All Forum Posts by: Hana Kooker

I’ve been working on building software to automate the process of collecting and organizing data from public records searches and maintains a database of real estate wholesaling leads. I wanted to see if anyone here has run into challenges with this kind of research.

For those of you who regularly look up probate records, code violations, water shut off, tax delinquent, etc., what’s your biggest frustration? Is there a specific type of information you wish was easier to extract, track, or analyze?

I’m also curious—if you had a tool that could streamline this process, what features would be most useful to you? Bulk searches? Alerts for new filings? A workflow that would automatically send out Right to Know/Open Public Record Act forms?

Would love to hear your thoughts. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated.

I do this for a living. Scraped and built scrapers for easily 300 county rerocrders/courts/notice websites across the USA

Biggest hurdles are

Limited access to information because of search parameters i.e only being able to search a single name/case number at a time and where/how do you generate them to search in the first place.

Limited info provided from the diff records/courts/departments search results. Whatever you cannot find you must go somewhere else and get.

Database structure forces you to have to go through every record 1 at a time to identify certain info from pages/docs

Typically a row/lead takes 3-5 different scrapes to get what an investor/wholesaler wants.

Must be able to use bots/tools to navigate and fill forms

notices are unstructured text can you automate parsing unstructured and unpredictable text?

Documents are somewhat structured but not anywhere near structured data most scrapers have to/used to getting and thats assuming they are available to view at all. IF no docs and the data a client wants isnt available then you must get it somewhere else.

Every website is different and you will have start fresh building a new scraper everytime.

Competing against many other types of software doing what you are doing.

Competing against upwork/fiver/foreign VAs doing the same thing you are doing

If your presence becomes to big you will bring attention and likely forced into a propstream/propwire/propradar model where you must buy the data from the counties as scraping regs are in a greyzone in most states

What hurdles have you hit so far?

Thank you for your response this was all very helpful. I've run into many of these hurdles some of which I have been able to build work arounds for, some I have not. I've built a few bots that are able to mimic my clicks and extract what I need, in terms of replicating it for every different website, it is still a work in progress.

My main issue right now is sites where search parameters are such that I have to search one case number at a time. Much like you said, even with a tool to replicate my keystrokes/clicks, I would need to have the case/parcel numbers to search to begin with. Additionally, training a bot to search every record individually may prove to be just as tedious as just doing the work manually myself.

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Hi Travis,

Are you looking for a no-code option? Maybe take a look at Browse AI I believe they have pre-built data scraping bots for Zillow and Redfin. If those don't work for you it is fairly easy to train a custom bot on their platform as well.

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Hey everyone,

Would love to hear your thoughts. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated.

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All Forum Posts by: Hana Kooker

Hana Kooker has started 1 posts and replied 3 times.

Post: Wholesaling Software/Database Management.

Post: How to retrieve/scrape data based on addresses already saved in Excel

Post: Wholesaling Software/Database Management.