself asset search? The answer is yes. When a private investigator does an asset search, there's nothing about what they do that a private civilian individual couldn't do themselves. It's just a matter of putting the time in. A typical asset search takes 12 to 14 man-hours of labor, and you have to search all the asset classes. But if you want to do it yourself, there's more information on our website, activeintel.com.

The way it's done is to search each location where the records are kept. For real estate records, you would search the county recorder's office for deeds, liens, mortgages, and recordings. For vehicles, you would search the DMV records for car titles. For bank accounts, you're going to search the ENT records for open-source records on banking deposits, wire transfers, money transfers, or any type of open-source record for banking. Corporate assets, same thing, Secretary of State, and so on. Each type of asset can be searched from the source of where those records are.

The good news about a do-it-yourself search is that if you don't want to search for all the assets, you can only search for one type. For example, you may only want to search for real estate. You can do a real estate-only asset search and skip the other ones. It'll save you a lot of time and a lot of money. Do you have to pay anything to do an asset search if you're doing it yourself? The answer is not really, but sometimes the record sources will have fees you have to pay to get their documents.

For example, at the county record's office, when you're getting real estate records and deeds, they might charge you $5 a copy or a couple of dollars per page to get the deeds. If you are getting, let's say, vehicle records for car titles, you may have to pay $10 or $15 for a copy of a title. For banking records, you may have to pay $100, $150, or so to get the records from the open-source system. So it may cost you a few hundred bucks to get all the documents, and then you can use the time to do the analysis.
So the cost will be minimal as long as you're willing to put in the time. A typical asset search, when we perform it, has a cost internally to outside parties for records of about $300 to $350 and about 12 to 14 hours of labor. So if you are doing it yourself, that's what you are looking at: a few hundred dollars in hard work and maybe 10 to 12 or 14 hours of labor of your time to research and analyze the document.
A do-it-yourself asset search is possible; more information is available on our website, activeintel.com, and there's also an option if you want to do a consultation with a licensed investigator. You can do that as well.