Automating your deal searches with scraping software.

[Justin P.]

Hi I am curious if anyone will give good advice about putting your business on autopilot!? I was considering buying this software https://contentgrabber.com/ to collect my data and criteria for acquisitions automatically. Has anyone used this or something like this? I've been searching but haven't found the right product, and a lot of the bigger pocket pod casts talk about putting things on autopilot. Thanks for the feedback!

[Joe Garbarczyk]

@Justin P. - I think automation is a really great idea and I have done it in the past for other, non-real estate related tasks. To answer your question specifically, I don't think you need to buy a program for that. Look at import.io for super simple scraping.

However, remember there are many things to consider BEFORE you start scraping - I like to narrow down my list of people I can potentially help by purchasing their property. I say help because buying their property will solve a problem they have - taxes, divorce, tenant eviction, etc.

Web scraping is just something you do to help you find potential properties. My advice would be to think strategically about these 5 things (and in this order):

1. What areas of the country do you want to invest in?
2. What problem are you tackling (taxes, pre-foreclosure, tenant eviction, etc)?
3. Is there enough publicly available data to find online (in most cases, yes)
4. What will you do with the data once you have it (direct mail campaign, boots on the ground in an area you don't live in, etc.) ?
5. What scraping tool will you use?

Hope this helps.