How do list services get there info?

[Elizabeth Wilson]

So I'm working on another mailing using both lists I've created and ones I've bought.  I started wondering how these list companies gather info.  Do they have lots of VAs going through public records or do they have some other type of system?  Wondering if anyone out there in BP land has thoughts on this.

Thanks!

[Sean OToole]

Folks above have hit some of the big aggregators like Corelogic (Listsource), First American (Data Tree) Black Knight (Agentpro247), Experian, Axciom, Lexis Nexis, etc. They are definitely the big boys in the field. That said, they leave lots of room for smaller players as they often suck (technical term ;-) in certain areas, or for certain data. For example while we buy data from the big boys and others, we also have to abstract foreclosure data ourselves in certain counties as the big boys don't have it available until the first foreclosure sale date has already occurred - meaning their data would be pretty much worthless to our customers.

Scraping and "bots" doesn't really play much of a roll in any of this as the most important data is contained in documents that in many states aren't available online, or even when they are, can't be reliably turned into data using optical character recognition (OCR). Instead the document images are viewed online, or purchased from the county, or you hire someone to sit at the county offices, all depending on state and county, and then the data is entered by hand. To do that nationally is tens of millions of dollars. Even in a single decent size county it can cost hundreds of thousands per year.

Finally, no one does everything. The credit guys focus on liens, judgements, court records, bankruptcies and the like. The title companies focus on transfers, loans, assessors data, etc. And then there are hundreds of things, like code enforcement actions, that pretty much no one does nationally.

So yes @Elizabeth Wilson even the big guys are doing it mostly manually like you are.