🛠️ BUILD OF THE WEEK

How I found 26 motivated sellers in Houston, $0 in subscriptions

Last week I posted this on LinkedIn:

What 8 hours of Claude built:

• 26 motivated sellers identified in Houston

• 20 phone numbers + emails, fully skip-traced

• $220K average property value across the list

• Pre-filled offer letters at 70-75% of market

• Total subscription cost: $0

It hit a nerve. The DMs and comments asking for the full system were the reason I started this newsletter.

So here it is. The whole thing. Prompt, skill, math, adaptations.

If you're paying $300 to $2,000 a month for data subscriptions to source deals, this is going to change how you operate.

What the system does

Four steps. All running through Claude.

1. Scrapes the county tax sale list. Filters for single-family homes only. Pulls address, owner, account number, taxes owed, sale type.

2. Pulls Zillow data for every property. Zestimate and Rent Zestimate, scraped from the actual Zillow page. No estimates, no placeholders.

3. Skip traces every owner. Searches TruePeopleSearch by name and city. Returns up to 2 phone numbers, 1 email, plus a confidence rating.

4. Scores and prioritizes. Weights equity spread, gross yield, years delinquent, absentee status. Generates pre-filled offer letters at 70 to 75 percent of market.

The output is a React dashboard I can hand to my acquisitions team. Sortable, filterable, color-coded by deal quality.

The cost is my existing Claude subscription. That's it.

The math on one deal

Take one of the 26 properties.

3-bed SFR in Houston. Zestimate: $213,000. Back taxes owed: $100,000. Years delinquent: 4.

If this owner does nothing, the property goes to auction May 7th. Investors bid it up. The owner walks with $0.

The play: offer $150,000 cash, close before the auction, pay off the taxes. Owner walks with $50K instead of zero. You buy at 30 percent below market.

Your basis: $150K all-in. Built-in equity: 30 percent. Gross yield at $1,800/mo rent: 14.4 percent.

That's one property. The system surfaced 25 more.

Why this beats PropStream

PropStream is a great tool. So is BatchSkipTracing. They have better UI, more polish, and you get all of it in one place.

But by the time properties hit those platforms, every investor in the county is already looking at the same data. The edge is gone.

This system gets you to the owner 28 days before the auction. Direct contact. Before anyone else shows up.

The edge is timing. And public records have always been free.

The reason nobody runs this play is the manual labor of scraping, cross-referencing, and skip tracing was prohibitive. Claude collapses that into minutes.

📋 THE FULL PROMPT

Copy this. Paste into Claude (you'll need Cowork mode and the Claude in Chrome extension). Adjust the county and sale date. Run it.

Build me a Tax Delinquent Property Acquisition System for Harris County, TX. 
Target SFR properties going to tax sale on April 7, 2026. The strategy is to 
reach motivated sellers before the auction with direct cash offers at 70 to 80 
percent of market value.

Step 1 — Pull the tax sale list: Go to the county's tax sale or delinquent 
property list. Filter for SFR properties only. Pull every property with its 
address, owner name, account number, legal description, tax owed, and sale type 
(struck-off vs. resale). Save as a structured dataset.

Step 2 — Enrich with Zillow data: For each property, use Chrome to navigate to 
Zillow and search the address. Scrape the Zestimate and Rent Zestimate directly 
from each property's Zillow page. If a property isn't found on Zillow, flag it 
and move on. Do not use placeholder or estimated values, only actual Zillow data.

Step 3 — Skip trace every owner: For each individual or estate owner, use Chrome 
to search TruePeopleSearch.com by the owner's full name and city/state. Extract 
up to 2 phone numbers, 1 email address, and note the confidence level (high/
medium/low). For business entities (LLCs, trusts, LPs), flag them as needing 
separate lookup and skip.

Step 4 — Build the React dashboard: Create a single-file React JSX dashboard with:
  - Property table with sortable columns: address, owner, Zestimate, estimated 
    rent, tax owed, years delinquent, acquisition score, and status. Color-coded 
    score badges (green/yellow/red).
  - Acquisition scoring algorithm (0-100) weighted by equity spread, gross yield, 
    years delinquent, absentee owner status, and owner type.
  - Detail modal per property with: deal calculator (offer, all-in basis, equity, 
    yield), motivation signals, owner contact info, property details, pre-filled 
    offer letter ready to print or email.
  - Financial summary bar: total properties, average Zestimate, average equity 
    spread, average gross yield.
  - Filter/search by address, owner, score range.
  - Dark theme, professional styling.

Step 5 — Export: Save the React JSX file, a CSV with all data, a JSON with the 
complete dataset, and a standalone HTML version using CDN-loaded React for 
browser-only use.

400 words. Runs in about 30 to 60 minutes depending on the size of the tax sale list.

To adapt to other counties

Replace these three things:

• "Harris County, TX" → your target county and state

• "April 7, 2026" → your county's tax sale date

• Claude will find the county tax sale URL itself

Works for any U.S. county that publishes a tax sale list (most do).

🎁 GET THE CLAUDE SKILL

I packaged this whole pipeline as a Claude Code skill. Drop the folder into your skills directory and it runs end-to-end without you re-prompting every time. Same county, different sale date? Just say "run the tax delinquent skill for Harris County's August auction."

Reply to this email and I'll send you the files.