Off-Market Leads Scraper

Off-market, time-sensitive real-estate leads collected directly from official public records across all 50 US states - sheriff and trustee sale lists, tax-delinquent auctions, probate notices and legal-notice boards. Every field of every lead ships with its own provenance: the exact source URL, how it was collected, and a confidence score.

Who this is for

• Wholesalers and investors who need motivated sellers whose properties are NOT listed on the MLS - before the crowd finds them.
• Agents and brokers building farm-area pipelines around distress events (foreclosure auctions, tax sales, probate).
• Analysts and data teams who need auditable public-record data where every value can be traced back to its origin.

A single closed wholesale deal routinely returns thousands of dollars. This actor automates the discovery work: it reads county sheriff dockets, trustee notices, tax-sale rosters and court/legal notice boards week after week, and hands you structured leads with hard deadlines attached.

How it works

1. Collect - the actor reads official state/county sources for every state you select (all 50 by default), through Apify residential proxies with sticky sessions.
2. Verify off-market status - every candidate passes an always-on OFF-MARKET GATE: the actor searches for active listings of that property and kills anything MLS-listed. Only genuinely off-market properties survive. Killed candidates never reach your dataset.
3. Enrich - when available, owner phone numbers are skip-traced from public people-search snippets and attached with their source and confidence.
4. Score and filter - each field gets a confidence score with the rule that produced it, and each lead keeps its deadline and the reason it is time-sensitive (auction date, hearing date, redemption window).
5. Deliver - clean, schema-validated JSON items land in the run dataset, ready for CSV export, webhooks, API or AI workflows.

What you get

• Hard deadlines, not vague signals - auction/hearing/tax-sale dates and the reason each lead is urgent, so you can prioritize outreach this week.
• Proof on every field - value, source URL and collection method for owner name, addresses, phones, emails, property details and distress signals.
• Honest confidence scores - each field carries the anchor rule that fired plus corroboration info, including a wrong-person risk flag where relevant.
• Self-healing collection - three extraction tiers (stealth HTTP, adaptive selectors that relocate when a site changes, stealth browser fallback) keep working when county portals redesign.
• Postponement tracking on repeat runs - distressed sales get adjourned for weeks (11-week chains were observed in ground-truth research). Run weekly on a schedule and each run diffs against the last: new, postponed and removed leads are reported in run stats.

Input

Field	Default	Description
States	all 50	US state codes to collect from.
Time-sensitive leads only	true	Keep only leads with a hard deadline. Turn off to also receive deadline-free distress signals (tax-delinquent, code enforcement, absentee owner).
Max leads per state	5	Cap per state. 0 = unlimited (up to 500/state).
Proxy configuration	Apify residential, US	Required. Several sources hard-block datacenter IPs - leave residential on.
Search engines	DuckDuckGo, Google, Bing	Failover order for the internal search module (off-market gate + phone enrichment).
Stealth-browser fallback	true	Allow escalation to a fingerprint-spoofed headless browser when a source soft-blocks. Recommended - several sources are browser-only.
Max search queries per lead	6	Upper bound on search-module queries spent per lead (gate + phone enrichment combined).

Output

Each dataset item is one verified lead:

{
  "lead_id": "WI-0001",
  "state": "WI",
  "lead_type": "pre_foreclosure",
  "deadline": "2026-09-15",
  "time_sensitivity_reason": "Sheriff sale scheduled 2026-09-15",
  "off_market": "pass",
  "off_market_evidence": "No active listing found for this address",
  "fields": {
    "owner_name": {
      "value": "SAMPLE, JANE Q",
      "source_url": "https://www.examplecounty.wi.gov/sheriff/sale-list",
      "collection_method": "direct"
    },
    "property_address": {
      "value": "1360 SAMPLE BRIDGE RD, MADISON, WI 53704",
      "source_url": "https://www.examplecounty.wi.gov/sheriff/sale-list",
      "collection_method": "direct"
    },
    "distress_signal": {
      "value": "Judgment of foreclosure - sale listed on county docket",
      "source_url": "https://www.examplecounty.wi.gov/sheriff/sale-list",
      "collection_method": "direct"
    }
  },
  "confidence": {
    "owner_name": { "confidence": 0.9, "anchor": "official_list_full_name" }
  },
  "source_id": "wi_dane_sheriff",
  "parse_part_used": "direct",
  "extraction_path": "primary",
  "collected_at": "2026-08-21"
}

Lead types include pre_foreclosure, tax_delinquent, probate, absentee_owner, code_enforcement and other. The off_market field records the gate verdict: pass means no active listing was found; unchecked means the gate could not complete and the lead was kept conservatively (counted transparently in run stats). Properties confirmed MLS-active never appear in the dataset.

Usage tips

• Run weekly on a schedule. Distress sources re-post the same property with moved deadlines; weekly runs catch postponements and removed properties via automatic diffing.
• Start small, then widen. Try a few states with the default cap, inspect the data quality, then raise Max leads per state or select more states.
• Keep the browser fallback on unless you have a specific reason - several official portals require JavaScript rendering.

Support

Questions, feature requests or a source you would like added? Open an issue on the actor page or contact the developer via Apify.