Data Mining......Any Easier Way

[Derek T.]

Guys I have my assistant pulling data from MLS, county records and land records to come up with my investor data file for the county I invest in the most. Basically I pulled all the cash purchases for the last 2 years and I have my assistant pulling the owner records and deed/deed of trust records for this purchase. She is then entering the data into my master file that has a number of sortable fields that are included when you export from the MLS. Basically she is entering 5 columns worth of data that pertain to who bought the house for cash, their contact info, did they have a Deed of Trust, if so how much and with who, and did this investor flip the house or rent it out.

She is doing a great job and got through 100 houses in the first day as most of this is copying and pasting from the county office and the land records office but is there any easier way? I've heard that you can buy data files from the county but I am not sure if this will help our cause much as she would still have to sort through that file to copy and paste data to my master file.

[John K.]

@Derek T. - the key is to find a computer programmer (like a college kid), and have him write some scripts to compile all the data, and then export it into a excel sheet or build a simple tool to analyze the data.

Years back I wrote a script for someone that crawled local court cases (via a RSS feed) that were people with homes that were about to be foreclosed on and put them into a excel file - instead of hours of sorting through the data after a few simple clicks what took days could be done in seconds.