How to reach a property owner legally (Colorado)

A letter to the owner's mailing address has the fewest legal traps. The county assessor keeps an owner's mailing address as a public record, and you can read it at the county. The Do Not Call list, the TCPA and CAN-SPAM cover phone, text and email, not postal mail. You still have to be honest in a letter.

• Give a real name and a real return address.
• Say you are a private buyer. Never make a letter look like it came from a county, a court, a lender or the IRS.
• Say in writing that you may assign the contract to another buyer or resell the property.
• Honor a "stop" request at once and keep a list of those owners so they are never mailed again.
• Colorado has extra rules for owners facing foreclosure (the Foreclosure Protection Act). Talk to an attorney before you write to anyone in foreclosure.

These are the rules that cost people the most money, so check them every time.

• Do Not Call. Check each number against the National Do Not Call Registry before you call or text. A check is good for 31 days. Also check Colorado's no-call list. Keep your own list of people who told you to stop, and honor it.
• Hours. Sales calls are only allowed between 8 am and 9 pm where the person is, not where you are.
• Autodialers and recorded voices. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) bars autodialed or prerecorded calls and texts to a cell phone without the person's prior written consent. Do not use an autodialer, a robocall service or a bulk texting tool on numbers you found cold.
• Say who you are at the start of the call and why you are calling.
• A call a person places by hand to a number that is not on a Do Not Call list is the lowest-risk way to call. The risk is still yours, not your data provider's.

CAN-SPAM covers any commercial email, including a note to one business owner.

• The From line and the subject must be honest.
• Include your real postal address.
• Include a working way to opt out, and honor it within 10 business days.
• Say clearly that it is an advertisement if it is one.
• Do not send to addresses harvested by scraping sites.

Skip tracing means paying for a phone number or email that the county record does not give you. It is a paid choice, and every rule above still applies to what you get back. From lowest risk up:

• The mailing address in the county record. Free, public, and enough for a letter. Start here.
• Business owners. If an LLC owns the property, the Colorado Secretary of State record lists the registered agent and the business address.
• A commercial skip-trace service. You pay per record. Pick one that says where its data comes from, and read what its terms let you do with it. It does not make a number safe to call: check Do Not Call yourself.
• Do not pose as the owner, an heir or an official to get information (that is pretexting), build profiles of private people from social media, or use credit reports to find or screen owners.

shinnslist does not publish owner names, mailing addresses, phone numbers or emails on public pages, and does not sell lists of them. This guide is about how you can reach an owner yourself, within the law. Owner details in your own signed-in view are for your own outreach and stay private.

• Never choose who to contact by a protected trait: race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, family status, or Colorado's additions such as marital status, age, creed or source of income.
• Market your contract, not someone else's house. Advertising a property you do not control can count as unlicensed brokerage.
• Do not claim to be the end buyer if you are not.
• Do not call a model value an appraisal. Call it an estimate.
• Have a Colorado real estate attorney read your letter, your script and your contract before you contact owners at scale.

• National Do Not Call Registry (FTC), read October 30, 2026
• FTC: CAN-SPAM Act compliance guide for business, read October 30, 2026
• FCC: Telemarketing and robocalls (TCPA), read October 30, 2026
• Colorado No-Call List, read October 30, 2026