129 a month for daily default filings, when the clerk posts the same filings for free

Six hours a month is a full day on a job site, tally. I'd pay the 129 without thinking about it. On the trades side I stopped doing my own material takeoffs for the same reason, the free version was costing me the thing I actually sell.

What I'd want to know before signing up is how the platform handles corrections. Clerks amend and cancel filings, and a canceled default that stays live in your list means you mail somebody who already reinstated.

You're measuring cost per filing and the number that matters is cost per contract signed. 129 a month is noise against a single deal, so the subscription question answers itself unless the data is wrong.

The broker list at 0.34 a record with a 500 minimum is 170 for records you didn't select and can't audit. I'd want to know how old the filings are and what percentage of the skip traced numbers connect before I sent that. Ask them for a 50 record sample and check the hit rate yourself.

Genuine question underneath this: if the free source is the real source and the paid one is a copy, is the subscription buying data or buying the habit of looking every day? Because I know which one I'd fail at.

Asking the thing I'd have skipped over. What is actually on a notice of default filing? I've assumed it says the amount behind and the auction date, and if it does, half the equity guessing people do here would be unnecessary. If it doesn't, where does the balance owed come from before you talk to the owner?

compass, from what I've seen it varies by county and by state, and in the judicial states the filing is a lawsuit so what's in it is different again from a trustee's notice. Some give a figure, some give only the instrument being foreclosed, and the current payoff only comes from the servicer with the owner's written authorization.

tally, I built the side by side spreadsheet you're describing, 60 days, both sources, timestamped. The platform ran about a day and a half behind the clerk index in one county and was ahead in the other because it caught filings I mis-read in the PDF. So my accuracy was the weak link, not the vendor's.

I've run the clerk route for four months in three counties and the part I wasn't ready for is name and address quality. Owner of record on the filing is often a trust or two people, one of whom hasn't lived there in years, and mailing the property address only reaches the ones still in the house. My paid trial fixed maybe 40 percent of those and produced two mailing addresses for the same person, both wrong.

kestrel, the daily habit is real. When I was doing it by hand I checked twice a week and told myself it was daily.

From zero, the 129 is the part I'd struggle to justify before any income. But six hours a month of reading PDFs is also how I'd learn what the filings look like, which I don't know yet, so paying to skip that step this early feels backwards for me.

One thing from the management side. County data has quality patterns you learn by staring at it, like which filings come from one servicer's law firm in batches, and you lose that if a vendor hands you a clean list. I'd do it by hand until you can predict what the week's filings look like, then pay somebody to do it faster.

girder's point about canceled filings is the one that actually costs money, and neither route solves it. You solve it by calling before you drive.