Uniting Missing Heirs with Previously Unknown Assets, with Michael Zwick of Assets International

0:01 One of the fascinating things about probate is you learn about industries and companies and resources that you need that even know existed. And pretty early on in my probate career about six I started six years ago found that there would be people who well a we had administrators who need to find heirs and then b people who suspect there might be other heirs. And how do you find them? Well, we actually have a person whose business assets international is uniting heirs with assets of the CEO and investigator in chief. That sounds interesting. Michael Zwick, returned guest. Michael, thanks for coming back.

0:39 Glad to be here, Bill. I'm now a member of the three-time club. You are. And you wait till you see what you get in the three-time club for those of you who don't know. So, let's talk about finding heirs. I think there's really two sides to this. One side is there. One of the jobs of the administrator is to do a reasonable search and it varies the law and the practices vary by state and then by county and such the rules but administrator supposed to be a reasonable search as to whether or not there are heirs. And so one of the processes is to hire a company to say do I have any heirs and they pay a fee and then you research it. So talk about that process. Do you get contacted by attorneys or fiduciaries or administrators families that suspect there's somebody but don't know what to do to find them? Yes. So, as you said, it v varies from state to state and even sometimes county to county. But generally speaking, when someone is the executive, they have to make at least some effort to locate all of the heirs at law. And that is regardless of whether the heirs are going to be inheriting anything. And that requires some clarification. People think heirs are people who inherit. That's not true. Heirs are basically the closest living relatives to someone who has passed away. So some cases the heirs can be cousins. They can be you know aunts and uncles. Whereas in some cases you know if a person has spouse and children those are the only heirs. And those heirs are entitled to notice of a probate proceeding when someone dies even if they're not entitled even if they're not getting anything. On the flip side, in addition to finding the heirs, in spending at least some effort to find them, there has to be effort made to find the beneficiaries.

2:21 And, there's the expectation in most courts that the more somebody is going to be receiving, the more effort the executive should make, because there's more at stake. So, for example, if someone dies with only say $50,000, then in, you know, that's the what their state is worth, the exec the court's not going to usually make the executive spend say $5,000 to track all the heirs down. But if it's talking $5 million, then $5,000 isn't that much,

2:50 Right? And so they would retain a firm like yours. And so what's that look? Let's start with the administrator who has to make their due diligence. So imagine the estate's worth about a million dollars. What does that look like? They retain you, they pay you a fee, and you do a certain amount of research and give them a report back if you don't find anybody or what does that what's that process look like?

3:10 So there are two different ways we work. One is where we work on a contingency fee basis where we're actually not retained by the executive or the fiduciary.

3:18 Let's hold that one because that's a whole another world that people on this call need to know about. So let's hold on that's business for us. Okay. The service side, right? So if we're just if we're just looking for people to give the report back to the fiduciary, we will charge an hourly basis. And obviously, we, you know, if it's a matter of tracking down one person whose name we know, that we usually can ballpark how much it's going how much it's going to take, it's usually not going to take more than a few hours at most. Where we never know until we start working is where someone dies with say no known heirs or one side of the family meaning they might know all the maternal heirs but don't know who the paternal heirs are. In that case we don't know because as you know some families you might have somebody who has you know 20 first cousins or you know has a lot of relatives or you might have somebody whose both parents were only children. So therefore it becomes this you much smaller family tree. So but we don't know that until we start digging into it.

4:21 Now the flip side case is the one where anybody watching this is a chance to make some money because this started for me where I got a phone call from somebody who said hey the house next door appears to be vacant and I went online and determined that there was a prior owner. We determined they did pass away. We verified there was no probate in action. Had been two or three years and by law something should have happened. Somebody should have been in charge. Somebody should have been maintaining the property. It was getting sided with the city and so we said well you know if we find who the heirs are we can do a probate and so me as a real estate agent obviously a chance to do a sale and so we talked to Michael and Michael went about to find who the heirs were of the property. Now that's done on a contingency basis meaning we had a property that we thought I forget the time we thought was worth maybe $600,000. Theoretically you're calling people saying hey I'm Michael Zook. I'd like to give you $600,000 less expenses. Do you like it? Talk about what do you call that business and talk about that business a little bit.

