Scrubbing a Large Vacant Houses List

[Caleb Jones]

I just received a fairly large list of vacant properties in a nearby city (4,000+). I am planning on starting a cold calling, RVM, and direct mail campaign to these properties. In order to do this, I need to get all of the properties' owners names/mailing addresses in order to skip trace them. 

I am currently doing this one by one on the county tax accessors website, but there has to be a more efficient way to get this data, right? I would love any suggestions! Thank you in advance!

[John K.]

@Caleb Jones

I would recommend that you have a script built for you, that will scrape the county website. This way you can capture more data at the same time, not just owner info. 

1. Visit any of the freelancer websites, I use fiverr, and make a post that you need a script for web scraping. The tricky part is what code to use, I use VB for Mac, not saying it's better or anything else, it just works nicely for me. I am not a coder, just have worked through dozens of these scripts. Check the county website that provides this data, and be ready to explain to them exactly what data you want and how you want it delivered to you, usually this would be excel. 

2. It's important to build in timed delays when scraping websites. As you are finding out, manually looking up info, takes forever and a day. A script will do it in a fraction of the time, which could trigger the security on these websites. The server could react in a way of being under attack and block your IP. You can solve this in one of two ways. Build in that time delay, say 1 search every 2-3 minutes, this will mimic the speed of a human. The other way is to subscribe to a batch of proxies and have the script call for a new one, after "X" number of searches. This will appear to be a different computer accessing the information, instead of just 1. Ideally you would do both, but this increases the cost.  You can get all the assistance you need from your coder, to help you navigate the lingo if you are not comfortable doing so, yourself. 

3. You should be able to get a script like this done, for under $100. I have over 50 scripts, and I would say the average cost was around $50-60. If you add in the proxy change, expect to pay $10-15 more, just because the script has to access a different website. 

You can build an additional script to scrape phone numbers for you, as well. 

The downside to having a script on government sites is if the site makes a change to the page you need to visit to pull that data, your script will break. You will just need to have the script reworked to account for the changes, this should cost you $10-20, max. With all of my scripts, I can honestly say this has happened to me, one time. While county websites change daily, the portion of the site where you look up property information, rarely needs to change. The one time it did for me, I figured out that county had place the notification of taxes due, inside the property info tab. That little banner was all it took to break the script.