How to Web Scrape Tax Delinquent Properties
Are you looking to find motivated sellers and want to be able to get tax lien data at your fingertips with property owners? Well in this video I'm going to show you how to actually get that list for free using Browse AI.
Ariel Herrera 0:00
Are you looking to find motivated sellers and want to be able to get tax lien data at your fingertips with property owners? Well in this video I'm going to show you how to actually get that list for free using Browse AI. My name is Ariel Herrera, your fellow data scientists with analytics area our channel where we bridge the gap between real estate and technology. I love data driven solutions and automation to help empower your business. And if you do to them, please subscribe to this channel as well like this content if you want to see more of it. Alright, let's get started. For this next segment, I'm going to actually be searching tax deeds, not tax liens since tax deeds is specific to Florida. So please be aware of which one is specific for your own state to so the problem at hand that we have is we're looking to find motivated sellers, people who need to sell their properties now or someone who may be in some sort of hardship. And that case, tax liens is a great way to do so. Although you need to pay off the tax lien before you can sell a property. There's ways to obtain it. And it could be a great list especially for wholesalers or investors looking to flip a property right now I'm on Browse AI's homepage, where we're going to do is use this in order to extract data from Jacksonville, Florida for tax liens. The way to get started is using the link below. This link is going to allow you to sign up for browse AI. And although browse AI is free, if you were down the line to go towards a pricing model, you want to make sure you use the link so that you can get a discount. So once you have Bradley I open click login. And if you're creating an account for the first time, then you could do so and once you do, you'll see that you get brought to your tasks. Before we jump into tasks, let's just quickly go over what browse AI is. So browse AI basically takes the automation part for you of actually developing a web scraper. Web Scraping allows us to get data from a webpage and browse AI X and browse AI is able to take the same actions that we have. So in this example, browse AI is web scraping Twitter, where you're able to record a new flow, browse AI watches as you sign in to take that parameter. And then you're able to take screenshots as well as capture data. You can also schedule when you want the web scraper to run in the future. This can be really useful if you're building a list and you want to be the first person to reach out to property owners when they come when they become tax delinquent. So let's jump over to Jacksonville to the tax deed search the way I was able to find tax liens was typing in Jacksonville, Florida, tax deed auction. For your county, the words may vary a little bit you may need to find tax collector. But ultimately you should come to an online web page where you'll be able to see all tax liens up for sale. So here let's click this like this is for Duvall, County of Florida, which Jacksonville exists in. And a tax deed file searches broken out by two different segments, we're going to look at sales as of May 2021. Within their new system. Here we have different tabs, we could look at tax liens by sale date, case number, parcel ID owner and look at surplus funds. What we're going to do is just look at the populated search right here. So let's click search. And now we're able to see all the tax liens that are up for sale coming in October, we could see the applicant information, case numbers, ticket number, parcel ID, sale date, opening bid, as well as the owner, we could even dive deeper into more information of the owner, including what the property address is that we could send out mailers. And we could even sync this up with say, batch data. So we could do skip tracing automatically, which I have a video on that as well.
So let's just start here on this page, we want to be able to take the data that's here and get it into a spreadsheet so that we could see what tax liens are available and then do our own research if we want to actually purchase a tax lien or if we want to reach out to the owner themselves as part of our marketing strategy. The first step for browsI is to create a new task. Next select Extract structured data, which is going to allow us to download the data into a spreadsheet at the bottom we can enter our origin URL, which is where we're going to start our web scraping bot. And you might be asking at this point, well, why are we using a tool like Browserify? Why can't we just develop our own web scraping tool ourselves? Well, first it takes a level of programming And to be able to do that. Second, if you're in data analysis, data analytics data science space, it's not the best use of your time, you want to be more focused on evaluating deals analysis, not taking hours of your time or building a bot to scrape a webpage, where in this case, we can leverage the technology browse AI already has for free to be able to extract this information. So we can go to tax deed dot Duvall clerk.com, copy or URL, and then we'll paste it as our origin URL. Next, we're going to record a new task. Now we have a pop up box. And what's happening now is that browser is going to record all of our actions within this window. So you can click OK understood, and say if we want to select a different timeframe, we could do that and browsing, I would acknowledge it. But in this case, I'm just going to keep what's already preset, and I'm going to click Search Browse is going to recognize that I hit that search button so that it can replicate it in the future. Now we want to get all the data in this table. So we click Browse AI and we want to capture a list. Since it's multiple rows, we can hover over the lists that we want to capture. And now we could select answer. In our case, we want to capture each of the columns available. So let's select each one. And when we're given the prompt of either capturing visible text, or title, let's always select visible text.
Now that we've captured all the visible tags, we can hit Enter to finish Browserify is now going to ask us to label each of these fields, I'm going to use the same label that's already set in this table. After we enter each of the column headers, we're going to see our table here. Browserify also gives us the option to set this up where we navigate to the next page or click on Load More to load more items. For this tutorial, I'm going to stop right here. And just name this list. I named my list tax lien, Jacksonville, Florida, and October of 2022. So now we can click Capture list browse AI congratulates us for finishing this latest step Nalli. Say that we could look for more data if we'd like. Or we could finish. So we're going to click OK understood. And in this case, we're all done. So when we click Browse AI, we can click finish recording, the recording is now being uploaded, and we're going to be redirected into our browse AI dashboard. Here there are two steps. First, we name our task, which in this case, I'm going to use the same name that's already given and click Save. And the second step is to review our results. So browse AI is now testing to make sure that it's actually able to extract this data, it's doing this on the cloud, and it's going to follow the same steps that we just took in the browser. If we scroll down, we could see that Rousey is successfully got all of our data, we can see the same exact fields that we were looking to capture now all here. And we could download this into a CSV file within the CSV file, we could see the same exact data. And if we like, we could actually filter on the opening bid, as well, we could see the owner information and down the line length us have another API to automatically skip trace. So once we're satisfied, we can come back to our dashboard. We could view our results within this video and look at the steps once we agree that the task results match what we were expecting. We can select Yes, looks good. Now if you have any issues, please do report them browse AI has terrific support. So you'll be able to get information on what you need. I'm going to select yes looks good. Here we can see our task, we can look at all history of lands previously run as well. We could set up if we want to monitor our tasks. So if we click here, we could do add new monitor. And we could run this a every day, every other day every week and notify whenever there's a change. So if we see that a new property owner comes on this list, this is how we'd be automatically notified. We could also change this limit of 10 records that we were able to extract to be a higher value so that we get everything on the page. Lastly, we can also integrate browse API with Google Sheets Zapier as well as the REST API. As a recap where we were able to do was to build a web scraping bot with absolutely no code for free to be able to get tax lien information for particular county, you will be able to replicate this process for your own county as well. And there's many use cases you could have here. Whether you're an investor looking to invest in tax liens, or if you're looking to actually acquire marketing lists of motivated sellers. This is useful for real estate agents and investors that are flippers as well as wholesalers. I hope this has been a super useful video and if you want to see more like this of tutorials with web scraping, getting marketing lists of motivated sellers, whether it's through social media or county websites, and please let me know in the comments below. Thanks so much. And if you haven't already, please subscribe.