Building distressed property lead lists that actually convert means combining two or more distress signals instead of pulling one big list. A single foreclosure filter in a major California county returns thousands of records that every wholesaler, agent, lender and bird dog in the market is already calling. Stack a physical condition signal on top of a financial one and that same county returns a few hundred names nobody else has touched.
Saim Chaudhry has been working California distress data since 2012, first with spreadsheets and a VA, now through Properant, the statewide parcel platform he built and launched in 2025. His filter stacks are specific: USPS-confirmed vacancy plus utility liens, structure fire records plus out-of-state ownership plus tax delinquency.
Below: which signals to combine and what each one actually tells you, how to read a fire report before you dial, the opener he uses, how to create urgency when there’s no auction date, and why tax auction data is worth more before the sale than at it.
Key takeaways
- Layer one physical distress signal (USPS-confirmed vacancy, structure fire, boarded up) with one financial signal (tax delinquency, utility liens, foreclosure). Either one alone produces a list everyone else has.
- A stacked search Chaudhry ran on structure-fire apartments with out-of-state owners in Sacramento County that were tax delinquent or carrying utility liens returned about 112 properties. That size list is the goal, not a problem.
- Unpaid utility liens of $300-$400 compounding over several years signal a physical problem as well as a financial one — squatters, boarding, abandonment.
- Fire reports carry severity, occupancy at time of fire, displacement count, units responding and hours on scene. A one-hour kitchen fire and a 13-hour fire with 11 units responding require completely different calls.
- California counties can tax-auction a property after five years of unpaid property taxes. The money is in reaching the owner during that window, not bidding at the courthouse steps — and a federal tax lien will usually survive a tax auction purchase.
From the Real Estate Pros Show
This article draws on an interview with Saim Chaudhry of Properant on the Real Estate Pros Show, hosted by Dylan Silver.
Why One-Filter Lists Stopped Working
Mortgage foreclosure is the most heavily worked lead type in residential real estate, and the math is against you. As Chaudhry puts it, everybody and their mama works foreclosure leads. A homeowner in default is being contacted by their lender, by creditors, by listing agents, by brokers, by wholesalers and by bird dogs — often daily. You are not going to win that conversation on volume or persistence.
The alternative isn’t a secret data source. It’s combining filters that already exist so the resulting list is small enough that almost nobody else has bothered to build it.
Chaudhry’s original version of this was entirely manual. Starting around 2012 he ran acquisitions off spreadsheets, pulling from three different platforms with five browser tabs open because no single source had everything. A virtual assistant filled in the columns. Then he went through property by property and highlighted every distress indicator in red — delinquent taxes, vacancy, absentee owner, liens. Finally he re-sorted the whole sheet by how many red fields each property carried.
That red-field count is the entire framework. A property with three distress markers is a different lead than a property with one, and it deserves a different place in your call queue. Modern platforms let you build that stack as a query instead of a spreadsheet, but the logic hasn’t changed — and most investors still aren’t doing it, because pulling one filter is easier and produces a number that looks impressive.
A 40,000-record list is not an asset. It’s a bill for skip tracing and dialer minutes on leads that were burned before you got them.
The Distress Signals Worth Stacking
Each signal tells you something different. Know what each one actually indicates before you combine them.
- USPS-confirmed vacancy. The mail carrier has flagged the address as vacant and it’s in the postal data set. This is a physical signal — somebody stopped living there — and it’s the strongest single vacancy indicator available because it comes from a person who walks past the door.
- Absentee or out-of-state ownership. Every platform has it, which is why Chaudhry calls it “icing on the cake” rather than a primary filter. Its real value is emotional distance: an owner who bought a lot 20 years ago and lives three states away has far less attachment than a resident owner.
- Tax delinquency short of a scheduled auction. Delinquent but not yet on an auction calendar is the underworked version. There’s no public sale list driving competition to the door, and on vacant infill lots it’s the dominant signal — Chaudhry treats it as the primary filter for land.
