Heir-Property Lead Engine
Turns several Texas counties' delinquent tax rolls into a ranked list of inherited properties, finds and verifies the heirs, and delivers them to the CRM ready for outreach. AI vision scoring of property condition was piloted and validated against hand scores.
01 · The challenge
The client buys heirs' interests in properties left behind by deceased owners. That only works if he finds the right estates early and reaches the right family members. The research was done by hand, one property at a time: pull the tax list, guess which owners had died, search probate court, county clerk filings and obituaries, check the appraisal district, skip-trace names, and type it all into a CRM. One county alone had tens of thousands of delinquent accounts, and most of them aren't estates. Estates the tax roll didn't label were effectively invisible, and skip-trace results for common surnames were easy to pin on the wrong person.
02 · What we built
- 01Parsers that turn each county's delinquent tax export into one consistent lead table, whatever the format
- 02Research bots that work through leads unattended, checking probate, clerk filings, obituaries and appraisal data
- 03Heir tracing with an identity gate, Do Not Call scrubbing and a human review queue for doubtful matches
- 04CRM delivery that keeps co-heirs together and enrolls them in the right outreach sequence
- 05A private dashboard to browse, filter, skip-trace and push leads in one click
03 · Revision history
| Rev | Change |
|---|---|
| 01 | Research bot running on the first county (May 2026) |
| 02 | Heirs, skip tracing, CRM delivery and outreach sequences live (June 2026) |
| 03 | Identity gate, heir confidence scoring and review workflow (July 2026) |
| 04 | AI vision validation run and lead ranking (late July 2026) |
| 05 | Final county loaded and cross-county duplicates flagged (August 2026) |
The parts that do the work.
- W-03-ATax roll ingestion
Turns each county's delinquent tax export into one lead table, whatever the vendor's format.
- Fixed-width, pipe-delimited and two-file joined formats
- Derives fields the files don't carry, like property city and true appraised value
- Filters to the record types the client actually buys
- W-03-BEstate research bots
Work through leads unattended, highest tax debt first, and record what they find against each property.
- Probate, clerk filings (heirship affidavits, lis pendens), obituaries and appraisal data
- A discovery mode that finds owners who died without the tax roll being updated
- Each lead scored strong, moderate, weak or skip by the evidence found
- W-03-CHeir tracing and verification
Turns heir names into reachable contacts, and checks that each one is the right person.
- Name match, Texas footprint and relative-graph confirmation for common surnames
- Every mobile number scrubbed against Do Not Call lists
- A spending cap per run, so a bad batch can't run up the bill
- W-03-DCRM delivery
Pushes verified contacts into the CRM with the property data attached.
- Nine custom property fields and estate-level tags
- Co-heirs grouped so CRM deduplication doesn't silently drop a family member
- Sequences stop automatically on any reply
- W-03-EInvestor dashboard
Where the client browses, filters and acts on leads.
- County tabs, filters for score, taxes owed, years delinquent and deceased status
- Links to the source court and clerk documents for every lead
- One-click skip trace, push to CRM and CSV export
- W-03-FAI vision pilot
Scores property condition on the client's 1 to 5 scale from street-level and satellite imagery, the way he'd judge a house driving by.
- Validated against a hand-scored set of 48 properties, 240 model results
- Claude matched the hand score exactly 76% of the time, vs 52% for a local open-source model
- About 2 to 3 seconds per image vs over 3 minutes locally
- Not in production yet: severely distressed properties still need validating
Engineering decisions that make it trustworthy.
- 01Never attach the wrong person.A skip-trace hit only counts if first and last names match. For common surnames the heir must also appear in the deceased owner's relative graph. 357 doubtful matches are held for human review instead of going to the CRM.
- 02Measure the fix, don't guess it.Tax rolls use "LE" to mark a life estate, but Le is also a common Vietnamese surname. Checking all 150,000+ rows showed where each one appears, so the rule was changed by position. That corrected every misread name without touching a single real life estate.
- 03Test the AI before you trust it.The first vision version scored properties from browser screenshots, and the client found it wrong. The rebuild tested four model setups against a hand-scored reference set and found the screenshots never showed the house: 40 of 40 were map views.
- 04Compliance built into the pipeline.Only mobile numbers route to text, every number is Do Not Call scrubbed, and one opted-out co-heir moves the whole family to email. When texts started failing, the cause turned out to be carrier policy and Texas opt-in law, so automated texting was paused rather than pushed through.
- 05Restart-safe by design.Each lead's status is saved the moment research finishes. A crash costs at most one lead, nothing is processed twice, and new county loads join the queue automatically.