5:16 So that's what you know on a contingency fee basis where again we don't get retained. You for example did not retain us to find those people. We took it upon ourselves I guess you could say in some in some field to be you know do it on spec where we're doing the work and hope hopefully we get paid later. Where we basically tracked down the heirs and to put it in very simplistic terms, we went to them and said, "Hey, we've located your entitle entitlement you have to assets or to money and in exchange for a percentage, we'll not only give you all the details, we'll also do all the leg work to get you to get you that money." in that particular case. Now I'm in California and California law provides that while obviously spouses or immediate family members most commonly file a probate petition to start the process here in California. The law allows also creditors and then also allows any resal to file probate. Now that doesn't mean you're going to be approved. And in this case, what we did was I filed as a petitioner, which was kind of fun. And we, worked with Michael try to find the heirs. By the time the heirs popped in, we said, "Hey, look, we're almost approved to do it. Here's our game plan." And in that case, they said, "Well, fine. Go ahead and administer the probate for us, and we laid out the fees, we laid out the costs, we laid out the process, and then they would get a certain percentage of it." So in that case, you guys actually find them and then get them to agree to some sort of finders fee which then gets them kind of now involved in the probate process.

6:52 Right. So right we basically first obviously ident not only finally we identified who they were because I remember that case correctly we started again with no known heirs. All we knew was the name of the decedent. You know her age, right? You know

7:10 We had no clue to offer you. We had no clue. Yeah. We were able to you know we started out by finding out who her parents her parents name and then from there we were able to find if I remember correctly we found I think it was two nephews and niece scattered throughout different cities. And then we're able to identify them as the heirs to the estates.

7:28 But you know like I said we never know who how many we're going to have to find and where they might be. And the good news there is I get in this case I was the petitioner rather than the Realtor®. I had somebody else we appointed as the Realtor®. So we both got business. Michael got business for his firm as finding the heirs. Theirs got money they knew nothing about. They had no real knowledge of this deedent. They maybe suspected there was somebody but they had no relationship. The neighbors had a house that was being used by drug addicts, squatters, cats and all kinds of mess. And we got the house sold and somebody paying money. The home association got a dues paying member next door. So, it really worked out for everybody. So, I would encourage any real estate agent if you find a house. Research it and maybe there's an opportunity to either bring it to an attorney or service or if it's in California, I'd love to talk to you about it. See if we can help you try to find the heirs and move the process along. So, you I know you do a lot of marketing at like trust events and so talk a little bit about the building of your business. Who's your ideal referral source and what kind of business does that look like?

8:33 So yeah, we I do a lot of networking, a lot of a lot of LinkedIn if you go is to be on LinkedIn. You're not going to get off of LinkedIn ever once you meet Michael.

8:45 Yeah, I won't. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. Also active in some networking organizations as well as, you know, attending events. I say our most our biggest referral source are trust and states attorneys. So for big event coming up in Orlando which is where I live in January is the big estate planning conference called Hecarling. So I'll be there not as a not as an a registered attendee like a number of other people. I'll be there for the for networking and just meeting people. But yeah, it's just a matter of you know people knowing who I am. So, I'm trying to, you know, get my name out there as much as possible and, you know, providing value for people so that they'll think of me when they when they have a matter that can use our services.

9:33 Now, one of the things you do, I do know you market to attorneys. I think that's the number one source for estate planners. So, people on this call, a lot of them are real estate agents want to do the same thing. Yet, in my mind, they kind of come out the wrong way, right? They're cold calling them on the phone and saying, "Hey, Michael, I'm Bill. I'm a real estate agent. Can you send me your business? I'm sure it's not as simple as that. What's your presentation? You meet, you go to a networking event or you're on LinkedIn. What is it you're looking to communicate to a prospective referral source, an attorney or fiduciary or a trust estate planner?

10:06 Simply that, you know, our the main skill set of me and my team, our main skill sets are the ability to identify people and find people. And those are two like says thing. One is to it's is to build out who the who's on the family tree but it's also a matter of locating where they are. Another big skill says we have we have, you know, 24 years of tracking on people who are owed money. So, we have the ability to communicate with them and address before they come up whatever doubts they might have. So we were able we're able to present that in value. I should add in terms of not only going back to earlier thing in addition to estate trust states attorneys, we actually have seen a rise in cases of coming out of real estate issues where someone needs to find you know some are cases like yours where you know someone died and the house just sitting vacant. There are also issues where for example there's an easement that someone wants acquire title and finds that there's someone got easement 75 years ago and the easement is pretty much worthless but they need to get it taken care of in order to transfer title to build on the property or whatever. We're getting a whole bunch of cases like that recently where you need to find these people just to like say give them notice of a quiet title action or to hopefully make an offer you know an offer just to get their name off the title or something like that. So there are various uses for our services of finding people when in the real estate context.

11:36 I'm sure to be honest I don't know of I don't think other companies that do what you do. I think I've reached out try to talk to a couple but you know there's like websites but there's a person behind it sometimes you reach out but I'm sure in minds I mean they've already done something if they're in the space they've done something without you in the past. Maybe not as effective as working with you. So, what do you present to the attorney or how do you present to the attorney that you're meeting, let's say, that your service is superior or worth giving a shot to rather than what they've been doing in the past.

