How to Web Scrape County Data Using with No Code with Browse AI

Want to take advantage of the real estate crash? Contact property owners directly to find deals at a discount. In this video, we'll cover how to get property owners with no code using Browse AI.

Ariel Herrera 00:00

With rising interest rates and inventory coming back onto the market, the market itself is changing fast and as real estate investors, we need to make sure that we're up to date to find motivated sellers. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use browse AI a non code solution to web scrape county data for foreclosures. My name is Ariel Herrera analytics area channel, we bridge the gap between real estate and technology. If you're looking to grow your real estate business and be data driven, then please subscribe as well if you want to see more web scraping tools and tips on like this content, so I know to make more of it. Alright, let's get started.

Ariel Herrera 00:49

We're going to cover how to get foreclosure information and then ultimately be able to web scrape data of property owners from our county. So first, what is a foreclosure? A foreclosure is what happens when a homeowner fails to pay the mortgage. So typically, when you buy a property owner occupied, you may put anywhere between 5% or 20% down and have a loan to pay back that loan typically is 30 years and you have mortgage payments every month. Now sometimes due to hardship such as divorce, death, or loss of job someone may fall behind on paying their mortgage. What happens is the owner forfeits the rights to the property and it gets back to being bank owned foreclosures are an interesting case to find motivated sellers because if you could actually purchase foreclosures, you could typically get the property at a discount. And if you find the homeowner during the pre foreclosure process, so before the bank has taken it back, you can potentially again get the property at discount without it going to auction where more people would see it and it'd be visible. For our use case we're going to search properties in Jacksonville using Redfin. Redfin allows us to filter on for sale by owner short sales as well as foreclosures. So if we look at Jacksonville, which is in Florida, we can search the city. And we can also look at market insights too, I highly suggest for you to watch one of my previous videos of how to go through the market insights to really analyze an area that a high level we could see it the median sale price for Jacksonville is 300k. And there's been 1600 homes sold, which is a 10% drop year over year due to low inventory. And median days on market, your rear also has decreased due to the competition. So if we now go back to our view, we have all for sale properties. But we just want to focus on homes that we can get at a discount. So let's go to all filters. And at the bottom, we could see that we have options for selecting only foreclosures. So let's deselect the rest. And see the five homes that we have. Here we have actually a really nice property and Jacksonville that's in foreclosure. So if we click this property, we get some information, we could look at the property photos, since it's already on foreclosure, it's likely already on auction.com. And we could see information on the description sold as is, which is most of the case for foreclosures, and we can get more insight into the location too. Now for our purposes, we want to use this as a use case to get the property owner. So ideally, we'd like to get to the property owner at the Pre Foreclosure state not at foreclosure. But let's try this out. So in order to find a property owner, you need to search the property records website for this area. So in this case, this is Jacksonville. So I'm going to go to Google and search for Jacksonville property records. We could select the second one here, which says Property Appraiser Basic Search. Usually there's some type of search because this data should be publicly available and hopefully digitized for your area. This website's pretty old school. It's not that user friendly. But here at the bottom we can see property address where we can get information. So if we go back to the property that we had, let's copy this address and paste it we could see here that the issue is we need to separate Street and street name so let's do that. And street type is separate as well. So let's remove road

Ariel Herrera 04:59

now let's click Save Search. And our first result should be related directly to this address. And we could see we already get the homeowner here. But let's imagine we want to get even more detail. So in our sample use case, we're getting data for one single property, including the property owner. But in most use cases, you may have a list of pre foreclosures. And for each address, you want to be able to append information, we will use the bot to make this repeatable. But at a high level, we have information on the property owner, their mailing address, which it looks like this is owned by a larger corporation Secretary of Veterans Affairs, and they're out of state. So they're located in Nashville, we also have information on the property detail, its value, as you could see, his value has really skyrocketed since 2021. It was valued by the assessor at 270. And for foreclosure, it is listed at 420. So I guess they're trying to sell this property as is without a go into auction. And we have more information on sales history, the use of the property, as well as information on the type of roof, flooring, heating, air conditioning, and number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Great. So now we just step through how to find a property owner manually. But of course, we want to be data driven, we want to automate. So now we're going to use browse AI in order to record our steps so that we could repeat this for any property in Jacksonville. Once you sign up for browse AI in the link below, and you're going to start your first task, there's two options. There's extract structured data and monitor site changes. Extract structured data means we put some input. So in this case, we're going to put the dress and we want to get back some fields that we can have an Excel file, for example that we can analyze. On the second end monitor site changes. This is good if you want to see any updates. So for example, if we wanted to look at pre foreclosures on our county website, and see when any new pre foreclosures hit the market, we could look at it with this site with monitor site changes. But in our example, we're going to focus on extracting structured data. So let's click this. And in your initial start, it's going to ask you to install an extension for browse AI, which is normal, it needs to be able to record your actions so it could simulate it. Then after you bypass that you're going to pace the origin URL here. So if we go back to the county appraiser site, and go back to basic search, we're going to copy this URL and paste it within browse AI to start off with and we're going to record a new task. Once we hit record, browse AI is going to start recording our actions so that it can replicate it in the future. It can extract data as a text or list of items. So we can click OK, that we understand. And now we can simulate the same exact steps that we just took. So if we go back here, our address was 10 991 lot more road. So let's enter in the property address 10 nine and one lot more, and click Search. Browse AI is also able to handle login. So if you have to enter a username and password, it could do that as well. Now we want to select the first result. And here is where we can select the actual elements, we want to save down ultimately to a spreadsheet. So if we go back to the robot, so now if we click on the robot, we could select capture text. And here we're going to select the elements that we want. So we want to get owner name, which in this case is Secretary of Veterans Affairs, we want to get the owner address. And when we select this piece, it's going to ask us at times if we want the visible text or the HTML, we just want the actual text. So let's click the first one. Let's get some information on the property. Let's get the total building value, land value, taxable value.

