ListBot Usage Guide
An autonomous scraper for pulling property data en masse
Use this tool
About
If you've ever gotten a list of leads from the county (Tax delinquents, code violations, water shutoffs, vacant houses, etc...), you probably ended up with a big list (1000+) properties with none of the owner data you need to send mail or skip trace.
Common advice for handling this monstrous logistic task is to hire a Virtual Assistant, (aka a VA) to manually look up each property in your property appraiser's website, and add the owner's name and mailing address to your list. This will work, but it can cost weeks of waiting, tie up your VA's time, and the work is prone to mistakes
ListBot is capable of taking a list with nothing more than site addresses and doing this work with some smart automation. It is fast, efficient, and more affordable than spending your VA's time on this job. Check the cost optimization calculator to see how much time and money using this tool will save you. This system does not skip trace! Rather, it can essentially 'pre-skip trace', pulling in the data that your skip trace service needs to work.
Data pulled
A variety of useful data points are pulled for each property on the list. These new fields include:
- Owner's name
- Owner's mailing details
- Bedroom/bathroom counts
- Owner type (Individual or Company)
- Property use (Residential or Commercial)
- Estimated market value
- Last sale date
- Legal descriptions
- Mortgage lender, amount, and loan date
- GPS Coordinates (Lat/Lng)
Data source and quality
The property records are pulled fresh on the spot from Melissa Data, a reputable provider of real estate property data that serves nationally. They are one of the few data companies that aggregates the data directly from public records, rather than redistributes it from a different source.
The availability and freshness of the propery records is not consistent for all markets. Most markets will have records as up-to-date as public records, and sometimes even sooner. You should verify that the data is recent and accurate using some of your account's testing credits before committing to a large order of credits, as REIZoom has absolutely no control over the quality, freshness, or hit-rate of the data.
Using ListBot
ListBot is fairly straightforward to use. Upload a CSV file with your leads, configure the columns so the system can understand how to read the addresses, then you can start your data searches. Once your list is processed, you can download it, or filter it first before downloading.
Limitations & best practices
The hit rate for vacant land, commercial properties, or apartments is very low or zero in most cases. If you are not satisfied with the hit rate, chances are the properties were not relevant to you anyways, and you can verify this by checking the addresses with your assessor's website. List of residential properties tend to have sufficiently high hit rates.
Before purchasing a large batch of credits, it is very important that you verify the quality of the data provided for your market. The best way to do this is to use PropertyWizard on a few addresses first using the testing credits provided for free!
The system can work with or without a header row, but for clarity is is ideal to include a header row. If the top row is missing a value, that column will NOT work, so do not include only some header cells but not all.
You must use CSV files for this program to work. All major spreadsheet programs support exporting to CSV.
Finally, a property record request will cost one credit, even if there are no results or if the address fields are empty. You will be prompted of the data cost before it is used. We would like to offer per-hit pricing, but the API calls to Melissa cost money regardless of the results.
Subscriber benefits
Depending on your list volume, it may be ideal to sign up for a subscription before purchasing a large order of credits. You'll save money over a virtual assistant no matter which plan you're on, but the per-credit cost savings scales well with large lists.
Additionally, professional plan subscribers can use the full-service list work, where they can simply email me their list and I will deliver it promptly with the data appended. Both professional and entrepreneur plan subscribers are welcome to enhanced consultations, where we can work together to figure out the best way to approach any sort of list work or real estate technology logistics. Pay as you go members can ask for consultations depending on availability. All users recieve technical support.
Support
If there are technical issues with this tool, contact Noah from the support page. REIZoom subscribers are welcome to ask for general advice or other logistic questions regarding these spreadsheets, and professional subscribers can send the lists to Noah for total-service.