12:10 Well, some attorneys will, you know, they'll try to use say Google to find people or one of these services where you pay 20 bucks or something like that and I say, "Okay, you think very nice, but you frankly, you know, there's old saying, you get what you pay for." and in some case like I said you don't have to face anything because all you're doing is you're just referring the matter to us and then we're going to find the heirs. So we're doing it and you know we live now in a an age of specialization. People you know not only are more and more knowing what they can do and can't do but they don't want to do what they don't know how to do. They want to stick to what they do well. So, an attorney who does probate unless they happen to be an amateur genealogologist on the side is going to have a hard time doing the work and might just get frustrated and say, "I've got better uses of my time to build my practice." And might say, "Let me hand it off to an expert." And then me then when an expert like me, not to my own horn, but comes through and does the work, they look like the hero to the client that they were able to resolve the matter, make this the state go through, you know, quickly and efficiently.

13:18 Well, and I think that if you're presenting yourself as an expert attorney in trust matters, you should have a rolodex and team members who assist you in the job who are bestin-class as well. And if your best-in-class tool is a Google search, you're kind of saying I'm a commodity and I'm just waiting to be replaced by ChatGPT. But I think when you have a chance to understand these situations and bring in experts and I think the other, you know, the thing in working with you, I appreciate that the business I gave you wasn't the biggest iter kind enough to treat me as an important source because we had done some business together. And I think that's what relationships are about, that you can maybe have some equity and get a little extra service. And as an attorney, that's very important to them to be able to present to their clients or estate that not only did they do a Google search, I always find it funny when the when the judge asks for what they did and or there's a supplement says, "Oh, we you know, search these two websites." Like, really? That's all you need to do to check an error? It doesn't make any sense to me.

14:16 Well, that it does vary. I mean, I from state to state again in county to county. Some courts are going to be much more rigid in terms of what they expect people to do for to identify and track down heirs. New York example, for example, especially the New York City courts are require a lot to get past the inability to find to find these. Michigan though, for example, is the opposite. It's requires pretty much no proof that you did what you have to do. You just you just say, "I don't know where these people are or I don't know who they are." And then you just publish notice in a newspaper that nobody's going to read. And then you're just on your way and you administer the estate and whatever is left over just you just deposit with the county. So it really just like I said varies very much from state to state and county as to what you have to prove and what you have to do.

15:11 And I see why somebody's lazy. Just assume do as little as they can because you know case in point one of the files we worked on sometimes the can be difficult to work with right like I know how to sell a house I don't really need help with that I know how to work the probate don't really need help with that but also now you have to stop and explain well here's why we're doing this here's why we're doing that and in some cases you know argue with somebody who you bring into the deal and yet I think if you're in the service business you have to be prepared to do that and earn people's support and earn their trust and be willing to put yourself on the line to do that. So again, I would just caution anybody the shortcut is never really the shortcut. It's always going through the process and learning and that's why I've taken the time to add on some of these some of these things. So I know I you mentioned that you have business coming from real estate which I imagine you probably like real estate attorneys that send you business as well some real estate agents along the way but I think you know my experience is that people in all industries have certain common characteristics. The you know the business we're in today I've had a great couple years but I know for a lot of real estate agents it's tough for a lot of probate attorneys you know it's a challenging field what are the common characteristics of the successful probate attorneys state planning attorneys refor what are the common characteristics of those who have a business they're doing well despite what might be a difficult market or in spite of the market or because of the market

16:33 Well I said probate attorneys are not really affected as much by the economy simply because there's the old saying that you know there are two things in certain in this world and probate attorneys are dealing with one of them namely death. So

16:48 Avoiding taxes they're trying to limit taxes so they're kind right but I think for probate attorneys I think it's a matter of speak to that specifically about probate attorneys is how two things how efficient they are and how responsive they are to their clients. I will tell you when I back when I practice law and even well into still doing what I do, I used to get the Michigan the Michigan Bar Journal because that's Michigan is where I originally from and still licensed there as an attorney and every month in there the disciplinary notes for attorneys that and it shows like who's been suspended, who's been disparred, who's been, you know, reprimanded and like many it's for people that's the first thing I look at bar journal see who's in trouble and what are they in trouble for. I know it sounds kind of morbid, but whatever. Anyways, one of the things you'll see in there is like what are the some of the one of the most common causes of an attorney getting into trouble is not being not having an open line of communication with their clients because when the clients feel that their the attorney's not responding to them,

