Finding Vacant Properties via your city's Open Data!

[Pablo Avila]

Here's another post adding value to this community: Leveraging your city's open data to find vacancies.

I'll start by pointing you how to get these leads yourself. To give you an idea, sometimes pulling these manually can get you ahead of those who utilize commercial solutions propstream/listsource. 

Open Data is data made available and typically updated daily/hourly which might include Police incidents, Inspection data, and other incidents that will have plenty of information to indicate if a property is vacant, if there's any code violations, and other indicators that may help you find motivated sellers). These data sets are typically available in .csv or excel format so they should be easily consumable. Let's get started!

1. Google for your city county data "Dallas Open data"
2. Search for relevant data sets Service requests (code violations), Police Incidents, Police Arrests - (ensure it's sorted by most recent updated (There might be outdated data sets which no longer get updated so those won't be relevant).
3. Download relevant data such as the following and filter by my suggested categories: 

- 311 Department - Filter by Office of Homeless Solutions or Environmental Quality, Court & Detention Services, Specifically searching for (Homeless Encampment, Illegal dumping).
- Police Incidents - Search for Type of incident (ABANDONED PROPERTY, COMMUNITY/PUBLIC - UNINHABITED, BURGLARY OF HABITATION -NO FORCED ENTRY, Abandoned/Condemned Structure). There's also information about death-related incidents which I won't go into details (i.e. Natural death, Murder).

4. Luckily this information includes the address in question along with the date of the incident, you might be the first person with access to this data, and therefore the first to market to these properties.

My suggestion would be to join your county appraisal district data to further identify the properties of interest along with other relevant data such as tax delinquencies, and/or other motivating factors.

Lastly, leave any questions or comments below! And don't be lazy, some of you won't do proper due diligence in finding your own information :)