Does anyone actually build their own list or is everyone just paying for the same tired data

Probate held up for me past the first few deals but only after I stopped trying to contact at filing and started waiting for the inventory petition, which in my two Maryland counties usually hits the docket around 60 to 90 days post-filing. That's the moment the personal representative actually has authority to do something with the property and isn't just drowning in grief paperwork. Before that window you're either getting hung up on or talking to someone who literally cannot sell yet. The thing nobody mentions until it costs them a deal is that some counties post the inventory petition online same-day and some are still scanning paper and uploading weekly, so your "fresh" pull might already be two weeks stale by the time you see it.

Courthouse sourcing scales but it demands a dedicated person whose only job is monitoring the filings, and that changes your cost math entirely. In Baltimore probate I ran a test for about eight months, two counties, and the window between a petition filing and when the first wholesaler letter hits that address has collapsed to maybe three weeks in the last two years because everyone read the same playbook. You probably got lucky on timing more than source. The clustering theory your acquisitions guy used on the DFD run is honestly more durable because it's behavioral intel nobody can buy. If I were allocating effort right now I'd be building relationships with estate attorneys in your two counties before the filing ever happens, because that moves you upstream of the courthouse entirely and the referral pool is genuinely uncontested.

Probate timing isn't guessing if you track the inventory number and set a 90-day follow-up from filing date.

Probate is not one thing, which is the part that catches people. In Maryland the small estate threshold sits at $50k, and those move through the register of wills on a completely different track than full administration, sometimes 60 days start to finish, sometimes they drag 18 months because a beneficiary is uncooperative or the decedent had a lien nobody caught. I ran a spreadsheet for about 14 months tracking every probate file I pulled from two county courthouses, logged the open date, the personal representative appointment date, and the date the inventory was filed, and the gap between appointment and inventory was the only interval that actually predicted when the PR was emotionally and practically ready to talk. Average in my sample was 11 weeks post-appointment before the inventory hit the docket. I started mailing at week 9. Response rate was not spectacular either, maybe 3.1 percent, but the conversations were different. Nobody else had called yet, and the PR was usually still in the phase where they wanted the problem solved, not the phase where they'd already been burned by three lowball offers and shut down.

The scalability question really comes down to one operational thing you didn't mention: are you pulling the full docket or just the petition filing? Because if you're only catching the initial petition you're timing everything off the wrong event. The appointment of the PR is what matters and in a lot of states that's a separate docket entry that comes weeks later. What's your courthouse actually surfacing when you pull, the petition date or the letters date?

Probate in Maryland and Virginia runs differently enough that they're basically two separate processes. Virginia's commissioner of accounts system creates a public inventory filing around 16 months post-qualification, and that's the moment I'd be targeting, not the initial filing when every other wholesaler with a courthouse subscription is already circling.

The scalability question comes down to whether you can get someone checking those dockets two or three times a week consistently, because the edge evaporates fast once the estate gets an attorney who's fielding calls. DC metro probate moves slower than Richmond or Baltimore so the window is wider there if that's your territory.

Your distress clustering instinct on the DFD run is more repeatable than people give it credit for. I've seen zip-level clustering hold for 18 to 24 months after an initial deal closes before the neighborhood tips enough that the signal degrades.