Anyone else scraping auction listings?

Question

hey guys

so im tired of being late to good deals on auction.com... their email alerts suck lol

i write code in my day job so i built a little scraper on apify that pulls all the new foreclosures each morning. way better than getting 100 emails a day about random properties

anyone else doing this? what sites are you scraping besides auction?

so far it's been a labor of love, but i finally got it to scrape the entire site. now just trying to figure out how to improve my flow and other sites I should add to my sourcing engine. feedback would be appreciated!

ps - found 2 decent properties so far but havent pulled the trigger yet. still learning

-jim

Brooke Newport · Answer

Yeah scraping Auction is smart but the real edge is what you do with the data after it lands in your lap.

If you already have Apify pulling all new foreclosures each morning, I’d tighten it up by baking your buy box into the scraper so it only keeps stuff that roughly pencils in, like estimated ARV times 0.7 minus a ballpark rehab and fees still leaves you with your target equity. From there I’d add a second source with messy data but good leads, like county sheriff sale calendars, Xome, Hubzu, and even preforeclosures from Redfin or Zillow, then normalize them into the same feed so you are seeing everything in one place. Big win is turning it into a ranked daily list so the top 5 get your attention and quick underwriting first instead of scrolling through 100 randoms.

What market are you in and what does a “decent” deal look like numbers wise on those two you found so far purchase rehab ARV and target rent or resale price?

Bart Key · Answer

Jim,

I am not writing scraping code but interested to hear how it goes?

Have you done any research into the language on the site about titles may not be free from all liens?

From auction.comTitle and Liens: Most liens are removed after a foreclosure property sale, but certain liens may remain. What type of liens remain?

Do you happen to know if they are selling properties with clouded titles or is this disclaimer language?  Thanks