Ariel Herrera 09:42

And if we skip down we can get the use description, zoning assessment which can be useful if the property ends up being zoned for commercial as well or even zone where we can have AD use. Next, we want to get the year of the property As long as the building type, and let's get the information on the roof, so let's get the detail for the roof, and bath and bedrooms. So now let's click Enter since we're done getting the fields we want, and it's going to ask us to label our fields. I like to use snake case to do this. So no underscores, or spaces in between, you can select however you want for your fields.

Ariel Herrera 10:40

Once done, Rasouli is going to say well done. And you can continue if you'd like or finished recording. In our case, we're done right here. So we can right click, and hit finish recording. The next step is going to be sent back into our browser API. And we have two steps, we need to name our task and review its results, I'm just going to keep the name the same and hit Save. Next, what's going to be happening is browser is testing to make sure that it's able to follow the same steps that we did manually. So it sends the task to a cloud. And now it's navigating the same steps. So it's going to the website, and then it's going to select the same fields. And as we saw this happen pretty quickly, we can see here that we were able to get all the fields that we need it, we can download it into a CSV file as well, if we want to view it, we can see all of our fields here. And if we go back, we can actually watch the video on how browse AI was able to go to the website, enter in our elements, which was street number and then the street itself, select the first and then take the elements. So now that this has worked, let's click Yes, looks good. And now our task is done. And what we can do is we can input different parameters. So this is the street number, and this is the street itself. So let's go back to Jacksonville. And let's just imagine we want to go to any one of these new properties. So let's actually unfilter this. And let's look at for sale by owners. So we can get the owner of the property. There's several for sale by owners. Let's select one of these here. And we can input 9106 Jefferson app. So let's put here 9106, and then Jefferson. And we could run this task.

Ariel Herrera 12:43

Our tasks finished successfully. And we could see the owner name for this property looks like they're an out of state owner since they're located in New York. And we have information on the property itself. We also have that screenshot. So we could see the steps that were taken by the bot in case there's any errors, we'll know where to troubleshoot. And what's really awesome here is that if we want to integrate this, say, within a system that we have, it could be a CRM, like Podio or Zoho, we could do this with Zapier. And we can integrate this to automatically go into Google Sheets. But of course, my favorite rest API's, you can actually integrate to dynamically pull this data through an API. And I'll be showing this in part two video to show you how you can use REST API's with browse API. As a recap, what we did is that we automated the process of finding property owners and more information on the property itself. Normally, we had to manually go to the county website. But we were able to build a bot with no code to do this. And it didn't take that long, it was pretty quick, we were able to enter our property address, then click the property address and get information back including property owner. So next steps we could take is actually contacting the owner ourselves. At the stage, if you're thinking, hey, area I like the method of but I want a no process solution. I just want to be able to get the owner information at my fingertips for any market. Because I'm not just focusing on one county, I'm focusing on many, that is fair. And in that case, I highly suggest for you to use prop stream. Prop stream is a really awesome tool to be able to collect information. It collects data across counties for the United States, and presents that an easy way to be able to consume. So in our example, where we had 10 991 Lock more road, we could actually just copy this address here. We input the property and then we select it and once So we do, we could see property details on the right hand side. When we pull up the property itself, we could see that same owner that we found from the county, we can then do skip tracing either in Prop stream or using API's like batch data's API. So there's a ton of options you can go it really just depends on your use case, if your focus on one particular market or if you're expanding your business and you're looking at multiple if you're going to use prop stream, please use the link below so you could get a seven day free trial. Overall, I hope this has been super useful tutorial for you to be able to get information from a county without any code using Browse AI. If you have other tools that you enjoy using or web scraping then please comment with them below so I could look into them and create some future videos as well. Thanks so much. And if you haven't already, please subscribe.