I run my own data company so we're very niche, I'm getting clients that are no longer satisfied with propstream and similar products as everyone is targetting the same lists. Below I'm going to cover where you can get this information for free! As a quick summary here's where you can find other relevant real-estate data if you're an investor and what does the data contain: - County appraisal data - Absentee owned, Owner information (mailing address, years of ownership), Probate. Parcel property details such as single/multi-family, SQ/FT, # of rooms, etc. "Google your county + appraisal data") - County District clerk (Criminal/civil data) - Divorce, Tax delinquency, Foreclosure, Felony convictions. Preforeclosure data as well (Lis pendends, Reassignment of trustee, etc..) - Justice of peace courts (Lookup your Precinct) - Debt claims, Evictions, Small claims, etc.. - Public real Estate Agent records - Many real estate agents are actually buyers (you can pull up their company info and match it with appraisal district data and identify cash buyers to build your cash list, for example in Texas you can download the entire list from the state site ). - Regrid - is a great place to pull USPS vacant lists. - Public City Works - Code violation data, Water shutoff (although there's been privacy changes with this) - 311 Service requests data - Great to identify bad land lords, code violations, vacant properties, etc. (Think of this list as Driving for $'s as the neighbors/concerned citizens are the ones making the calls to complain). - Other Public sites such as nextdoor[.]com & Facebook - People will tell you what's going on in their neighborhoods (complaints about homeless camps, breaking into houses, etc.) Back to the County Appraisal District Data: This is where as I mentioned you'll find your "Absentee owners", all this really means is that the property site address is different from the Mailing address as an individual may own multiple properties and the only thing that will tie them together is the owner name along with the mailiing address, how can I get ahead of these data vendors and use my competitive advantage? I've put together a Google sheets with the top cities/counties in the U.S that include downloads to the appraisal district/Parcel data which can be accessed here

Just finished a Python project that uses Hugging Face Transformers to clean up municipal code violation data which many of you can easily access by googling "your city's code violation open data". (sorry it gets a bit technical now) - I’m running a distilbart Zero-Shot Classification model locally to process thousands of code violation records. So far I think this has done a great job and we'll probably implement this for our larger datasets. (See screenshot) The script iterates through raw text descriptions (Complaints/Code Violations) and classifies them into categories like 'Absentee Owner,' 'Structural Damage,' or 'Probate'—without needing a pre-trained dataset. It even includes a logic layer to prioritize probate keywords with high confidence scores as we were getting false positives such as "Abandoned Vehicles, Dead cats/dogs, etc.." It’s cool how accessible NLP (Natural Language Processing) has become for solving niche business problems like identifying distressed property inventory! The best part is that we don't spend $ on API calls to OpenAI/Gemini as we're running all of these locally. Here's the link to the script if you're interested in trying it yourself. Again, implementing our changes to our data offerings at https://lspdata.io ;)

This post focuses on my experience in the fastest way of using your local county clerk documents to find real-estate leads, specially pre-foreclosures. I mean the fastest because even your commercial data reseller vendors won't be as fast as your local counties, trust me I run a real-estate data company ;) Here's a bit of background: The county clerk's office is responsible for recording and maintaining public records (related to property and legal matters) It tracks documents like deeds of trust, mortgages, liens, Lis Pendens, probates, and related foreclosures docs, etc. These records help verify ownership, track legal claims related to real estate and legal transactions. Below is a table I've put together on these Document types (or some counties call them instruments) which get recorded daily. I've also added a simple explanation of what they mean, and estimated time before they go into a foreclosure or auction state. I know some of you who are truly experienced in real-estate go directly to the foreclosure pages on your local county which get published daily; however, these document types below often occur much earlier. The point of these is to get hold of a property owner and work something out to help them deal with their situation (i.e. creative financing, subject to, etc..) Take a look at the screenshot which is a table of the documents that i'm referring to, what they mean, and the time period that you'll have to reach out. County clerk documents like lis pendens, mortgage loan modifications, and similar filings can reveal signs of financial distress in a property. A lis pendens indicates that a foreclosure lawsuit has been filed, marking the property as legally contested and likely in preforeclosure. Mortgage loan modifications suggest the homeowner is struggling to keep up with payments and is attempting to renegotiate terms to avoid foreclosure. Other filings, such as loan defaults, tax liens, or bankruptcy notices, can further signal financial hardship.

I’ve been wholesaling homes since 2019 and I’d like to transition into land. Has anyone had success with land? If so, what are the top 3-5 pointers you’d share about the process and finding the best locations?

So we can have a central place for that information, please tag yourself here & post the city/ies you’re doing this business in in the state of Texas.