Zillow Motivated Seller Leads — priced against real ZIP sales, price cuts, stale listings

Not a list of houses for sale. A ranked list of owners who look ready to deal.

See it run

Every lead carries a 0-100 motivation score and the reasons behind it, so you can see in one glance why it scored:

75 | 3207 Wickham Ln, Austin, TX 78725
   $324,900 | 4bd 3ba | 2,575 sqft | 135 days | SINGLE_FAMILY
   asking $126/sqft · homes in 78725 sold for $162/sqft (31 sales, 90 days)
   price cut $15,000 · 135 days on market · 11% under assessed value
   22% under its ZIP's sold price per sqft · 2.4x the usual days on market in its ZIP (57)

That is a real lead from a run on 17 October 2026. Zillow shows the asking price and the county's assessed value. Neither tells you what buyers actually paid next door, and that is the number you make an offer against. Here the house asks 22% less per square foot than what sold in its own ZIP code, and it has sat more than twice as long as homes there usually do.

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Priced against what actually sold in its ZIP

Every home for sale is compared with the real sales of its ZIP code over the last 90 days, from Redfin Data Center, Redfin's public market tracker:

• zipMedianSoldPricePerSqft, zipMedianSalePrice, zipHomesSold, zipMedianDaysOnMarket, zipSaleToListPct (what share of the asking price homes in that ZIP sold for).
• pricePerSqft of the listing and pricePerSqftVsZipPct: how far it asks from what the neighbours sold for. -22 means 22% under.
• priceVsZipMedianPct, and valueAtZipPricePerSqft: the listing's living area times its ZIP's sold price per square foot. A reference figure, not an appraisal.
• daysVsZipMedian: 2.4 means it has been listed 2.4 times longer than the typical home in its ZIP.

Filter on it with "Only homes priced under their ZIP's real sales": -15 keeps homes asking at least 15% under their ZIP.

Measured on 17 October 2026, one search page per city: 41 of 41 Austin homes and 78 of 78 Austin and Cleveland homes with a living area came out compared. In Austin, 7 of 41 asked 15% or more under their ZIP's sales, and 4 had sat at least twice the ZIP's usual time.

Said plainly:

• The ZIP figure covers all residential sales in the ZIP. A condo, a multi-family or a house that needs work can sit far under it for a reason; the score tells you where to look, not what to pay.
• A ZIP with fewer than 5 sales in the period has no comparison: one or two sales make a median that means nothing.
• Sales data runs to the end of the latest month Redfin has published (31 May 2026 in this build). Rentals are never compared with sale prices.

Market data provided by Redfin, a national real estate brokerage (Redfin Data Center).

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What the score is built from

Signal	Points	Why it matters
Price cut of $25,000 or more	30	A published cut is a public admission the first price failed
Any price cut	20
Cut of 10% or more off the original	15	Size of the climb-down
120+ days on market	25	The listing is stale and the seller knows it
60-119 days	15
30-59 days	5
20%+ under county assessed value	20	Distress, or a hurry
10-19% under assessed	10
25%+ under its ZIP's sold price per sqft	20	Asking less than the neighbours sold for, not just less than an old tax roll
15-24% under its ZIP's sold price per sqft	10
Listed 2x or more the ZIP's usual days (and 45+ days)	10	120 days is normal in a slow ZIP and a long time in a fast one
For sale by owner	15	No agent in the middle
Pre-foreclosure auction	30	The strongest signal there is

What is deliberately not scored: Zillow marks nearly every listing as absentee-owned, so that flag cannot tell one lead from another. It ships on the record as a filter, and scores zero. A signal that is always true is not a signal.

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What you get per lead

Address, city, state, ZIP, coordinates. Price, price change amount, the price-cut label with its date, days since the cut. Days on market. County assessed value and the percentage the asking price sits below it. Price per square foot, and its ZIP's real sales: median sold price per square foot, median sale price, homes sold, median days on market and sale-to-list. Beds, baths, living area, lot size, home type, status. For sale by owner, by agent, new construction, pre-foreclosure. Broker name, photo, and the Zillow link.

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Permit history: has this house had any work done?

With withPermits on, every lead in one of 12 covered cities (Austin, Chicago, Seattle, Orlando, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Cincinnati, Mesa, Everett, Somerville, New York, Marin County) is looked up in the city's official building permit register for the last five years, and the row says:

• permitCount, permitCountRecent24m, lastPermitDate, lastPermitTrade, lastPermitDescription, lastPermitValue, lastPermitContractor, and permitHistory with the last ten permits.
• deferredMaintenance: a price cut and not one permit in five years. The house nobody has touched, the investor's lead. Adds 10 to the motivation score with the reason spelled out.
• renovatedRecently: a remodel, roofing, HVAC, electrical, plumbing, solar or pool permit in the last 24 months. The house someone fixed up before listing, the buyer's lead.
• permitSignal: deferred_maintenance, renovated, some_work, no_permits, or not_covered for homes outside the 12 cities.

Measured on 23 September 2026: 1704 Shelbourne Dr, Austin, 2 permits since 2021 (windows and a gas line); a Lake Shore Drive unit in Chicago, 9 permits, the last one electrical, issued the day before the check. A lookup takes 2 to 30 seconds per home depending on the register.

Example inputs

Strong leads only, three cities

{
  "locations": ["Cleveland, OH", "Memphis, TN", "Birmingham, AL"],
  "minMotivationScore": 60,
  "pagesPerLocation": 5
}

Stale listings under $300k that have already cut

{
  "locations": ["Austin, TX"],
  "onlyPriceCuts": true,
  "minDaysOnMarket": 90,
  "maxPrice": 300000
}

Homes asking 15% or more under their ZIP's real sales

{
  "locations": ["Austin, TX", "Cleveland, OH"],
  "maxPricePerSqftVsZipPct": -15,
  "minMotivationScore": 0
}

Everything in a ZIP, unscored, for your own analysis

{
  "locations": ["78702"],
  "minMotivationScore": 0,
  "pagesPerLocation": 10
}

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Who buys this

• Real estate investors and wholesalers — this is the list they pay $100+/month for elsewhere, and the reason they pay is exactly the motivation signal.
• Cash-buyer and "we buy houses" operators — the price cut plus days on market pair is their whole targeting.
• Buyer's agents — clients want the house that will take an offer, not the one that just listed.
• Renovation and flip firms — under-assessed plus long on market is the profile.
• PropTech and analytics teams — a clean price-cut history across ZIPs.

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Reliability, said plainly

Zillow refuses about half of all requests, and nearly all from datacenter IPs. This Actor is built around that fact rather than pretending otherwise:

• Every request goes through a US residential exit with a browser-grade fingerprint.
• Each retry leaves from a different exit, because retrying on a refused address just gets refused again. Up to six attempts per page.
• RUN_SUMMARY reports pages served, pages refused and megabytes used, so you can see what the run actually cost.
• A page that never comes through is logged and skipped; the sweep continues to the next location.

About 41 homes per page, and Zillow stops paginating past 20 pages per search.

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Pricing

Permit history is a separate event, permit_check, charged once per listing looked up in a covered city; the check is the product, so "no permit in five years" costs the same as "nine permits". Homes outside the 12 cities cost nothing.

Pay per delivered lead. Filtered-out listings cost you nothing — you are charged only for records that reach your dataset, after the score and filters have run. Leads arrive sorted by motivation score, so a capped run keeps the best ones.

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Data source

Public property listings on Zillow. ZIP code sales from Redfin Data Center, Redfin's public market data (market data provided by Redfin, a national real estate brokerage). Records are property listings and their public marketing data. No personal data about owners or buyers is collected.