17:54 They go file bar they file bar complaints. So and but also probate can be a super stressful event. Usually the person who the executive is usually someone who is a close relative of the person who died, meaning they're not they're dealing with the loss of a loved one. They're usually going to be the adult children, which means they're balancing their other obligations like their family and their work and whatever. You know, they're grieving the loss of loved one. And now they got to deal with this whole new world called probate, which can be extremely timeconsuming. It can be very stressful and if they don't feel like the attorney is there to help them along the way and be there to answer questions that can really leave someone very disaffected. On the flip side, if you have a really good attorney who is there for you and you know it's someone finishes the process is oh this guy was or this guy or this woman was here for me when I needed them. They asked the questions and maybe move things smoothly. When a friend or a relative has to be an executive, however many months or years down the road, they're going to refer that person. You know, there's the old saying of you know, people don't what is it?

19:12 People don't care what you know until they know that you care. And that goes for pretty much any profession out there. So I think that's really a big thing in law is that the you know yes in a good economy everyone you know any lawyer can do well but it's in the bad economy that the ones who are real who are who are really there for their clients through thick and thin will ride be able to ride things out and be okay. You're on mute.

19:44 I'm sorry mute. I want I want to share a quick surprise. Because I didn't want to have the typing background. So I know two things that you are focused on or I should say two of your passions. One is t-shirts of different colleges which as somebody who went to a lot of I was on the debate team in high school and college and I went to a lot of different schools for competition so I know a lot of obscure schools and you have t-shirts. I never heard of the places so you really have some obscure schools. But the other thing I know that you're very committed to is High Lifeline. And so I thought you'd kind of surprise you with that. A picture of Mike on a bike ride. I think that's in Is that Miami?

20:18 No, that's me running. Actually, I'm just tall. Running. Okay. Is it a bike ride or is a run or No, it's a run. So, I will be doing for the 11th year in a row be doing my doing the Miami Half Marathon for High Lifeline. It is an organization near and dear to my heart. My 18-year-old daughter was diagnosed at age two, I think, with a very rare condition for pediatrics called polyythemeia vera. It's one in 10 million for children. I think she was the youngest child ever diagnosed with that case. And thank God she's okay. It's more of a chronic issue for her, but it's an organization that gives amazing services to children with serious illnesses or chronic illnesses. They do wish trips, they do summer camps, they do hospital visits, whatever, not only for the kids but the families as well. And it's something that I've been about that if I may though that link is from a past thing. I can see it's Miami 24.

21:27 So we're doing Miami. This will be Miami 26 the Miami half marathon. Yes. It is the 2026 race.

21:37 I do appreciate I just want to make sure people get the right link, but they can email me if they want the link if they want if they like to donate. That would be very nice and I appreciate really appreciate you doing that for me, Bill. And my goal is

21:48 Once you get connected to Michael, you're gonna get an imit an opportunity to participate. And I say an opportunity because Lifeline is a national organization. I'm a Los Angeles is very well thought of here in our local area. And my daughter at one point was a volunteer for the organization and really out of working with some local kids who I bumped into one of them yesterday as a matter of fact. So, it's a great organization and continued you should have continued health and be able to continue to raise money for the worth organization. Thanks for your work with that.

22:14 I appreciate that. Yeah. And so I'm sure he'll send me I'm sure I'll get the link for anybody who wants to donate. Reach out to Michael directly on or he'll reach out to you on LinkedIn and you'll get the link and wish him success on the run. And I first of I didn't think he was going to be able to do it. So I figured yeah sure I'll donate for a mile. So congratulations on that.

22:31 Yeah I well the funny thing is I actually only started long distance running about three years ago. I used to walk it with my wife and she was she's not a runner and then after when she retired from it I started running and yeah I enjoy it. Not always during the running but when I'm done with it I you know done with the run I'm always you know happy that I did it.

22:54 Fantastic. Well, Michael, look, again, this is a resource that for those of us professionals in the business or as a resource to bring to our professionals, to Realtors®, I mean to attorneys who need to find heirs or if you find abandoned property, again, if it's in California, let me help you research it. But if you find a spot where somebody's deceased for a couple years, probate not filed, there's a solution and part of the solution is heirs research and Michael Zwick at Assets International is one of the best in the business. He's the resource I go to and we'll put his contact info on the web page down below. And if you're not seeing this or you're listening on audio, just to email me or text me and I'll get you his info. Michael, thank you so much for coming back again and sharing with us your service and pleasure standards. Really appreciate what you do.

23:36 Thank you. And for the rest of you, this was Probate Weekly. We get together every week with mostly probate attorneys, vendors who help us do better at our job. Today. This is a vendor who can not only help us, but we can bring to our attorneys to help them be more successful and more efficient with their business. If I can help anyway, reach out at Bill Gross Probate on social media. And as always, make today