- Utility liens. These are usually small — $300, $400. That’s the point. When a $300 utility bill goes unpaid and compounds across several years, the owner isn’t strapped for $300. Something else is happening. The property is likely boarded up, occupied by squatters, or simply abandoned. It’s a financial record that reveals a physical condition.
- Structure fire records. A fire-damaged property that’s been boarded and left is one of the clearest motivation signals in existence, and almost nobody filters for it because the data doesn’t sit in the standard platforms.
Combine one financial and one physical and you have a lead with a reason to sell and a reason to sell now.
I don’t need 50 million records. I need the 500 that’s going to matter. You have to uncover other types of distressed leads and data that your competitors aren’t working.
— Saim Chaudhry, founder of Properant
Layering Physical Distress With Financial Distress
The rule Chaudhry works from: layer a physical condition signal on top of a financial one. Financial distress alone gives you a payment problem the owner may solve without you. Physical distress alone gives you a property nobody wants to deal with but no deadline. Together they create the pressure that gets a deal signed.
Here is a stack he ran on his own data in Sacramento County: apartment properties affected by a structure fire, owned by out-of-state owners, that were either tax delinquent or carrying utility liens. The result was roughly 112 properties. Four filters, one county, a list you can work through personally in a couple of weeks.
That number is not a failure of the search. It’s the objective.
I don’t need 50 million records. I need the 500 that’s going to matter.
The same stack transfers across asset types with one adjustment. For vacant infill lots, drop the USPS vacancy flag — you already know it’s vacant — and lead with tax delinquency, then narrow with out-of-state ownership and length of ownership. For multifamily, commercial and medical office, the filters are identical to single-family; only the property-type parameter changes.
Wholesalers and end buyers work the identical list. Chaudhry’s position is that the data, the script and the list are the same whether you’re closing with your own money or assigning the contract. The only thing that changes is what you do after you get the yes.
Build the stack once, then vary one filter at a time to see which combination produces contacts who actually engage in your market.
Reading a Fire Report Before You Dial
Fire records tell you what kind of conversation you are about to have, which matters more here than on any other lead type. The fields worth pulling before you pick up the phone:
- Severity of the fire
- Whether the property was occupied or vacant at the time
- How many people were displaced
- How many units responded
- How long crews stayed on scene
The first three shape your approach. The last two size the damage. A minor kitchen fire with one unit on scene for an hour is a cosmetic rehab and a relatively neutral call. A severe fire with 11 units responding and crews on scene for 13 hours is a structural loss — and if the property was occupied and displaced a family, you are calling someone about the worst week of their life.
Occupancy at time of fire is the single most useful field for tone. If the record shows an absentee owner and an investment property, the call is a business conversation. If it was the owner’s primary residence and people were displaced, slow down and ask where they’re living now before you say anything about buying.
The practical obstacle is that this data is fragmented. Fire incident records live with individual county and municipal fire departments, in different formats, with no statewide feed. Building this list means going county by county, pulling reports, normalizing the fields and matching each incident back to a parcel. That work is exactly why the resulting list has so little competition on it.
The First Call and the Follow-Up on Physical Distress
Chaudhry’s opener is short and leads with the problem:
Hi, my name is Saim. I’m calling about your property on Applebee Way. I saw you were behind on some payments. I buy and sell houses. I was wondering if you’re open to an offer, or if you have something lined up right now.
Then stop talking and let them respond. Naming the specific condition does two things: it tells the owner you’ve done your homework, and it positions you as someone offering a solution to a problem they already know about. They know what’s wrong with the property. Pretending otherwise wastes the first 30 seconds.
Fire and foreclosure calls are sensitive for the same reason — the person may be losing or have already lost their home. Adjust the opener to what the report told you, but keep the structure.
Follow-up on pure physical distress is the harder problem. There’s no auction date, so nothing is forcing a decision. Your job is to make the financial cost of holding visible:
- Liability. A vacant property is a liability. If someone gets hurt on it, including a squatter, the owner can be exposed — particularly in California.
- Code enforcement liens stack month after month.
- The property keeps depreciating while it sits.
- The neighbors. Ask how they’d feel living next to a boarded-up house for six months.
