Quick Review of Proptstream Trial

[Brent Ryerson]

I have been wanting to contribute to the forums for a while now, and I have finally come up with something that might help others.

I heard about Propstream from Joe McCall's podcast (shout out to Joe and his great content!) and thought I would give it a try using his propstreamjoe.com link for a free 7 day trial.

After a day of use here are my observations:

Data Accuracy- I am pursuing a tax delinquent strategy so I wanted to get a good feel for how accurate the data was. My target counties are all in NC and have online tax lookup services.  To determine the accuracy I pulled tax delinquent 2018 or earlier in Propstream and then used a few samples to research in their respective counties' website to see how often they were correct.  Of the 4 counties only 1 returned data that actually reflected being at least 2yrs behind on their taxes.  Using my method I didn't come up with a great way to determine what the lag time of the data would be in the 1 county where the level of delinquency seemed to be correct.  In at least one other county the properties did seem to be delinquent, but only for 2019.

Usability/Interface - Propstream has a very good interface with menus and options that are fairly intuitive.  It does take a few minutes to get a feel for how to create the lists using multiple filter criteria. It requires some experimentation because different counties have slightly different ways they categorize properties for example. You will need to try a few different options if you are getting no results.  Again, pretty intuitive and the queries appear to run very quickly.

Features - This is where Propstream seems to really shine! There is a myriad of information available for every property even in the free trial version so you can get a great feel for the power of using this.It has information on the owner, property itself, mortgage, comparables, prior or current MLS listing information (the actual photos, description, DOM, etc), and more. The numbers of filters including expired MLS listings, liens, vacancy, divorce, bankruptcy, and so on are impressive. They will really allow you to very selectively target sellers. Though I was unable to verify the accuracy of several of the filters, I did toggle some of them off and on to see if my target counties appeared to have that data, and it was again somewhat hit or miss.

Overall - I have enjoyed Propstream and I'm impressed with its value proposition at $97/month (I believe).  However, because the data I need for my counties is not accurate on tax delinquency, I will probably have to use a different source for that information.  I would encourage everyone to give it a try for their strategy and county to see if it works for you.  I may even consider paying for the service just for all of the other features and information that is available all in one place.

Hope you found this helpful!