Probate & Foreclosure Leads Scraper — US County Records

Aggregate US distressed-property events — probate filings, foreclosures, sheriff sales, tax liens, and tax sales — from official government open-data portals into one unified, normalized leads schema. Case numbers, property addresses, parcel/APN identifiers, party names, filing & sale dates, and dollar amounts, ready for direct-mail, skip-tracing, and CRM pipelines.

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Why this actor

• Five event types, one schema. probate, foreclosure, sheriff_sale, tax_lien, tax_sale — every record lands in the same canonical shape regardless of which county published it, so your downstream pipeline is written once.
• Curated + discovered sources. A hand-verified registry of county/city datasets (Prince George's County foreclosures, NYC tax-lien sale lists, Cook County tax sales, New Orleans sheriff sales, Baton Rouge adjudicated property, NY State tax warrants, and more) is paged first; optional live discovery then sweeps the whole open-data network for newly published datasets.
• Noise-filtered. Government catalogs are messy — a "probate" search returns probation statistics, a "tax sale" search returns sales-tax revenue tables. A two-gate classifier (keyword + column-shape validation) kills aggregate statistics and off-topic datasets so you only pay for real per-property records.
• Official data, zero fragility. Pure JSON APIs from government portals — no browser, no proxies, no anti-bot arms race. Runs are fast, cheap, and stable.
• Raw row preserved. Every canonical record carries the original source row under raw, so nothing the county published is ever lost in normalization.
• Clean input schema. No forced "tell us your use case" fields — set your filters and run.

Use cases

• Real-estate investors — pull distressed-property leads by state/county for direct-mail and cold-call campaigns.
• Wholesalers — find motivated sellers (tax-delinquent, pre-foreclosure, estate situations) before they hit the MLS.
• Title companies & attorneys — monitor new foreclosure filings, sheriff sales, and tax-lien lists in specific counties.
• Probate researchers & heir-finders — track probate case records and missing-heir registries.
• PropTech / analytics teams — build distress-scoring models on a unified, geocoded national event feed.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
eventTypes	array	all five	Any of probate, foreclosure, sheriff_sale, tax_lien, tax_sale
states	array	all	Two-letter state codes, e.g. ["MD", "IL", "NY"]
counties	array	all	County names, case-insensitive, e.g. ["Cook", "Orleans"]
dateFrom / dateTo	string	—	Keep events whose sale date (or filing date) falls in this range (YYYY-MM-DD)
minEstimatedEquity	integer	0	Keep records where estimatedValue − mortgageBalance ≥ this value (needs both figures in source data)
onlyOwnerOccupied	boolean	false	Drop records without a verified owner-occupied / homestead flag
maxItems	integer	100	Total record budget across all sources
maxItemsPerDataset	integer	0 (off)	Cap per source dataset so one big county doesn't eat the whole budget
liveDiscovery	boolean	true	Sweep the open-data network for datasets beyond the curated registry
socrataAppToken	string	—	Optional free app token for higher API rate limits on large pulls
maxConcurrency	integer	6	Parallel dataset fetches

Example input

{
    "eventTypes": ["foreclosure", "tax_lien"],
    "states": ["MD", "NY", "VA"],
    "dateFrom": "2025-01-01",
    "maxItems": 1000,
    "maxItemsPerDataset": 200
}

Output schema

One row per distressed-property event:

{
    "eventType": "foreclosure",
    "state": "MD",
    "county": "Prince George's",
    "caseNumber": null,
    "filingDate": "2009-09-10",
    "saleDate": null,
    "parties": {
        "decedent": null,
        "executor": null,
        "attorney": null,
        "plaintiff": null,
        "defendant": null,
        "owner": null
    },
    "property": {
        "address": "8825 East Grove RD",
        "city": "Upper Marlboro",
        "zip": "20774",
        "parcelId": "06-0606582",
        "propertyType": null,
        "latitude": 38.84915,
        "longitude": -76.85252
    },
    "financial": {
        "estimatedValue": null,
        "mortgageBalance": null,
        "lienAmount": null,
        "taxesDue": null,
        "openingBid": null,
        "winningBid": null
    },
    "estimatedEquity": null,
    "ownerOccupied": null,
    "status": null,
    "source": {
        "domain": "data.princegeorgescountymd.gov",
        "datasetId": "cni6-nr5g",
        "datasetName": "County Foreclosures",
        "datasetUrl": "https://data.princegeorgescountymd.gov/resource/cni6-nr5g"
    },
    "raw": { "taxaccountnumber": "06-0606582", "street_address": "8825 East Grove RD", "...": "..." }
}

A tax-warrant example with case + party + status populated:

{
    "eventType": "tax_lien",
    "state": "NY",
    "county": "STEUBEN",
    "caseNumber": "E-042193055-W001-1",
    "filingDate": "2024-09-18",
    "parties": { "owner": "ROLAND L ROBINSON" },
    "property": { "address": "5799 CLARK RD", "city": "ALFRED STATION" },
    "status": "Closed",
    "source": { "domain": "data.ny.gov", "datasetId": "v7ua-z23v", "datasetName": "New York State Tax Warrants" }
}