That last one isn’t just a talking point. Chaudhry once bought a boarded-up house in an otherwise beautiful neighborhood, tipped off by a code enforcement contact who took no fee — he simply noticed they were fixing these properties and putting owner-occupants in them. Squatters had been throwing needles like darts at the fence separating the yard from a neighbor whose kids rode bikes out front. They rehabbed it and sold to a first-time buyer family.
Auction Data Is a Pre-Auction Tool, Not an Auction Tool
Chaudhry hasn’t been to an auction in a long time, and it’s deliberate. His read is that over the past decade auctions have been bid past prices that make sense for an investor. He only chases off-market deals now.
That doesn’t make auction data useless — it makes it a targeting list for the window before the sale. Once a property hits the courthouse steps you’re one of hundreds or thousands of eyes on it. Reach the owner two months earlier and you’re competing with a couple of callers, if any found it at all.
In California, a county can tax-auction a property after a minimum of five years of unpaid property taxes. That’s a long runway, and it’s the reason tax foreclosure is less crowded than mortgage foreclosure while still being competitive. The owner has had years to solve it and hasn’t.
Two operational notes. First, tax auction lists go stale fast. Owners redeem, taxes get paid, properties come off the calendar — a list downloaded three weeks ago is partly fiction. Counties also announce sales at unpredictable times, publish in PDFs, and sometimes list only APNs with no street address. If you’re tracking this manually across multiple counties, you’re refreshing announcement pages indefinitely.
Second, the due diligence warning. A property tax lien is a super lien — buy at a tax auction and it generally wipes out lender mortgages. But a federal tax lien will usually survive the sale and transfer to you as the buyer. Chaudhry puts it at 99% of the time. Anyone bidding on the assumption that a tax deed clears everything should confirm the lien position on that specific parcel before raising a hand. This is not legal advice — verify with counsel or a title professional.
Frequently asked questions
Which two distress signals should I combine first if I’m building my first stacked list?
Start with USPS-confirmed vacancy plus unpaid utility liens. Both are widely available, and together they identify a property that is physically empty and financially neglected — the owner isn’t paying a $300 bill that’s been compounding for years, which almost always means something is wrong at the property itself.
If you want a third layer, add absentee or out-of-state ownership. It’s on every platform and it filters for emotional distance from the asset.
How small should a good distressed lead list be?
A few hundred records per county is a working target. Chaudhry’s four-filter search on fire-damaged apartments in Sacramento County returned roughly 112 properties, and he treats a narrowed list of about 500 as the goal rather than a shortfall.
The test is whether you or a small team can personally call and follow up with every name on it within a few weeks. If you can’t, the list is too big and you’re going to work the top of it and abandon the rest.
Do stacked distress filters work for land and commercial, or only single-family?
They work across every property type. The filters themselves don’t change — tax delinquency, liens, absentee ownership, fire records all apply to apartments, retail, medical office and vacant land exactly as they do to houses.
The one adjustment is on land: drop the USPS vacancy flag, since there’s no mail delivery to confirm. For infill lots, tax delinquency short of a scheduled auction is usually the strongest primary filter, narrowed by out-of-state ownership and long hold periods.
Is it worth buying at a tax auction, or should I contact owners beforehand?
Contact owners beforehand. Chaudhry’s position is that auctions over the past decade have been bid to prices that no longer make sense for an investor, and he now chases only off-market deals.
The auction calendar is still valuable — as a source of names. Reaching an owner during the window before the sale means competing with a handful of callers instead of hundreds of bidders at the courthouse steps.
What lien can survive a tax auction purchase in California?
A federal tax lien will typically survive and transfer to the buyer. Property tax liens are super liens that generally wipe out lender mortgages at auction, which leads some bidders to assume a tax deed clears everything — it does not.
Confirm lien position on the specific parcel before bidding. This is a due diligence question for a title professional or attorney, not something to assume from the auction listing.
The bottom line
Pick one county, build a single stacked query — one physical signal, one financial signal — and work the entire resulting list before you pull another one. The discipline that produces deals here is refusing to expand the list when it comes back small.
