Scraping the Web for Deals

[Christopher V.]

(This the right forum for this? Not sure, but here goes.)

Hey all, I just wrote a little script to scrape the interweb for information on addresses I give it. Being a programmer, I didn't really want to spend all the time navigating my county's tax assessor's site for dozens of addresses at a time, so I made a script to do it for me.

Anyhow, the short of it comes down to a pretty simple question: What am I looking for?

When I pull up the property record, I get all kinds of information, which is cool, but I don't really know how to decipher it to know if it's worth my time contacting the owners.

I went driving around for about an hour the other day and compiled a list of about 20 potentially vacant properties (not much, I know), but now what? Do I even need to filter out anything about the assessed value, sales information, year built, anything like that? (Looking at one on my list, the assessed value is $115,950, but it has some RMV stuff as well. The last purchase price was in 2009 without a price given, then 2008 at $190k. What does that even mean to me?)

What do you guys look for after you go driving for dollars?