The code violation scraper works, so now who's the customer

I pull municipal code enforcement dockets for six cities. Open cases, the citation type, the address, the responsible party, dates. Some of them post clean tables, two of them I get from a monthly records request and a lot of parsing. Total time to keep it running is maybe five hours a month now that it's stable.

The signal is decent. Structural violations and repeat citations on the same parcel correlate with a seller who is out of options. I ran my own mail against 400 of them last quarter, 5.8% called back, and I put two under contract. One closed, small rehab, cleared about $21k after everything.

The business question is who pays for the feed. Wholesalers want it cheap and non-exclusive and will churn. Contractors and roofers want a repair lead, which is a different product from the same data. A local investor group offered me $1,500 a month for exclusive access to two of the six cities, which is real money and also caps the thing forever.

Records request cities are the moat. Anybody can scrape the two with clean portals. The four I have to fight for are the reason the data is worth anything, and they're also the reason a subscriber base of forty people would break me on labor.

Sitting on the exclusive offer for now. Not sure whether I'm building a data product or just found a good private list.

1 reply

3nataliehsuSO1BPRO7

$1,500 a month for two cities means the other four are worth at least that again, and probably more since those are the ones nobody else can get. I would not sign anything exclusive until you've tried to sell city three to somebody else at the same price. If two buyers pay, you know the number wasn't a fluke.

The contractor angle is a separate business and I'd leave it alone for a year. Selling a roof lead means you're competing with everyone who buys storm data, and their pricing will drag yours down.

One thing worth pinning down before you take money from anybody: what the records request cities say about redistributing what they give you. Public records access and what you can do commercially with the output are handled differently state to state and sometimes by the individual agency, so get the answer in writing from the clerk before you build a subscription on top of it. That's the sort of thing that turns into a cease and desist in month eight.

Also, two contracts off 400 pieces is a strong enough number that I would want to see it hold for another quarter before you use it in a sales conversation. Small samples on mail response swing hard.

The code violation scraper works, so now who's the customer

1 reply