Paid data feed, county records by hand, or just be the person the REO agents call

Question

I have been pricing sourcing tools and the spread is wide. The national subscriptions with daily updated default and auction data run from about thirty dollars a month for something fairly thin up to several hundred for the ones with skip tracing and equity estimates attached. The pitch is speed, because a notice of default posted this morning is worth more than the same notice repackaged three weeks later, and everyone here says current data is the whole game.

The counter is that in a lot of counties the same information is public and free. Recorder's site for the notices, the legal notices section for scheduled sales, and some counties post the trustee sale lists directly. It is slower and it is tedious and you have to build the habit yourself, but you are looking at the primary record instead of somebody's scrape of it. Availability varies a lot by state, and about a dozen states do not make sale prices public at all, which makes the comp side of a paid product weaker in those places than the marketing suggests.

Then there is the third version, which is spending the same money and time on people. One agent who lists for a couple of servicers, a closing attorney, an asset manager who remembers your name. Slower to build, does not scale, and it is the one that supposedly produces the calls before a listing goes live.

I genuinely do not know which of these produces the first deal fastest for someone with no deals, and I suspect the answer is different depending on whether you want pre-foreclosure or REO. Where would you put the first three hundred a month.

marcus_hale41 · Answer

I put money into a paid feed for eight months and cancelled it, and the reason was that I could not verify it. Two of the addresses I chased had been reinstated before the record showed up in the product, and one auction date had moved. When I started pulling the same counties off the recorder's site myself I found the paid data was accurate maybe most of the time, which is fine for building a list and useless for deciding what to do on a Tuesday.

The part I would keep is skip tracing, which is genuinely hard to do by hand and cheap to buy per record rather than by subscription. So my split now is free primary records for the list, pay per lookup for contact information, and the rest of the money into gas and lunches.

One caution on your comp point. In the states that do not publish sale prices, the valuation numbers inside these products are estimates built from other estimates, and I would not underwrite a bid off them. Ask the vendor directly where the price data in your county comes from and make them answer in writing.

laurenkim53 · Answer

In the rural counties I look at none of this matters because the volume is tiny. One county I follow had four filings in a quarter and I know about all of them from the paper. The paid products barely cover it and the free records are three pages long. If your market is small the whole question collapses into knowing the one agent who handles bank listings for two hundred miles, and that costs nothing but showing up.

Paid data feed, county records by hand, or just be the person the REO agents call

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