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The records that come before a sale
No single record means someone will sell. What works is stacking: a tax default on a vacant house with an out-of-state owner says much more than any one of those alone. These are the signals worth watching, with the weight Parcel gives each one when it ranks owners. The weights are fixed numbers we set for how strongly a signal tends to come before a sale; they rank owners against each other and are not measured probabilities.
Where to get them free
Cities and counties publish many of these records on open-data portals (Socrata, ArcGIS, CKAN and Carto), free and without a key. The catch: every county publishes different things, in different shapes, on different schedules. Parcel has checked and wired in 520 feeds across 121 markets so far:
Anywhere else, the same records usually exist on paper or in a paid list. To find a free one, search your county's open-data portal for:
- "code enforcement", "violations" or "property maintenance" cases with a status column (keep the open ones);
- "delinquent" or "defaulted" tax rolls from the treasurer or tax collector;
- "vacant building" or "vacant property" registries;
- assessor rolls with a mailing address (absentee and out-of-state owners) or a homestead or homeowners' exemption flag;
- "foreclosure registry" datasets, which some cities require lenders to file.
Example: Los Angeles
Los Angeles shows both sides. The City publishes open code-enforcement cases weekly (LADBS) and the Housing Department's foreclosure registry, where lenders must register a home within 30 days of a notice of default (LAHD). The County Treasurer publishes its defaulted-tax roll (TTC), but only by parcel number, so it needs a join to an address before it is useful.
71,344
LA County parcels with property taxes in default, October 2026
Los Angeles County Treasurer and Tax Collector~220
Homes registered in the City of LA foreclosure registry per month, Feb to Sep 2026
City of Los Angeles open data13,313
Open LADBS general and PACE code cases in the City of LA, Oct 30, 2026
City of Los Angeles open dataWhat Los Angeles doesn't publish: owner names or mailing addresses in any open dataset we found, and recorded notices of default, which the Registrar-Recorder says it “does not provide online access” to (LA County RR/CC). A free proxy for absentee owners exists: a single-family home with no homeowners' exemption has no owner-occupant who claimed one (BOE), and an old Prop 13 base year means a long hold.
One Los Angeles limit before you reach out: until January 1, 2027, unsolicited offers to buy homes, by mail, phone, text, email or any other means, are banned in 15 fire-area ZIP codes, including Pasadena, Altadena, Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Malibu and Santa Monica 90402, with penalties up to $25,000 per violation (AB 851, Civil Code 2079.26).
What isn't free, or isn't allowed
- Probate and divorce filings sit with the courts. California keeps family-law records courthouse-only and limits bulk court data to calendars, registers and indexes (CRC 2.503). Florida and New York restrict family records too.
- Washington bans using bulk court records “for the purpose of commercial solicitation of individuals named in the court records” (GR 31(g)(4)).
- Recorded notices of default are online in some counties and paper-only in others (Los Angeles among them). Paid list vendors sell them.
- Phone numbers are never in these records. Skip tracing adds them, at a price per hit, and those numbers can only be called by a person after a Do-Not-Call scrub, never by an AI voice.
Buy probate or divorce lists from a vendor or the court clerk where it is allowed, and score them alongside everything else.
How to rank owners
Parcel's score works like this, in code, so it is the same every time:
- 01
Match every record to its property
Addresses are normalized so a code case, a tax row and your uploaded list land on the same house. - 02
Fade old events
Dated events lose half their weight every half-life (code violations every 180 days, pre-foreclosures every 120), but never drop below 15%. Standing conditions like an out-of-state owner don't fade. - 03
Count each kind once
Five code violations are one signal, not five times the evidence. - 04
Combine like independent chances
Score = 100 × (1 − the product of each signal's miss chance). Stacked signals rise fast but never pass 100.
Worked example
A fresh tax default (24), a vacant registration (18), a new code violation (14) and an out-of-state owner (9) score 51 out of 100. Any one alone scores 24 or less. Parcel calls 45 and up hot, 25 to 44 warm.
How to reach them
- Never mention how you found them. The record decides who you contact, never what you say. No foreclosure, tax or court language in an email, letter or call.
- Email from your own mailbox, a few a day, with an ad label, your postal address and a working unsubscribe (CAN-SPAM). Email Outreach does this in code.
- Mail needs no consent, except that unsolicited offers to buy homes are banned in 15 California fire-area ZIP codes until January 1, 2027 (AB 851), by mail or any other channel.
- Calls from a person, after a National Do-Not-Call scrub, inside calling hours. An AI voice may call only the owners who asked for a call in writing. Here's why.
- A seller page where owners request an offer or a call back, with a consent checkbox that is unchecked by default.
Questions
Sources
- 1.LADBS Code Enforcement Cases, open (u82d-eh7z) · City of Los Angeles open data · read October 30, 2026
- 2.LAHD 2026 Registered Foreclosure Properties (5nzp-isg9) · City of Los Angeles open data · read October 30, 2026
- 3.Secured Defaulted Property Taxes layer · Los Angeles County Treasurer and Tax Collector · read October 30, 2026
- 4.Viewing real estate records · Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder · read October 30, 2026
- 5.Homeowners' exemption · California Board of Equalization · read October 30, 2026
- 6.California Rules of Court 2.503 · Judicial Council of California · read October 30, 2026
- 7.Washington GR 31 (access to court records) · Washington Courts · read October 30, 2026
- 8.California AB 851, Civil Code 2079.26 · CalMatters Digital Democracy · read October 30, 2026
- 9.15 U.S.C. 7704, CAN-SPAM requirements · Cornell LII · read October 30, 2026
- 10.FCC 24-17, Declaratory Ruling on AI voices (Feb 8, 2024) · Federal Communications Commission · read October 30, 2026
Changes
- : First published.