Built a lead pipeline around pre-foreclosure filings in a county that doesn't publish them the way I assumed
Ran this for seven months and shut it down in March. Posting the whole thing because the failure was at step one and I didn't see it until step four.
The plan: serve two investors who buy rural and small-town single family, 15 to 90k purchase range, by sourcing from pre-foreclosure and tax-delinquent filings across four rural counties. My edge was supposed to be geographic. Nobody was driving those roads and the national list vendors had thin coverage out there. I priced at 250 a lead with a 500 bonus on a close, both clients agreed, no retainer.
Where it broke. Two of my four counties post notice records in a way that gave me filings roughly 5 to 7 weeks after they were filed, and one of those two only made them available in person at the clerk's office. Recording and notice practice varies by state and by county inside a state, and I'd assumed my home county's timing was normal. It wasn't. By the time I had a name, the owner had been contacted by whoever was pulling the same records faster or paying a vendor. On two occasions I delivered a lead and the owner told my client's acquisitions person that they'd already signed something.
The cost. Seven months, roughly 20 hours a week, 3,100 in mileage and record fees and one paid data trial. Revenue 4,750 across 19 delivered leads and one close. So I made money on paper and lost badly on my time, and one client went cool on me because two of the 19 were stale enough to embarrass him.
The part I got wrong in analysis, not execution: I treated distress filings as the lead source and my job as retrieval. Retrieval speed is a commodity and I was the slow one. The rural coverage gap was real but it was a coverage gap in vendor data, not a gap in investor attention, because the local buyers out there already knew those houses.
What I'd do differently. I'd test data latency in each county before spending a dollar, meaning pull a filing I know the date of and measure how many days until it's available to me. If the answer is over two weeks I'd either not source from filings there or I'd go in person weekly and price for it. And I'd build the second half of the operation, which I never built: a reason for the owner to talk to my client rather than the first of six people who called. That's a relationship business and I ran it as a records business.