The leads blueprint
Tax sale surplus funds, from the gavel to a name you can call.
Most providers hand you a county list and call it a lead. A tax sale surplus funds lead worth calling starts at the auction result, gets researched against the property and its liens, gets skip traced across several tools, and reaches you while the trail is still warm. Foreclosure surplus funds follow the same path. This is that path, step by step, with every field we ship at the end of it.
Four steps
The same four steps run on every tax sale surplus funds lead and every foreclosure lead we publish.
- Step 01Foreclosure and tax sale tracking
We monitor foreclosure and tax sale auctions across many states, held by counties, trustees and sheriffs, in person and online. Our team compiles the properties that sold to a third party with an estimated $20,000 or more in excess funds.
- Step 02Property research and scans
Every lead gets a property search: estimated mortgage balance and principal, the previous owner and their relatives, property address, parcel ID, case number, and the auction data itself including opening bid, winning bid, mortgage specifics and trustee contact.
- Step 03Skip tracing
We skip trace the previous homeowner and their relatives and associates, then compare results across several paid tools rather than trusting one. Numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry are flagged for your review, and your own opt-out list is always blocked.
- Step 04Published in real time
Leads publish into Surplus Funds the moment they clear research, in real time rather than a monthly dump. Volume runs 20 to 40 fresh leads a day depending on your plan and states.
Every field
we ship
What comes with each lead, grouped by the question each field answers.
The sale
What happened at the auction, in the numbers the county actually recorded.
The day the property sold, so you know exactly how warm the trail is and which statutory clock has started running.
What the selling officer opened at. In several states this is the judgment or tax amount itself, which is the first sanity check on whether a surplus is real.
What the property actually sold for. The gap between this and the liens and payoffs is the surplus you are chasing.
We only keep sales that went to a third party. A property taken back by the lender leaves nothing over, and those never reach your list.
The county or trustee valuation, which tells you whether the winning bid was a bargain or a stretch.
Liens and payoffs
The liens and payoffs against the property, because gross surplus is not what anyone takes home.
The figure the court entered. In judicial states this is the anchor for every calculation downstream.
What we estimate was still outstanding on the first position at the time of sale.
The principal worked forward from the original mortgage terms and recording date, which catches the cases where the stated balance is stale.
Everything we can see stacked together, so the surplus figure is a subtraction you can follow rather than a number you have to trust.
The surplus itself, estimated from the sale price minus the liens and payoffs. We target an estimated $20,000 or more, because below that the economics of a signed case rarely work. It stays an estimate until the county confirms it.
The people
Who is entitled to the money, and every way we found to reach them.
The person entitled to claim, named as the county recorded them rather than as a skip trace guessed at.
Mobile and landline, compared across several paid skip tracing tools rather than trusting a single vendor.
For the channels a phone call does not reach, and for the mail piece that often lands better than a cold call.
Parents, children, spouses and known associates. On older cases the owner has often moved or passed, and a relative is the only live door.
Numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry are flagged for your review before you call, and your own opt-out list is always blocked.
The file
The identifiers that let you pull the record yourself and check our work.
The court case, so you can open the docket and read the judgment rather than take a figure on faith.
The assessor parcel number, which is how you find the property in county systems that do not search cleanly by address.
Street, city, county and state, standardised so the list sorts and dedupes properly against what you already hold.
Where the case sits in the process, which decides whether you are early enough to matter.
The trustee or selling officer handling the sale, pulled from the auction detail rather than a directory.
How it
reaches you
Leads publish into the Master Database in Surplus Funds the moment they clear research, in real time, ready to call.
Leads land in the case pipeline in Surplus Funds, the CRM your plan includes, and you work them right there: call, text, mail and e-sign without exporting anything or copying a row.
Each lead publishes the moment it clears research, on its own, not batched into a nightly job or a monthly drop. The database updates while you are looking at it.
Each lead arrives with the sale, the liens, the people and the file, so your caller opens it and starts calling rather than researching first. Volume runs 20 to 40 fresh leads a day depending on plan and states.
Where we
draw the line
We only keep sales that went to a third party, because a property taken back by the lender leaves nothing over. We target an estimated $20,000 or more in excess proceeds, because below that the economics of a signed case rarely work. Every surplus figure is an estimate until the county confirms it. And a figure we could not verify is marked as an estimate rather than printed as a fact.