Key output fields

Field	Meaning
eventType	One of the five distressed-property event classes
state / county	Jurisdiction tags derived from the publishing portal + per-row county columns
caseNumber	Court case / docket / warrant / recording number where the source provides one
filingDate / saleDate	Normalized to YYYY-MM-DD from whatever format the county publishes
parties.*	Decedent, executor, attorney, plaintiff, defendant, owner — populated per event type
property.*	Address, city, zip, parcel/APN (incl. composed NYC borough-block-lot), type, lat/lng
financial.*	Assessed/estimated value, mortgage balance, lien amount, taxes due, opening/winning bid
estimatedEquity	estimatedValue − mortgageBalance when both figures exist in the source
source.*	Exactly which government dataset the record came from — full auditability
raw	The unmodified source row

How it works

1. Registry load — a curated, hand-verified list of county/city distressed-property datasets is loaded first (each one probed and quality-checked before inclusion).
2. Live discovery (optional) — cross-portal catalog queries sweep the whole US open-data network for additional probate/foreclosure/sheriff-sale/tax-lien/tax-sale datasets.
3. Classification — a two-gate filter (positive/negative keyword patterns + column-shape validation) rejects probation statistics, sales-tax tables, budget reports, and aggregate counts.
4. Paging — each surviving dataset is paged through its official JSON API with a global sliding-window concurrency cap.
5. Normalization — heterogeneous county field names (parcel_number / apn / pin / folio / taxaccountnumber…) are mapped onto the canonical schema; the raw row is preserved; jurisdiction tags, ISO dates, and equity estimates are derived; your filters are applied; one row per event is pushed.

What makes this different

• Aggregate junk is filtered out. Several "foreclosure" datasets on government portals are monthly per-county counts, not per-property records. Those never reach your dataset (and you're never charged for them).
• Verified seed registry, not just blind discovery — baseline coverage doesn't depend on catalog-search luck.
• Composed parcel IDs — NYC borough-block-lot columns become a single usable parcelId.
• Honest tri-state owner-occupancy — true / false / null (unknown), never a fake false for "Unavailable".

Notes & limitations

• Coverage follows open data. Only jurisdictions that publish these records on open-data portals are included — coverage is strongest for foreclosures, tax liens, and tax sales in counties like Prince George's (MD), Cook (IL), NYC, New Orleans, Norfolk/Richmond (VA), East Baton Rouge (LA), Howard (MD), Riverside & Sonoma (CA), plus state-level NY tax warrants.
• Probate is the thinnest type. Most current probate dockets live on court-system websites, not open-data portals; the probate datasets that do exist here are limited (e.g. Santa Clara County probate case records, Ramsey County missing-heirs). If you need deep probate coverage for a specific county, contact me — see Support below.
• estimatedEquity needs both figures. Many counties publish neither an assessed value nor a mortgage balance; a non-zero minEstimatedEquity filter will legitimately shrink results.
• Some sources are archival (e.g. Cook County recorder foreclosures 2011–2015). Use dateFrom to keep only fresh events.

FAQ

Do I need proxies or a login? No. Everything comes from official public JSON APIs. For very large pulls (10k+ records), add a free socrataAppToken to raise the rate limit.

Why is a field null on some rows? Each county publishes a different subset of fields. The normalizer maps whatever exists; missing source fields stay null rather than being fabricated. Check raw to see exactly what the county provided.

Can I get records for a county that isn't covered? If that county publishes to an open-data portal, live discovery will usually pick it up. If it doesn't, I can build a dedicated county scraper — see Support.

How fresh is the data? As fresh as the county keeps it. Several sources update daily (Norfolk delinquent taxes, NY tax warrants); others update on the county's tax-sale calendar. source.datasetUrl lets you verify update cadence.

Is this legal to use? The actor reads public government open-data APIs published explicitly for reuse. Your obligations around outreach (e.g. do-not-call, CAN-SPAM, state-specific solicitation rules for pre-foreclosure homeowners) are your own — see the Disclaimer.

Support

• Bugs / feature requests — open an issue on the actor's Issues tab
• Custom exports, new counties, or tailored fields — drop a note via the Apify Store contact form
• Other actors — see my Apify Store profile for the rest of the catalog (290+ production scrapers)

Additional services

Need skip-tracing, owner contact enrichment, or a custom county/court source wired in? Contact me through the Apify Store profile — custom builds are my day job.

⚠️ Disclaimer

This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any government agency, county, or open-data platform vendor. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

The Actor accesses only publicly available government open-data APIs published for public reuse — no login bypass, no authenticated endpoints, no CAPTCHA solving.

Users are responsible for:

• Complying with each portal's terms of use and the applicable open-data licenses
• Following all laws governing outreach to distressed-property owners (including state pre-foreclosure solicitation statutes, TCPA/do-not-call, and CAN-SPAM)
• Handling personal data in the records (owner names, addresses) in line with applicable data-protection laws
• Independently verifying records against official court/county sources before acting on them — open-data feeds can lag or contain errors

SEO Keywords

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