Real Estate Seller Opportunity Monitor
A per-county monitoring system that turns public records — tax delinquency, code violations, probate, pre-foreclosure — into a ranked list of likely home sellers before they hit the open market.
Problem
Real estate investors and agents who work off-market deals spend hours manually checking county websites and assessor records to find motivated sellers. The data is public, but it's scattered, inconsistent, and slow to compile by hand.
Who has this problem
Real estate wholesalers, small investment firms, and agents who specialize in off-market and distressed-property deals.
Why now
County record data is increasingly available online, and LLMs make it practical to normalize and summarize messy, inconsistent public filings at low cost. Existing tools like Propstream and BatchLeads are broad national databases, not tuned to a specific market.
Current workarounds
- Manually checking county assessor and court websites
- Buying expensive generic lead lists (Propstream, BatchLeads, ListSource)
- Hiring virtual assistants to scrape and compile records by hand
- Driving for dollars to spot distressed properties visually
MVP concept
A tool that ingests public record feeds for a specific county — tax delinquency, code violations, probate filings, pre-foreclosure notices — scores each property on seller-motivation signals, and delivers a weekly ranked list with contact information and the reasoning behind each score.
System leverage
One ingestion and scoring pipeline is reusable across counties through different source connectors. The aggregation and scoring layer is the product, not any single data source.
Suggested stack
Monetization options
- Monthly subscription per county or market
- Tiered pricing by number of markets tracked
- Per-lead pricing
- White-label licensing to real estate teams
Risks
- County data formats vary widely and scrapers break often
- Legal and compliance sensitivities around contacting distressed homeowners
- Some counties charge for data access or license it restrictively
- Established, well-funded competitors already serve this space nationally
Would we build this
Cautiously. The data engineering and legal surface is large for a first build. A narrow, manually validated pilot in one county is the right way to test real demand before investing in broad infrastructure.
Next step
Pick one county, manually pull and score 30 days of public record data, and see if a handful of investors would pay for the resulting list.