How We Built an AI Deal Sourcing System That Delivers 4,951 Leads Daily

The Challenge: Finding Off-Market Deals Before Everyone Else

Every real estate investor chasing off-market deals in the San Francisco Bay Area faces the same bottleneck: public records are scattered across county websites, each with different formats, search interfaces, and update schedules. A human researcher can realistically cover one county per day, combing through tax liens, code violations, probate filings, and pre-foreclosure notices.

Our client -- a Bay Area investment firm -- was spending 15 to 20 hours per week on manual research. They had a VA doing the work, and the results were inconsistent. Some weeks they would surface 50 leads. Other weeks, 200. No scoring, no prioritization, no way to tell which properties were genuinely distressed versus which ones were just noisy data points.

They came to us with a straightforward request: automate the research, score the opportunities, and put the best leads in front of the team every morning before they start making calls.

What We Built: Bay Sentinel

Bay Sentinel is an automated deal sourcing platform that runs 24/7 across three Bay Area counties. It handles the entire pipeline from raw public records to scored, enrichable leads delivered to the team's inbox.

The Numbers

Before Bay Sentinel, the client's VA was producing roughly 80-120 leads per week at a cost of $1,000/month plus the time cost of Lucas reviewing and re-scoring them. Now the system runs autonomously, delivering higher quality leads at less than a third of the cost.

The Tech Stack

What Made It Work

Three design decisions made the difference between a prototype and a production system the client actually relies on:

• County-specific scrapers: We did not build one generic scraper and hope it worked everywhere. Each county site has different structures, rate limits, and anti-bot measures. Custom scrapers per county meant reliable data from day one.
• Signal-based scoring, not binary flags: A property with a single tax lien filed last week is very different from one with three years of delinquent taxes plus code violations. The 14-signal scoring model captures that nuance, letting the team focus on the highest-probability opportunities first.
• Daily cadence, not real-time: The client does not need leads in real-time. They need a curated morning briefing they can act on during business hours. Batch processing overnight keeps costs low and delivery reliable.

Results After 3 Months

The system is not magic. It does the tedious work -- scraping, enriching, scoring -- so the humans can do what they are actually good at: picking up the phone and closing deals.

Want Something Similar?

Every deal sourcing workflow is different. Some clients need pre-foreclosure focus, others need probate or tax lien specialization, and some need multi-state coverage. We build these systems custom to your market and your deal criteria.