Real Estate Seller Opportunity Monitor

Real estate investors and agents who work off-market deals spend hours manually checking county assessor, recorder, and court websites to find motivated sellers before a property hits the open market. The data is public, but it's scattered across separate county systems, inconsistently formatted, and slow to compile by hand — and the generic databases built to solve this (PropStream, BatchLeads) cover the whole country at the cost of being tuned to none of it.

Solo investor-agents and small wholesaling or investment teams (1-5 people) working a single metro or county, who've already tried PropStream or BatchLeads and found the lead quality generic rather than locally relevant — the same national filters applied everywhere, with no local scoring logic.

County record data is increasingly available online, and LLMs make it practical to normalize messy, inconsistent public filings at low cost. The market has also consolidated: PropStream acquired BatchLeads and BatchDialer in 2025, folding two of the largest generic lead-list providers into one company. That's fewer, larger national competitors — and more room for a narrow, single-market specialist that actually verifies its own data instead of aggregating everything at national scale.

• Manually checking county assessor, recorder, and court websites
• Buying PropStream or BatchLeads at roughly $99-147/month for national-breadth data tuned to no specific market
• Hiring virtual assistants to scrape and compile records by hand
• Driving for dollars to spot distressed properties visually

A tool scoped to one named county that ingests four public record types — tax delinquency filings from the treasurer's site, code violations from the city or county code enforcement portal, probate filings from the county probate court index, and pre-foreclosure or notice-of-default filings from the county recorder — and scores each property against a weighted seller-motivation model. Every Monday morning it delivers a ranked list with property details and a one-line explanation of why each property scored high enough to include. The tool stops at research: it does not auto-contact anyone. Outreach stays fully manual and is the agent or investor's own compliance responsibility under TCPA, Regulation F's seven-attempts-in-seven-days limit, and Do-Not-Call rules — this is explicitly a prioritization workflow, not a lead-blast system.

The ingestion and scoring pipeline is reusable across counties through different source connectors, but the real product is the scoring and verification layer for one market, not broad national coverage — the opposite bet from PropStream and BatchLeads.

• Monthly subscription per county, roughly $150-250/month — priced above PropStream's national rate on the premise that one market done and verified by hand is worth more to an active local operator than the whole country done generically
• Per-lead pricing as an alternative for lower-volume buyers
• White-label licensing to small real estate teams

• County data formats vary widely and scrapers break often — this is a data-engineering problem more than a product problem
• Legal and compliance responsibility for contacting distressed homeowners sits with the buyer, not the tool, but a bad customer outcome here is still a reputational risk to whoever built it
• Some counties charge for data access or license it restrictively
• PropStream's 2025 acquisition of BatchLeads consolidated two major competitors into one well-funded player, raising the bar for what "better than generic" has to mean
• A one-line score explanation has to be genuinely accurate — a wrong or misleading reason erodes trust fast in a small local market

Yes, but only as a single-county pilot with a real agent or investor already lined up to test it — never as a broad multi-county SaaS from day one, and never expanded into automated outreach. The compliance boundary (research only, no auto-contact) is a hard constraint, not a future feature to relax. If a hand-verified pilot in one county can't find 3-5 people willing to pay for it, that's a signal to stop, not to expand to more counties.

Pick one county the founder can realistically verify by hand, manually pull and score 30 days of the four record types, and show the ranked list — with the compliance framing explicit — to 3-5 real investors or agents in that market to see if they'd actually pay for it.