Pre-Foreclosure List & Lis Pendens Lead Finder — Notice of Default

Pull a fresh pre-foreclosure list — lis pendens and notice-of-default filings recorded against property title — fused per parcel, scored for sale-urgency, and skip-traced to a callable owner.

Get the freshest forced-sale leads before they hit the market. This Actor pulls lis pendens, notice-of-default (NOD), and pre-foreclosure filings straight from county recorder records, fuses each onto its parcel, scores how urgently the owner must sell, and skip-traces the hot ones to a phone you can call.

A lis pendens is a public notice recorded against a property's title that an active lawsuit may affect ownership. It is recorded at the county recorder — exactly like a deed or mortgage — so it is property-keyed (by parcel/APN), not person-keyed. While it sits on title, the owner usually cannot sell or refinance normally, so they have a strong, time-pressured reason to deal fast.

Legal boundary (read this)

This Actor reads ONLY the county recorder's PROPERTY index — the title-side record: parcel, owner-of-record name (as it appears on title), recorded document type, and recording date.

It never pulls, stores, or sells family-court party data, divorce-defendant lists, case-party rosters, or any person-keyed "who is getting divorced / sued" list. Bulk court-record solicitation of named parties is restricted in several jurisdictions (WA GR 31.1, Massachusetts, Cook County IL) precisely because it is person-keyed court data. A divorce that produced a recorded lis pendens reaches us only as a parcel with a recorded lis pendens — a property fact, not a person list. This boundary is restated in the code and in docs/prd.md §1/§10 and must survive every code review.

Leads are for making purchase offers only — not for tenant, credit, or employment screening (FCRA).

Example

Input

{
  "county": "Miami-Dade, FL",
  "mode": "check_for_changes",
  "lookbackDays": 30,
  "maxResults": 100,
  "enrich": true
}

Output (one row per lead)

{
  "mode": "enriched_lead",
  "parcel_key": "1450 nw 7th st miami fl 33125",
  "address": "1450 NW 7th St, Miami, FL 33125",
  "payload": {
    "document_types": ["lis_pendens", "notice_of_default"],
    "urgency_score": 58,
    "owner_name": "MARIA L SANTOS",
    "owner": { "full_name": "Maria Santos" },
    "mailing_address": "PO Box 22, Hialeah, FL 33010",
    "phones": ["+13055551234"],
    "source_urls": ["https://onlineservices.miamidadeclerk.gov/..."],
    "snapshot_date": "2026-06-15",
    "change_type": "new_filing",
    "enriched": true
  },
  "sha256": "a91f…"
}

Inputs

Key	Required	Default	What it does
county	yes	—	County recorder to pull from, as "County, ST" (e.g. "Miami-Dade, FL").
mode	no	check_for_changes	Monitor selector. check_for_changes returns only filings recorded since your last run (auto-creates the baseline on the first run → first run returns everything). reset_baseline re-snapshots and reports nothing.
signals	no	all	Which recorded-filing signals to run: lis_pendens, notice_of_default.
lookbackDays	no	30	How far back to read recorded filings.
maxResults	no	100	Max buyer-ready leads to return.
enrich	no	true	When true, skip-trace owners (enriched_lead); when false, return scored matches only (lis_pendens_match, cheaper).

The signal modes (lis_pendens, notice_of_default, owner_attribute) self- register and run automatically inside the monitor pipeline — they are not selected via mode.

Pricing (pay-per-event)

Event	Price	What you get
run_started	$0.005	Lifecycle floor, once per run.
signal_record	$0.002	One raw recorded filing (parcel + doc type + recording date).
owner_attribute	$0.003	One derived owner-state row (e.g. absentee owner-of-record).
lis_pendens_match	$0.02	One parcel with the filing fused to the owner-of-record record + sale-urgency score. The fusion moat.
enriched_lead	$0.06	One scored match + owner name, mailing, and phone. The sellable lead.

The first 20 result rows per run are free — except enriched_lead, which bills from the first row (each lead chains a publisher-paid skip-trace, so a free lead would still spend real cash).

Output

Main dataset = buyer-ready leads. Each row carries parcelId/parcel_key, address, documentType, recordingDate, ownerName, urgencyScore, optional ownerPhone/ownerMailing (enriched only), evidence/sourceUrls, snapshotDate/changeType (monitor), and a stable sha256 fingerprint for cross-run dedup.

Coverage & build status

Coverage starts with the most-open Florida recorders (Miami-Dade, Broward, Hillsborough, Orange, Duval, Palm Beach). No Florida county exposes a free queryable API for recorded documents — all use HTML search portals (AcclaimWeb, Landmark Web, custom OMNI). The recorder fetch adapter (recorder_fetch.py) is a correct-contract scaffold: it carries each county's live portal URL and yields nothing until a per-county portal scraper / OCR template is wired. The parcel / owner-of-record fusion side IS available free via ArcGIS (Florida Statewide Cadastral, Miami-Dade parcels) and is wired. The fusion, scoring, enrichment, and monitor pipeline are complete and tested end-to-end offline.

This is a focused sibling of distressed-property-ai-scraper (tax-delinquency / code-violation / vacant / probate signals). For those signals, use that Actor.