Deep-Research Investigator — Skip Tracing, Public Records & Property Title (Real Estate)

Read this first:
Most "research" jobs are box-checking. This one isn't. We buy distressed, tax-delinquent, and inherited (probate) real estate in Minnesota, and before we can help a homeowner or an heir, we first have to find the right human being — often someone who has died, moved five times, or never wanted to be found in the first place.

That's your job: take a property and a half-dead trail of information and figure out who legally owns it, who inherited it, and how to reach them. You are the detective at the very front of everything we do. If you get it right, a family gets helped and we do a deal. If you get it wrong, everything downstream breaks.

We are looking for one exceptional person. Not five average ones.



What the work actually looks like:
A few real examples of the thinking we need:
1. The obituary nugget. The owner died. You find the obituary — and instead of skimming it, you read every single line. Buried in paragraph four is "she is survived by her daughter, Maria (Robert) Thompson of Bloomington." That one line just gave you a married daughter, a son-in-law's name, and a city. Most people miss it. You don't.

2. The dead end that isn't. The phone is disconnected. The address is vacant. The person is deceased. A box-checker stops here and writes "unable to locate." You think: okay, who are their people? You find their Facebook, you see who comments "love you mom" every year on the memorial post, you trace the daughter, you find the daughter's spouse, you build the path. You treat a dead end as a puzzle, not a stop sign.

3. The messy title. Grandpa died without a will. He had four kids; one of them died before him and left two kids of her own. There's an old mortgage and a lien. You don't just report that — you can reason about who actually has to sign to sell this property and what fraction each person owns, because you understand how title and inheritance work.

If reading those three scenarios made you a little excited, keep reading. If they sounded tedious, this role will make you miserable — please don't apply.



Who you are:
You think like an investigator, not a clerk. You are genuinely intelligent and you love connecting scattered pieces into a picture nobody else could see -- the entire role is essentially like stalking a scummy boyfriend who you suspect might be messing around -- same mindset, really. You get a small thrill from finding the thread everyone else walked past.

You are relentlessly detail-oriented. You read the whole document. You notice the middle initial, the maiden name, the second address, the neighbor's last name. You assume the one clue you need is hiding in the part everyone else skips.

You are resourceful and creative under a dead end. When the obvious path fails, you already have three more. You know your way around public records, county sites, genealogy and obituary sources, social media, and open-source research (OSINT) techniques.

You understand property and legal structure. You can read a deed, follow a chain of title, and reason about heirs and ownership shares. We keep everything ethical and above-board, but you need to actually understand the machinery.

You are fluent with AI, and you use it every day. This is non-negotiable. We run our research with AI tools — especially Claude (Cowork) — and you'll be expected to work alongside it fluently: prompting it well, checking its work, and using it to move faster without ever letting it think for you. If you're not already comfortable living inside AI tools daily, this isn't the role for you. Hands-on experience with DataSift / ReiSift (our CRM) is a strong plus.



Backgrounds we especially want (any one of these moves you to the top of the pile):
Private investigation, skip tracing, or asset/people location
OSINT / open-source intelligence research
Intelligence, law-enforcement, or government investigative service (e.g., NBI, NICA, PNP intelligence, military intelligence)
Title abstracting or work at a title company, title insurance, or a real estate law office
Paralegal / legal research, especially anything touching estates, probate, or property

You do not need all of these. One of them, done well, plus the right mind, is what we want.



What you'll do day to day:
Run deep research on specific properties and people using Claude Co-Work, public records, county assessor/recorder data, court and probate records, obituaries, genealogy tools, and social media
Determine the correct legal owner, confirm whether they're living or deceased, and map out heirs and decision-makers
Trace and verify current contact paths for the right people
Document everything with sources, so the next person can trust and re-check your work
Flag the messy title situations that need extra legal thinking, and reason through them with us

This is a research-focused, low-phone role. You'll rarely be on live calls. If you love the hunt and hate cold-calling, that's a feature, not a bug.


A note on our team:
ARCH is a women-led company, and right now our whole team is women. We're proud of the supportive, collaborative, drama-free culture we've built, and to keep that going we're prioritizing female applicants for this role.

Availability:
To start: ~30 hours/week, with a clear path to full-time for the right person
Core hours overlap with U.S. Central Time (Monday–Friday); occasional Saturday if a deal is hot
Ideally ~6 hours/day, 5 days/week

Compensation:
Up to $10 USD/HR with $ ---------- bonus/closed transaction (averaging 3-5 transactions/month), total monthly income to be around (10*30HRS*4 weeks) + (300 per file bonus * 3-5 bonuses/month) = $2100-$3000USD/month. If you're truly exceptional, bonuses may become even larger.

–
Up to $10 USD/hour based on experience -- lower hourly rate if low experience, plus performance bonuses for hard-to-find location wins. Compensation will be reviewed and raised as you prove yourself. We pay more for people who are genuinely great, and we keep them.


How to apply — read carefully, this is part of the test:
We screen hard, on purpose. Follow these instructions exactly — attention to detail is the job, so this is your first audition. Applying takes two steps, and you must do both.

⚠️ READ THIS:
If you do not follow every single instruction below, exactly — the subject line, both personality tests, the PrinciplesYou PDF attached, the screen-recording, and both application steps — your application will be immediately rejected and will not be reviewed at all. No exceptions, no follow-up, no second chances. This is not us being harsh; following precise instructions is the job. If that already sounds like too much, this role is not for you.


Step 1 — Email your full application

Email everything to ---------- with the exact subject line "REAL ESTATE RESEARCHER" (applications without this exact subject line are deleted unread).

Include all of the following:
1. Your resume.
2. A short note (5–8 sentences): Tell us about the single hardest person or piece of information you ever had to track down — what made it hard, and how you cracked it. Be specific.
Two personality tests (complete both):
3. DISC — free at ---------- (attach or paste your results)
4. PrinciplesYou — free at ---------- . After you finish the assessment, click "Invite and Share" in the left menu, then under "Download as PDF" click DOWNLOAD, and attach that PDF to your email.
5. A 5-10 minute screen-recording (or however long you need -- the more thorough and better your research is -- great!) where you complete a small test search and talk out loud through your thinking the entire time. We care far more about how you think than whether you get the "right" answer.

Your test task:
Using free public information and any other tools & websites you want, find out everything you can about the current owner of this property:
1235 Thomas Ave N, Minneapolis, MN ---------- Who owns it?
Are they living or deceased?
If deceased, who are the likely heirs and how would you try to reach them?
Any thoughts about the property? Any information you found in public records?
Show us your screen and narrate every step, every source, and every dead end and how you got around it.

One-line answer:
In the test research above, what was the single most useful piece of information you found, and where exactly did you find it?


Step 2 — Message me here on OnlineJobs.ph
After you email, also send me a direct message right here through OnlineJobs.ph letting me know your application is in your inbox. Doing both steps is itself part of the test — it tells us you can follow a multi-part instruction exactly.

Applicants who skip either step, leave out any of the five items, or ignore the subject-line instruction will not be considered.

We read every complete application carefully. If you're the person we're describing, you'll enjoy this — and we'd love to meet you.