No doubt you have heard somewhere (on TV, in the newspaper, online) that there is a great deal of unclaimed property being held by the government. Maybe he even went to a state’s unclaimed property website and searched and found some nice sums of money people were owed. If he searches his state right now, he’ll probably find at least a few people who are owed a few thousand dollars. The next logical step is to wonder how to collect finders’ fees for unclaimed property, letting these people know about their 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, they no longer live at the address the state has on file, which is why they don’t receive notifications of their unclaimed funds.

Finally, once you find them, you’ll need to try to get them to sign a contract agreeing to pay you their 10%, before divulging where you found the record of the money. Unfortunately, since most states have an unclaimed property website, if these people 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’s fees outright… and this is why there are some secret sources of unclaimed property left that are enriching the few money seekers who own them. know. These funds are kept outside the state level and are therefore not subject to finder fee caps. They are typically created from real estate transactions and are therefore often in five figures or higher. And best of all, they never show up on the state’s unclaimed property websites, and their owners are almost always unaware of their existence.

If you can locate the records of these funds (and there are many) and locate their owners, it’s fairly easy to hire them, process your claim, and get paid 30-50% per transaction. This is by far the best and easiest way to collect finders fees for unclaimed property. It’s a very simple process: search records, find owners, get contracts signed, process the claim and get paid.