Let’s be honest. Ownership research has always been a grind.
You find a property you want to call on. Then the busy work starts. Title website. Secretary of State filings. Managing members, trustees, and agents for service of process. Recorded deeds. Mailing addresses that lead nowhere. You finally think you found the right person, then you’re on another site hunting for a phone number that may or may not work. This goes on and on and on.
Three hours later, you’ve made a few calls with no results. Bad numbers. Disconnected lines. Completely wrong people.
Now you’re frustrated, and you haven’t dug up a single deal. Every broker knows that feeling.
And that’s exactly why we built Automated Ownership Research inside DealGround.
Ownership research used to mean:
It worked. Sometimes.
But it burned time, mental energy, and momentum.
If you’re serious about building your pipeline in 2026, your time should be spent talking to potential clients, not deciphering a Delaware LLC with five layers of managers.
Maybe you are early in your career trying to hit 500 calls a week. Maybe it was a few years in when you realized half your day was disappearing into ownership rabbit holes. Or maybe it was last month when you had a hot lead and couldn’t get to the actual decision maker fast enough.
Every broker hits that wall.
Whether you’re new and grinding or an established producer or investor, the last thing you want is to waste prime hours connecting dots just to maybe find the right person. You want the right contact. Fast. Clean. Reliable. Done in the background while you’re getting deals across the finish line.
Make yourself ten times more efficient and the results will follow. More conversations. More listings. More deals. Earn significantly more commissions because you’re simply doing more volume at a higher level.
When I started in the business I was given a market area. I chose North San Diego County. For three months, I drove every street taking pictures, drawing site plans, writing down addresses and tenant names. I built my farmed market area into about four massive three ring binders. Once I was done driving, I had to commence the process of researching the ownership of every one of those properties. That process took three or four months and I probably got 50% of the owners’ information. This was late 1998 / early 1999.
Over time, the tools advanced. The title companies created websites with parcel overlays and underlying information. The Secretary of State digitized everything. People search engines started popping up. This made ownership research significantly easier than when I started but the process was still unreliable and extremely disconnected.
There are a couple commercial real estate specific applications that provide an ownership database. Most of you are familiar with these applications and most likely have your own subscriptions. These services are riddled with incorrect information. The information is static and the results are binary - meaning they are either right or wrong - there is no close to the pin. Wrong is wrong in these systems and when that happens you get to commence the process described in the above paragraphs. No fun and a waste of time.
These applications are also unnecessarily expensive. A significant majority of the brokers I speak to have no problem telling me that they intentionally give incorrect information to one of these providers (guess which one).
This is where the ownership research process has been until today.
Enter DealGround’s Automated Ownership Research.
Now it’s different. Instead of bouncing between 7-10 different browser tabs with multiple research services cobbled together, DealGround has built the connective tissue to allow you to go from discovery to discussion with just one click. It’s really that easy.
With Automated Ownership Research inside DealGround, you click a single property or a large list of properties and let the system do the heavy lifting.
Within minutes you get:
You can see the path. The filings. The logic. The connections.
This isn’t guesswork. It’s documented ownership intelligence delivered cleanly and ready to use. And you didn’t burn half your day getting it.
Here’s what changes when ownership research becomes instant.
You move faster than your competition. You contact more owners in a week than you used to in a month. You turn one listing into 50 conversations with all trade area owners.
We’ve watched our users take a single QSR listing and build a list of owners of similar properties in a 50-mile radius in minutes. You could search for the same tenant, the same use type, or just a handful of specific properties surrounding your subject property. Whatever owner criteria you want to contact - DealGround helps you identify and research every owner without the usual friction and loss of days to manual research.
That is leverage.
Ownership data has always been out there. The difference now is how quickly you can find the right information and turn it into action.
If you haven’t experienced how Automated Ownership Research changes everything, log in to DealGround right now and run it.
Assume you’ve been doing it the hard way, because you have.
Click a property. Launch the research. Watch the ownership trail build itself. Names. Numbers. Sources. Done.
This is what your prospecting should look like. Log in and try it now.
