Virtual Assistant or not?

I see a lot of posts on the forums about how investors hire virtual assistants to gather information from the web instead of doing it themselves. The question "what is your time worth" is asked many times whenever someone is deciding to DIY. For me, my time is valuable, but if I'm not doing any deals, then why not get the information myself.

I target evictions, code violations, and now probate. At first, I didn't mind the amount of time it would take me to cross reference the property to the owner. I quickly changed my mind after I saw that it took me about 1-2 minutes for each property. At that pace I'd never finish. I looked into VAs in the past and knew that I didn't want to pay them monthly. I'm a cheapskate. I've heard on 2 podcasts that they used scrapers. Bingo!

I have a 2 part bot for probate listings. It downloads the data from the web. Since the pdfs are images, they have to be converted to text pdfs. I use Adobe Acrobat to convert all of the files. The bot then scrapes the needed data from the pdfs. The other bot I have is used for my eviction list. It scrapes the owner's mailing address for each eviction property from the tax assessor's website.

All the scraped data is automatically saved into an excel spreadsheet. Next bot I'll get will be for code violations. For a one time cost, a scraper or bot is a one time investment that can be used multiple times.